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13-story apartment/condo building proposed for Huntington Avenue next to Mission Park
By adamg on Sun, 11/28/2021 - 1:25pm
Rendering by Stantec.
A non-profit group has proposed a 13-story, 111-unit residential building on what is now a parking lot next to the Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers, on Huntington Avenue, just outbound from Brigham Circle.
The BPDA holds a Zoomed public meeting on the proposal by the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard Association at 6 p.m. on Monday. The non-profit runs some 1,100 income-restricted apartments in the Mission Hill area, including the Mission Park development.
The group's proposal calls for 55 income-restricted apartments and 55 condos, roughly half of which would have income restrictions on purchasers.
The building would have a 24-space underground garage.
The filing describes how the building will fit in with the surrounding streets:
A newly imagined sidewalk condition takes inspiration from the "Welcome Mat" concept carried out along Huntington's "Avenue of the Arts" district. An engaging sidewalk, playful hardscape forms, and a lush, vegetative landscape all work together to create an inviting, active, and pedestrian-friendly environment. Benches along the pedestrian zone provide seating opportunities beneath the street tree allée; opportunities for café-style furnishings are provided as well. A handful of tables and chairs can be placed within the streetscape Parklet, a bump-out protected from Huntington Avenue vehicles and enclosed by plantings. Vegetated areas add to the site's beauty and allure and collect and clean stormwater within designed green infrastructure planters. The new streetscape provides a 15-dock Blue Bike station, visitor bike parking racks, and an integrated vehicular drop-off/loading zone.
Accessible by way of St. Albans Road is a woonerf-style access corridor, a curbless environment that blends a vehicular drive aisle with a pedestrian way. This woonerf provides vehicular access to the building's garage parking while safely allowing for pedestrian circulation to carry on simultaneously. The 15'-0" wide drive aisle is differentiated from the pedestrian way with distinct pavement markings and materiality. However, the combined widths of the drive aisle and pedestrian way provide for a continuous 20'-0" wide, vehicularly-graded surface which allows for both firetruck and two-way traffic. The design for the woonerf prioritizes pedestrian safety. The intended condition is one of slow-moving traffic and accessible pedestrian surfaces flanked by plantings. A newly landscaped courtyard between 777 Huntington and 779 Huntington connects to the woonerf, providing for additional plantings and occupiable space.
A sloped pedestrian corridor provides circulation along the western side of 775 Huntington, connecting the woonerf to Huntington Avenue's "Welcome Mat" streetscape. This accessible sloped path meanders through a vegetated native woodland landscape, "Woodland Connection."
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Comments
A little short on parking...
Only 24 parking spots for 111 units??? Not a great ratio.
I know right. If only the
I know right. If only the area was not a transit desert.
/s
Yeah I hear that one a lot
Yeah I hear that one a lot but the reality is folks have cars in the city and do not want to use the T because it sucks even if it is right outside their door.
Then they can choose to not
Then they can choose to not live in this building.
Then they should either:
1.) pay to use one of the many parking garages within a short walking distance of this building.
2.) don't move into this building and instead find a place that does have available parking
In reality
they will just park their cars on the streets of MH and JP.
If that works for them
then sure, that's also an option.
lol
I'm sure the 100+ cars coming to our community won't have a negative effect on traffic, parking, pollution, etc. There is nothing the city could do to prevent it.
You mean something like the negative effect…
…. you and the rest of the car parking community already put on the community at large?
Not a car owner
So that obtuse burn doesn't work on me. Good to know you endorse the city doing nothing though :)
Glad to hear you don’t.
You have no idea on what I endorse the city to do.
So we are even.
Yes I do
You confirmed it
There's room for 100+ new cars to be parked on the street there?
If there is, then it sounds like what the city could do to prevent it would be to remove some of the street parking. If there's not, it's not a problem - people who move there with cars will need to get rid of them when there's nowhere to keep it (or they just won't move there at all).
Really, if we're going to say "people will have cars no matter what", then it sounds like you're just arguing for "no new housing in the city ever". Which, I guess is an argument, but I wish you'd make that directly.
It's really very simple
The city can prevent residents of this address from getting parking permits from City Hall. Couple that with zoning the unrestricted streets in MH and JP as resident only and the problem is solved. The current system is ripe for abuse and the city needs to get off its butt and be proactive to remedy the problem.
Directly on the 66, 39, and E
Directly on the 66, 39, and E; 10 minute walk to D and Orange Line.
I, and I hope others, plan to submit comments demanding less parking, in the hopes of canceling out the concerns of our parking-obsessed fellow citizens who just want to make sure residential development takes longer and costs more.
At least some of the spaces
Will be designated for people with disabilities.
Damm housing shortage!!
What’s that compared with a parking shortage?
People don’t belong in a city. Send them up to run loose in the wilds of Maine.
In addition to the T line right there
there's already multiple parking garages in the area. If someone really wants to pay extra to have a parking space, they have plenty of options.
Is it in the middle of nowhere?
Others note the transit connections, but there's a grocery store a block away and employment opportunities within an easy walk from the building.
I mean, it's not downtown, but it's got the amenities of downtown.
Why should school kids be in perpetual shadow?
Of all groups for whom light and air should be protected, surely it is BPS kids. Yes we need more housing, but it should not be at the expense of suitable conditions for children in school. Children should enjoy sunlight, through the windows and in the school yard, not have a hulk of a tower run right up against their building.
What windows are we worried about?
From what I can tell, the school building doesn't have any windows on that side of the building anyway. And I haven't commissioned a sun study or anything, but as far as I can tell, given that the building is being built on the west side of the school, it's not likely to be blocking much sunlight for most of the school day in any case.
Nearly windowless
From street view on Google Maps, I can see a whole 2 windows on that entire side of the building.
EMK is a high school, yes? Students in high schools tend to move between classrooms throughout the day, so even if there was an actual loss of sunlight on one side of the building, we aren't committing students to spending their entire days in a darkened classroom. Not to mention to existence of interior rooms in schools...
They typically park snow in that lot
When we have a normal amount of snow, the city has historically stored snow in that lot until it melts. Other than being a bit short on parking, this sounds like a good use of an otherwise desolate piece of property.
That's why it's known as the
That's why it's known as the "Snow Lot". Mission Park employees and contractors are also allowed to park there.
Still
Too much parking.
Roxbury Tenants of Harvard?
Curious about the name of the organization that's building this. I imagine it's a tenant-owned cooperative of some sort, which sounds great. But are they tenants of Harvard? Does Harvard own some of the land and they are tenants of it? And no, there was nothing on their website about this :/
Mission Park History
https://www.missionpark.com/history.htm