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Developer still proposes 679 apartments aimed at grad students and their ilk on Brighton hilltop
By adamg on Thu, 07/21/2016 - 7:06pm
Architect's rendering. See it larger.
Cabot, Cabot & Forbes officials took careful note of Brighton residents' objections to the density and types of tenants at its proposed St. Gabriel's project off Washington Street and said: Eh, we know better.
The company yesterday filed formal plans with the BRA that are pretty much identical to the ones company CEO Jay Doherty told the Brighton Allston Improvement Association last month he'd reconsider after residents complained 679 units on the 12-acre site were just too many off crowded Washington Street and the jammed Green Line - especially since another developer is proposing 287 apartments right next door. And after hearing residents say they wanted tenants - or even condo owners - more likely to stay in the neighborhood for the long term, Cabot, Cabot & Forbes said nah.
In its filing, CC&F writes:
The proposed Project serves as a unique opportunity to deliver much needed housing in the City. The development will be designed, built and marketed to serve a number of growing demographics, including but not limited to graduate students, young professionals, and other university affiliates such as residents, faculty and staff. ...
The Project will provide a new development in Boston to house this demographic, at a scale that will free up local housing for permanent neighborhood residents. In addition to reducing housing pressures in the neighborhood, the Project will restore historic buildings on the site, and respectfully transform an underutilized parcel into an active and engaging development. The Project will preserve and enhance the existing landscaped spaces along the length of Washington Street and within the entire south and east sides of the Monastery, with the handsome stone wall at the edge and the many existing mature trees remaining amidst the open rolling lawn in the center. In addition to maintaining this existing landscaping, which has been neglected for decades, the Project will create a new, raised, publically accessible courtyard space that will provide vistas of Boston and Cambridge. In total, the Project will include approximately 7.3 acres of open space, representing 62% of the site.
The company says the site is ideal for researchers and workers at area hospitals and research labs:
From this location, residents are within a half-mile walk of the MBTA Washington Street subway stop and have access to multiple MBTA bus connections near the site. Important lines include the 65 bus on Washington Street which connects the site to Brighton Center and Kenmore Square, and the 501 bus at the corner of Washington Street and Cambridge Street that provides access to downtown Boston. In addition to these public transit options, the Project will explore including shuttle bus connections to nearby universities and research areas and will be a member of the recently formed Allston-Brighton Transport Management Association, which helps facilitate a number of alternative modes of transportation, including van pool subsidies, guaranteed ride home and transportation coordination with other members in the community. The Project site is also located along major bike routes, which has become an increasingly popular mode of transportation among students and young professionals in recent years.
Cabot, Cabot & Forbes says it hopes to begin the estimated two years of construction in mid-2017.
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Comments
What's there...
... now?
St. Gabriel’s Church,
St. Gabriel’s Church, Monastery, and an attached dormitory
From their filing
St. Elizabeth's uses the parking lot now, but that will end when the project is built.
In the image at the top, the monastery building is the red-roofed one in the center.
That's a big number of units
That's a big number of units for that parcel. Some of the streets that would be completely changed with large buildings where there used to be trees.
The people there would still have cars. People don't only use transit just because they live near it. That is more true for young professionals and grad students who want to go to other places in the city beyond the campus.
They talk about housing for students, but unless they restrict the market to that, there's no way to ensure that's actually who would rent there. It's also not longer term housing that for neighborhoods like condos. The green area there now is nicer and more should be preserved. The transit that is there now is not really enough. The region could use more housing but it needs to be managed and built in amounts that are good for the location of the building.
Medical residents?
I wonder how many units would end up being rented to people working at the hospital? Kind of like many of the residents I knew when I worked at MGH lived at towers adjacent to the hospital campus, and people in the LMA tend to land at Mission Main.
Developers say all sorts of
Developers say all sorts of things that don't end up being exactly what they said. This is simply housing for anyone since it's in a location that has other things nearby.
"That's a big number of units
"That's a big number of units for that parcel. Some of the streets that would be completely changed with large buildings where there used to be trees."
Big compared to what, exactly? And if not here then where? The whole point of building in this neighborhood (close to the Green Line) is to attract non-drivers. Obviously people are free to buy a car anyway, but honestly why would someone who wanted to own a car choose to pay the premium to be so close to the train? Unless of course we were to require the developer to include gobs of low-cost parking for them to use.
