Wellesley Developments

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FK4

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This development doesn't really "deserve" its own thread in my opinion, but there weren't any Wellesley entries I could find. I remember hearing about it a while back and saw it, nearing completion, today (sorry, no pics). The website makes it look shittier than it does in person. It's nothing to write home about, but from the road it certainly feels bigger - ie, more dense - than anything else around.
http://www.belclarewellesley.com/
 
Globe: Housing proposal gets mixed reaction in Wellesley

Boston Globe said:
A proposed housing development that would add 95 new rental units across the street from the MBTA’s Wellesley Square commuter rail station has some town officials concerned about the impact on the neighborhood.

Developer Victor Sheen, president of Brookline-based Oakgrove Residential, wants to replace five homes on Delanson Circle with a six-story development with 95 rental units, including 19 apartments that would be affordable to households earning 50 percent of the median income in the Boston area.

Sheen is seeking a waiver from local zoning rules to build under Chapter 40B, a state law designed to spur the development of affordable housing.

[...]
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A whole bunch of Wellesley NIMBYs are out against it for the typical reasons...

delanson_circle_wellesley2%20(2).jpg
 
The Globe article is somewhat misleading about the context here - Delanson St. would be eliminated by the development. The building would actually sit on Linden St. The author makes it sound as though this is going to be on a tiny cul-de-sac with a few residents, when the reality is that it's on a major thoroughfare directly across from a Commuter Rail parking lot and a block from a major shopping center.

I don't think you can make an argument about "traffic" at this location. Linden is a commercial strip and the "small local road" used for parking access is about 50 feet of Hollis St until it hits Linden and becomes a driveway for a different apartment building. In the other direction, Hollis goes for a block until it becomes... a driveway for yet another apartment building.

I doubt that the developer is really expecting to get six stories here, but he should.
 
Meh, that's a bit out of character for the area in terms of scale, even with the shopping center a few blocks down & CR across the street. I admire the ambition, but I too think the developer is coming in high and hoping to win them over by loping off 2 floors or so, which I think is appropriate (maybe even 5 stories).
 
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Equilibria said:
I don't think you can make an argument about "traffic" at this location. .
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Yes you can. Traffic most certainly backs up quite a bit at the light at Linden St. and Crest Rd. This is especially the case when trains arrive at the station and there are 30 or more cars trying to exit the commuter rail parking lot onto Linden St. That being said, I would still be in favor of something similar at this site given that it's practically on top of the train station.
 
BosDevelop said:
Yes you can. Traffic most certainly backs up quite a bit at the light at Linden St. and Crest Rd. This is especially the case when trains arrive at the station and there are 30 or more cars trying to exit the commuter rail parking lot onto Linden St. That being said, I would still be in favor of something similar at this site given that it's practically on top of the train station.
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It's also rough on weekends. Linden really backs up.

Of course, the way to allay these concerns is to just lower the parking ratio.
 
datadyne007 said:
It's also rough on weekends. Linden really backs up.

Of course, the way to allay these concerns is to just lower the parking ratio.
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I didn't mean that there's no traffic issue, but that if folks there were worried about that they shouldn't have let the large-scale commercial in. Wellesley made Linden St. an arterial in the first place.
 
I actually live near this. 95 units is a lot for the area. Traffic is already bad here but not due to the shopping area, more from traffic on Weston Road and the middle school in the area. Its way bigger than anything in the area but not sure what the right number of units should be.
 
If not here, then where? It's a major problem when the inner burbs (outer burbs can be as guilty) place such restrictions on multi unit housing, even when it's literally across the street from the train station. Same tired arguments as you hear in the city...traffic, too tall, doesn't fit in with the character of the neighborhood, schools, town services, water supply, etc.
 
There is a lot of multi family in the area. South Boston (the ACTUAL city) has fought projects a lot smaller than this. I don't think it needs to be single family housing but seems big for the area. im pretty sure wellesley has some of the smallest lot size requirements around. But I guess you are making generic arguments than considering actual facts.
 
TallIsGood said:
There is a lot of multi family in the area. South Boston (the ACTUAL city) has fought projects a lot smaller than this. I don't think it needs to be single family housing but seems big for the area. im pretty sure wellesley has some of the smallest lot size requirements around. But I guess you are making generic arguments than considering actual facts.
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I'm not just picking on Wellesley, it's a problem for the whole metro Boston area, as well as the city, as I mentioned in my original statement. And if you read Wellesley's number one goal as stated in their housing and residential character paper that I listed, you'll see that I'm not making generic arguments. It's a major problem for the whole metro Boston area.

http://www.wellesleyma.gov/Pages/FOV1-0001FDAB/chapter4.pdf
 
atlantaden said:
If not here, then where?
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No one is saying this is not a good site for a sizeable (for the immediate area) development. Rather, the real issue is how big to build. Would you have the same comment if the developer proposed 180 units on this site? 250 units?
 
BosDevelop said:
No one is saying this is not a good site for a sizeable (for the immediate area) development. Rather, the real issue is how big to build. Would you have the same comment if the developer proposed 180 units on this site? 250 units?
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Get to the 40B requirements and you won't have to worry about it.
 
Globe: Single-family home plan in Wellesley may be scrapped for condos

Boston Globe said:
The developer of a planned Wellesley subdivision of a dozen single-family homes has told town officials that he is now considering a condominium complex for the property instead.

[...]

The Concord-based developer is considering 44 condo units in a town house and duplex style for the 12-acre property at 135 Great Plain Ave., for which it paid $6.5 million in December 2014.

[...]

The project would be built under the state’s Chapter 40B affordable housing law and would include 11 affordable units, according to Wellesley planning director Michael D. Zehner.

[...]
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Massive u/c wood frame building thats highly visible when exiting 95 onto rt 9. Being constructed in the main parking lot of the Wellesley office park, building contains 350 residential units, 88 income restricted. Im glad to see some affordable housing going up in Wellesley, but its pretty telling that theyve forced it onto an ofice park thats essentially an island. Still, its adding new units onto the market, we need as many as we can get.

“Hanover Wellesley”
e_3_Hanover_Wellesley_concept.jpeg

e_3_Hanover_Wellesley_rendering.jpeg

Cube_3_Hanover_Wellesley.jpeg

https://www.bldup.com/posts/350-unit-hanover-wellesley-now-under-construction
 
It's been a while, but we did talk about this before:

Wellesley Office Park Master Plan | William Street | Wellesley

If Northland, Riverside, et al get threads, this should too: https://wellesleyma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/14353/BoS-Public-Hearing-Presentation---January-28-2019 This is one of the worst ideas I've ever seen, and it's transparently so. Let's shove all the poors in a corner with a single...
archboston.com

It's the "hide the poors where they can't get out" project.
 
jklo said:
Do Workforce housing, aimed at all those Lab Techs that are going to be needed with all that lab space?
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This is locally-supported 40B, which is basically a way for rich white suburbanites to dump affordable housing in places they don't have to see it. In some cases that's okay (if there's convenient transit, for example) but in this case William Street is an access nightmare with egress only to WB Route 9 (which can't really take the new cars from this development). As we discussed in the other thread, there's an intriguing transit accessibility for this via Waban if a footbridge were built to Newton, but really MassDOT, the Town, and the developer need to extend William over 128 through the former Harvard Pilgrim property if anything more is built on it. In a perfect world, the Harvard Pilgrim site itself would be densified and the entire William Street corridor returned to a forest area to front the river, but that's obviously not realistic.
 
It’s the way of getting above the threshold where 40B applies. Dump it in large blocks where the fancy folk don’t go, and they can avoid someone dropping a project where they do go.
 
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