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Old Readville warehouse could be replaced with housing
By adamg on Thu, 09/17/2015 - 9:52pm
A developer that specializes in turning dilapidated industrial and commercial parcels into market-rate housing has its eyes on the dilapidated old warehouse at 1725 Hyde Park Ave., just north of the Readville train station.
Ad Meliora holds a meeting for neighbors next Thursday to show its initial plans for a 270-unit residential complex - with 400 parking spaces.
Company President Jan Steenbrugge, a Belgian native now living in Boston, will make the presentation starting at 7 p.m. at St. Anne's School, 79 W. Milton St.
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Comments
your advice requested
I'm a neighbor of this proposed development in Readville, and I plan to go to the meeting next Thursday. I don't usually go to neighborhood meetings, so I thought I'd throw a few thoughts, comments, and questions out there and see what the big brains in Uhub comments think.
1. Affordable housing: Readville, like all of Boston, has an affordability problem. Is there anything I should be reading before this meeting to know whether any affordable units are included in the plan? And is this the right forum to bring up the topic of affordable units?
2. Traffic concerns: The current exit from this parcel is right next to the Milton Street bridge over the Northeast Corridor. This is already a tricky, congested intersection, as cars stack up at both ends of the bridge morning and night. Trying to have a 400 car parking lot exit into this mess will make it all the worse. I hope they relocate the parking exit to the north end of the parcel.
Part of the problem is due to all the traffic control devices and design assuming that the majority of traffic will be traveling along Hyde Park Ave, while in actuality the majority is crossing the bridge. There have been some bad accidents over the years, and several proposals (reported on Uhub and elsewhere) to add traffic lights to both ends of the bridge. Most of the proposed improvements seemed to die after Rob Consalvo left the city council. Is there any way to leverage this project to get better traffic design around Readville Station? And if so, how do we get the ball rolling on this?
3. Pedestrian safety: There is a full mile of Hyde Park Ave inbound from Wolcott Square without a legal pedestrian crossing. If I'm being honest, there isn't a safe crossing other than the Commuter Rail platform from Truman Parkway to Cleary Square. The streets around Readville Station on all sides need better pedestrian crossings, and specifically Hyde Park Ave needs a crossing by the Milton Street bridge. People cross here illegally all the time to access the bus stop and rail platform on the inbound side, and I see lots of close calls with cars.
Even pedestrians using the existing crosswalks are in danger, as a majority of cars traveling from Sprague St/West Milton St/Neponset Valley Parkway across the Milton Street bridge don't stop at the stop sign before the crosswalk. Part of this is due to bad design. If you stop at the stop sign, you can't yet see traffic in either direction on HPA, so you stop, roll out 15 feet, then stop again where you can see. Most people blow through the stop entirely and then slow and yield to traffic on HPA.
Dropping a 270 unit building into this mix absolutely demands better facilities (and ENFORCEMENT) for pedestrians in this area. How do we extend this to both sides of the station and inbound along Hyde Park Ave?
4. Transit oriented development: 400 seems like a lot of parking spaces for a building located literally next door to a station serving two major commuter rail lines and the 32 bus. I'm not an anti-car zealot like many commenters here (in fact, I'm pro-car AND pro-transit!), but 400 still seems high. I'm not sure I'll even bring this up. It's not like they lack space for parking at this parcel. Unless there could be an argument to eliminate some parking and add some affordable units, but I'm not sure about that.
Parking/affordable housing/pedestrians
One thing to remember about parking and affordablity: parking isn't free. It costs a few thousand dollars to build a single parking space, not even accounting for the cost of the land. Multiply that by 400, and you're talking real money, that someone has to pay for. That someone is the renter/condo-owner. More parking drives up the cost of the units, making them less affordable. One way to help lessen that effect (it doesn't completely nullify it) is for the developer to charge for parking. They can rent or sell specific spaces or sell permits, and if they can't sell all the spaces they can open up sales to neighbors as well.
(Parking lots also take up a massive amount of land that could be used for more housing. Boston's housing prices are high because we have a housing shortage, more units would mean lower prices. This is not just theoretical, and is already happening in the downtown/luxury market, where prices are dropping (or developers are throwing in extras like 3 months free), and it's bleeding into the back bay market.)
Huge parking lots also take up a lot of street frontage, pushing places farther apart. This makes people less likely to walk, which makes traffic worse. They create a lot of environmentally harmful run-off, and absorb a lot of the sun's rays, contributing to the urban heat island.
All excellent questions
One thing to keep in mind is that this is only the first of many meetings on this project. It's well over the maximum size for a "small project" and so needs formal BRA hearings (and maybe even a citizen-advisory committee, although they have another name for that). It probably will also need a ZBA hearing.
The parking kind of puzzled me, too. City guidelines have tended to be one space per unit, and the BRA has been letting developers go well under that for "transit-oriented" developments, which I'd think this would be, given its location across the street (granted, a horrible, awful, no good street) from a train station.
But speaking of that street and its intersections, you, or somebody, absolutely has to ask what they're going to do about it. As you note, it's already a nightmare for both pedestrians and drivers (kidlet takes the train to Readville after school some times, so, yeah, I'm quite acquainted with it), and now they're going to put this large new residential complex on top of that?
Thank you for the reply, Adam
Thank you for the reply, Adam. Yours is certainly the voice of experience when it comes to development related meetings in Boston. Including now an in-person BRA meeting, apparently. I will keep in mind that this is, as Tim McCarthy said on a Facebook thread about this meeting, "VERY preliminary."
I almost hate to write this
But I like the industrial feel of this stretch of Hyde Park Ave. It's really cool and a homage to what the area was like from back when it was settled. Sure, the wall keeping the likes of me plunging 30 feet is no long there and the city does need housing, but still, it's a neat part of the city overlooked by a lot of people.
Read what I have to say about housing in the city. I support increased supply. But I don't like how the industrial sector is disappearing. We need these services. Those are my 2 cents, that since I am not an abutter should only count as a penny.