BPDA Austin Street Parking Lot Development | Charlestown

Equilibria

Equilibria

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There's a meeting on this tonight for the two development teams to present their proposals. BPDA has done something interesting to present them:

Experience

experience.arcgis.com experience.arcgis.com

The two RFPs:

DREAM and Onyx Development: https://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/f4219712-78d0-4efe-b12d-1f1767d759f3

1695240329846.png


Trinity Financial: https://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/172443ff-7adb-46ce-8266-76b0413b5d6f

1695240405678.png
 
By the way, it's been quite awkwardly wedged in its location for some time now...but if this development gets built, and with the CX development on the other side, damn we'll have all-out Boston Sand & Gravel sandwich going on at that point.
 
Really good numbers here from the DreamOnyx proposal: "Create approximately 757 housing units that are truly affordable for existing, local, low- and middle-income families and individuals, including approximately 122 for-sale units, which will provide opportunities to those who have historically had to overcome steep hurdles to homeownership, and 635 rental units affordable to individuals and families from 0% AMI - market rate."
 
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Equilibria said:
There's a meeting on this tonight for the two development teams to present their proposals. BPDA has done something interesting to present them:

Experience

experience.arcgis.com experience.arcgis.com

The two RFPs:

DREAM and Onyx Development: https://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/f4219712-78d0-4efe-b12d-1f1767d759f3

View attachment 42858

Trinity Financial: https://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/172443ff-7adb-46ce-8266-76b0413b5d6f

View attachment 42859
Click to expand...

That Rt 99 highway separating the train station from Main St/Thompson Sq./Austin St. looks absolutely horrifying still, in the image. The tunnel needs to go, and the whole thing limited to one lane single direction. Separate bus lanes are ok. But man, those buildings are gonna be mentally isolating still, due to the endless sea of car asphalt around it.
 
Delvin4519 said:
That Rt 99 highway separating the train station from Main St/Thompson Sq./Austin St. looks absolutely horrifying still, in the image. The tunnel needs to go, and the whole thing limited to one lane single direction. Separate bus lanes are ok. But man, those buildings are gonna be mentally isolating still, due to the endless sea of car asphalt around it.
Click to expand...
When people use extreme language like...
- "absolutely horrifying"
- "mentally isolating"
- "endless sea of car asphalt"

...honest question: do you actually feel that extreme, or is this just a mechanism for activism? Not trying to be an ass, seriously. And I am a strong believer in values similar to what you share (in terms of how the area needs to change), though I note that there is more than one type of mechanism for activism.

My perspective: When I was 25 years old, I would have KILLED for a nice place to live this close to Boston. I lived in less-optimally-located shitholes with lots of roommates/housemates throughout most of my 20s. There was no decent housing at the quality of what would be in this asphalt-surrounded development accessible me at that point. In that time in my life, I have had a bedroom window that literally faced a blank cinder block wall (and that was in the NICE place that I loved living in at the time).

This place will be inches away from the city, literally right next to the T, and a SHORT HOP across the Gilmore bridge to the Cambridge Crossing area which is quite nice to hang out in.
Do you actually spend a lot of time passing through this "absolutely horrifying" area? I do. And I see streams of people walk or bike across the Gilmore bridge daily, many from the T station, some to/from BHCC, a few ostensibly heading to/from Charlestown. This "absolutely horrifying sea of asphalt" has been here for decades, and while nobody likes it, all of these humans are numb to it - they don't even think about it - they are not horrified by it.

Should all of your suggestions be enacted (road diets, tunnel removal, etc). Yes! But why they ire toward these prospective developers who do not control those roadways or that land, and are simply responding to an RFP from the City of Boston. Should they not respond because the land is surrounded by roads?
 
From an urban perspective, I am liking the DREAM-Onyx proposal better. The Trinity Financial one is more straightforward, but the amount of surface space for cars cutting through the site, especially on the east end of the parcel, bugs me. Also the fact that Trinity has one more curb cut on to Rutherford feels unsafe. Trinity does appear to have more dedicated open space, but until Rutherford Ave has a true road diet I wonder how those spaces will truly feel. The DREAM-Oynx connection over the primary drive bisecting the site is an elegant design solution, but it also highlights how bad the ground level is at the human scale is at this point.

On Trinity's proposal, I feel like they also just turned their back on the street between the development and the interstate. The DREAM-Oynx group put more graphic effort into that area to make it not feel like a dead space.

I like the interactive model that BPDA has for this. It is a great way to work around the site and understand some of the more unique aspects of the site.
 
bigpicture7 said:
When people use extreme language like...
- "absolutely horrifying"
- "mentally isolating"
- "endless sea of car asphalt"

...honest question: do you actually feel that extreme, or is this just a mechanism for activism? Not trying to be an ass, seriously. And I am a strong believer in values similar to what you share (in terms of how the area needs to change), though I note that there is more than one type of mechanism for activism.

