Seaport Square (Formerly McCourt Seaport Parcels)

Additionally the legal doctrine of merger combined with "upzoning" promotes mega-blocks.

In MA, under the merger doctrine, adjacent nonconforming lots generally merge for zoning purposes when they come into common ownership. This holds unless a municipality adopts a zoning ordinance/bylaw overriding the common-law doctrine of merger, allowing adjacent nonconforming lots coming into common ownership to be treated as separate lots for zoning purposes. As such, if adjacent non-conforming lots are purchased within a rezoned area, that resulting lot effectively loses whatever pre-existing non-conforming (PENC or "grandfathered") status the previous lots had.

The impact of this is that, in an area that has been "upzoned", a merged lot cannot be subdivided in a manner that would violate the new zoning, even if it would result in smaller/better development that would have been allowed under the previous zoning.

I'm not sure if that's what happened in this area, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me,
 
SeamusMcFly said:
I'm going to take a different route since we are talking about Seaport Square. This entire area has been held and sold from one land owner to the next. Hynes didn't buy it from the city, he bought it from Murdoch, who traded for it with Frank, who owned it for many moons.

Other areas become owned by large developers over years. The party wants the whole area, but has to buy it bit by bit and block by block and then has enough contiguous land to make his dream of fat stumps and parks a reality.

In a big pick up like Seaport Square, they got a sh*t ton of land for fairly short money. This could just be an investment, and then they the landowner can portion it off to smaller developers and developments. We are starting to see this a bit.

Same thing at Fan Pier, this ownership has been well documented, but in this case Fallon wants to reap all the benefits, and develop them all himself. Maybe then sell them off at a large profit.

The city, aside from revieweing and approving what is to be built, is not really that involved in the real estate transactions.

This seems to be more in the vein of what the question was.
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Sheamus -- a lot of it has to do with the Chimera of Planning and the Hubris of Knowing how something should develop

Take MIT and the land formerly known as the "Simplx Property" (aka University Park on Mass Ave):

1) when Simplex Wire and Cable owned the land it was a "sprawling" industrial zone with dozens of small industrial buildings shoehorned onto small blocks -- times changed and the company left
2) MIT acquired the property but basicaly sat on it -- getting some revenues as a "slum lord" -- there were dozens of small highly entrepreneurial companies such as "Atomic Welding" -- mostly supporting the R&D community
3) MIT decides the time is now to capitalize on all this land near to the campus -- hires some planning firm (founded no doubt by alums)
4) MIT partners with mega-developer Forest City -- project begins to take form
5) Meanwhile Novartis decides to base its world-wide R&D in Cambridge
6) however too much has happened to accomodate them in the already planned and under construction 'Simplex Property"
7) after some preliminaries -- Novartis buys and leases land on the other side of Mass Ave (Analog Devices building, etc.) -- which MIT would love to have available for the "nano-Materials, Structures, and Systems (nMaSS) laboratory -- the Institute’s “highest academic priority" -- now searching for a home -- Analog Devices would have been ideal

Had MIT used the Time Machine (product of a future alum) they would realize Atomic Welding and such should have stayed until Novartis needed the land to expand

Oh Well
 
Hutchison said:
The impact of this is that, in an area that has been "upzoned", a merged lot cannot be subdivided in a manner that would violate the new zoning, even if it would result in smaller/better development that would have been allowed under the previous zoning.
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Plus, it's easier to get "upzoned" in the first place if you have a large lot. For example, in most neighborhoods in the city, lots large than one acre are eligible to be designated a Planned Development Area (PDA). That allows easier upzoning and "creative" zoning. It's kind of an end around on the ZBA.
 
whighlander said:
Sheamus -- a lot of it has to do with the Chimera of Planning and the Hubris of Knowing how something should develop

Take MIT and the land formerly known as the "Simplx Property" (aka University Park on Mass Ave):

