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[Kit Collins]: Sounds good. Great. Welcome, everybody. Thank you all so much for being here. I know we have some folks outside in the hallway as well. Thank you, everybody, for coming out in person and on Zoom. Tonight is a Q&A on the corridors zoning proposal. Before I introduce Alicia and Emily, I just want to quickly place this in the context of where this occurs in the citywide. that we have been pursuing for more than a year now. Earlier in this process, we workshopped, reviewed, held public hearings on, and have ordained several zoning proposals already, including phase one updates, Mystic Avenue Corridor District, Salem Street Corridor District, and Green Score. The other corridor's proposal, which we'll be talking about tonight, is one of several zoning proposals that are currently working their way through the proposal and discussion pipeline. Other current proposals include West Medford Square, Medford Square residential zoning and a proposal for Tufts institutional zoning. I want to be clear the purpose of tonight is to present on and get your feedback and questions and concerns on the other corridors proposal. So the focus of tonight will not be on the other proposals that I just mentioned. We're going to be focusing on the corridor's proposal as advertised because at this point in the process, this corridor's proposal is still being workshopped by the planning and permitting committee. So this is a really valuable and important time for us to be getting your feedback on it and to be hearing your questions and your concerns while it is still in development. So thank you again for being here. We're looking forward to hearing your questions and comments. With that, I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Kit Collins, Vice President of the City Council. I'm the Chair of the Planning and Permanent Committee, which is the committee in which all of our zoning proposals originate. And with me up here is Director Hunt of the Planning, Development, and Sustainability Department, and Emily Innes of Innes Associates, which is a zoning consultant that has been working with the City Council and the Planning, Development, and Sustainability Office for quite a long time now on all of these zoning proposals and on other projects in the city. Before that, I'll pass it off to Alicia.
[Alicia Hunt]: Good evening. I do think that Councilor Collins covered basically everything, and Emily will be presenting the zoning. But just for those who aren't aware, the city of Medford has an Office of Planning, Development, and Sustainability. And so we are an office of 10, and we do professional planning, housing work, we manage the Community Development Block Grant, the Community Preservation Act money, we have economic development staff, We have climate staff, we do open space plans. and environmental planning, and we staff a lot of boards and commissions. So several of us are professional planners, and so we are advising on this project. We also, by law, are technical advisors to the Community Development Board. And so the legal process to adopt zoning in Medford, as in Massachusetts, is that if a zoning proposal goes to the city council, they then must refer it to the Community Development Board, which in some cities is called the planning board. for their professional opinions. So the planning board has opinions, and then they make recommendations to the city council on that zoning. And they do that through a public hearing process. So this topic is not yet entered the CD board we're presenting we're getting feedback from you before it is a formal proposal, and before the public hearing process starts. Right now we have other proposals that are in the public hearing process that have opened public hearings right now. And then those recommendations go to the city council and the city council votes on the zoning for the city of Medford. In order to do this project, it's a very large project around rezoning in the city. We have engaged a planning and zoning consultants. So this is Emily Innes of Innes Associates, and she and her team are here. And I did want to mention, as those of you in the room have noticed, but so people on Zoom are aware, We have staff both from my office and Emily's office in the hallway with big maps. If you find that you really want to talk one-on-one with somebody or go into depth or talk about a very specific parcel pointing to a map, then we encourage you to go out there and talk to them. They're collecting this information. They have sticky notes. They can write stuff down. You can write stuff down. and collect that information for us. If you're at home and you're like, gee, I wish I could do that. You can come over here. Tufts has kindly provided parking. That information is on the city events calendar. If you want to come over and talk to the staff in the hallway. And then here in the room, Emily is going to do a presentation this evening. And then we're going to do Q&A. We have both the questions from people in the audience and then on Zoom. We also have turned on the Q&A function on zoom. So people on zoom could enter comments, opinions, or questions. And if you want to sort of say, I agree with that opinion on zoom, you can upvote it. And then we can just see that multiple people have, have checked that, that question or that comment. Um, and so we'll try and go back and forth as you've often seen in public hearings or the city council. where we go back and forth between the in-person and the online questions. And I think with that, I'm going to turn it over to Emily, and Emily is going to present from the podium.
[Emily Innes]: That's my cue to stand up and come over here. Can you all hear me through this mic? Okay, great. Awesome. Let me get rid of the camera control. Let me share the content. And it works. I love it. So thank you all for being here tonight. And that includes the people who are in the room now and the people who are online. We really appreciate you being here. I am going to quickly actually walk through the we've just done the introductions. I'm going to walk through the process timeline and where we are to date, the opportunities for public comments, a little bit of setting the context of the analysis that we've done to date and some of the other work. And then we're really focusing, as I said, on the other corridors. Because we're doing this geography by geography, it's really important that we hear the comments on the geography that we're working on today. However, for those of you in the room who passed by, there is a board. If you have comments on some of the other districts that we've been talking about, there's a board that you can put those comments on out there. We don't want to lose those thoughts. We just want to make absolutely certain that we hear about the other corridors today. And again, as Alicia said, my team is there with the big maps. They're also there with the interactive map to show you how to use it. I'll be talking about that a little bit later. So the introduction, why we've done this for those of you who have been participating in other parts of the process you're going to recognize the first set of slides, but we are aware that people are sometimes joining us for the very first time so we want to make sure that they're starting from the same base. So, we are doing we are working with the city on this rezoning process, because this comes out of the recommendations from the comprehensive plan, which was adopted in 2023. There are also zoning related recommendations in the Medford Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. And so we're taking those into account as well and trying to merge all of these goals together as we look at the zoning. So this is the comprehensive plan is usually the basis for zoning changes. And in fact zoning changes are often the first thing that comes out of the comprehensive plan process. I will say that the city has actually been working on this longer they started to read the modification process. I think back in 2020. And so that finished about the same time the comprehensive plan did within the same couple of months. That mostly looked at technical errors, best practices, making sure that everything was up to date, whereas this is taking the recommendations of the comprehensive plan and evaluating them and moving them forward. So in the comprehensive plan there was a future land use map. This is where the terminology squares, quarters, and neighborhoods comes from. And the plan is on the city's website, but this is what when we taught what the reason we are talking about plans quarters and squares and neighborhoods is because it came from this map. So that's that's the basis for why we hear the process for approval, Alicia already went over it, city council that's the planning and permitting portion of the city council, we present the topic to them. We go back and forth you know get their feedback, go back to our office to iterations we have weekly calls with city staffs and representatives from the planning and permitting council. at some point planning and permittees and says, look, this is ready to go to CDB, refers it up to city council, city council refers it to the community development board. They hold a public hearing. So some of you may have been participants in those public hearings. Once they feel that they're ready to vote on the topic, they send it back to the city council with recommendations and the city council has a final vote on the zoning. These are the meetings just for March, we had ended up with so many meetings I think we're on our last night was our 26 meeting with the planning and permitting Council committee. So we took some of them off because it was getting too hard to read so we've got two coming up one June 11. We'll be talking about the Tufts Institutional District, and we'll be talking about parking, and then June 25 is tentatively scheduled for Wellington. These are the community development board meetings that we've been doing we've got one coming up now it still says residential districts squares, but at you should have been taken out. So that's June 4 that's next Wednesday. And there's also the public meetings that we've been holding. And so since March the ones that have been here we did squares on May 8, we're here today for the other quarters, and then June 9, we're going to be talking about parking and transportation demand management. In this meeting, we're going to show you some recommendations just for discussion. At the parking meeting, we are not showing recommendations as such, where that's really an opening listening session. So anybody who has concerns about parking, we just want to, I think we're going to present some information to frame the discussion, but we want to start out by doing some in-depth listening about parking. So just to let you know what's coming up. And then, because we were asked to also show it in the table with the next things, a little bit easier to read than the other one. Community Development Board next week, public meeting on the 9th, which is a Monday for parking and transportation demand management, and then June 11th for the Institutional District for Tufts.
[Alicia Hunt]: It just says that the parking meeting, the locations TBD, that will be at the Medford Public Library.
[Emily Innes]: All right, so we have been working on a lot of different districts within the city. The mystic Avenue quarter has been approved. The Salem street neighborhood quarter has been approved. The green score has been approved. We're working on several now one is the residential districts and I recognize some faces in the audience and some names online from people who've been involved with that so welcome. We're also working on the commercial, the mixed use districts and so I mentioned Salem and Mystic Avenue. Those two corridors are outlined in black because they have been approved. We've talked about West Medford Square, and now we're talking about the other corridors. You're going to see a more in-depth map on those. Yes, I know. That's why they're printed outside. If you're online, you're probably sitting right here, but the maps are printed outside. I'm going to tell you about the interactive map so you can zoom in. Can I ask you a question? Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: This, I was supposed to have a Zoom meeting tonight for the work being done on Main Street between Stearns and Stanley. Does this have anything to do with that? How come I can't get on Zoom? What kind of scam is this? Three of us on the street can't get on Zoom to get this meeting that's already started.
