Athletic Sports Closes

Despite the optimism of the Town Meeting buffoons who would tell you that there is nothing to worry about in the local commercial economy, the truth is that our retail health is circling the drain.  As Rob wrote here on the blog the other day, a TMR countered to my comments at the microphone by pointing out that we’ve added Peppercorns (will this be the restaurant that finally survives in that hideous space next to the hobby shop?) and Liberty Bell.  Local roast beef chain Liberty Bell is a fine establishment, but it’s a sandwich place, folks, and a step down from the funky — even hip — Coffee Emporium it replaced.

This morning on my way to the train I noticed that Athletic Sports, Liberty Bell’s next door neighbor in the historic town center, is shuttered, dark, and vacant.  And it does not look like it is moving since there is no note on the door directing patrons to its new location.

In 2009 Mike “Uncle Rico” Rosa made emotional appeal to the Finance Committee objecting to my mixed use warrant article, presumably feeling that by suggesting that the place could be improved a little I was saying his town was crap.  Near tears, he told FinCom that Sportstown USA was great just the way it is.

Now Sportstown USA is without a sporting goods store.

Grumpytown Forever Stuck in Mud

We have before us (as the Moderator would say) another reason to do some self-reflection.  Not only did Billerica Town Meeting pass on the opportunity to improve its own center — at a private land-owner’s expense, no less — it also looked small business owners squarely in the eye and spit in their faces.

I guess some members of our town’s venerable leadership group don’t realize that the region is watching us, particularly the business community.  They see that the owners of 5 Andover Road hired an attorney, surveyor, and an architect — at considerable expense, I’m sure — only to have their plans torn up by a Billerica’s paranoid governing body.  Zero return on their investment.  We are becoming the Chernobyl of the Merrimack Valley business landscape.

Now for the sickening irony.  The owners of 5 Andover Road could used the dreaded 40B law — which opponents used as part of their argument against the overlay district — to build their residential units after all.

Discuss.

Back to the May 8 meeting.  It’s not so much the result that bothers me so much.  It’s the way TMRs arrived at their decisions. To wit:

• Many expressed strong support for mixed use in concept but spoke against the article.  These people don’t like the article as written, but offer no amendments and show no interest in working on a compromise article.
• Facts that clash with beliefs and fears about the article were rejected out of hand.  The proponent supplied a three-page FAQ to TM before the meeting started, but did people read it?  When no one is even open to a rational conversation, where does that leave the proponent?

Town Meeting is an obstructionist, immovable object.  No form of progress can puncture it so long as a two-thirds vote is required.  Obstructionist TMRs cannot be removed by the voters, because no one will challenge them for their seats and even if there were, there aren’t enough voters to oust the buffoons.

And forget mixed use for a second.  Anything of consequence that we want has to pass through TM, too.  Take the bike path.  The committee is working their asses off trying to get abutters along the path corridor to sign on.  But when it gets to the TM floor, the obstructionists will say “finish the sewer first” and that will be the end of it.  Quality of life means nothing whatsoever to this voting bloc.

What to do?  Brainstorm time:

• Get new people to run for TM.  Problem: already tried that.  This year with all 240 TM opened up after redistricting, every seat was there for the taking.  But just 203 people stepped forward.  TM is a product that is nearly impossible to sell.
• Put the mixed use question on the ballot.  Problem: It’s not clear this is legal.
• Got after TM itself by slashing the number of seats.  Problem:  Good luck.  Expecting TMRs to risk losing their own seat in an election will be harder than asking Congress to pass on a pay raise for themselves.  Reading TM last week rejected an article that would have reduced its size from 192 to 144 seats.  The vote: Six in favor, 121 opposed.  Ouch.
• Put together an education campaign.  Problem: Education only works on people who want to learn, and the obstructionists are not interested.

Town Meeting is hopeless.  I hate to say that — honestly, I do — because there are dozens of good people in this town who want to govern, are good at it, and put in a tremendous amount of time into it.  Start with the Finance Committee, the hardest-working group in town.  But what good is a top-notch FinCom if TM never takes their advice?

