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Board approves Fields Corner housing proposal that is about as transit-oriented as you can get
By adamg on Tue, 12/05/2023 - 5:27pm
Rendering of project on lot that touches Fields Corner Red Line stop by Hue Architecture.
The Zoning Board of Appeal today approved plans for a five-story building with 14 studio apartments on a lot that ends at a wall for the Fields Corner Red Line stop in Dorchester.
The project needed variance for, among other things, not having any parking spaces. Develop Hiep Chu said the vacant lot at 22 Freeman St., where a house burned down in the 1980s, isn't big enough - roughly 40 feet by 80 feet - to support both parking and 15 new apartments, even small ones.
Board members, however, said that was fine in this case. "I think the density feels right," board member Hansy Better Barraza said. "It's right next to a train station."
The lot sits on a seven-foot rise, so its ground level would actually be built more as a basement, with spaces for 15 bicycles and a lift to get people with mobility issues up to the first floor for access to the units, architect Jennifer Ha said.
The units would range in size from 378 to 398 square feet. Two of the units will be rented to people making no more than 70% of the Boston area median income.
Nobody spoke against the proposal.
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Comments
WTF
Get the fuck out of here.
My current bedroom is almost 200 sq ft. What is this? An apartment building for ants?
It works
It's your bedroom plus a 5x10 bathroom, a 5x10 kitchenette, and 10x10 space for a small table and some shelves.
For a single person or a couple who don't have much stuff, it's tight but functional.
I'd prefer that over a larger apartment with 2-3 housemates, personally.
Sensible human habitat
It is housing for people who don't want/need a lot of space.
Layout is everything - I jointly own a 500 square foot one-bedroom condo in PDX and it is one of the larger units in the complex, built in 1948. A couple of the units are studios - still with a full kitchen and bath - at 380-400 square feet. The development was designed for singles, couples, and elders during the intense housing crunch after WW II. It costs very little to heat, has a back garden and a front courtyard, and works perfectly well for a single elder relative who lives there.
We looked at larger units that felt more cramped because they had crappy layouts and/or not enough windows and light. The bottom line is that, for many singles and couples, these sizes of units work just fine. My son and his partner have a similarly sized 1br in Boston - about 520 square feet.
Then again, I grew up with four people in 700 square feet so my expectations of space are a bit different from many my age.
THIS
I guess it is because all of the long term residents grew up in Dorchester when it was empty. They have very strange ideas about how much space a person needs. My grandparents in Chicago owned a 2 family and my mother slept in their room until she was 6 and her older siblings left the home. Dorchester needs these small studios to keep the homeless out of our parks!!! We need more small units built in neighborhoods where there is a hope of working people affording them.
Some perspective:
Some perspective:
Only in the US this is considered unusually small.
For anyone who has spent time at sea on a Navy ship, this is palatial; larger than the captain's quarters. Never mind a submarine.
Probably larger also than a room for four unrelated young adults at the newish UMass Boston dorms. I have yet to hear that this is a problem.
Great for people who weren't born into privilege or would rather not live a planet-plundering lifestyle.
https://www.umb.edu/campus-life/housing-dining/on-campus/floor-plans-roo...
Dorm room
A dorm room doesn't have a kitchen. A fridge is like 10 sq feet alone.
Do you mean cubic feet? Most
Do you mean cubic feet? Most fridges take about 4 square foot of floor space, but they are 10 cubic feet. You wouldn't want a massive double door fridge in most places in Dorchester because it would fit through any doors.
Uh, no
A fridge for a single person can be much smaller.
This is how spaces in a 400 square foot studio stack up:
Kitchen - can be compact and along a wall, still needs about 40 square feet
Bathroom - without a tub, about 30 square feet with walls and a door
Bed nook - if separate from just having some bed/couch set up in the living room, a full-size bed is about 3.5' x 6.5' ... make that 5x8 to walk around it = 40 square feet
Closet space: give it 30 square feet to be generous.
So our essentials tally about 140 square feet.
The rest - about 260 square feet or a 16x20' room - can be divvied up for table space, storage, and living space. This can actually work pretty comfortably if it is laid out well.
If you go to Zillow or Trulia you can search for units this size and see how they stack up. It may not be how you or I choose to live, but that doesn't mean that they aren't workable spaces.
This one is only 315 square feet.
This one is 400 square feet.
Kinda funny
It's very true Americans are accustomed to having huge houses as compared to the rest of the world. But I wouldn't tell someone the quarters on military ships and submarines are the comparison. That's like saying the restaurant food is pretty good compared to a middle school cafeteria. :)
Who are they trying to
Who are they trying to attract to reside in these units? The only pet you are allowed to have is an ant. No kids. Tiny house. Tiny apartment. No big folks. Work all day, play all night, and rent it to sleep alone on your bed that will fold out from the wall.
yes
yes
What 400 square feet looks like
It is clearly much roomier than you envision.
This is from an actual unit for sale on Zillow:
Note that it has a reasonably sized kitchen, a bath with a tub, two full closets, and a separate bedroom.
Y'all need to adjust your senses of scale.
I lived
In a 300 SQ ft studio for almost a decade as a young person in Los Angeles. It's not as small as it sounds if you don't own much furniture and get creative about shelving and room layout to create different areas.
We need housing for all types
We need housing for all types of people and a studio sized apartment right on a train line is the sort of thing we need massive amounts of in this area. There were lots of options for single people a hundred years ago that included boarding houses, the YMCA and yes little studios that you'd live in if you were young, single or just plain low income (we used to call that poor.) Then around the post war period we seemed to pull away from that and these things weren't built. Boarding houses and the YMCA slowly became places where you went as a last resort , not because it was simply affordable.
When I was in my 20s I would have jumped at something like this. In my 40s I prefer a little more space but then again I make a little more money so it works out.
If we could get these 20 something's out of these three and four bedroom apartments maybe we could start finding a way to get larger families into those units so they aren't competing with a five earner household. They are renting these units as groups because they have to live somewhere. We need to stop pretending like we don't have a huge number of young people who need places to live. When you have five people in a unit and each is willing to pay almost a thousand, if not more, for rent you end up with grossly inflated larger units that are impossible for a family to compete with. Sure some of these people would prefer to live in that group setting but I bet most would get an upgrade in absolute space if they moved into one of these units.
Okay, Karen
Nobody said you need to rent one of these units. Your outrage is very misplaced.
Kind of like Chicago
where the El runs right past your window.
Have You Ever Been On The Red Line?
I know to many people Dorchester is a place like those 14th century maps which show people in Africa with their faces where their chests should be but a lot of the Ashmont branch above ground goes by people's houses.
Northbound between the tunnel and Freeport Street and from Savin Hill Ave. to JFK UMass.
Oh - untwist your knickers,
Oh - untwist your knickers, willya?
Nobody is looking at you Nana.
The building will be separated from the train cars and platform by both a street then a very tall wall.
Beacon Hill, too
It was more obvious before the T added sound walls just east of Charles/MGH station a few years ago.
What noise?
So I am sure the building does not shake when the Rapid Transit lumbers by at 8 MPH, and yes
when there is no room to build this is what we get, and we get bilked for it.
Train goes by often you won't even notice it
https://youtu.be/pVmK0agsUmI
Magoo sez
Magoo likes to walk around in Magoo’s abode in the buff so Magoo wonders if redline peepers would peep on Magoo if Magoo lived here. Magoo.
Oh, great - now we know where
Oh, great - now we know where Magoo lives! He's that guy in the apartment building at Dot Ave & Broadway!
...
Another image I need to purge from my brain!