[Alicia Hunt]: So let's go, I'll go out in the hallway and see. Can we turn the lights down?
[Emily Innes]: Is there a way of doing that? Thank you, we will get the lights turned down. A little more. Okay, great. In that case, let me just hop back so you can see. So that was the residential districts I can see it a little bit more clearly. These are the commercial framework and again we have these printed outside and we also have the interactive map outside so people can learn how to use it.
[SPEAKER_18]: Anything that you can utilize online of these things online.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, they are. Absolutely. So the city has a website specific for this project. Everything we do is posted to that website.
[SPEAKER_18]: That would be a thing that we could get if we could get that actual website if you go on the city, it's very confusing.
[Emily Innes]: So when Alicia comes back, we usually put those in the chat of every meeting. So it'll be there. I'm also about to give you the link to the interactive map that's coming up.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: You're very welcome. So then when you put those areas together, this is sort of the one of the things we've been hearing from people is because up until now, we've been working in isolation in these areas, it's been hard to understand the relationship. So we now have a map that shows what we've done, what we're talking about, what we've been talking about, and what we're talking about now. But what I'm going to do for you in a minute is I'm going to break down the corridors so we can zoom into those. First, however, I'm going to tell you about the interactive map. So we were getting a lot of questions about, you know, how does this affect my parcel or my property? What district am I in now? What district will I be in? What does that mean? So we've created an online interactive map where you can go in and zoom into specific properties. You can put layers on, you can put filters on. Jimmy is actually, for those of you who are in the room, Jimmy is outside in the hall. He has his laptop up and he is happy to show everybody how to use it. For those of you who have not used interactive maps before, sometimes it's not as intuitive. There are also instructions on the page, but it's sometimes it's nice to have somebody do it for you. This is the link, and this is the QR code to get to that interactive map. That link is also on the city's website. But what we've tried to do is put the layers and the filters on that answer some of the questions that we've heard by providing data. It's continually being updated. So if you ask for something, a question today, and we know that we can put the data up there, then we will modify that. And in the opening page, it will say when it was last updated, but know that it is being updated in response to these public conversations. So it's worth checking back every now and then to see what else has been added. So with that, I'm going to start with the other quarters and I can put the QR code back up at the end of the presentation. So we're looking at Boston Ave, Main Street, Broadway, Harvard Street, High Street in Medford West, and Boston Avenue in Medford West. So this is the current zoning map, barring the changes that were just made for mystic and Salem. These were the districts that existed when we first started. This is the map of the quarters that we're looking at the current zoning. and I can zoom in so we can see them a little bit more clearly and again they're all printed out there and they will all be on the website if they're not there now. So the existing zoning districts along the corridor are the C1 which is the commercial one, apartment one, industrial, office two, general residential and a little bit of single family one. The commercial one, so your existing zoning allows or governs your height and other dimensional standards by use. So that's a little bit different from what we've been talking about. So right now in commercial one, a residential building can be six stories by right. By right means that you can get a building permit to do it. You go to the building inspector and you say, I'm allowed to do this by right and you, provide the application, and if you need all the requirements, you're allowed to do it. So residential building by right, six stories, commercial building by right, six stories, and then there's a category called other permitted structures, which is 15 stories by right. Four stories for the commercial, six for the residential, and then other permitted structures by right. And how you know whether or not something is permitted is by going to what's called the table of uses. We don't have it on here because frankly in a presentation like that it would be unreadable but it is in your zoning ordinance. apartment one, so that's the orange color the darker orange color that you're seeing their commercial is a light pink apartment one allows three stories by right for residential building commercial building is not allowed so there's no height restriction because it's not actually allowed. industrial is the gray you've got a very little bit of gray sort of down towards the broadway area other permitted structures so they don't they don't separate out residential commercial it's just other permitted structures two stories by right Office two is that bright pink. Other permitted structures are six stories by right. General residential is a single unit dwelling, a two unit dwelling or an ADU. An ADU is an accessory dwelling unit and state law changed fairly recently on those. So that has been another topic that we've discussed earlier. in this process, and we'll be discussing again. It hasn't yet gone to the Community Development Board, so we haven't discussed it with them. General residential, that's the sort of lighter orange or lighter yellow, depending on how you read colors. That's a single unit dwelling, a two unit, and an ADU. I think I mentioned that. And then single family one is the lightest yellow. It is a single unit dwelling or an accessory dwelling unit. So that's what you have now. So this is looking at the other quarters in the context of the full map. And you're going to see that we're looking at five different districts here, and I'm going to zoom in so you can see them. So we have three mixed use districts. We have an institutional district for Tufts University. We're going to be talking about that later in June. We haven't yet come up with any sort of ideas for it, but we know that we had a public meeting about it already. We've talked to Tufts a little bit about it already we need to come through and come up with some recommendations, but we know roughly where the boundaries are going to be so we've put it on here. And then we have urban residential to so our discussion today for the other quarters are the three mixed use districts and the urban residential to. So mixed use one be, it says small to mid scale for stories by right so with that building permit, and one by incentives zoning so incentives zoning is the ability for a developer to come in and say, I would like an extra story up to the limit that's allowed in that district. And in exchange, I'm going to do something from this menu of incentives. So we have, if you've looked at the Mystic Avenue, or if you look at the Salem, we have a menu of incentives. It starts with different levels of affordable housing. There's also other public benefits in there. The idea is in exchange for affordable housing or in exchange for other public benefits or a mix of those, the developer would get an extra story in 1B. Mixed use 2A and 2B, they differ by story level. Mixed use 2A is five stories by right to incentive zoning stories. Mixed use 2B is two stories by right, two incentive zone stories. And then urban residential two is the same as the urban residential two that any of you have been following the neighborhood and urban residential districts. They haven't made any changes. Townhouse, three unit dwelling, multiplex, which is four to six units on one lot, multiple unit dwelling, which is over six units. It's a three story maximum. We have, discuss in-house, but have not yet discussed with the Community Development Board because of the last meeting that we had. Possibly adding a one-story incentive zone, but that's for the neighborhood discussion. We're just showing you today what urban residential two looks like. Then an accessory dwelling unit, but only for one, two, or three-unit dwellings. So urban residential 2 is really part of that discussion about the neighborhood districts, but we wanted to show you the places in here where that fits within the quarters. So, 1 of the things that we've been hearing in these meetings is how does this work? How does this look on the street? So, what we're doing is we're doing street sections and building sections and 1 of our clients likes to talk about it. The section is basically baked a nice cake of the district and you're slicing it in half. And now you can see all of the layers. And so what we're showing you is the layers of the cake on both sides of the street. So the top for each the ones I'm about to show you are the existing, the bottom of the proposed. And what we're doing is we're cutting along that red line from left to right. So the left side of the buildings in the diagram is the left side of the line. right side of the buildings goes to the right side of the diagram and you can kind of see that with the existing you see that existing three and a half story building, then there's a parking lot you can follow that on the red line, then there's another one story building, then there's the street section you can see it with the cars, and then you see a three story building and you see the parking behind the building so if you kind of follow that top line along the red line, you can you can see how they relate to each other and it's the same structure for each of the images that I'm going to show you. So on the proposed, we're following the same thing. If you see those buildings on that sort of grayish-brown color, if we were going to be fancy interior design, we'd probably call it grige. The gray, the grige color is the existing buildings. When you see the yellow and the red, or in some cases white, that is what we're showing as could happen under the new zoning in terms of height. Now, for those of you who can see clearly, looks like it's on there. It's a little bit light. In the proposed, you'll also see a diagonal line with a very, very light gray shade on it. That's a shadow study. And one of the things that we're doing is looking at how the new buildings would affect the existing buildings in terms of sunlight hitting the building and would the shadow fall on the existing buildings. That's part of these. Those of you who have seen other of these presentations, we've shown this before, but again, I wanted to explain the mechanism. In this case, what you're seeing is that new building. Red means commercial, so you're seeing ground floor commercial, and you're seeing the yellow floors above are residential. Then on the building on the right, that now on the existing, it's only three stories. On the proposed, it's three stories, but it's got two outlined white stories on there. That would be the incentive zoning that would be allowed. In this case, three stories as a right, it has that option for an incentive on top of it. Then gray, we're going to see some buildings that have gray stories and then that is parking. So this gives you a sense of how something might be built in one of the areas. In this case, this is along Main Street on that corner. So here's another zoning section. You've got Tufts Park, Main Street, and then you've got two one-story buildings. In the proposed, this is one of the higher residential. I'm not sure why we don't put the which one it is on here, but you can tell by the number of stories that's probably mixed to beat. And you can see commercial on the ground floor. Next to