Planners tackle future of Boston’s metro regions

Yawu Miller

By the year 2030, increasing population demands in the Greater Boston area will require 120,000 new housing units.

Where and how those housing units get built could have a profound impact on traffic, water resources and school systems in Boston and other nearby cities, according to a report released recently by the Massachusetts Area Planning Council.

According to the report, “MetroFuture: Making a Greater Boston Region,” the area’s population will grow by 10 percent over the next 25 years — with much of that growth concentrated in the state’s urban centers.

Looking at current trends, the Massachusetts Area Planning Council is attempting to get stakeholders in the development of local communities to talk to each other about the shared future of the region.

“We’re talking with anyone who will meet with us — local officials, community development corporations, business groups,” says MAPC Executive Director Marc Draisen.

Draisen and others from MAPC use slides with maps and bar graphs to illustrate their forecast of impending regional changes. They then engage their audiences in conversations about what directions they would like to see development take. Within the next year, MAPC will hold a region-wide meeting for people who have attended their briefings. There they hope to come up with guidelines for development.

The hope is that the planning will help the various players in the region pursue development in mutually beneficial ways.

“You can’t just build housing if it creates traffic problems,” said Timothy Reardon. “You can’t solve problems in Roxbury if the solution creates more problems in Dorchester.”

Along with MAPC’s projections on population increases, the organization has projected increased traffic on the region’s roadways, a loss of open space and an increased strain of the region’s water supplies.

MAPC staff made one concrete suggestion — pressuring lawmakers to pass legislation that would increase funding for cleaning environmentally contaminated sites. Because most of the sites that CDCs like Urban Edge use for their development are in inner cities, where environmental contamination is widespread, without state aid, development of new low-income housing is virtually impossible, according to Reardon.

Other trends MAPC has identified do not necessarily have easy legislative answers.

Even though jobs are projected to increase, the region may likely lose 46,000 manufacturing jobs in the next 25 years while the education, health care and business sectors will likely see increases. Coupled with the continued trend of better-educated residents leaving the state, the loss of unskilled jobs could lead to a surplus of 150,000 unskilled workers.

Reardon said that the information MAPC has culled should serve as a wake-up call to policy makers.

“We can change the trends,” Reardon said. “Urban Edge is working to change the trends in this neighborhood. We can do it as communities and we can do it as a region.”