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Apartment building with artist live/work studios approved for Bremen Street in East Boston
By adamg on Tue, 03/09/2021 - 10:35am
Rendering by RODE Architects.
The Zoning Board of Appeal today approved a 126-unit apartment building at 282-302 Bremen St., at Brooks Street, that will include 13 live/work studios for artists and 5 three-bedroom apartments aimed at families making no more than 60% of the Boston area median income.
In total, 20% of the units will be rented to people making no more than 60% of the Boston area median income, under the plans submitted by Transom Real Estate of the South End. The city currently requires only 13% of units be rented as affordable.
The building will have a 61-space garage.
The BPDA approved the proposal, across the street from the Bremen Stret park, last month.
The mayor's office and the office of City Councilor Lydia Edwards supported the project.
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Comments
All the nimby’s are upset in
All the nimby’s are upset in East Boston today.
So it’s perfectly ok for the East Boston neighborhood health center to sell their large parcel to a developer just two blocks away from this site and be granted countless apartment units.
Great news, the city needs
Great news, the city needs more support for creatives
"Creatives"...
...is a pretentious term. Not nearly as bad as "cultural creatives" though.
Don't be fooled by buzzwords
Housing for creatives is a joke and a lie, and is part the overall Boston "affordable housing" initiatives, which are also a joke. DIY musicians and artists are often working part-time service jobs in normal, non-pandemic life in order to attempt to stay alive, pay rent, and also allow for things like touring. It is highly unlikely that working-class folks have low rent but also sufficient savings to qualify for these sorts of housing initiatives. It adds insult to injury that the few remaining practice spaces in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville and surrounding areas are being closed to make way for more and more gentrification.
Artist housing like this is a
Artist housing like this is a good thing, but yeah, most artists and musicians work first, second, and/or third jobs in the non-"creative" economy and don't make enough money from their art to qualify for city programs. Building a couple live-work units scattered around the city is barely worth mentioning. Working class housing is artist housing. That's what we need.
The city needs more support for truly affordable
housing for all not just for the "creatives."
what’s with the scare quotes?
?
Agreed, especially since no
Agreed, especially since no one said "just"
And someone said "_why_ creatives at all?"
Me, below. Why subsidize them at all? Why not, let's say, home health care workers? They do difficult work that has a clear and measurable benefit for society; they don't typically come from a moneyed background-- unlike art school graduates; you can look this up-- and they don't typically get paid enough to afford a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle.
So, why not them?
We have architectural style periods
of renaissance, neoclassical, gothic revival, federal, victorian and now bland box.
When did "bland box" start?
Oh, over a century ago.
Great photo!
A lot of that was still going on when I was a kid. I always wondered how they strung those clotheslines from pole to pole so high up.
Ladders
Ladders
AKA
#crapitechture
Can we just stop it with this?
"This" being the idea that those who self-identify as artists are some kind of endangered species, and that by providing cheaper housing for them the city will be "better" in some way.
Really? Some questions:
1. "Better" how, and for whom? (other than the subsidized artists) Anything we can measure here? Can a plausible, logical argument be made?
2. If it's measurably or just arguably better, is it money well spent?
3. Are these people truly needy?
4. What's an "artist" exactly?
Some people I know who took advantage of this program were:
-A wedding photographer
-A painter whose primary customers were suburban parents who wanted murals for their kids' bedroom walls
-An editor of a motorsports magazine
None of them pulled any strings or falsified anything about what they did to get into the program; all were graduates of good-- even prestigious cough H bomb cough-- colleges and made a more-than-decent living doing what they did. Maybe less than they might have otherwise, but none of them created a "Paris in the 20's" effect by their presence, as far as I could tell.
So, why subsidize these people? And yes, I know art is good. I have some.
On the Money
You are right on the money with this. In the 70s and 80s I played in local bands and wouldn't have been so presumptuous to assume that this life choice would be subsidized by the government, though I was dead serious about it. I worked at a series of God-awful jobs like telemarketing, with all the other musicians. Luckily I never had to succumb to being a waiter or a bike messenger (do those even still exist?). Full disclosure, I once attempted to apply for a grant to fund an album I wanted to make and was turned down. They told me it was a "commercial or money making project". If only they knew.
Hit Some Of The Open Studios
You'd be amazed that bedazzling a bag you bought at a thrift shop will qualify you for an apartment at way below market rent in some buildings at Fort Point.
“The sixth edition of the
“The sixth edition of the Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA) finds that arts and culture contributed $877.8 billion, or 4.5 percent, to the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017. That same year, there were over 5 million wage‐and‐salary workers employed in the arts and cultural sector, earning a total of $405 billion“
https://www.arts.gov/about/news/2020/during-economic-highs-and-lows-arts...