that to the right of the commercial you can see underground parking, and then you can see the levels of residential and the possible incentive above that. 1 of the things to remember, because in every community I work in, people are very concerned about height as they should be and about development volume as they should be. We're showing height here. 1 of the questions that we've heard in the neighborhood zoning discussion is, you know. If you have a lot size of X, what can you fit on it? So our team back in the office is actually working on another round of analyses that would show you which building types could fit on which lot sizes. So here we've been focused on height because we've been hearing a lot of concern about height and we want to show that. But we also want to show in this next iteration of diagrams and drawings, setbacks which affect it. open space requirements or green score requirements depending on which district we're talking about, pervious surface requirements, parking requirements, all of those affect what we call the ground plane or the footprint of a lot. So if you think of this, don't want to walk too far away from the mic, if you think of this as being a parcel, What happens is if I have setbacks, I offset from each side, I come in a few inches from each side of my parcel here. That gives me another rectangle because I've got a front setback, I've got side setbacks, I've got a rear setback. That gives me what we call the building footprint or the building envelope rather. That's where you can put your building, your parking, your required green space, etc. surface parking, building footprint, some of the other requirements we've talked about. all serve to shorten the amount of space that's available. So those dimensions, in addition to height, govern what can happen on the site. So even though we're only showing height, I want to make sure you understand that there are other requirements. Main Street at Harvard Street, so again, we're seeing the existing here, and the proposed, and the proposed with the incentive zoning. Remember, they only get the incentive zoning if they've shown that they can meet the incentive requirements and all of the other dimensional requirements on the lot. Harvard Street zoning section. So here, you see the ability to use parking to connect two buildings. In some of the other zoning analyses we've shown, that space in between the two buildings can be amenity space for the residents in the building. And again, you might not be able to see now the light line. It might be a little bit clearer online. but certainly when you look at these online, you'll be able to see the shadow is not going all the way across the street to the building on the other side of the street. The street width very much governs the character of the area. And then here, Boston Avenue, you can see this section with the train tracks down in the middle there. You can see an example in this proposed of tucking parking underneath the building. So you've got the retail on Boston Avenue and on the backside of the building next to the train track. We have parking and some of that parking is under the building. So again, showing you options. And here's one on Boston Avenue where you can see the parking has a green deck on top. So providing some, not just stormwater management, but a green area for residents on the other side of Boston Abbegan, you can see parking underneath. And then finally, we wanted to call this out. So some of the development standards that we put into the zoning, development standards are other things that a developer is required to meet. We typically tie those to things like stormwater management, access for pedestrians, bicyclists, vehicles, the circulation within the site, how the building relates to the site, all of those are written out. Not all of them can be easily diagrammed, but one of the things we heard talking in Salem Street and also in the squares, is, again, making sure that new buildings were not going to adversely affect existing buildings. So you can see here, one of the requirements we've put in for consideration is this idea of an abutting residential district. was passed in Salem. We've been looking at how we include it with some of the others. One of the things we want to do is this incentive zoning that adds the extra two stories is going to be contingent on whether or not it allows for the minimum amount of daylight. You can't shadow somebody's existing residential building 365 days a year. We're considering and reviewing a minimum daylight standard that if you can't meet that standard, you can't get the incentive. That's what the bottom one shows. You can see this 45 degree angle. We've already got one where you have to set back the building from the residential neighborhood. We're also looking at adding this minimum daylight standard. If you're shading that building, you can't do it. So, with that, I'm going to stop there so we can take questions. I can jump back. I'm going to also actually, I don't think anybody's got there. Are we going to do cameras? I was going to say, I can just leave this up, or I can take it off. So we can see everybody's names, whichever you all prefer, but I can certainly jump back to any of the slides again. For those of you in the room, I'm sure you're going to want to go and send some. A solid time looking at the maps and also perhaps learn how to do the interactive zoning. You are welcome to move in and out if you want to go ask a very specific question now, and then come back in to listen to the Q and a, you're totally welcome to if you want to wait to the end. You're also welcome to turn it over to you to monitor. I will stop my share.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you. Thank you so much for the presentation, Emily. So we're going to switch into the Q&A portion. And I just want to quickly remind myself with Kevin, is it ideal for sound purposes for people to speak into the microphone or can they? Okay, great. So it's ideal for folks who want to give questions in this room to speak into the microphone. And if you need a microphone carried to you, happy to do that. We're going to be monitoring the Zoom so that we can be alternating between in-person questions and questions from people who raise their hands on Zoom.
[William Navarre]: Zoom participants hear if you don't speak to the microphone.
[Kit Collins]: The Zoom participants will not be able to hear if we don't speak into the microphone and it will be easier for folks in the room to hear as well. Okay, so I saw a question back there, sir. Thank you.
[Paul Morgan]: My name is Paul Morgan. I live on Brewster Road. I noticed on these diagrams all the shadows were 45 degrees. Obviously, shadows range a lot during the day and during the seasons. So when you say somebody can't have a shadow in their building, what are the limits? What time of day does that include? And what time of year does that include?
[Emily Innes]: So that's a great question. And I have seen different zoning ordinances, different zoning bylaws handle it differently. What we have been looking at for this one, and we're looking forward to feedback on it, is establishing a minimum number of hours per day that the building must have sunlight on it, rather than specifying specific meridian heights or angles, just because We don't want to make the calculation so confusing that people don't understand them. But we're open to other suggestions and how that can be done.
[Paul Morgan]: Okay, so what what time of year would that minimum number apply for any time of year? December 20.
[Emily Innes]: You would have to be the worst.
[Paul Morgan]: It would have to be there. Now also that now you just said shining on the building that doesn't do anything for the yards.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, so excellent point, and I should have done that. We were looking in these and trying to give a simplified visual graphic rather than showing every single angle. We were looking at the front yard and the face of the building and obviously the windows, light shining through the windows. We weren't looking at the backyards because the existing building itself would already shade the backyard.
[Paul Morgan]: Well, that would all depend on which face where the which way the house faced a North facing house would have a nice sunny backyard.
[Emily Innes]: Understood. We were focusing on buildings across the street or next to each other. So yes, there is a whole bunch of additional analysis that we could do. But your point about looking at the yards as well as the building that is well taken. We will add that to our list.
[Paul Morgan]: You could be affected by a building that's pretty far away in the middle of winter. Okay, thank you.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for bringing that up. I appreciate the additional clarification.
[Paul Morgan]: You're welcome.
[Alicia Hunt]: Um, so, uh, Emily, we have a question on the, um, online, um, around what are the following the colors on the map? And she specifically says she was asking about the yellow and the green specifically. She mentioned the map or they, sorry. I don't know that, um, that they mentioned a wife, Brooke Parkway, Boston Ave hillside. Okay. Um, so presumably they're on the. Sorry, and if you if you wanted to raise your hand up, if you want, I can unmute you to you can clarify your question, but just share just to make sure that we're in the right place. So, I'm going to unmute the person asking the question so that they can clarify make sure. Now. All right, there you go. MK Reisch, you're unmuted. Are you speaking? Because we're not hearing you in the room. And I'm going to look at our tech support in the room. Can you try again? We're not hearing you here in the room. Sorry, tech support's coming over in case the problem's on our end. Because this map doesn't have yellow and green, right? Because this map doesn't have yellow and green, so we're trying to.
[Emily Innes]: You know what, they may be looking at the faded green.
[Alicia Hunt]: Which road did you say it was? Oh, Albright Parkway, Boston Ave, and Hillside. So that is the faded green and yellow. So they're looking at the residential areas.
[Emily Innes]: That's right. Let me jump back to residential areas just so that they can see it more clearly. So that's going to be urban residential one. You can see that the green here, it's still when it's brought up, it's green, a little bit greener when it's faded away.
[Alicia Hunt]: And you're still unmuted if you want to try and ask again, but we're not hearing you.
[Kit Collins]: So I guess you're going to have to type at us and we're trying to just to the to what we what we think the question is and I hope the person is able to unmute in case we're misinterpreting. the other kind of muted pastel colors on that map that Emily just brought up. We wanted to place the current proposal that we're talking about today in the context of the other zoning that's been proposed, so those others colors, light yellow, light green, are just meant to say these are the sub-districts that are being proposed, in those cases not yet ordained or finalized. for the areas surrounding the corridor proposals, just so people have a sense of what is proposed to butt up against what for that context. And I hope I'm speaking correctly to what MK was asking about. In case folks missed this earlier, all of the images that we looked at tonight are available on the city's zoning website, which is medfordma.org slash zoning. If you scroll down to public documents for any given proposal, we'll have links to slide decks and maps for each of those proposals, including a link to the presentation images that were shared tonight. I'm sure we'll have those up by tomorrow.
[Alicia Hunt]: If there are other people who want to raise their hands, I was messaged another question from the online, but I don't want to cut people off. Why don't we take one from the room and then we'll do one from online.