Oh, wait...
It's a false assumption that
It's a false assumption that more housing needs to be built in all areas. Not everyone has to live in the most expensive cities and the region does not need to keep trying grow.
As for why people would want to own a car near transit, you would have to as the countless residents who already do just that. There is less than one parking space per unit.
They can build in other
They can build in other cities, and other cities can grow. Making cities bigger doesn't necessarily mean that are better. Also, not everyone has to live in the most expensive areas. Some designated affordable housing is good, but the market can allow other places benefit.
Can't have this two ways
We can't have this two ways -- if we want affordable housing, we also need to accept that we have to let developers build big in areas that might not have the best of everything else: transit service, parking availability, etc., rather than shooting things down because it's not as perfect as being in the middle of Longwood, Back Bay, or in the suburbs. Further, we'll never see solutions to the problems that sites like these pose (better bike infrastructure, increased/reinvisioned mass transit) until there's real and pressing demand.
As far as existing residents wanting condos and other long term housing investments: tough. Sure, I want to buy a house or condo in the city someday too, but the pressing and urgent need to build more housing outweighs this preference.
If we can't build big right off Brighton Center, then where would be acceptable that's not DTX, Back Bay & other super high end markets?
Except that building more
Except that building more housing does not necessarily lower the cost of housing in these kinds of locations:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/06/15/why-more-housing-won-mak...
Also, there already is real demand for more transit, but there's not enough money. If you increase the users of that transit, it increases the cost to improve it.
Not all demand for housing needs to be accommodated in the most expensive areas. Market rate housing never going to be affordable to large numbers of people. Zoning matters to help preserve areas.
There is another way you
There is another way you could read that article which basically says this: "Building more housing won't necessarily bring prices *down* but refusing to build it will *definitely* drive prices up.
"If you increase the users of that transit, it increases the cost to improve it."
You could say the same thing for the roads we'll have to build if we force all of these people to live in the suburbs instead, but the roads cost even more and they don't scale well.
The article also makes it
The article also makes it clear that it makes it more crowded and that creates other issues. The point is simply building more to try to provide housing for everyone that wants to live in desirable areas isn't really a good solution.
Your post takes the position need to keep moving and the region needs to keep growing. Other regions can grow as well.
Your post assumes the region
Your post assumes the region needs to keep trying to grow. It doesn't. There's barely adequate funding to improve transit significantly.
And yours assumes "the region
And yours assumes "the region" is one unified entity that has chosen to increase population. SimCity might work that way, but real life does not. Individual people move here because individual people want to.
If there isn't housing for
If there isn't housing for people, then they aren't going to live there for the most part. They can go to places with more housing.
You are right, it's not a computer game, and just because you move somewhere or think that there's not enough new construction doesn't mean you get to decide what is built.
Here's the problem with your
Here's the problem with your model:
You've decided that for whatever reason there are already enough people living in Boston (or Brighton at any rate), and that the best way to cap the population of the city is to limit the number of houses that will be built. Great. You're probably right that this will limit population growth in the City of Boston itself. But of course you've done nothing to change the underlying reason why people are choosing to move to Boston in the first place (an increasingly knowledge-based economy means that many of the available jobs are now clustered around urban areas, especially those with lots of universities). Normally this would mean a decline in population in places with high unemployment (like the rust belt) would be met with a proportional rise in population in places like Boston, New York, and San Francisco. But of course since NIMBYs like yourself have decided that Boston (and New York. And San Francisco) "already have enough people", what happens instead is that the richest 5 percent of people from all over the world continue to send their kids here and buy "investment properties" (and sometimes even live here), and everyone else, including--probably--you and I, and all of the unemployed people in those depressed rust-belt towns, are basically SOL. Many of us will choose to live in the distant suburbs and drive an hour each way to and from work, contributing to the state's already horrendous traffic and carbon emissions problems, but the rest are basically stuck in places where there are no good jobs, because the places with the jobs (read: Boston), refuse to build enough housing for those people to move here, and the housing we do have is--consequently--insanely expensive, and getting more so every day.