My perspective: When I was 25 years old, I would have KILLED for a nice place to live this close to Boston. I lived in less-optimally-located shitholes with lots of roommates/housemates throughout most of my 20s. There was no decent housing at the quality of what would be in this asphalt-surrounded development accessible me at that point. In that time in my life, I have had a bedroom window that literally faced a blank cinder block wall (and that was in the NICE place that I loved living in at the time).

This place will be inches away from the city, literally right next to the T, and a SHORT HOP across the Gilmore bridge to the Cambridge Crossing area which is quite nice to hang out in.
Do you actually spend a lot of time passing through this "absolutely horrifying" area? I do. And I see streams of people walk or bike across the Gilmore bridge daily, many from the T station, some to/from BHCC, a few ostensibly heading to/from Charlestown. This "absolutely horrifying sea of asphalt" has been here for decades, and while nobody likes it, all of these humans are numb to it - they don't even think about it - they are not horrified by it.

Should all of your suggestions be enacted (road diets, tunnel removal, etc). Yes! But why they ire toward these prospective developers who do not control those roadways or that land, and are simply responding to an RFP from the City of Boston. Should they not respond because the land is surrounded by roads?
Click to expand...

I guess I feel strongly about it, like I can never unsee it once I saw it from NJB, basically impossible for me to unsee it now. After watching it, everywhere I look around me, and NJB is the first thing to come to my obsessive mind.

I guess the top-down perspective kind of makes it looks worse than it seems. Like if there's a building there from street level it would look better than the desert it is today. It would block the view of the highway from street level, which is a desparately needed improvement. That way people see a building, and not the highway, at ground level.

Also, there's also the case of lower income areas dealing with higher rates of air pollution. It kind of locks in the status quo of air pollution in lower-income areas , even though somewhere to put homes is better than nowhere to put homes.

I wouldn't put this feedback for the developers. This part of the area just happens to be the last remaining undeveloped parts that can be improved and fixed upon. The current situation I just have strong feelings about it, since I have already seen what can't be unseen for my obsessive mind. Most ppl and most locals probably don't watch NJB or CityNerd, unless they are like already on this AB forum or something like that, so they won't think twice about something that's always been there.
 
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bigpicture7 said:
When people use extreme language like...
- "absolutely horrifying"
- "mentally isolating"
- "endless sea of car asphalt"

...honest question: do you actually feel that extreme, or is this just a mechanism for activism? Not trying to be an ass, seriously. And I am a strong believer in values similar to what you share (in terms of how the area needs to change), though I note that there is more than one type of mechanism for activism.

My perspective: When I was 25 years old, I would have KILLED for a nice place to live this close to Boston. I lived in less-optimally-located shitholes with lots of roommates/housemates throughout most of my 20s. There was no decent housing at the quality of what would be in this asphalt-surrounded development accessible me at that point. In that time in my life, I have had a bedroom window that literally faced a blank cinder block wall (and that was in the NICE place that I loved living in at the time).

This place will be inches away from the city, literally right next to the T, and a SHORT HOP across the Gilmore bridge to the Cambridge Crossing area which is quite nice to hang out in.
Do you actually spend a lot of time passing through this "absolutely horrifying" area? I do. And I see streams of people walk or bike across the Gilmore bridge daily, many from the T station, some to/from BHCC, a few ostensibly heading to/from Charlestown. This "absolutely horrifying sea of asphalt" has been here for decades, and while nobody likes it, all of these humans are numb to it - they don't even think about it - they are not horrified by it.

Should all of your suggestions be enacted (road diets, tunnel removal, etc). Yes! But why they ire toward these prospective developers who do not control those roadways or that land, and are simply responding to an RFP from the City of Boston. Should they not respond because the land is surrounded by roads?
Click to expand...
I don't think it's being that hyperbolic or extreme considering the site is hemmed in by a combined 22 lanes of urban expressway and is right next to a gigantic concrete plant. I can absolutely see why a 25 year old would want to live here, because he/she is less concerned about their long-term physical health. Anyone else (the elderly, the infirm, children) will have to deal with the consequences of living in a traffic island.
 
Delvin4519 said:
I guess I feel strongly about it, like I can never unsee it once I saw it from NJB, basically impossible for me to unsee it now. After watching it, everywhere I look around me, and NJB is the first thing to come to my obsessive mind.

I guess the top-down perspective kind of makes it looks worse than it seems. Like if there's a building there from street level it would look better than the desert it is today. It would block the view of the highway from street level, which is a desparately needed improvement. That way people see a building, and not the highway, at ground level.

Also, there's also the case of lower income areas dealing with higher rates of air pollution. It kind of locks in the status quo of air pollution in lower-income areas , even though somewhere to put homes is better than nowhere to put homes.