[Page Buldini]: Hey there, I'm Page Buldini, 37 Winter Street and 319 Boston Ave. I just had a couple questions. The first one being, I myself have been contacted by some residents, some people even in this room. And although there's been so many meetings and a lot of work done on the part of y'all, a lot of us are still learning and it's still a lot of information. Is it possible, and I know the timeline is kind of pertaining to other meetings, is it possible and not to stall it or slow it down, but to really focus on some of the commercial neighborhoods in those areas, really nail it, get it done. see how the housing looks, because I'm super pro-housing as well, see how the housing looks in the square on Mystic Ave, and then move it into the residence to make sure the city can support that, the building department can support that, so that we really know what we're doing. So there's a couple questions if that's okay, but that would be the first one. The second one also, where I'm on 319 Boston Ave, Tuff owns properties along Boston Ave, and I know that this is not a Tuff's meeting, but I think it's really important to include them because with that proposal on Boston Ave, where I am, there's Hillside Hardware, Danish, that whole building is also Tuff's. So has the city had direct contact with Tuff's with this planning? Do we know what Tuff's long-time vision is? And are we collaborating? And I can pause for a second.
[Alicia Hunt]: Why don't I, why don't I answer that second one first. So first of all, some of the Tufts representatives are actually here in the room tonight. And we have, we had both a direct meeting with, we invited direct Tufts of Butters to a meeting to talk about what they were interested in. And then we had a meeting with some Tufts staff to hear what they had to say. And we also met with the planning staff from Somerville to hear their reflections on their Tufts institutional zoning. And so one thing I think is not readily obvious to everybody. The idea of a Tufts institutional zone, and we don't have it up at the moment, but there was a dark blue area. That's the area that we are right now proposing in this map. On this screen, it's purple. I think online it looks a little more blue, would be zoned specifically with what we will think of as campus zoning, right? So that would be appropriate for a campus. It would not be appropriate for a neighborhood or a commercial district. If Tufts owns buildings outside of that area, they are subject to whatever zoning they are in. So if Tufts owns a building as they do on George Street, which is a residential neighborhood, it will be subject to the same zoning as every other building on George Street. the danish pastry house building would be subject in fact to the topic of tonight's conversation the commercial zoning on um boston ave um so i just want to make sure that that's clear just because tufts owns it doesn't mean it would be subject to special zoning it would only be if it was within those borders it would be um And yes, we're collaborating, we're talking with them. What are their interests? What are their needs? What does the community want? And so our intention was to hear each of those groups separately. And then Emily has heard all of that. She and her team are sort of synthesizing that. And the idea is that they would come back with a presentation and show it to the planning and permitting committee of the city council. And at the same time, the public and tops for people to then comment on and to to then reflect on altogether.
[Page Buldini]: just specifically to that. So where my building is, which would be perfect, it's nine units for mixed use totally. But with that said, if that were, it's a private business that owns it, like we just rent. If that does get sold, and Tufts does purchase it, which it's free for sale, would the Dover amendment change potentially that zoning? Because Tufts has then purchased it with the zoning
[Alicia Hunt]: Reform, I guess you could say, right? So part of the Dover amendment is that it has to be used for educational purposes. So if they said, oh, this is an investment property and we're going to put commercial on the ground floor and rent to anybody upstairs, then Dover would not apply. If they said we are buying this because we want to use this as a Tufts, we want to put Tufts offices in. And so, for example, the dorm that they built, that is an institutional use. with a tiny accessory use of a couple of businesses on the ground floor to kind of complement it and make it nicer for the neighborhood that some businesses along there. So that's how that is. If they said, well, we're going to turn this into Tufts residential housing, and we're going to continue to rent to a business on the floor, they could make an argument for Dover. So I think there is that space there, and it really is around the use that they want to use it for.
[Page Buldini]: If that makes sense, small business to hear that is a little tough, right?
[Alicia Hunt]: If right. So, and that's decided to open my business.
[Page Buldini]: Tufts is a community partner. Right.
[Alicia Hunt]: So we've been working with Tufts as they have commercial spaces that we want to see them rented to local commercial businesses. Will that be possible in something like this dorm? I don't know. They might need to bring in a cafe. Can they bring in a local cafe or do they bring in, you know, I can think of like three different kinds of brands that college students prefer to frequent. Right. And so how do you do that? On the other hand, the college students love tamper. Right. So if they were buying, we would say to them, you have good you have good businesses in there. We would like to see you keep them. You can honestly we can't force anybody, there could be a commercial developer could build that by that building and say they want to bring Starbucks in, and we couldn't stop them. We could say to them, we would prefer that they, they rent to the local business that's here we'd like to work with you on this, how can we support you in that. And some of this zoning has actually included one of the incentives that we've put in in the mixed use, is that so where we say you can do taller if you do incentive zoning, one of the incentives is that you give a discount, am I getting this right, a discount to small businesses. so that if they agree to give discounted rent to small local businesses or small businesses for a number of years, they can do an extra story on their building. So that's what we're doing. That's a really good incentive.
[Page Buldini]: Because that would be a bummer.
[Alicia Hunt]: We're hoping to use that to not just get them to rent to local businesses, but to rent to local businesses at a discount to support our small businesses.
[Emily Innes]: It is specific to the neighborhood, but the idea is that the incentive incentive zoning table. is across all the districts that allow for incentive zoning. So the neighborhood residential, the urban residential, maybe urban residential too does, but the others don't. But all of the mixed use districts that we've looked at so far, we intend to have incentive zoning. So that would spread that option throughout the city.
[Page Buldini]: Last one and then I'll leave. We're on the hillside. Yes, Tufts is there, but if you're from here, hillside is a really important part of that. We're on a hill. So what are we doing for the topography? Thank you, because I know with my friends who are here with the tough storm and the shade studies, that was a big deal. But now if we're going to go all the way down Boston Ave, are we being mindful of like Orchard Street, like those streets as well? And what would that look like? Because I did notice that the buildings that were on the train track side were also getting fully developed. So are we being mindful of that as well?
[Emily Innes]: Yes, so if you get another plug for the interactive map, there's 2 layers on the interactive map that I think what 3 actually that I think would talk specifically to what you're asking. We put the publicly owned and privately owned streets. There's a layer on there. So you can see that. We also put the LIDAR, which is a way of measuring slope, so you can actually see the slope. And we also have a calculation of the percentage slope by parcel in there, so you get to see an impact of what the topography is doing. We have been looking very closely at those. I should add, because I think your question is bringing up something else that I wanted to say, is The reason we're here at a public meeting is that none of these boundaries are fixed. We're gathering into it. So one of the great things is if you can stop by the maps on the way out, if you have time, understanding where you think, oh, maybe this isn't right. Maybe this would be better over here. being able to draw on the map with my team would be critically important, because that's just the sort of information we're looking for. So thank you for bringing all of those up, really appreciate it.
[Alicia Hunt]: We'll say Kit has an answer for your first question, which I'm going to let her do.
[Kit Collins]: share the load, which we like to do. Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions. Thank you for being here. Didn't want to gloss over your first question to the question about the pacing of the different proposals in this process. We have been focusing very intensely on, I would actually call them not commercial districts, but mixed use districts, because as folks who have been paying attention to the process probably have heard from me over and over again, There are very few areas in the city where in this new zoning we are proposing for only commercial, and I'm pretty sure that most of those districts that have undergone the new zoning treatment are mostly on Mystic Avenue Corridor District. Most of the other districts that I think probably all of us in this room would think of as commercial districts are really mixed use. We're incentivizing commercial on the first and sometimes on the second floor and residential up top. and those we've studied and gone through the process and passed a number of those districts already. Mystic Avenue Corridor District, the Salem Street Corridor District has a mix of residential only and mixed use zoning. Currently in the process are proposals for Bedford Square and West Medford Square. And I believe the CDB is going to get, it's just very first introductory we're going to be having a very, um, very, um, discussion of those squares this coming Wednesday. If I'm not mistaken, it's by no means going to be, uh, the final time that the CDB discusses, um. Those proposals, but I think it is when the proposals we introduced to the city for the very first time. All that to say, um, we've been looking very hard, very much focusing on these commercial and mixed use nurture existing commercial in the city where where do we want to help that grow more where do we really hope that commercial and residential will grow alongside each other. To your point about, should we kind of do one thing first and then pause and then see if it's appropriate to do the second thing, I think that for myself as one participant in this process not talking for anybody else. I think in terms of how zoning plays out on the ground, and it is true that I think none of us have a crystal ball to see how developers and private property owners will, in what specific ways will they take us up on the zoning that we pass as part of this process. Indeed, we don't know what private property owners or developers will do with the zoning that's currently on the books in Medford. And I say that because I think that the premise of, well, let's see if this zoning kind of does what we want it to do. And then let's look at another problem in need of a solution or their topic. That's not the premise that I'm coming at this from, because I think we'll never really get to the point where we're able to say with certainty. that. Okay this geography of zoning did it check the box for this goal for the city of Bedford. Overall this entire process is iterative. I don't think we'll ever get to a point where we're like, Okay, we did it. We have we have enough small businesses and we're good on that, or we have enough of this specific type of housing, and we're good on that, and nobody's in need of that. Because this. What we do is we. Through this ground floor and the ceiling for what could happen. And then we have to wait and see how private property owners, what private property owners decide to do with that. So all that to say, sorry, that was kind of a lot of words, but that is my way of saying why I think it is useful for us to try to continue doing these two things in parallel. looking at you know kind of that small minority of commercial only sub districts. At the same time as looking at our mixed use sub districts at the same time as looking at our residential only sub districts, because we know that we have different goals and wants for all these different needs of the city and just trying to move the needle forward on all of them at the same time. Of course, the goal is to be holistic, and a truly heroic number of public meetings is how we try to get to that goal. So I'll look around and see if anybody else has a different answer to the question. Thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: Do we want to go back to that follow up? And then we have another question online. So sorry, the person who was trying to talk earlier isn't able to get their mic to work, but they say the zone adjacent to Tufts Blue, Northwest along Boston Ave is shaded green. Is that color residential 1B? So if not, what is the zone status? And then continuing Northwest to Quincy Street, the color is beige, as is much of that residential Medford. So they're asking about the residential zoning. And what does that indicate? So are you able to sort of speak to that a little bit?
