Parcel R-1 | Chinatown

sm89 said:
I find it odd that it's not even as tall as the building next door. Would have thought at least matching that height would be "easy".
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I think there is some intention to "step-down" from Kneeland Street into the rest of the neighborhood. The old neighborhood is mostly 3 story row houses.
 
Approved

A few different options to choose from now. The first keeps the same massing but swaps the grey for light green. 2-4 are all one green shade and the right side gets less and less angled.

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https://m.box.com/shared_item/https://bpda.box.com/s/wndl5dsthawxz9r9zjxdab13qwkd92yu

Vs the previous option
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The Boston Air Pollution Control Commission met last Wednesday to discuss parcel R-1, and it was a bit wild.

First, just to get it out of the way, construction for this library/housing project on the 2/3rds of the lot closest to Kneeland seem to be on track to start early next year. The major discussion - going from around 2:45 to 5pm - was about the 1/3rd of the lot adjacent to Harvard St. The nature of the meeting was for the property owner to ask for an exemption to the Boston parking freeze and to grant a permit to park 30 cars.

The property owner, which is a church who moved to Brookline many years ago, was not present - instead, the site's interest was represented by Tufts Shared Services. Apparently, when a parking freeze exemption was requested for R-1 quite a while ago, somebody (the church owner?) royally messed up the paperwork. Instead of requesting 60 spaces on the northern 2/3rds and 30 spaces on the southern 1/3, all 90 spaces they had been allotted were tied to the northern portion of the site. This means that, technically, the lower third was never allowed to park any cars on that site at all, and has been/is currently in violation of the parking freeze. So rather than asking for a renewal of an existing permit, in this meeting they had to initiate a new request for 30 spaces. Tufts and the nearby St. James church on Harrison St. (not the church who owns the lot) spoke in favor of granting the spaces for Tufts valet and MD parking during the weekday and church parking on the weekend. There was a massive amount of community turnout from a variety of groups to speak in opposition to the permit, calling on the board to reject the spaces. Points were raised on the topic of existing air quality issues in the neighborhood, safety issues related to drivers and particularly Tufts valets, and suggestions that a community green space, park, or garden would be preferable adjacent a new library.

After public comments closed, the APCC board was not thrilled that the site was in active violation - one board member asked "so if I go down to Harvard St. right now, I won't see any cars parked on that portion?" and the Tufts representative was forced to reply that they had just gone ahead and continued parking there for months even after discovering they were in violation. Regardless, the board seemed amenable to granting the permit, and put forward a motion to approve, albeit with some kind of multi-year time limit on renewal. This prompted the Tufts legal council to beg the board to reopen public comments. When they agreed, he aggressively challenged the board's legal authority to make an approval with caveats if the Tufts proposal met the APCC guidelines. He came across as quite confrontational, starting his comments with "with all due respect," which did not endear himself to the board. They had City staff review their legal obligations and authority, which clarified that they absolutely had wide discretion when it comes to granting or denying permits, and then promptly revised their motion to deny the parking permit, though with the caveat of delaying enforcement until the end of next July (since much of this site will be staging for the new building through that date anyway). Tufts' council talked Tufts out of multiple additional years of parking at this location, and devalued the owner's property as a parking lot.
 
Despite all the craziness, it sounds like a good decision since so many people would rather have a park, green space, or garden. I just feel bad for the St. James church, who may indeed need the parking for their services.
 
Tufts also argued that they are in a parking "crunch" (especially since the Parcel P-12 project was revised to eliminate the expansion of their parking garage on Washington/Tremont St.) but I think overall concerns about parking loss were shut down by the presence of many parking garages nearby and also by the high level of public transit service (10 minute walk from Back Bay and South Stations, direct service by the Orange, Silver, and Green Lines). Having a "walk score" under 50 was discussed as one of the specific metrics to consider granting the permit, and as you likely know this parcel has a walk score of 100 (out of 100). I'm not sure where everyone at St. James is coming from but I assume they could make up for the loss of up to 30 car spaces by running a smallish shuttle bus to nearby transit stations a few times.
 
MjolnirMan said:
The Boston Air Pollution Control Commission met last Wednesday to discuss parcel R-1, and it was a bit wild.

First, just to get it out of the way, construction for this library/housing project on the 2/3rds of the lot closest to Kneeland seem to be on track to start early next year. The major discussion - going from around 2:45 to 5pm - was about the 1/3rd of the lot adjacent to Harvard St. The nature of the meeting was for the property owner to ask for an exemption to the Boston parking freeze and to grant a permit to park 30 cars.

