Development Is Not Progress

To the editors:

Benji Chen's article, "Welcoming Holmes Trust: Central Square Development Would Carry Significant Positive Externalities" (Editorial, March 12) is a masterpiece of what might be called value-free positive economics.

Chen argues, through an exploration of externalities, for the Holmes Trust project, a six floor building of luxury apartments and chain stores in the middle of Central Square.

Chen characterizes the inhabitants as "young punk skaters in front of Hubba Hubba," but what is really at stake are stores like the Golden Doughnut, Surmans, the Greek Market, the Ethiopian Restaurant and Lucy Parsons Bookstore. These are elements of Cambridge which serve as the cornerstone to a diverse community of real people, not just the "young punks."

It is not the march of progress that we are witnessing, where chain stores will provide a great economic miracle to lift Central Square out of poverty. This is the destruction of a community of people who care about the stores they frequent. These are places that have served as communal gathering points and provided cheap food for the elderly.

The Holmes Trust project, according to Chen "will benefit many local homeowners because their house values will increase." So those who earn little now will be benefited by increasing property values, reaping rewards from the soaring rents of their tenants. But most people who live in Cambridge do not own their homes. They rent them.

If property values go up due to the new construction, and it is almost certain that they will, it will be the current residents who will be evicted. The idyllic small property owners of economic models simply do not exist in Cambridge.

Big Business has absolutely no loyalty to the communities it enters. It has often been argued that if these new stores do not succeed, the old community-oriented shops will return. But, once these shops are gone, they are gone forever. Not only will the area have become more upscale, but the process of the development itself entails the physical destruction of the site.

Development is not about the natural process of the free market. It is about the power dynamics in the confrontation between residents and corporations.

Once we recognize that the free market is as much a conscious policy as market regulation is--that to pose no checks to development is to ensure that it will happen--whether or not to allow the existence of the new building becomes a normative decision. To relegate the consequences of development to mere side effects, the ideology inherent in calling them "externalities," is to ignore the large-scale impact the building is intended to have on the entire community. The intended effect of the Holmes Realty plan is not to improve the living standards of those who live in Central Square, but to drive them out. DANIEL R. MORGAN '99   March 27, 1998