[Emily Innes]: Yes, I'm gonna flip back to the residential zone. So for those of you who will be looking at this at home, just know that slide 10 is going to give them the information. The reason these colors don't match the colors on the slide that they were asking about precisely is because the colors on the slide that they were asking about are the faded versions of these. We faded those back.
[SPEAKER_18]: So can we put the interactive map on what you're looking at right now?
[Emily Innes]: That is a good question.
[SPEAKER_18]: To show the specifics of what we're talking about?
[Emily Innes]: Yes.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Do you want me? No, no. Okay.
[Emily Innes]: There you go, interactive map coming on up. So this is the splash pad. That's the instructions when you first get here. So I'm going to go over to the layers right now. So just a very quick introduction. You have layers. You have the legend. It'll take a minute to load because I'm probably using up all the Wi-Fi availability in the room. Next to the legend, you have the base map, so you can change to look at an aerial versus a street map. Then you've got information here with more instructions about it. Let's go to the proposed zoning districts and turn those on. I'm going to turn the transit off because we don't actually need those. Then we're going to zoom in here and now I'm going to turn to the legend. And the legends taking a while. So the, the, these, the yellow and the green are the residential districts that that map that I was showing earlier actually had the names on them. But I will show you how to look at on the interactive map. So it's urban residential 1 is the green neighborhood. Residential is the neighborhood residential 3 yellow and then let me go back to the map itself. And then let's just pick our random parcel here. Just so you can see. So if I click on this parcel here, what will happen if we had sufficient bandwidth? I suspect the Zoom is taking up the bandwidth. But what would happen is on the right-hand side where you now see this block, it would come up with the information about the parcel. And what it will say is, you know, the address with this, it will say what the existing dimensional standards of the parcel as they are now are. It will say what the existing zoning for the parcel is, and it will say what the proposed zoning is for that parcel. So you can look at each 1 individually. You can also go up here where it says find address or place. You don't have to know where you are on that. You can search for your address or any other address that you're interested. on that map and zoom in. So I highly recommend it. The other thing you can do is this little arrow here up at the top, that leads to data filters. For those of you who really want to geesh out on the data, you can, for example, we're showing all of the zoning now. I've just pushed on the neighborhood residential zoning. So now you only see the neighborhood residential zoning. Um, you can look, let's see if this works. You can we have the historic dates that things are built. I think actually, because the residential so in here, I've said, tell me all of the things in neighborhood residential 1 built between 1990 and 2025 and they show up if I were to take that away, if I were to go say, um. tell me all of the parcels in the proposed zoning districts built between 1990 and 2025. It would show them up if I only want to see, for example, let's say historic districts, historic buildings. So I'm going to go for A little over 75 years ago, those are all the buildings that were built in if I want to see all of the private ways and these areas I can put a map on and that shows all the parcels that are on private way. So. For all the questions that people are asking, this is a really critical tool to be able to delve into the answers to those questions.
[SPEAKER_18]: So I'm going to clear all of this, but I hope for the first time... I look at it like this, and I'm trying to determine exactly where that's showing and all of that stuff, and it makes it a little bit... difficult to understand because then when you're looking at it this way, I'm not seeing the allocation of the zoning, the yellow, the green, and what they determine and what they mean.
[Emily Innes]: So that's because the legend is not loading for some reason. The legend is what you want. Yeah, absolutely. And the maps, the large scale maps, the legend is on the left hand side and has all of those details.
[SPEAKER_18]: So, yeah, I saw them out there, but it's like, it's different when you're kind of looking at it and poking around trying to determine things. It's a whole different animal.
[Emily Innes]: Yes. And the other problem is that the colors on the PDFs render slightly differently from the colors of which render depending on which computer monitor. Right. So, so the legend is what you need. And I know today, so I think it's just the bandwidth. because it's trying to pull up all of those. Actually, let me just see if I can put up a smaller amount of legend. These are the approved ones. Will it pop up? No, I don't think we have enough bandwidth, so apologies for that.
[SPEAKER_18]: And on the Boston Ave section, where exactly are we go? I mean, I can see certain sections of that, but how far down does it go? Because I know we split into some of them at a certain point on Boston Ave.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, I was asking Paula outside. I was looking at the maps and like, you know, some of these parcels don't have colors on them. I'm assuming that's Summerville. She said, yes, yes. So that's an easy way of knowing. Yeah, it's that cut out there. It's one of the reasons that this map is interactive is quite useful because you could actually zoom in and out and see where the other communities are. Makes it a little bit easier. Do you have any other questions online?
[Unidentified]: We do. Okay, great. Sorry, put my mic on.
[Alicia Hunt]: So the other question, Gil Gabay at 48 Allmont Street, I completely support the new rezoning project and the ambitious of the ideas the city council has been undertaking. My question is about how our bike lanes and pedestrian safety plan for around newly zoned commercial or large residential lots. And so we'll start to get into that, is that zoning does not talk about things like streets and bike lanes, et cetera. It's a completely separate way that those are controlled. But the city is a director of traffic and transportation. He was literally in my office today coordinating with me. He's actually looking at some stuff on Salem Street. We had a very funny interaction. because he asked me about when the Salem Street zoning was passed because he's looking at some stuff treatments on Salem Street. And then I sent him the zoning that was passed. He said, no, no, I want to see the meeting. I want the video because I want to see the comments that people made about traffic at that meeting to inform what I'm doing and what I'm proposing and the public meeting that I'm setting up. So that is to say that we are working in tangent, and I might say in parallel. And so we're working on things. He's also looking at stuff. He's aware that these meanings, some of them are contentious, and he is trying to get the input from those to help inform some of what he is doing. He said to me, I'm looking at more bike lanes on Salem Street. I said, people might be upset about that. I don't know. Some other people might love it. He said, I'm going to go watch the video and see what people what they were literally saying. He's planning to do a public meeting about Salem Street and additional bike lanes and what changes they could do on there. There are a couple of side streets there that he's looking at treatments. He's looking at stuff right now on Main Street close to Medford Square. So the main street coming out of Medford Square is the area that this MassDOT just had a big meeting on. Some of that is going to be at Traffic Commission in the next month or two. And so he's sort of going back and forth. He's also looking at some stuff in Medford Square around bike lanes. Those are all the things he actually mentioned to me today. We're looking at the lower part of Fulton Street. I think actually, sorry, I had to leave traffic commission early this month in order to go to a city council meeting, but I believe that we adopted a bike lane on the lower part of Fulton Street by Gillis Park. So we're actively looking at these things and where does it make sense to add them and how do we add them? to protect the pedestrians and the bicyclists, but it is city staff separate from this zoning effort. We're also, I sat yesterday, we've done an RFP for the lots in Medford Square to do some new ground floor commercial. What we're looking at is a grocery store and a coffee shop with residential above it and a parking garage. And I met with that developer with the mayor yesterday to talk about, do we want to look at realignment of some of the roads? Do we want to look at the directions? He said to me, do you have traffic counts? I said, you need to talk to our director of traffic and transportation. So they've already been introduced. So these things are all sort of going on at the same time. That is to say that there is no mechanism zoning talks about the parcels and the pedestrian and bike lanes are for the most part on the public ways or on the streets. And the one exception to that is what we were doing over on mystic have. And we did on Salem Street where we said we want the sidewalks to be wide enough for the people and the traffic. And if your sidewalk is not wide enough, then your building setback has to be further set back and you have to use some of your private property for sidewalks. And I don't know if you want to go into any more detail on that, but that's. It's we absolutely we, we worked it we workshopped it on mystic ab and we're including it everywhere we're including it, we're including it in all of the mixed use districts and I think that at one point there was a little confusion.