I wouldn't put this feedback for the developers. This part of the area just happens to be the last remaining undeveloped parts that can be improved and fixed upon. The current situation I just have strong feelings about it, since I have already seen what can't be unseen for my obsessive mind. Most ppl and most locals probably don't watch NJB or CityNerd, unless they are like already on this AB forum or something like that, so they won't think twice about something that's always been there.
Click to expand...

Delvin, appreciate the thoughtful response.

I guess what you and I "see" here is different. For me: I am not seeing time in the same way you (seem) to be seeing time. My brain really hates all the roadways and cars too, but the large-scale technical project manager in me doesn't see the sequencing, paralleism, non-linearity, etc, of things getting done in the same way my brain would have seen it pre-career. Getting rid of cars is an important, monumental project. Building housing is an important, monumental project. I want them both done, and I am sure as hell not going to increase the complexity of getting either of them done by turning it all into one ultra-monumental-super-interdependent-project if I can instead meaningfully make progress on one or the other asap.
If that expressway is still there operating in its present form, largely fossil-fueled, pumping out fumes in a few years, then shame, shame, shame. I want to kill that thing in parallel. When I look at this housing project, I want to get it moving asap in parallel.

The younger activist in me would have said: put a chokehold on this developer to leverage their interests toward also killing all the lanes of traffic if they want to get anything built. The older activist in me knows that this developer is far to weak in the grand scheme for that to matter one iota, and wasting lots of energy on that particular target is incompetent activism. There is no logical way that stalling this project is going to have any impact on killing the expressway. Effective activism is about passion and targeting. These bidders are not the target. This project is not the target. The cars and the roads are their own target.

So, I suppose I could agree that that particular aerial view is angst inducing; the project, to me, is promising.
 
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king_vibe said:
I can absolutely see why a 25 year old would want to live here, because he/she is less concerned about their long-term physical health...
Click to expand...

The 25 year old is pretty desperate and with few/no good options. That's the point. Most of my friends from my 20s left Boston because it was not viable for them. Housing and car-centricity are both crises. Why does there need to be a forced sequence to addressing them one after the other when we can be pursuing them both at once.

Do we really think Boston's use of internal combustion cars is going to outlive the buildings in this project? The project better outlive the IC cars. IC cars should be gone in a matter of years. In supporting the project, that is a central assumption of mine.
 
curcuas said:
Hate how much parkland Trinity is proposing next to Rutherford Ave. Don't make more parks with poisoned air! Build a streetwall, set back the green space where it becomes usable!
Click to expand...
You mean on the other side of the site, with the even worse air?
 
bigpicture7 said:
Do we really think Boston's use of internal combustion cars is going to outlive the buildings in this project? The project better outlive the IC cars. IC cars should be gone in a matter of years. In supporting the project, that is a central assumption of mine.
Click to expand...

The MUCH more significant health risk from living next to a highway is particulate matter from tire-to-road friction, not exhaust.

Moving from internal combustion to electric doesn't improve anything.

The slight improvement in air quality from less exhaust is offset (if not more) by more particulate matter coming off the tires of heavier electric vehicles. Look it up.
 
bigpicture7 said:
The 25 year old is pretty desperate and with few/no good options. That's the point. Most of my friends from my 20s left Boston because it was not viable for them. Housing and car-centricity are both crises. Why does there need to be a forced sequence to addressing them one after the other when we can be pursuing them both at once.

Do we really think Boston's use of internal combustion cars is going to outlive the buildings in this project? The project better outlive the IC cars. IC cars should be gone in a matter of years. In supporting the project, that is a central assumption of mine.
Click to expand...
95% of cars sold in 2022 had an internal combustion engine. Even the most optimistic predictions show EVs having a 50% market share by 2050. And EVs may not have tailpipe emissions, but they produce fine particulate emissions and noise pollution like any other car.

I’m not saying that this project should not pursued. I am saying that I pity the people who will live here because the only places we build affordable housing are wastelands.
 
bigpicture7 said:
Delvin, appreciate the thoughtful response.

I guess what you and I "see" here is different. For me: I am not seeing time in the same way you (seem) to be seeing time. My brain really hates all the roadways and cars too, but the large-scale technical project manager in me doesn't see the sequencing, paralleism, non-linearity, etc, of things getting done in the same way my brain would have seen it pre-career. Getting rid of cars is an important, monumental project. Building housing is an important, monumental project. I want them both done, and I am sure as hell not going to increase the complexity of getting either of them done by turning it all into one ultra-monumental-super-interdependent-project if I can instead meaningfully make progress on one or the other asap.
If that expressway is still there operating in its present form, largely fossil-fueled, pumping out fumes in a few years, then shame, shame, shame. I want to kill that thing in parallel. When I look at this housing project, I want to get it moving asap in parallel.