The property owner, which is a church who moved to Brookline many years ago, was not present - instead, the site's interest was represented by Tufts Shared Services. Apparently, when a parking freeze exemption was requested for R-1 quite a while ago, somebody (the church owner?) royally messed up the paperwork. Instead of requesting 60 spaces on the northern 2/3rds and 30 spaces on the southern 1/3, all 90 spaces they had been allotted were tied to the northern portion of the site. This means that, technically, the lower third was never allowed to park any cars on that site at all, and has been/is currently in violation of the parking freeze. So rather than asking for a renewal of an existing permit, in this meeting they had to initiate a new request for 30 spaces. Tufts and the nearby St. James church on Harrison St. (not the church who owns the lot) spoke in favor of granting the spaces for Tufts valet and MD parking during the weekday and church parking on the weekend. There was a massive amount of community turnout from a variety of groups to speak in opposition to the permit, calling on the board to reject the spaces. Points were raised on the topic of existing air quality issues in the neighborhood, safety issues related to drivers and particularly Tufts valets, and suggestions that a community green space, park, or garden would be preferable adjacent a new library.

After public comments closed, the APCC board was not thrilled that the site was in active violation - one board member asked "so if I go down to Harvard St. right now, I won't see any cars parked on that portion?" and the Tufts representative was forced to reply that they had just gone ahead and continued parking there for months even after discovering they were in violation. Regardless, the board seemed amenable to granting the permit, and put forward a motion to approve, albeit with some kind of multi-year time limit on renewal. This prompted the Tufts legal council to beg the board to reopen public comments. When they agreed, he aggressively challenged the board's legal authority to make an approval with caveats if the Tufts proposal met the APCC guidelines. He came across as quite confrontational, starting his comments with "with all due respect," which did not endear himself to the board. They had City staff review their legal obligations and authority, which clarified that they absolutely had wide discretion when it comes to granting or denying permits, and then promptly revised their motion to deny the parking permit, though with the caveat of delaying enforcement until the end of next July (since much of this site will be staging for the new building through that date anyway). Tufts' council talked Tufts out of multiple additional years of parking at this location, and devalued the owner's property as a parking lot.
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Is there a video recording of this hearing? I'd be interested in seeing some of these interactions.
 
#bancars said:
Is there a video recording of this hearing? I'd be interested in seeing some of these interactions.
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It was Zoom recorded but I'm not sure if or when they are made publicly available.
 
If Tufts needs parking, they can build a garage, absolutely whacky they're demanding surface parking when they can fund whatever they want.
 
curcuas said:
If Tufts needs parking, they can build a garage, absolutely whacky they're demanding surface parking when they can fund whatever they want.
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I agree that surface parking is whacky.

But where exactly in Chinatown would you have Tufts build this garage? They tried to expand their garage in the original 290 Tremont proposal -- but the big compromise design fell through when the development lost the Winthrop Center transfer payment.

And the last time Tufts tried to build a garage in Chinatown, they lost the fight with the community, and The Metropolitan at 1 Nassau was built instead:

The Struggle over Parcel C: How Boston’s Chinatown Won a Victory in the Fight Against Institutional Expansionism and Environmental Racism

For the last fifty years, Boston’s Chinatown has been a shrinking community. Squeezed in by highways on two sides, its land is being gradually consumed by two medical institutions, Tufts University Medical School and New England Medical Center. During the last few decades, these two medical...
scholarworks.umb.edu scholarworks.umb.edu
 
JeffDowntown said:
I agree that surface parking is whacky.

But where exactly in Chinatown would you have Tufts build this garage?
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Don't quote me on this, but I believe the average "under load" main Tufts garage utilization figure that was presented in the meeting was something like 84%, so they are not at 100% max capacity and unable to serve patients as a result - they would just like more headroom.

Besides complex engineering challenges like adding levels to the existing Tremont garage, their existing Herald St. garage could easily be knocked down and built up into something higher. However, a better solution for the long-term area may be to build a parking garage over the Pike if absolutely nothing else productive is going to be built there anytime soon, similar to the new South Boston Waterfront Transportation Center garage. I'm sure they could get a really good offer on the Herald St. garage property for terra firma development in order to finance a new multi-story air rights garage. And they could point out to Chinatown how seriously they take air quality concerns by capping the Pike and installing CO2 scrubbers or something.
 
JeffDowntown said:
I agree that surface parking is whacky.

But where exactly in Chinatown would you have Tufts build this garage? They tried to expand their garage in the original 290 Tremont proposal -- but the big compromise design fell through when the development lost the Winthrop Center transfer payment.