[Emily Innes]: People assuming that we were taking the public right of way to make the increased sidewalk. No, no, it's actually the public. it's a private property, so if you already have the existing sidewalk, say the existing sidewalk is six feet wide, that's a public sidewalk, and you're putting in a new building and we want a 12 foot wide sidewalk, just to make the math in my hands a little bit easier here. So here's the property line, you, the property owner of your, the new mixed use building, will have to add a six foot sidewalk and then set your building back from that. So you're not doing public land, but the idea is to make it more walkable, more comfortable. We noticed that certain areas of Medford have quite narrow sidewalks. And so.
[SPEAKER_18]: Air rights over that sidewalk?
[Emily Innes]: No, the building has to go up after that sidewalk. They can't build over the sidewalk.
[Adam Hurtubise]: They can't build over the sidewalk.
[Emily Innes]: They can't build over the sidewalk. Excellent question, though. So other questions here? Come up to the mic, please. I know we've been doing some chatting, but I'm worried about the people online not being able to hear. And then, Alicia, maybe let us know after this one if there's another question.
[Unidentified]: Hi. So I'm with SOS33. I have a question, if you could pull up the... I'm so short.
[Zoe Moutsos]: Which map would you like? This one. This is the one. So I'm just going to focus on an area that I can pick out on the map, which is where I live. So if we're looking at High Street, that is going down to the river there.
[Unidentified]: Yeah.
[Zoe Moutsos]: So I want to make sure I heard this correctly. Like at the base level, this zoning that we're doing is correcting or modifying some sort of crazy zoning that exists right now, which is like, you could put a 15 story building here if you wanted to. And so at like the very baby step is that's now let's get rid of that. Right. So we're looking so that's great.
[Emily Innes]: No one's going to go to the mat on that one.
[Zoe Moutsos]: So if we're looking at the blue or green or whatever color that is, teal. Okay, teal. Right now, those are already sort of a mishmash of businesses in there. There's like a pizza shop, a liquor store, dry cleaner, smoke shop, bodega. So they're already there. We're sort of codifying that they can be there. But then also, the teal means that It's easier for other businesses to come in there should they want to without having to get by right without having to get some sort of special distance station to do it. And then on top, almost all of those buildings do have residential on top already so it's not actually a huge change from what is there now, but they could potentially go a little bit taller. So I'm understanding that right, on the teal?
[Emily Innes]: Super important motion. I'm actually going to shift to the other map because the legends are outlining here. That's not very helpful to us. But let me jump to this so we can see them. So that red is actually the urban residential two. So that's residential only. That teal color would have been our mixed-use 2A. So that's five stories by right to incentive zoning. But that does bring up a couple of important points that you brought up. One is the uses. So I believe Paula has a printed document out, but use tables on presentations are really annoying. But for those of you in the room, I believe we have a current draft of the uses. Have a look. We've been talking about what the buildings look like and how they fit, but we haven't talked about the uses. You bring up 2 points in kind of your 1st statement, and I think they're really important. 1 of the things that we did when we looked at this and the maps are online is that last June, we did a workshop with the planning and permitting committee and we did maps of all of the existing conditions, including the existing nonconformities. And those are the buildings that are the parcels that don't meet the current dimensional standards. And so one of our first steps was where can we reduce the nonconformities? So that's point number one is that was kind of a base understanding. Point number two is the idea of allowing it making it easier for businesses to come into these next uses areas. That's where the use table comes in and what we've talked about, I talked about by right earlier where you just get a building permit if you meet the conditions. So there's 2 other review levels. 1 is site plan review and site plan review is a by right use. but we want the ability as a city to put conditions on that by right use. So it goes to the CD board. In some cases, we might have an administrative site plan review. We need to talk about that a little bit more. But the idea is we want the use, but we think there are some things that we want to talk about. The CD board can't deny the use, but it can put conditions on them. Then the final thing, and it's the hardest thing to get, is a special permit. Special permit goes to the CD board in most cases. And it requires public hearing. And the CD board can approve it. They can approve it with conditions. Or a special permit, the CD board can deny it. Now, they have to be very careful about how they deny it. They have to have good reasons for it. But a special permit, they do allow that. So as we think about uses, we want to think about, is this a desired use that we want to make it easier for somebody to do, but because the community wants this use? So that becomes a byright. Is this something where the community wants it? We think it's a good idea, but we want some conditions. That becomes site plan review. And if this is something that we think is important, but needs that added step, or we're not sure if we want it or not, then that's a special permit or we don't want it under easy conditions necessarily. That's a special product. So that's what we're thinking about when we think of how we structure the use table.
[Zoe Moutsos]: So it seems like I can only speak for my I don't know the rest of the city well enough, but it seems like This has been very intentional in that this zoning is actually codifying what's really already there by businesses. So, if you're looking though, I can pick out those businesses up high street and down Boston have to what Brooke right? I can see in the teal. those are where actually where businesses are now. So when we're talking about a corridor, we're not really adding a ton more sort of mixed use. We're just making sure that what's there can continue to be there. And if things change in and out, it's not a hassle. My question is the second question is the red sort of like across the street or adjacent, which is the urban residential too. So When you're thinking about how to apply urban residential versus residential or neighborhood, if for whatever reason, perhaps the neighbors are like, could you please make this urban residential one? Could you do NR3? That's not going to impact the teal, right? Those things can change, can flex. It's not like we can only have teal if we have this much density across the street kind of thing.
[Emily Innes]: It's not a color by numbers. You have to put the pink next to the yellow. Yeah, right. Which as I say, that sounds pretty garish. Yeah, no. So one of the things that we've been talking about with the city, as a consultant, we've been talking about with city staff and planning and permitting and to the CD board is we are doing this geographically. There was another option. There was an option where we could have come and done the whole thing and walked up to you with a potentially multi-hundred page document and said, here it is, read it and tell us if you like it. We collectively, all of us thought that that was not a good idea because it would be even more confusing. The zoning and geography is confusing enough as it is. So we know as we look at all of these and start to put these together, that at the very end of this process, we're going to need to do a cleanup. And we're going to say, oh, gosh, that parcel never got zoned for anything. We're looking at the boundaries now just to make sure. Or after we did all of this, maybe this district should be something else. As you look at this, it's not like there should be massive changes once it's approved, but know that we are going to come back and just, did we get it right?
[Zoe Moutsos]: We're just not necessarily changing for in this instance, let's say across the street from Giles or Giles, however you say it, is right now we're suggesting urban residential too, but perhaps the neighborhood is like, no, we would prefer it not. That doesn't impact the teal.
[Emily Innes]: It doesn't impact the teal, absolutely. And that's one of the reasons we suggest that people who have been interested in this go online and look, because we also have the existing land uses on one of the layers. So people can see what's there now. One of the base maps is an aerial. So, you can see what's there now common to most of our New England communities had significant build out significant construction prior to the introduction of zoning. So. we can look and say, hey, this is zoned X, single family two, for example. But you know what? It's got a lot of two and three families and apartments in here. What does that mean? Should that be something else? And that's been a lot of our back and forth. Same is true for the commercial. And you mentioned, OK, maybe those buildings that are existing now are one story. They could go a little bit higher. Yes, absolutely. It is important to remember that there's consideration for anybody who owns a property of the cost of development, which is high now, but may not always be high, right? And so when we think about zoning, we're thinking about a 20 to 30 year cycle, not in the next year cycle.
[Zoe Moutsos]: And then just my last statement is I really thought it was so helpful when you did your little here's the table in here when you step in and when you step in even more because it is so confusing when you just think about your lot size and you're like oh this is my lot size but there are so many little add-ons that actually really impact and then very quickly you begin to see actually no this size building couldn't go here for all of these reasons By lots, you just have to start at the I just really thought that was really helpful. And I think that's where it gets so difficult to envision and really understand, because there are so many different things that just slowly chip away at what can actually be built there. And it's hard to remember that I really don't know how you put that in a presentation. But that was very helpful. So thank you.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much. Again, our designers, you know, we, we It's a balance of giving too much information and not enough information. So our designers are currently working on images that better explain my table analogy. And we're hoping to have those for you soon, because you are not the only person who has mentioned kind of how difficult it is to remember all of the components that go in. So we're looking forward to having that for the community soon. Alicia, did you have anything on the line?
[Adam Hurtubise]: Oh, sorry.
[Alicia Hunt]: So people online are welcome to raise their hands if they want to speak. Oh, so I can quickly answer this one. Roberta camera asks, I'm zooming into my neighborhood on the map, but I see the walk in court is listed as you are too. Does this make sense? Should it be something else? So to be clear, Walkling Court is a Medford Housing Authority property that was recently done what we call a planned development district. So this is where a property owner can propose, we want to do something specific that we think would be appropriate for the city. and we need different zoning for it, and this is the project we want to build, and this is the zoning we think will work. And that would go through the same kind of process as we're doing this, where it goes to City Council, the Community Development Board, and then back to City Council. And so the Housing Authority actually did that for Walkling Court, because Walkling Court, they are in the process of redeveloping to just do more modern, expanded public housing there. And so they have what's a PDD, a planned development district. It is an overlay that goes on that property. When you have an overlay like that, you still need to have underlying zoning. So urban residential two seem to make the most sense because they're about to build a bunch of apartment buildings and townhouses on their property. That's all been approved by the City Council and the Community Development Board. But we needed to put something there. And so at this point, we've put Urban Residential 2 as that area. So that would allow apartment buildings in that location as the base zoning. How many stories? She said, how many stories would that be?
