Dorchester Bay City (nee Bayside Expo Ctr.) | Columbia Point

Equilibria said:
I think it's best to accept that there are about five development firms that can ever actually build anything (Samuels, HYM, Alexandria, Boston Properties, National Development). Everyone else (Mark, Peebles, Accordia...) is in the render generation business.
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  • Millennium Partners
  • MITMCo
  • WS
  • Fallon
  • Skanska
  • Related Beal
  • Hynes
Others too...
 
Skanska has the benefit of both being a developer and a contractor.
 
The list is longer than 5, but Equilbria has a point. It is a finite list.

There's another signature characteristic: when a firm from within that inner circle starts a project, that project gets going. Worksites are quickly filled with machines and workers. Vertical structure within a year, etc. Those firms' projects freaking move.

If/when others occasionally make it past the Render Magic stage, its: port-a-potty and one excavator shows up....a few months later, it's just the port-a-potty....then a few months later its just the gravel pit and even the port-a-potty is gone...then a few months later if the interest rates are 0.000%, a port-a-potty shows up again along with a few concrete trucks / if the interest rates are bad, the project is dead and a gravel pit sits there for 15 years.

You can pretty much tell just by how a project starts whether it's going anywhere or not.
 
Uggh, this sucks.

Fortunately there's a really easy solution: instead of relying solely on huge development companies to redevelop massive, neighborhood-sized plots of land in a process that takes a decade under the best case scenario, just write up a master plan and then break up the area into small lots that can be developed by lots of different parties. You know, the way every city in the world was built until about 50 years ago. Unfortunately, we've just decided to stop doing that in America for some reason.
 
Do I need to say it again? Why on earth did we even think one company would be able to build out a 235 million dollar, 20 acre site? It keeps failing everywhere across the city. Why do we keep trying this over and over and over… The places where developing entire new neighborhoods on massive empty lots from scratch has worked like assembly, seaport, cambridge crossing, kendall sq have been developed by many different developers building one or two buildings at a time, over time.

Why did they sell the whole thing to accordia? Then the entire success or failure is wrapped up in them alone. Hire a company to design a street grid then sell each parcel to a different developer. Neighborhoods always come out when built this way anyways. Accordia could have still bought a couple parcels here but the rest could have gone to multiple developers and one or two would probably be u/c by now.

We think we know better now than city planners of the past, but our record of getting things done today is abysmal. Stop with the over complicated, built from scratch to completion, utopian city concepts.. they suck anyways, and instead do the thing that has worked literally since the beginning of time. Lay down a street grid, throw a court yard or park in the middle, and just then let people build lot by lot according to what the market needs at the time. Thats it…
 
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Financially, it doesn’t pencil out these days for anything less than a megablock landscraper variant.
 
RandomWalk said:
Financially, it doesn’t pencil out these days for anything less than a megablock landscraper variant.
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What's not penciling out? There are nicely scaled buildings with 20-40 units and ground floor retail being built all over the city. Just let small developers build a new neighborhood of those. We don't need mini seaports all over the region. We just need well-planned housing.
 
I agree with the general sentiment, but this is right next to JFK/UMass. If transit-oriented development and decreasing VMT are priorities, shouldn't we be going the way of Toronto or Vancouver and building high-rises near stations? 5-over-1s won't be enough to move the needle, and excess demand will just be spread out to 128 and beyond. If anything taller than 6 stories isn't penciling out right now, maybe a density bonus incentive by lowering property taxes or IZ requirements would change the calculus.
 
This is essentially the only project in Dorchester that doesn't work because it is high end. There are about 1200 units of regular people housing under construction right up the street
 
3decker said:
I agree with the general sentiment, but this is right next to JFK/UMass. If transit-oriented development and decreasing VMT are priorities, shouldn't we be going the way of Toronto or Vancouver and building high-rises near stations? 5-over-1s won't be enough to move the needle, and excess demand will just be spread out to 128 and beyond. If anything taller than 6 stories isn't penciling out right now, maybe a density bonus incentive by lowering property taxes or IZ requirements would change the calculus.
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Five-over-ones absolutely are enough to move the needle. This is the third-densest square kilometer in all of Boston. It doesn't have a single building taller than five stories. But it what does have is around 10,000 people living in it, most of whom pay far less than what the units would cost in Dorchester Bay City:

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I would love to have a few 20-story towers around JFK/UMASS. But they are not necessary components of density. If you turned the Dorchester Bay City site into a neighborhood of five-over-ones built by a variety of developers, you'd have housing for 5-10,000 more people within two years. And that housing wouldn't be as expensive as what we would've gotten with the massive redevelopment.
 
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Five over ones are genetically incapable of possessing architectural merit. I'd rather the land lay fallow.
 
Idk about other people but my comment wasnt about 5 over 1’s. Just because you break it up into a bunch of individual lots doesnt mean it has to be 5 over 1’s. You can build towers block by block, its actually easier that way because nobody can finance a 10 tower development.

That being said if they laid down a street grid and build a couple 5 over 1’s now and a couple towers later wouldnt that be a better outcome than it just being a parking lot for the next 20 years as we wait for the next mythical super developer to attempt to build out an entire neighborhood from scratch again only for it to fail for the 200th time? Neighborhoods are better with some variety anyways. Build it over time like a real neighborhood with different buildings from different eras and financial situations and it will be better in the end. Neighborhoods with some variety are more livable than a neighborhood of just 10 brand new glass towers 9 times out of 10.
 
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Jeremi said:
Five over ones are genetically incapable of possessing architectural merit. I'd rather the land lay fallow.
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Congratulations, this might just be the least relevant thing ever posted at ArchBoston. :rolleyes:
 
Jeremi said:
Five over ones are genetically incapable of possessing architectural merit. I'd rather the land lay fallow.
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With decent architecture, a good ped/bike path system, a grid of small streets and blocks, and retail and pocket parks scattered about, with little or no parking lots, then a great neighborhood can be developed with five over ones .
 
Charlie_mta said:
With decent architecture, a good ped/bike path system, a grid of small streets and blocks, and retail and pocket parks scattered about, with little or no parking lots, then a great neighborhood can be developed with five over ones .
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Probably not, because you rarely have a grid of small streets and blocks when building 5 over 1s. And you can make a great neighborhood out of Soviet slab apartment blocks, but that doesn't mean it's architecture.
 
Jeremi said:
ArchBoston.
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And that might be the second least relevant thing. Architecture can be good or bad, regardless of construction technique. There is nothing inherent to a 5 over 1 that implies bad architecture. And yes, this is an architecture discussion board, but we also discuss more general urbanist issues. 5 acres of parking lots is never preferable to dense housing, even if the architecture is plain to your eye.
 
5 over 1’s are like a blank canvas, you can put on the outside whatever you want. Some have hand laid brick, some have precast fibre cement panels. A rectangular brick 5 over 1 with no garage that goes right up to the sidewalk can look like any other brick residential building ever. Theres plenty of examples.
 
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