I’ve written before that no government can excel unless the people in it trust each other.  (It would also help if the voters trusted the government, but I think we’re losing that battle a little more every day.)  Aside from the budget, TM has almost no trust in the Finance Committee, which voted 10-1 to recommend Article 31.  It certainly doesn’t trust the Planning Board (6-0), despite member David Kinsella assuring the crowd that he would be very tough with all proposals coming to him.  And there is some trust with BOS (3-2) members (particularly Mike Rosa, who delivered the minority report), but even if the BOS had voted 5-0 to recommend, I still don’t think you would get 120 Yes votes.

So where does that leave us?  Mired in the backwater.  We have left the business community no with no tools and little incentive to improve their properties.  Every year, properties are going to get older and older, and little by little, businesses are going to decline to renew their leases in favor of updated spaces in neighboring towns.  That leads to a drop in commercial property values.

What is the effect of declining property values?  Someone has to make up the difference in a budget that’s climbing by a few percentage points every year.  And who might that be?

Why, you of course, the residential property taxpayer.

Enjoy.

Correction: Mixed Use Article Did Not Receive Majority Vote

I made an embarrassing reporting error yesterday, inverting the results of the Article 31 vote Tuesday night.  I’ll let Town Clerk Shirley Schult, who confirmed my fear by e-mail today, break the bad news:

The standing count was seventy-one (71) in favor and ninety-four (94)
opposed.  Thus the motion LOST

Yes, and thank you Ms. Schult for the all-caps zing at the end.  I apologize to you readers for my error.  I have updated yesterday’s post accordingly.

Interest in Mixed Use Still High

Traffic to the blog smashed a record yesterday, and judging by the search terms used, it suggests that there is still a high level of interest by the general web-surfing public in this subject.  And looking at the comments, a fair amount of outrage, too.

Janet mentioned that she is drafting a letter to the paper.  This is a great idea.  If you are looking for a spot to channel your displeasure with Town Meeting where people will actually read it (I doubt I get many buffoons visiting the blog), you can address a letter to the Billerica Minuteman at billerica@cnc.com.  It will be worth your time; Minuteman editor Liana Measmer makes every effort to run every letter she gets.  No need to be verbose, either — 100 to 150 words would do the trick.  The deadline to make next Thursday’s edition is Friday at noon.

Remember, the buffoons believe, as suggested by  Anthony Ventresca (of the Finance Committee and lone minority voter during his report), that most people in town are against any improvement to the town center.  A show of strength in the paper next week would go a long way to dispelling that notion.

Once again, that you all for your interest and support.

Hopeless: Buffoonery Sinks Town Meeting

One anecdote from last night neatly sums up my five years in Billerica politics.  As the Buck Auditorium was emptying out, I was talking with Michael Belleri, the petitioner of the zoning overlay warrant articles and owner of the commercial building at 5 Andover Road.  I was apologizing to him for Town Meeting denying his chance to turn a profit improving his vacant property and asking what’s next for him.  A man I don’t know abruptly interrupted our conversation and told me, very incoherently, that he was upset with something I wrote in the newspaper — two years ago.  By the time I finally figured out what this person wanted from me, Mr. Belleri had disappeared.  The punch line: the angry interrupter sits on our Zoning Board of Appeals.

That was right after Town meeting voted 71 in favor, 94 opposed to the mixed use article.  It was the worst vote result of the three attempts, falling far short of the 2/3 majority needed to pass.  Somehow we lost 20 Yes votes since May 2009 and 28 Yes votes sine October 2009.  The trend is supposed to go up, not down.

Although the vote was very different, it was the same forehead-slapping debate.  The same people spoke against the article and they carted out the same fears about parking, 40B developments, strangers, density, spiders, traffic, disability access, and robot attacks.  Ralph McKenna (7) made the same joke about the Planning Board being the best money could buy, and it got the same laugh.  I live in an Andie McDowell movie.

It it abundantly clear, based on the questions and comments made by opponents, that there are still dozens of TMRs who have no idea how zoning works and what an overlay district is.  That’s the definition of buffoonery.

There are optimists out there that say with enough education we can show people that it’s good for the town.  I strongly disagree.  You would have to assume that opponents are receptive to education, i.e. facts, ideas, information, knowledge, and wisdom.  But some people just aren’t, and there’s nothing we can do about that but boot the buffoons out of office.  And I think we know how likely that is in a town when one in 12 adults vote.