[Adam Hurtubise]: And I will tell you.
[Alicia Hunt]: So while, right, so the whole point is it doesn't actually matter because they have this other zoning that they came, they went through the whole process. This would not overwrite the overlay that's been approved for them. So their overlay would still be maintained at that location as long as they build that project that they proposed within a timely manner, which is two years. They have to pull building permits within two years of getting permission. then they can build that project that has already been approved. So this is just sort of, because you can't leave it blank.
[SPEAKER_18]: I thought it was supposed to be a much taller building.
[Emily Innes]: So why would that be the two?
[SPEAKER_18]: But the point is it's not, when you look at what the actual description of that is, that's not what it says. It says up to how many stories. You are two says up to three storey possible fourth incentive.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yes, that's not what's being proposed right walkling port court and what my point is it's not being proposed. It was proposed, it was approved, and they're getting the building permits, and they're doing I believe six story buildings with four story. apartments, and that's approved separately from this zoning process.
[Rocco DiRico]: You can't put that in there because it kind of would be confusing for somebody that doesn't know that.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right, so we should include the overlay in some of our maps?
[Emily Innes]: We should, but I also want, does everybody know the difference between a base district and an overlay? Because if you don't, this could be a very confusing conversation. Everybody who owns property is owned for something. That is your base district. It's a table, sits right here. An overlay district sits on top of that base district. That's why it's called an overlay district. And what an overlay district does is it gives a property owner a different set of options. So if you are a property owner and you have a base district, you can develop under that base district. If you have an overlay district on top of it, you can choose to do the overlay district instead. The critical point is you can't pick and choose. So you can't say, oh, you know what, I really like the height and the overlay district but I like the setbacks and the base district a lot better. Once you choose the district you're going to develop under, that's the district you're stuck with. You have to follow the rules of that district. So that's why they could do a different building height and different types of buildings from the base district. But everyone always has to have a base district. Now, one question should be is you are to the appropriate base district for that site. if it's not, but that UR2 is currently our sort of highest level of residential only district. If we were going to change that, we would then have to something that matched the height that they're doing under the overlay. We'd have to change it to a commercial district. And I suspect that's probably not the desired results. So sometime, frequently an overlay is used as an incentive that allows something different from the base district. And that's where the options come in.
[Rocco DiRico]: I think adding what that overlay is there.
[Emily Innes]: We can put the district on looking at that map.
[Rocco DiRico]: Why is this this? And I know they're putting in six stories.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, Councilor Bears's asked us to do it on Monday. We just didn't have a chance to do it before this. Sorry, Tuesday. I forgot it. Monday was a holiday, wasn't it? It's been a long week. He asked us to do it on Tuesday at our check-in. We haven't had a chance to do it, but we will. Thank you for that. Alicia, anybody?
[SPEAKER_18]: It impacts all the stuff we're talking about as well.
[Emily Innes]: for the overall disease. Yep, absolutely, thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: I have your mic, yes. Kit is gonna go to a question. Did you wanna? Right, we should go back to the audience and then we'll go back to the online. So do you wanna? Thank you.
[nxzvg6ywlhM_SPEAKER_04]: So just a general question about development to the extent that this is promoting more stuff. What considerations have been made with respect to greenery, trees, and etc.? And two, from an infrastructure standpoint, is electric, water, and sewer up to all of this without some major reconstruction?
[Emily Innes]: So I'll be happy to answer the greenery. That's a great question for these district for except actually, part of your urban residential to would this would apply to the multiple unit dwelling. And for the other the mixed use a green score what's called a green score it was passed earlier by city council that would apply to all of these districts. And a green score requires that the developer meet basically a menu of requirements. And what they do is of that menu has to do with stormwater management. It has to do with tree plantings. It has to do with the depth of soil, because a lot of people plant trees without enough soil and they die. So the depth of soil. So there's a point system, and the developer identifies the things that they're doing, they multiply it by the point system, they add it up, and it has to hit a certain number. The key to that is that there's a flexibility in how they hit that number, but that number is what produces the elements that manage stormwater, reduce heat island effect, provide trees and greenery for the area. There's also some strategies for green and blue or green or blue roofs in there, but that's a key to look at. I don't have it up on this computer, but we could probably pull it up outside if you want to see it. It's certainly on the website. Then in terms of infrastructure, so this and some other questions that we often get for zoning is one of those that's really frustrating for people in a zoning process. because zoning does not speak to infrastructure. So I as a zoning consultant get to turn that back over to the city for discussion. But in general, what happens and this is where that site plan review, and special permit process becomes so important, because that's generally where those questions are asked is, when a specific development comes in, they have to show what capacity they're drawing on. And then there is the city staff reviews the site plan review application or the special permit application. And then that's where that conversation about capacity happens. You don't usually talk about it at the zoning stage because it would be very difficult to figure out what the needs would be over the next 20 or 30 years trying to factor in potential individual discussions. It's very appropriate at the review level. I don't know if you want to add anything to that.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you, Emily. No, I think that's a very concise summary of what impact in mitigation studies we do, when, for what reason, especially when it comes to those larger developments that have, of course, more of an impact on our shared services and infrastructure than probably any purely residential building except for, you know, the largest of multiplexes. The largest developments will go through that review process, site plan review. They will be subject to that greater scrutiny and in a lot of cases, you know, this public process of negotiation with the community over what is what ought the community to get back when a large development, large enough to trigger this special review process comes in. And I believe there's also thresholds at which linkage and impact fees for certain shared, sorry, for certain shared resources come into play. Smaller developments, like a lot of your one, two, and three unit residential buildings are not subject to these kinds of linkage fees, but larger developments by statute do already pay into shared funds for things like police and fire, water infrastructure, road infrastructure, and all larger developments under new zoning are subject to those as well. Anything to add?
[Alicia Hunt]: I think that I'll just add that. So something to mention is that our other department heads, like I mentioned, traffic, like our DPW commissioner often watches these meetings in the evening at home as well. I happen to notice that he was watching this one. But we talk about these things. And so they have had under this administration, our DPW commissioner has had assessments done of roads and sidewalks. So he has a list and what the statuses are. And he's done that and looked, they're doing that in the water and sewer. They know where the water pressure isn't as good. And there are various thresholds. They look at projects they can do to increase water pressure, to look at sewer if there are issues with capacity. So they're watching that and monitoring that all the time throughout the whole city. And water and sewer is its own enterprise. And so they have an enterprise capital fund, and periodically they get bonds. I've seen them ask for bonds, although I didn't pay very close attention to which project this was, this year so that they can continually increase sewer capacity, for example. But they're also always looking at the other things. Um, when we have the really big projects, like we're doing the parcels in Medford square, I explicitly said, if this was a private developer, we would have them comment on the thing. And often they'll ask private developers. We need you to put in these connectors. We need you to add a loop. The water isn't good enough over here. We need you as part of this project to do this increased capacity line. And then the developers understand they have to do it, or we literally can't provide the services to the building. For the one in Medford Square, they said, we have the capacity for water and sewer in Medford Square. We're not concerned. You can keep going. You're not going to have to put that one on the developer this time. But those are things that we look at with actual substantial, with concrete projects, as opposed to just what if. And a little bit of that is, there are things, there are sources of funding the city gets that are population dependent. For example, people say, well, you're gonna make, the schools are gonna be overcrowded. Well, schools get funding per student. So if the number of students goes up, there is chapter something funding, I'm gonna get roads and sewers confused. 70 is schools, chapter 90 is roads. And that money goes up when there are more students. You can either build a new school because your old school is so decrepit that you have to have one. And that's the card we're playing on Medford High, frankly. The other is your schools are overcrowded and now you need more schools. And that's the other reason that the state will give you money to help build new schools. They will not give you money because you think someday they will be overcrowded or you're projecting the population will be too high. They will only do it once it becomes too high or you're hitting that threshold. So that's part of the, it's the balance that we pay and how we fund things, at least in Massachusetts. So do we want to move on?
[SPEAKER_18]: I was just going to say Boston Ave's been decimated. They cut out all the trees when they put in the green line. Nothing has been replaced.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right.
[SPEAKER_18]: So that would be taken care of. It never was.
