The Zoning Board of Appeals is again torturing itself by wanting to require many dozens of new parking spaces to be provided for in newly planned for developments.
The tendency for the ZBA is to require the spaces, or the development cannot come to exist.
The ZBA is always posturing for all the right reasons – that is – every person who needs to park his car on the street they live on in this city ought to have a space to do so.
But of course, such a scenario is absolutely impossible.
That would be like bringing back yesterday, before the city was inundated and overrun by housing of every kind on crowded streets and the expansion of automobile ownership to include almost every Everett family.
Bringing back yesterday cannot be achieved.
Voting against outstanding, legitimate, multi-million residential developments because there are not enough parking spaces to justify them is a policy doomed to failure.
Everett’s traffic and parking conundrum changed more than 100 years ago years ago with the rise of the automobile and the expansion of roadways.
Everett is going to grow more dense with residential development and a larger population in the years and decades to come.
The city’s close proximity to Boston, public transportation and an abundance of reasons tied to modern economics, proves this.
Everett is not going to shrink.
Large tracts of the downtown aren’t going to be turned into parking lots for automobiles.
Traffic is not going to lessen. It is going to intensify.
The city is right now becoming more vibrant than it has been in decades.
We urge the ZBA to look more closely at history, and to come to understand that wanting more and more parking spaces and less and less traffic is a clear impossibility.
Making such things requirements before new projects such as the proposed 6 story building at the 600 block of Broadway can be built are archaic as well as impossible.
Whether or not the 600 Broadway project is three feet higher than city requirements should not invalidate this project.
The six story building will easily be the most impressive architectural wonder of the modern era along Broadway.
The lack of a full compliment of parking spaces to accommodate an outdated city requirement which should be immediately scrapped is also not a reason to vote against this project.
Last week, the ZBA listened to a resident complaining about McKinnon’s Market impacting his parking situation on a nearby street. Perhaps the city should suggest turning the 600 Broadway project into a parking lot, and that would be better for the future of the neighborhood and the city; to forgo a $25 million project so one resident has his parking space.
Even the suggestion is ludicrous, yet some members of the ZBA want shopping in Everett and parking in the downtown to be like going to the Square One Mall.
That can’t happen.
It won’t happen.
We urge the ZBA to enter the modern world and to accept the harsh reality that Everett is growing, not shrinking, and that despite the ZBA’s best efforts to hold back the future, the future has arrived.