The younger activist in me would have said: put a chokehold on this developer to leverage their interests toward also killing all the lanes of traffic if they want to get anything built. The older activist in me knows that this developer is far to weak in the grand scheme for that to matter one iota, and wasting lots of energy on that particular target is incompetent activism. There is no logical way that stalling this project is going to have any impact on killing the expressway. Effective activism is about passion and targeting. These bidders are not the target. This project is not the target. The cars and the roads are their own target.

So, I suppose I could agree that that particular aerial view is angst inducing; the project, to me, is promising.
Click to expand...

Yea. This project is very promising. The walking enviornment will improve with the more trees and shade when this development project gets built, and the train station will finally have some future residents living nearby it. Those are the extremely, extremely promising aspects of the project. I wouldn't want to forgo it just because of the car sewer, given how very many say the lack of homes is very deeply troubling for the region. The car sewer is alleviated by building ontop of the existing parking lot. It would still be very extremely quite car centric in the scheme of things relative to the scale used by NJB and other online urbanist content creators (that I frankly am very obsessed with and basically comparing everything in Boston with now). But still, anything that's a pretty good improvement from the existing is still better than no improvement, esp. with how some (like me), don't have a lot of hope or optimism about this region/continent. To go from 0 to 10 (out of a scale of 100) is better than being stuck at 0.

BTW, car centricity and car dependency are two completely separate things. Car dependency is the thing that forces people to drive with no other choice, which includes a lack of homes in destinations. Car centricity is the planning of things to be centered around cars, such as building wide roads through cities, and makes driving more preferental. This project is in a car centric area, but not a car dependent area, due to the Orange Line being next door. The crisis trying to be solved is the crisis of car dependency; which means reducing car centric enviornments, and providing multi-modal transportation options and homes together.
 
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curcuas said:
Hate how much parkland Trinity is proposing next to Rutherford Ave. Don't make more parks with poisoned air! Build a streetwall, set back the green space where it becomes usable!
Click to expand...

Or the development should offer to subsidize an interior public facility / soccer field, basketball courts , indoor track, a pool; or even replace the ice rink building currently across Rutherford, it's has to be 50 years old at this point
 
itchy said:
Moving from internal combustion to electric doesn't improve anything...
Click to expand...

Well, at minimum there's a difference in the physical distribution of where the effect takes hold. If we can global-system-wide succeed at decabonizing...

itchy said:
The slight improvement in air quality from less exhaust is offset (if not more) by more particulate matter coming off the tires of heavier electric vehicles. Look it up.
Click to expand...

Why not require the developer to provide passive-house type sealing and HEPA filtration? I mean, if it's the difference between being able to utilize / not utilize the parcel...

Your point is taken about EVs vs ICs in general.
 
Delvin4519 said:
Yea. This project is very promising. The walking enviornment will improve with the more trees and shade when this development project gets built, and the train station will finally have some future residents living nearby it. Those are the extremely, extremely promising aspects of the project. I wouldn't want to forgo it just because of the car sewer, given how very many say the lack of homes is very deeply troubling for the region. The car sewer is alleviated by building ontop of the existing parking lot. It would still be very extremely quite car centric in the scheme of things relative to the scale used by NJB and other online urbanist content creators (that I frankly am very obsessed with and basically comparing everything in Boston with now). But still, anything that's a pretty good improvement from the existing is still better than no improvement, esp. with how some (like me), don't have a lot of hope or optimism about this region/continent. To go from 0 to 10 (out of a scale of 100) is better than being stuck at 0.

BTW, car centricity and car dependency are two completely separate things. Car dependency is the thing that forces people to drive with no other choice, which includes a lack of homes in destinations. Car centricity is the planning of things to be centered around cars, such as building wide roads through cities, and makes driving more preferental. This project is in a car centric area, but not a car dependent area, due to the Orange Line being next door. The crisis trying to be solved is the crisis of car dependency; which means reducing car centric enviornments, and providing multi-modal transportation options and homes together.
Click to expand...

Again appreciate the reply and the details therein. I actually used car-centricity intentionally, though, aware of the difference. If I am not mistaken, NJB and influences thereof originated pre-pandemic, and the terms used exactly as you defined them made a lot of sense then (and still do in many/most contexts). Now, however, with hybrid and wfh, there's a blurred boundary because knowledge workers are trying less hard to live in Boston. So there's a preference for car-centricity among people who actually have somewhat of a choice about how car-utilizing they are making themselves. This is especially true for when we talk about the arteries that connect the burbs with Boston, such as pertains here. I get that car-dependency is usually used in a equitability sense, such as with regard to connecting people-to-place who truly have no choice. But if you were to tell someone who lived a couple of miles from the end of the orange line who had a predilection for driving in on those 2 days they go to the office that we were chopping back these routes, I bet you'd get a car-centric rebuttal.
 
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