And the last time Tufts tried to build a garage in Chinatown, they lost the fight with the community, and The Metropolitan at 1 Nassau was built instead:

The Struggle over Parcel C: How Boston’s Chinatown Won a Victory in the Fight Against Institutional Expansionism and Environmental Racism

For the last fifty years, Boston’s Chinatown has been a shrinking community. Squeezed in by highways on two sides, its land is being gradually consumed by two medical institutions, Tufts University Medical School and New England Medical Center. During the last few decades, these two medical...
scholarworks.umb.edu scholarworks.umb.edu
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That is a little silly --- they need a proposal that could get various tax credits + subsidies and not rely on Tufts paying for a parking garage b/c they lost the Winthrop Sq $$$. Tufts could have paid for a garage there, or could still pay for a garage on the remaining empty parcel along Washington. Tufts Med has plenty of $$$ and they can purchase land on the market and build their own garage....of course, given all the lots being developed on, they might lose the opportunity soon without redoing their own property.
 
curcuas said:
That is a little silly --- they need a proposal that could get various tax credits + subsidies and not rely on Tufts paying for a parking garage b/c they lost the Winthrop Sq $$$. Tufts could have paid for a garage there, or could still pay for a garage on the remaining empty parcel along Washington. Tufts Med has plenty of $$$ and they can purchase land on the market and build their own garage....of course, given all the lots being developed on, they might lose the opportunity soon without redoing their own property.
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291 Tremont is a City of Boston owned parcel. No one in city government who expects to stay in office would let that become a private parking garage ONLY. The priority for the parcel is low income housing. The garage extension was a possible add-on (as well as hotel extension for the Doubletree) in the original project plan carefully brokered by BPDA. Once the money for the large project fell through, the project was condensed back to housing only, the priority all along.

You might want to study some history about how city parcels get developed in Boston. There is intense community engagement (public land for public good is the community activist mantra). They rarely become private parking garages.

Also large institutions like Tufts Medical Center don't have unfettered ability to build whatever they want whenever they want. They are constrained by the Institutional Master Plans they are required to maintain with the BPDA. The bad old days of institutions being allowed to gobble up whole neighborhoods are largely over (with the possible exception of Harvard in Allston).
 
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JeffDowntown said:
291 Tremont is a City of Boston owned parcel. No one in city government who expects to stay in office would let that become a private parking garage ONLY. The priority for the parcel is low income housing. The garage extension was a possible add-on (as well as hotel extension for the Doubletree) in the original project plan carefully brokered by BPDA. Once the money for the large project fell through, the project was condensed back to housing only, the priority all along.

You might want to study some history about how city parcels get developed in Boston. There is intense community engagement (public land for public good is the community activist mantra). They rarely become private parking garages.

Also large institutions like Tufts Medical Center don't have unfettered ability to build whatever they want whenever they want. They are constrained by the Institutional Master Plans they are required to maintain with the BPDA. The bad old days of institutions being allowed to gobble up whole neighborhoods are largely over (with the possible exception of Harvard in Allston).
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There is land in the neighborhood that is held not by the city that could be bought and IMP'd. Tufts even has a garage they could redevelop. None of what you say contradicts any of that. There are bargains to be struck for the development of neighborhood housing, etc, too.

Further, my point does remain that if Tufts had been willing to construct a different cross subsidy for P-1, it might have worked. I know full well how this works.

Personally, I'm glad they're unable to do this. They're completely irresponsible with cars and traffic here as the surface lot case showed, or a simple drive down Washington St in the AM.
 
curcuas said:
There is land in the neighborhood that is held not by the city that could be bought and IMP'd. Tufts even has a garage they could redevelop. None of what you say contradicts any of that. There are bargains to be struck for the development of neighborhood housing, etc, too.

Further, my point does remain that if Tufts had been willing to construct a different cross subsidy for P-1, it might have worked. I know full well how this works.

Personally, I'm glad they're unable to do this. They're completely irresponsible with cars and traffic here as the surface lot case showed, or a simple drive down Washington St in the AM.
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The surface parking along Hudson is insane. But it is emblematic of why everything you propose won't work. That land along Hudson is not owned by the City (it is not part of R-1), it is owned by one of the local churches, and they refused offers to include it in R-1 planning.

Chinatown is full of smallish open lots that are private property, often in the hands of multiple family trusts. Unless you are somehow proposing eminent domain be used for Tufts parking acquisition, you cannot reasonably buy those properties. The minute one property sells, the rest skyrocket in cost.

And I would argue that Tufts patients and visitors are the ones who are reckless with car use. They create the traffic and drive the demand for all the parking in the area. (Much like patients and visitors do around Longwood or MGH).
 
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