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Genma Saotome, on Feb 22 2009, 03:32 PM, said:
I dunno about Boston but I do know that housing and transportation downtown went hand in hand, often the same hands actually. It was pretty common all over for land developers to build the street car system to the land they owned, thereby making it more valuable. In the earliest days it often would start w/ horse cars and penny ante land speculators. With electricity -- and city government quite ready to reduce the output of horses, both iron horse and haired horse would go by the wayside and better capitialized developers would step in. In Chicago, it was the head of the electricity company who pushed both development and transportation. Out here in the bay area it was a Mining magnate that took the plunge. But it always started w/ land + transportation. Of course, the owned land got developed and all that was left then was transportation and in due time that was a pretty crummy business to be in.
Locally here in Cincinnati, there is an abandoned subway system that was never completed. The story I heard, when they planned the system, the city was the same relative size as New York & Chicago. Those two cities invested in mass transit, Cincinnati abandoned it. You can see the results.
RGF