I get that you're annoyed that you can't find a parking spot, or that the traffic is bad, or the T is crowded, or that you don't like it when a building casts a shadow across your house, but people are literally dying for lack of housing, so pardon me if I think your priorities are a little out of whack.
The new apartments charge
The new apartments charge very high rents anyway compared to preexisting housing.
Agreed
Neighbors should definitely have a voice in the land development process, but they can't be the only/final voice. We as a city/region need more housing and need it yesterday or we are going to become a San Francisco-esque city driven apart by insane housing costs.
We can accept that new housing to accommodate our economic growth is going to somewhat change the character of our neighborhoods, and that change is part of living in a great city. Or we can try to resist change in vain and become a museum city: affordable only to GE executives in glassy seaport towers, tourists in tri-corn hats, and people with the good fortune to have purchased a triple-decker in the neighborhoods 20 years ago that is now worth 5x as much as it was back then.
Affordable housing?
It sounds like you guys have never been to the site.
The residents have the
The residents have the primary say because they are the ones currently invested in and caring for the neighborhood. Neighborhoods don't need to be complately transformed just because some people feel that they don't have enough housing options in desirable cities. Not everyone needs to move to all desirable areas.
Building enough housing to lowers costs is not really practical given the problems associated with overbuilding.
Also, the new construction is not affordable anyway.
Other things contribute to the extremely expensive cities including non local purchases of property.
Growth does not need to keep
Growth does not need to keep occurring to build housing for everyone in these locations. Other locations can accept growth. Not all economic growth and housing expansions need to occur in every area. Just because people want more housing options in desirable cities doesn't mean new housing needs to be build wherever they want.
Show us your master plan then
Go on - create a map of where growth can occur, while meeting all the other needs of the city 2100 - water, fire, police, climate change emissions reductions, job growth, commute length reduction, etc.
Sorry, but all this amounts to is WAHHHH MY CAAARRR. Why don't you move if you don't like a city being a city?
Traffic there sucks NOW
You are crazy if you think adding to the problem is going to force a solution. If that was true it would have happened. Traffic there sucks now. Transit is inadequate now. Parking is inadequate now.
679 units on the 12-acre site
That works out to 57 units per acre. Meanwhile, in Roslindale, Michelle Wu is convinced that ten units per acre is too high a density factor. We need housing in Boston, and if there are going to be big fights over ten unit developments, then we'll need to get used to this kind of mega project instead. The only way to avoid something like this one would be lots more of the smaller scale infill projects that every NIMBY in the city is convinced will ruin everything.
Of course, we also need the large projects, but it's frustrating to see the same arguments that people use on something like this also applied to something like the Poplar St. proposal.
Different areas have
Different areas have different amounts of density that make sense. Not all development needs to occur. Calling people NIMBYs when they are just asking housing be build to an amount that they think is best is just normal advocacy. People who disagree shouldn't assume that every nice area is going to have enough housing for everyone. Other places can have more housing.
A perfect summation of NIMBY
That's it, in a nutshell -- not here, but over there! Not In My BackYard. Yep, I think I used the right term.
Your post is the perfect
Your post is the perfect definition of entitlement. Just because you move to an area and want to live in the best locations doesn't mean housing needs to get build for you. There's plenty of more affordable options outside these locations, or people can simply not move to a more expensive region and complain about housing prices from the start.
No. Your post assumes that
No. Your post assumes that housing needs to be built for everyone that moves to a more expensive location just because they find it more desirable. You seem to assume that neighborhoods shouldn't be able to have construction built in a way desirable for locals just because you think housing is too expensive and you chose to not to move to a place that was more affordable.
Other places meaning other
Other places meaning other regions since this one already has issues with density and transportation.
Your post is basically demanding more housing in whatever area you choose. It's perfectly reasonable for residents of an area to try to decide what they want. Just because you simply want housing in a desirable area doesn't mean it needs to be built for everyone. People can instead decide not to move to areas that they find too expensive and choose other locations that already have housing.
I'm already a resident of the area
Some of us who have lived here for decades do not share your point of view, and that's the real point of this discussion.
Based on the article that was
Based on the article that was posted here, many that live there do not share your view either.
However, the point is still true that residents can advocate for what they think is best. There are plenty of residents that haven't lived somewhere for decades and move to more expensive places.