The exclamation point came from a member of the Board of Selectman who supported the article.  On his way out of Town hall he told me, “it’s too bad,” but that “it’s dead.”

Yes, but let’s be honest.  It was dead in 2009, which is when TM made up its mind.

The Financial Benefits of Mixed-Use Development

When I was attempting to make my case for mixed-use development to the town at large a few years ago, I searched for (but never found) a study that focused on the financial advantages of mixed-use development.  It made sense that such developments produced more in property taxes than, say, a mammoth strip mall.  But I wasn’t able to show it with fact.

A sprawling Walmart store produces far less in property tax revenue for Ashville, NC as compared to a mixed-use building

A recent story at Planetizen has done just that.  Here is a chart comparing the financials of a Walmart vs. a mixed-use building.  The small building is much more lucrative, and it’s not close.  The 0.2 acre parcel generates 100 times more money for Ashville, NC than the Walmart per acre and more than 10 times more jobs.

How do our own strip malls fare?  In 2005, O’Connor’s Plaza paid $175,000 in property tax.  The parcel is 11.6 acres.  This works out to just over $15,000 per acre.  And the Zombie?  In the same year, RD Management forked over just $16,000 more than O’Connor’s, and it is almost 3 times larger.  So in ’05 the Zombie was worth a pathetic $6,400 per acre, or even less than the Ashville Walmart.

When you hear people talk about the “cost of sprawl,” this is what they mean.  It is, in part, an “opportunity cost” — in other words, the money we surrender by not having a higher-value development on that land.

Could a mixed use development make over $600,000 per acre in Billerica?  Maybe not.  But let’s say it’s worth just one third of that: $200,000 per acre annually.  It would earn us about $6,000,000 in revenue.  So, the opportunity cost of not redeveloping this land is just over $5.8M every year.

Mind-blowing, no?  Could Billerica use an extra $5.8 million?

I say yes.

More on Burlington and Wegmans

I want to continue on this topic because clearly there is an interest here.  The question of whether Billerica can attract development that contributes to our quality of life (that is, stores, services, and restaurants that we can patronize) is an important question that should often be asked of town leadership.

Before I go any further, let me do a better job of defining the problem.  Here is a list of the establishments that have opened and closed since I moved here 5 years ago:

Closed Places

• Lincoln Liquors (1)
• Coffee Emporium
• Friendly’s (2)
• D’Angelo’s

New Places

• Towne Fair Tire (3)
• Dollar Tree
• Liberty Bell roast beef
• 7 Nana restaurant
• Planet Fitness

And that’s it, folks!  Not much new activity to speak of in the town of 40,000+ people.  Worse, almost every time we added something, we lost something else.  We are extremely fortunate to have 7 Nana, which has great food and is a lot of fun.  (Too bad I can’t afford to eat there more than a few times a year.)  We should have a dozen others like it.  I’m sure I left out some items on both lists — please add to them.

[Notes:

(1) To be fair, Lincoln Liquors simply moved to Treble Cove Plaza, so we didn't really lose it.  But it does leave the town center without a liquor store.  This is like Los Angelis not having an NFL franchise.  Yes, you can get beer and wine at Jim's Quick Stop in Convenient Plaza.  Right next to the live bait.

(2) A "for lease" has sprouted up on the former Friendly's front yard.  I suppose the real estate listing reads something like, "Small restaurant property with prime view of Mount Rosa and a 30-second drive to an eroding big-box drug store; 50,000 vehicles per day past site and zero foot traffic."  Any takers??

(3) This actually shouldn't be on the list, because it opened just before I got here.  Also, it replaced a Burger King, I believe, so whether or not this is a step up is open for debate.]

In the comments to the original post, Rick says:

we are likely to become that pond around which all the expensive real estate is built. In keeping with that scenario, I can already see the surrounding towns standing on the piers and boat docks plucking away our best and largest fish one at a time.

This is a great analogy, and we should use it again.  And he is right; it’s not just Burlington.  Chelmsford just got a a new Stop & Shop.  Wilmington’s recession-busting building boom on Route 38 has been well-documented and was more than once referred to by Billerica BOS candidates.  Tewksbury has successfully instituted mixed-use zoning and several leaders there have been quoted about positive economic development. And that’s just our direct abutters.

