Roxbury Infill and Small Developments

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I like how they mark the buildings with the year they were completed in:
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Nonprofit to transform vacant Roxbury parcel into housing

The Community Builders, a Boston-based nonprofit developer, has filed plans to convert a long vacant parcel near Roxbury’s Grove Hall into a $10 million mixed-use housing development.

Under the proposal filed with the Boston Redevelopment Authority on Friday, TCB plans to construct “The Clarion,” a pair of buildings totaling 67,000 square feet on the city-owned one-acre site at 311 Blue Hill Ave. The project site includes eight lots that have been acquired by the city’s Department of Neighborhood Development since the 1970s, many for nonpayment of taxes.

A ground breaking is set for next year on a four-story and a two-story building that would contain a total of 40 apartments with 5,000 square feet of space for community use on the first floor. Thirteen of the units will be market rate.

The city designated TCB to develop the site in 2011. Since then, the developer has attended a series of community meetings to determine the building design, site layout, number of units and open space. Once the approvals for the mixed-use development are secured, TCB will buy the parcel from the city for $1.

Since its founding in the 1960s, TCB has completed 320 projects and 25,000 housing units in 15 states.
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http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/r...to-transform-roxbury-parcel-into-housing.html
 
Seems a bit underwhelming for the size of the site. But ok. TCB did a decent job on Charlesview.

I was hoping at first that this was the site on Warren Street next to the bus stop, 645 Warren it seems. That's a big old vacant lot in the middle of Grove Hall that's just begging for something. Anything.
 
Demolition of the former B-2 police station is currently in progress
 
New Tropical Foods underway.

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Shows how much the city cares...
 
There's fencing around the current building at 1065 Tremont street

Demolition is about to begin.
 
FK4 said:
looks much better than the previous render...
nothing special, but definitely a big improvement
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Completely agree. The new render has everything I always harp about on here - it's contextual, has good massing and a coherent facade, and the facade has depth. This is an excellent infill.
 
This is one area that needs a lot of rethinking to make up for all the urban renewal. Other areas closer to downtown have been rethought and it's time to extend out this way. It's going to be a 20 year process probably to find a consensus, line up the money, and wait for the area to fill up. All these little development projects are great but the whole area needs a reworking to get away from the suburban/super block model. Otherwise you are going to have an urban fabric that won't properly facilitate good developments, open space that is used and enhances the neighborhood, and streets that are safe for all users.
 
Agreed. Hopefully some of the stuff popping up around Broadway and Andrew creeps over this way. There's a ton of space crying out for smart infill around Dudley.
 
Right, but the urban renewal demo obliterated networks of small streets and created much larger parcels that right now just get big buildings plopped on them. I agree with van here - Im very glad to see development but it needs to be thought out thoroughly in terms of reknitting the fabric, not just building big chunks. This one I just posted doesn't look TOO big, but the are needs more of a master vision then it currently has.

Of note, though, a potential outcome of the Dudley transport replanning is to make a road connecting Warren and Washington, behind the police station.
 
underground said:
Agreed. Hopefully some of the stuff popping up around Broadway and Andrew creeps over this way. There's a ton of space crying out for smart infill around Dudley.
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no way. that's a whole different world from Andrew and broadway. different crowd entirely.

that type of development has burned through much of southie and is now blazing through north Dorchester, hugging dot ave and the red line. but that type of great small scaled market rate stuff isn't going to go anywhere NEAR Columbia road, much less go down the Dudley corridor. (by Dudley corridor, i mean uphams -> Dudley station, not so much the station itself).

I'd expect the gentrification wave to hit Dudley station relatively soon... but it's definitely going to come from the fort hill side.

what does that mean for development? good question. first, i think there will be a gulf between Washington st through to Columbia rd - that area will not gentrify/will not be allowed to gentrify by the community.

furthermore, dot ave will be southie south, and fort hill/Dudley station west will be JP north. north dot's gentrification will be more thorough, more nimble, because it's basically built out - the plots are smaller, and investment capital to renovate/develop will be less (also it's going to be mostly small developers/personal savings getting a piece of the action).

Dudley station area will be more patchy and hit/miss. it will be more institutional, have more political interest, go through more review, be larger in scale, and probably miss out on much of the small scale stuff that dot will see, at least in the first wave. it will also take longer, and probably be more of a battleground for gentrification (we'll see more articles on displacement, more community opposition-this will put off small investors, but larger ones can afford more of a risk)

i don't think the mayor's office will push too hard in this area for development - if they do they run the risk of setting off the community leaders... can't really hate on a guy for renovating his triple decker, but you can point at develop-corp who built 200 units and scream bloody murder. pretty much the way to get around that is to make concessions to the community, aka more affordable housing...and build larger and blander... I'd also expect the mix to lean more towards rentals in Dudley, vs. ownership in dot/southie.

so i guess bottom line, I'm not feeling too good on the prospects of Dudley. it's built environment and political environment will basically demand developers to build buildings that we on archboston do not like to see.
 
The Urbanica building pictured above technically is in Fort Hill, and Fort Hill leads down to Dudley. With some of the best housing stock in the entire city (certainly much better than Dorchester 3-deckers), and with the institutions nearby (hospitals, Northeastern + other colleges), there is a better foundation for high end rentals in Roxbury than in Dorchester. Even Dot is ahead for now, that won't last long. It's just soaking-up the finance bro run-off from Southie...
 
Id expect the gentrification wave to hit Dudley station relatively soon... but it's definitely going to come from the fort hill side.
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Partly - Fort Hill is walled off from the rest of the Roxbury Highlands by bad development and vacant lots along Washington and by vacant lots at the foot of Fort Hill itself, all along Thornton.

dot ave will be southie south, and fort hill/Dudley station west will be JP north.
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Probably - I think there was an article a while back illustrating how the size of the area of real estate billed as "Roxbury" has been shrinking (the South End and JP keep getting bigger, not to mention the emergence of Mission Hill as a truly separate neighborhood that also keeps expanding (as an aside, it's probably well known that even the LMA is Roxbury, as was Back Bay before being annexed and developed).

Dudley station area will be more patchy and hit/miss. it will be more institutional, have more political interest, go through more review, be larger in scale, and probably miss out on much of the small scale stuff that dot will see, at least in the first wave. it will also take longer, and probably be more of a battleground for gentrification (we'll see more articles on displacement, more community opposition-this will put off small investors, but larger ones can afford more of a risk)
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Good points here. Dot was spared the wholesale destruction that was brought on Roxbury, since it used to be a white Irish neighborhood that politicians wouldnt dream of destroying back then. I do think that the South End will keep on marching out toward Dudley so there will be gentrification from there as well. But yeah, Melnea will get more large lot projects and Dudley probably will as well. But that should be thought about very, very carefully for the reasons we've been saying earlier on.

The one thing I disagree with is the fate of the rest of Roxbury Highlands other than Fort Hill. The unspoilt part of Warren, Elm and Walnut, not to mention the neighborhood immediately west of Dudley St, all have streets loaded with grand old Victorian homes. Many are abandoned or in rough shape, but are prime for redevelopment/renovation by young people priced out of JP. Crime remains a problem and the large housing developments on both sides of MLK will scare off a lot of people, but overall these neighborhoods are in much better shape than even five years ago.... Blue Hill Ave at night used to be just loaded with crack sellers and prostitutes, the last two years, startlingly fewer. While new construction on the vacant lots will indeed likely get pushback from a gentrification-fearing community, they wont be able to prevent individual properties from getting sold off and cleaned up by newcomers. And this is where it's more likely for there to be "good" infill. Or so I hope.
 
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