Time was when the city’s maximum building height was 45 feet, except for “public benefit” buildings like Cottage Hospital, which could ago up to 60 feet. How 75-foot high-rise apartment buildings at La Cumbre Plaza with only 10 percent affordable units — and thus 90 percent unaffordable units — could qualify as a public benefit rather than a giveaway to the developer is hard to see.

What is easy to see is that a 60 footer will now longer pencil out for the investor and that there is no market solution to our housing crisis. Clearly we need to have government subsidies to build needed affordable housing, as we have always needed in the past.

Given the impact Granada-sized apartment buildings would have on upper State Street traffic, we also need a traffic mitigation plan, an issue that seems to have been overlooked in the rush to build something in place of La Cumbre Plaza.

In this case, better a dead mall than no mall at all, is what I say.

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