They are beating us.  Badly.  Does this bother us at all?  Do we have any pride?

InterestedReader says:

I clicked on the link and it showed Burlington’s medium family income as $104k. Also, the daytime population of Burlington triples with people who work in all of the nearby high-tech companies with high paying jobs. So yes, I think demographics probably had a lot to do with it.

The census distinguishes between family and household incomes.    I listed the household median, but the difference is negligible.  Anyway, Mr. Reader is making my point for me.  Good development begets good development.  Remember our former Town Manager, Bill Williams, was run out of town for publicly saying Billerica needed more curb appeal.  We should have lined up behind him because he was right.  Instead we shook our finger because our feelings were hurt.  The Selectmen and Town Meeting (of which I am a part) has done nothing to improve quality of life since completing the library, and that was over 10 years ago.  These sort of improvements are among the things that businesses (like Wegmans) are looking for when scouting a place to land.  Not only does a nice town help attract future employees, is demonstrates that the town cares about its businesses.

We say we are “business friendly.”  Every town does.  But here all it means is, “we will give you tax breaks.”

Mike says:

Touche on your last point, Jeff. It’s far easier to complain than to step up and act.

Yes, and we have a lot of work to.   Other towns have already done this work, some of them a decade or more ago.  That’s whay they are ahead.  Meanwhile, with our three old Market Baskets squatting in their aging, overgrown strip malls, we are the town that time forgot.  We need to do a ton of work just to stay even with competing towns.

In the coming weeks, I will outline what sort of work needs to be done and how interested people can help.

Lost Again: Burlington Lands Wegmans

New York state grocery legend Wegmans is coming to Burlington. Yeah, it's better than Market Basket.

Chances are you have never been to a Wegmans.  Unless you are from upstate New York or have friends or family there, you probably have no idea what it is.  I certainly didn’t until going to college in western Pennsylvania.  No Wegmans there, either, but I did have a friend from New York who talked so much about the place we had no choice but to ridicule him constantly for it.

After all, it’s only a grocery store.

I was young and I did not yet understand the emotional attachment that some people have to stores.  It’s not a stretch to say that Wegmans has a cult following, and judging by local reports of the first Wegmans in New England recently opening in Northboro, it appears to be well-deserved.  More services than Roche Brothers and with lower prices, Wegmans — a family-owned grocery store chain — has done what the DeMoulas family couldn’t: create a phenomenon.

That phenomenon is coming to Burlington in 2013.  According to a Globe story, Nordblom Company is developing a parcel that will include a Wegmans grocery store and several locally-owned restaurants. These will not be down-market mall-town chain eateries, either, says the developer:

“We want the focus to be on getting the best operators, so we’re talking to independent and chef-driven restaurants, as opposed to chains,’’ said Todd Fremont-Smith, senior vice president of development. “We believe that’s what the market wants: something more experience-based than just a shopping center with a large food court.’’

Sounds nice, right?  When was the last time you saw a quote anything like this about a development in Billerica?

The project will be part of Northwest Park, currently a forest of old office parks and parking lots along Middlesex Turnpike.  You have probably driven by the site of Northwest Park hundreds of times on your way to Burlington Mall and thought nothing of it.  And why would you?  There’s nothing there worth seeing right now.  But Burlington is trying to turn this neighborhood into a large, mixed-use alternative to the office park and retail disasters that sprawl built.  The Wegmans is among the first real proposals that follow that plan.  (By the way, Newton is getting one, too.)

I wrote in a Minuteman column two years ago that the Iverson Ford site should be converted to big farmer’s market and that  Billerica should become a food mecca.  Burlington has beat us to the punch.

That we failed to land Wegmans is a loss, but if we never even tried to get the legendary grocer, that would be an even bigger loss.  This is exactly the sort of economic development we should be going after.  Wegmans would have been perfect off one of the Route 3 exits.  Imagine the economic growth it would have spurred, not to mention giving us a second grocery choice beyond the three moribund Market Baskets we have.

It’s nice that we are attracting high tech companies like E-Ink (albeit with boffo tax breaks) and are going after biotech to shore up the sinking industrial space hidden away in the backstage areas of our giant town.  The Assessing Deparement gets credit for that.  But how long is it going to be until we get some development in here we can actually use?

