Tear Down the Burren

post by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2025-02-04T03:40:02.767Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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I love the Burren. It hosts something like seven weekly sessions in a range of styles and the back room has hosted many great acts including many of my friends. It's a key space in the Boston folk scene, and it's under threat from developers who want to tear it down.

But after thinking it through, and noting that this puts me on the other side from many of my friends, I think the project should go ahead. The proposal isn't to tear down paradise to put up a parking lot, it's to put up 500+ apartments (studio, 1br, 2br, 3br), 100+ of them limited to people below income thresholds ('affordable'). We're in the middle of a housing crisis, where instead of letting people build up to meet demand we've been competing with each other to bid up the apartments that do exist. Rising rent has been really hard on our communities, folk scene included. Of my Cambridge/Somerville folkie friends from, say, fifteen years ago, the majority of folks still in the general area have been priced out, to Vermont, Maine, and Western Mass. While spaces to make music are a key component of a thriving community, housing is even more critical.

Part of what makes the tradeoff so substantial, with so much potential new housing, is that the Burren, Dragon Pizza, and other businesses along this stretch are not making very intensive use of the space:

Much of it is parking lots, and most of the rest is just a single story. And this is an area just a lot a three minute walk from Davis Sq Station!

Discussion also tends to assume that a lost place opens an unfillable void. In part because of this planned development, however, the owners of the Burren are opening another place a few blocks away: McCarthy's and Toad. Even if this weren't already in progress, there's clearly a strong demand for this kind of space, and other places could open to fill it. This kind of churn is still bad, but it's not forever.

At a more fundamental level, however, having this conversation at the level of individual proposed projects is the wrong way to do it, and is a key contributor to the rising cost of housing and infrastructure. Part of why housing prices are so high are that we've heavily restricted what can be built, but another significant component is the risk that community feedback will stall or cancel a project. In this case, illustrating both aspects, an earlier proposal was for six stories, but, after protests, city council rezoned the parcel to limit it to four stories.

If the project does go ahead I'll be really sad to see the Burren go, but letting people build housing is critical for bringing down the cost of housing.

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