1) when Simplex Wire and Cable owned the land it was a "sprawling" industrial zone with dozens of small industrial buildings shoehorned onto small blocks -- times changed and the company left
2) MIT acquired the property but basicaly sat on it -- getting some revenues as a "slum lord" -- there were dozens of small highly entrepreneurial companies such as "Atomic Welding" -- mostly supporting the R&D community
3) MIT decides the time is now to capitalize on all this land near to the campus -- hires some planning firm (founded no doubt by alums)
4) MIT partners with mega-developer Forest City -- project begins to take form
5) Meanwhile Novartis decides to base its world-wide R&D in Cambridge
6) however too much has happened to accomodate them in the already planned and under construction 'Simplex Property"
7) after some preliminaries -- Novartis buys and leases land on the other side of Mass Ave (Analog Devices building, etc.) -- which MIT would love to have available for the "nano-Materials, Structures, and Systems (nMaSS) laboratory -- the Institute’s “highest academic priority" -- now searching for a home -- Analog Devices would have been ideal

Had MIT used the Time Machine (product of a future alum) they would realize Atomic Welding and such should have stayed until Novartis needed the land to expand

Oh Well
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Not really sure what you're getting at. I tried to give a simple answer to a new poster with a simple question. You wrote a buunch of stuff someone needs a degree to understand.

All I got out of it was the time paradox you want to create. That future time machine will allow them to go back and hold property for a while, but by changing the past they may affect the time machine even being developed. Then Doc ends up in 1785, gets shot by Buford, Marty bangs his mother, gets frozen for a 1,000 years and wakes up and gets a job working for his great great great great great great great great grand nephew....
 
SeamusMcFly said:
Not really sure what you're getting at. I tried to give a simple answer to a new poster with a simple question. You wrote a buunch of stuff someone needs a degree to understand.

All I got out of it was the time paradox you want to create. That future time machine will allow them to go back and hold property for a while, but by changing the past they may affect the time machine even being developed. Then Doc ends up in 1785, gets shot by Buford, Marty bangs his mother, gets frozen for a 1,000 years and wakes up and gets a job working for his great great great great great great great great grand nephew....
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sn-wormhole-thumb-200xauto-2972.jpg


Seamus -- here's a paper you might want to read -- Not really :=}
Physics Letters B
Volume 687, Issues 2–3, 12 April 2010, Pages 110–113

Radial motion into an Einstein–Rosen bridge
Nikodem J. Popławski
Department of Physics, Indiana University, Swain Hall West, 727 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
from the abstract:
We consider the radial geodesic motion of a massive particle into a black hole in isotropic coordinates, which represents the exterior region of an Einstein–Rosen bridge (wormhole). The particle enters the interior region, which is regular and physically equivalent to the asymptotically flat exterior of a white hole, and the particle's proper time extends to infinity. Since the radial motion into a wormhole after passing the event horizon is physically different from the motion into a Schwarzschild black hole, Einstein–Rosen and Schwarzschild black holes are different, physical realizations of general relativity. Yet for distant observers, both solutions are indistinguishable. We show that timelike geodesics in the field of a wormhole are complete because the expansion scalar in the Raychaudhuri equation has a discontinuity at the horizon, and because the Einstein–Rosen bridge is represented by the Kruskal diagram with Rindler's elliptic identification of the two antipodal future event horizons. These results suggest that observed astrophysical black holes may be Einstein–Rosen bridges, each with a new universe inside that formed simultaneously with the black hole. Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing inside another universe
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Just what the Seaport needed! More grass!

They get bonus points for putting shade trees along the street, and ensuring there is no way to escape the sun on the lawn.
 
Arborway said:
Just what the Seaport needed! More grass!

They get bonus points for putting shade trees along the street, and ensuring there is no way to escape the sun on the lawn.
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Arbor -- try walking in July / August from say the Black Falcon or the Marine Industrial Park to South Station -- you will almost be willing to sacrifice a goat to the god of shade let alone a Greenway-style fountain you can wonder through

Howerver what is really needed is a Dunkin Donuts about every 3 to 5 blocks in the SPID -- a good 32 ounce ice coffee will do wonders
 
Me thinks you missed his point. Lack of shade, not abundance of. Unless you want to hang on the edge of the park.
 
Bummer. Avalon has deep pockets and a surprisingly low return threshold. Carrying cost of the land too high???
 
BostonUrbEx said:
We ran out of names for parks so we're resorting to lettering them.

Next thing you know, we'll have PP (Public Park) 535, PP 536, PP 537, etc.
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Don't forget PP 541!!!!! I am very excited for that one.
 
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