Outer Suburbs Are an Endangered Species

What lessons have you learned from the housing crisis?  Here’s one: two recent essays suggest that some suburbs are in big trouble.

In the first, Christopher B. Leinberger writes in the New York Times that land in the “fringe” suburbs will continue to lose value until it is next to worthless.  Here is how this works:  Market value of anything is a function of supply and demand.  He argues that there is too much housing in the suburbs (mostly in sprawling subdivisions) and that baby boomers and “millenials” (born between 1979 and 1996) do not want to live in “car-dependent outer ring” suburbs anymore.  And if you don’t believe him, ask the National Association of Realtors, which conducted its own survey.

Why?  Start with baby boomers.

1. They spent their whole career commuting to work in cars, and they don’t want to spend their retirement years idling in traffic while running errands.
2. They don’t have kids living at home, which means they don’t need that 4-bedroom house anymore.  They are also getting older and do not want to maintain a huge yard, shovel snow out of a big driveway, or keep up a large building.  They don’t want to climb stairs.  Downsizing makes perfect sense.
3. They also don’t need to pay for quality schools anymore.  Why continue to pay high property taxes for them?
4. Physical skills they need to continue driving are degrading.  A rash of older drivers causing crashes in the past year has raised the conversation on this topic, prompting some changes in the law.  In other words, one way or another many baby boomers will not be able to drive.
5. They see the value in having fine dining, shopping, recreation, medical services, and other amenities walking distance from home.

And millenials:  They are being raised in a “green” world.  They are open to using public transportation.  They understand (and care about) transportation costs and environmental impacts of sprawl.  They don’t want to spend their lives in cars the way their parents did.

Car-dependent suburbs have little to offer either group.  Meaning they will abandon those communities in droves, dropping demand for housing in those places.  That will leave people left in those towns with property worth even less than it is now.

It’s already happening.  Has your house lost value?  Mine has.  According to Zillow.com my house is down 20-25% in the five years since I bought it.  I have taken a giant bath, in essence writing a check that far exceeds the amount I have paid in property taxes.  (This is why I have little patience for whining over a hundred dollars here or there on our tax bills without any discussion on property values.  In real dollars, property values matters much more in terms of our financial well-being.  Just to use myself as an example, in the past 5 years I have paid 4-5 times more in depreciation costs than in property taxes.)

When more people move out of these towns than want to move in, you are left with houses that are not occupied by the owner.  They may be vacant.  Maybe they are rented.  These houses are less likely to be well-maintained, which even further depresses the value of yours.

Is Leinberger talking about your town when he talks about the “fringe suburb?”  Hard to say.  I think Billerica is close enough to Boston (with commuter rail service) to avoid this definition.  But that’s not to say the chilling consequences he describes can’t or won’t happen here.  (Are there any houses being rented on your street?  There are on mine.)

It’s up to us to transform our town into a place that is attractive to those who don’t love driving 20,000 miles a year. Not just baby boomers and millenials.  The Realtors say only 12% of all age groups want to live in a car-dependent suburb.  We have a lot of work to do and a long way to go, so we better start now.

President Obama wants to help, but according to Paul McMorrow of the Boston Globe, Congress cut his Sustainable Communities program.  This provided help and grant money ($100 million total) to places that wanted to fight sprawl.  Many Massachusetts communities had already taken advantage.  But, according to McMorrow, the program was cut under pressure from the Tea Party, which apparently doesn’t want the government telling municipalities what to build.  (I can only assume they will go after 40B next.)

Too bad.  Smart Growth, which (among may other benefits) saves communities money, was gaining momentum.  Professional planners, many transportation professionals, and activists (hello) still believe in this method of growth.  But towns need this help from the state and federal level to get it done, much like NMCOG is helping us with our own Visioning.

But even if the Visioning process leads to the zoning changes we have been advocating for in the town center, that still leaves the rest of the town, which retains its ’60s-era sprawl recipe zoning code.  Our next Master Plan, which is due to be written in the next few years, is a golden opportunity to address this problem.

If we do nothing, all we will see is our houses tumble in value year after year.  We cannot afford that.  In Leinberger’s words, the inflated home values of the mid 2000s “are not coming back.”  We need to slow the slide so that we don’t lose our shirts.