Everett residents would do well to pay close attention to the housing boom going on here. After all, it is impossible to ignore.
May thousands of units have gone up during the past decade. Many thousands more are being planned for right now.
Apartment houses look nice. These developments tend to clean up former industrial areas that were largely useless in their polluted, untransformed presence.
We all know these thousands of new residents do not vote here. Many don’t know they are living in Everett. They don’t shop here. They don’t make investments here. They don’t run businesses here. These new residents in these new apartment complexes are transients – cruising through their young lives, needing a place to live and then moving on.
What’s wrong with that?
Nothing.
What we must think about is not how many more enormous housing complexes can be put up.
We need to opt for thinking that brings clean, solid, futuristic technological, medical, and research development to this city’s remaining open spaces.
Why?
Because commercial development is the way to go.
Commercial occupants of structures in this city pay almost three times the taxes that non-commercial occupant pay.
In other words, we can try to make Everett an apartment complex du jour, or we can steer commercial investment into the city at three times the taxes and with less to do for the building owners than is required by thousands more people needing city services living here.
It is time to create an interest for Somerville and Cambridge type commercial development for research and scientific and medical companies in Everett.
A city of apartment houses ultimately becomes a very difficult place to manage because city expenses rapidly outpace our capacity to deal with them.
Think about it.