Mammoth apartments gobbling up blocks of city
By JOSH RESNEK
No place in the city is over-development more noticeable than with the soaring 8 story cinder block elevator shaft rising out of the ground and reaching for the sky at 800 Broadway.
This precursor to a mammoth apartment house with hundreds of units on a stretch of Broadway bordered by a neighborhood of single and two-family homes is the rough equivalent of the Empire State Building being put there.
Residents living in their well-kept neighborhood homes on Carlson, Bolster, and Henry Streets on Elliott Road on Marie Avenue will rue the day the new apartment house comes to life.
Why?
Because the opening of that apartment house signals the end of the neighborhood on this section of Broadway.
The new building will cast a great shadow blocking the sunlight on parts of those streets and ways.
It will tower over the single, two, and three-family homes on crowded but well-kept streets like the monoliths that roamed the streets in War of the Worlds.
It will stand as a great wall hiding all the homes behind it and beside it.
Its new occupants will make parking in the area more scarce than ever before.
Hundreds of new residents will come to live in the structure, with virtually none of them taking part in the city’s life and times, its politics and social movements, or its needs and wants.
Like nearly all of the four or five thousand new residents living in large apartment complexes built all over the city during this era of unrestrained development – over-development if you will – will stay to themselves and take part in nothing having to do with the well-being of the city.
This has been the inevitable history of over-development in Everett during the past decade.
For the most part, they will come and go like the wind, living in their apartments with their shades drawn, rarely venturing outside or making associations with Everett people.
They won’t shop here. They won’t party here. They won’t send their kids to school here. They won’t become a part of the community.
They will come and go from their apartments like millennials blowing in the wind.
This is the record of over-development for the past ten years.
The face of the city has been changed and a few wealthy and connected operators aiding in one way or another and for what, for the mayor to enhance his image to line his pockets.
The mayor feeds his insatiable greed and his penchant for collecting the benefits of municipal corruption by opening the gates to the city to developers.
Anyone willing to pay can play the development game here.
In the case of the 800 Broadway development, it’s to the detriment of the neighborhood but it is inevitably good for him.
We leave that to you to think about.
Do developers do more than say thank you to the mayor?
We leave this to your imagination.
The mayor has handed over the keys to the city’s future to developers intent on making their score…and the mayor is never too far behind holding his hand out, asking: “What’s in it for me?”
Yup. That’s one of the may- or’s favorite city hall expressions.
Residents and homeowners living all around and literally under the mass of this great building on Broadway will not vote for the mayor.
“Not one person on those streets changed by that building will give him a vote,” a Fred Capone supporter said to the Leader Herald.
“At least Fred is going to demand that over-development be put to an end and planned development to replace it. At least that will be a start,” he added.
The first of a series of articles exploring examples of overdevelopment changing the face of the city.