[Alicia Hunt]: So Boston. So a lot of the trees that were grown there were in the Boston were in the the railroad right of way. And they the MBTA has put their foot down that they can't have them there. They're afraid of branches dropping on the lines. We have been working with tops with this new dorm to take advantage of that. So one of the things that was approved is that the, so the other thing is the catch-22 is that you can't put tall trees under power lines. So on the railroad side, the MBTA won't let us put big leafy trees with big branches because they're afraid of the train tracks, but we have the power lines on the other side of the street. So we actually, well, we, Tufts with the city together got National Grid to agree to move the power lines to the railroad side so that we could put big leafy trees well they'll start smaller but they will grow to be big leafy trees on the dorm side of the street and we have we're working on some agreements to put some more evergreens and stuff on the say you can put those kind of tall bushes and stuff right we've been working on um the between the tea and tufts and the city to get to some agreement on some evergreen type things that can go along the railroad side of it as part of this Tufts construction. I do not have any sense of what the timeline is for that, but I think that we've gotten the agreement for those at this point.
[SPEAKER_18]: How much money do we get from Tufts when we do all of this stuff?
[Alicia Hunt]: So you're asking about the money we get from Tufts. So there are two different things. One is our pilot payments, which is negotiated from the mayor. Cannot speak to that off the top of my head. That is just not information that I just have. But then as we do individual projects, then we ask for sort of mitigation payments and mitigation work. So one of the things that Tufts has agreed to for the dorm is to do a full study of Boston Ave, a complete street study. what should the traffic look like, what should the lanes look like, what should the bike lanes, what should the sidewalks look like, and then there's going to be some amount of sidewalk rebuilding that's above and beyond immediately what's in front of the dorm. And again, I know that they have an agreement that they worked out with Medford's engineering department that I think I was sent earlier in the week and I have not frankly been able to look at yet.
[SPEAKER_18]: Is that stuff accessible to me to go look that stuff up?
[Alicia Hunt]: I don't know that off the top of my head.
[SPEAKER_18]: Because I'd like you know to me that's transparency.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. And some of it is, frankly, we have a communications department in the city of two. We for the toughs for the zoning page. Councilor Collins has been working very hard with our communication staff that she just feeds them all the information they just they just update whatever she tells them to put on that page, because it's not enough bandwidth for them to pay attention. So a lot of this is all of us just remembering to always send them all the stuff that we need all the time. And honestly, we're fallible. So we don't, we haven't figured out how to get all of this up all the time. We don't have the bandwidth to do it. I think that's really the answer to it. We're trying.
[SPEAKER_18]: I mean, you know, we're just like kind of regular folk.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. TOPS has a lot of information online as well for the community and about the new dorm. And that information might be available on their page.
[SPEAKER_18]: I bet it doesn't really tell you all that kind of stuff. I'm just curious about how much Tufts is paying in because I'm looking at the large amount like on Boston Ave that Tufts owns, right? And we're talking about that whole section and the impact it has. And I just, I want to make sure we're getting enough bang for the buck.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right, we need to keep.
[Adam Hurtubise]: No, I just want to say, I think this is, um, I think we actually let go into the question.
[Rocco DiRico]: I'm happy to answer some of these questions just to introduce yourself. Sorry. 14 Capen Street, Medford Tufts University. To answer the question of where this information is available, the Community Development Board did make a decision on site plan review. There's a document in there, it's about 25 pages that shows all the community benefits that are associated with the project. Those include a $1 million neighborhood improvement fund, $500,000 contribution to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, as Alicia was talking about, $500,000 for a planning study, new sidewalks, new trees, new bike lanes on both sides of Boston Avenue, a blue bike station on Boston Avenue, a free shuttle bus from the Medford campus to Medford Square, new crosswalks, a dedicated ride share zone, and there's also- Sidewalks can be taken by community members too? And I don't know the technical knowledge about this, but I'll just say it. An infiltration and inflow mitigation project. So basically a public works project that the city engineer asked us to do.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry, did you say that information is available?
[Rocco DiRico]: So if you go to the Community Development Board's website, they should have the past decisions and all those items were conditioned as part of that approval. I will note when you go on there, it says that the Neighborhood Improvement Fund was $500,000. After meeting with neighbors, we actually increased it to a million dollars. So that's the one thing that's different from what I said on there, but that should all be publicly accessible.
[Kit Collins]: I think the question is really helpful in illuminating that this is crucial context that the community wants as we especially as we go forward and talk about the Tufts institutional zone, which is a little distinct about from the proposal that we're shown tonight so I'm going to make sure that the communications department works to have that information that Rocco just discussed the updated version linked on our zoning websites that when folks are thinking about Boston out thinking about the institutional zone and the corridors. That's in the right place for them to find them. So thank you for bringing that up. We've had a hand up on zoom for a while. So I want to go to them. Yuko I'm going to ask you to unmute.
[Yuko Okabe]: Hello, my name is Yuko Okabe. For the record, my address is 55 Winchester Street, so I am very close to kind of that Somerville-Medford border. Just wanted to say up front that I'm very much in favor of this new zoning and just the opportunity to build more housing. And I'm also interested in how you'll work with the city of Somerville to kind of align the Medford and Somerville zoning rules for that split parcel along Broadway. I'm curious, like, in what ways do you think or have you seen that more housing will help local businesses succeed and grow in the corridors we're talking about tonight, whether it be like along Broadway or Boston Ave, where I'm closest to, or even like Main Street or other corridors that have businesses.
[Alicia Hunt]: The Broadway corridor? Sorry, I'm trying to answer too many questions at once. corridor yes so there was a study done so actually for the broadway corridor um the city of somerville identified this as a problem and i don't know if everybody realizes this but there are a number of parcels along that area that are half in medford and half in somerville and that makes it really hard to develop the parcels So a couple of years ago, Somerville got a grant to do a joint project between Medford and Somerville to look at those parcels. So Somerville has, I'm just gonna say it, they have seven times the staffing in their planning office as Medford does. For the 10 staff in my office, there are 70 in there, including their own communications division within planning, just saying. So they managed the project and the consultants, but we did come out with a Broadway corridor study, which I have provided to Emily, there was a whole number of public meetings in that area around the Broadway corridor, and they came out with recommendations. and so at this time we are taking those recommendations and implementing them with the heights and stuff that you see on our side of the street and it is our hope that Somerville because this was their project will be doing the same on their side of the street or on their sides of the parcels in some cases so that we can have matching zoning. The difficulty down there is though that the process is different. At this time, they are continuing to require that all buildings, even if there's just a few feet of building on the Somerville side of the border, go through a full Somerville process in addition to any Medford process that there might be. Our hope is that if a building is small enough and it meets the zoning, they can just build it at least on the Medford side, Um, and whether or not they need to then have public meetings, etc on them. Um, Somerville does require several more public meetings for every building they build than Medford does. Um, so we have had a few buildings kind of get caught in this back and forth. Um, we have also been talking about and they did agree to this idea that if a building was going through both processes, that our staff would make an effort to talk to each other, and if necessary, show up at each other's planning board meetings in order to prevent the board's giving them requirements that were in conflict with each other and not having us rely on a developer saying, but Somerville said I had to do this because we don't want them playing mom against dad. We would like mom and dad to talk to each other and make sure that in fact, if Somerville is requiring X, that it's Somerville that is telling us that because we can be accommodating And we can try and work with them to be able to develop some nice buildings along there. So that was a very long way of saying we're really working with them on this. And I have their numbers, and they answer my calls.
[Kit Collins]: Great, thank you, Alicia. And just to the second part of that question around how we're kind of, are we thinking about how increasing, I think the question was, are we thinking about how increasing housing close to mixed use districts and commercial districts, how those two things go together? That's very much been a theme of our discussions of putting together the zoning, putting those proposals together. Sorry, getting late in the evening. And that pertains to certainly much, much more of the zoning than just the specific areas we've been talking about tonight, but thinking very intentionally about what is the right level of residential intensity to place near what is the right level of commercial intensity, both so that people in their residential areas have access to the amenities that they want that are useful to them in the ways that they want, some things that is appropriate to drive to, some things people want to be able to walk to, and also making sure that at the same time as we are trying to incentivize and encourage more businesses and small businesses to come into Medford, to stay where they are, to grow in new places, that there is the base of people that will be there to welcome them and support them and patronize them so that they can really take root and stay there. So that's just a little bit of the thinking about that intersection.
[Emily Innes]: I'll just add to that, if you don't mind, there's a lot of research about the impact of having housing close to downtown's post commercial areas, and the impact that they have on local businesses. If we find that something that people are interested in, we can certainly pull some. examples and case studies and provide them for people to look at. But there's a lot of research out there. It's one of the things that happened when downtown's hollowed out and there weren't people living there, is there wasn't the audience, there weren't the customers there. But as Kit said, it's trying to get the balance right. That is important, is what is right where, and that throughout this process has been an ongoing conversation.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you. We're going to go back to the podium and then back to Zoom. Go to you first. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hi, Pauline Fiorello, Warren Street in Medford. Lifelong resident of Medford. I've always been very proud of the history of Medford. I'm concerned about, with the new development, how those things are going to look. And I probably know the answer to this question. I'm going to ask it anyway. I saw it went out on Salem Street. There's a building in West Medford right now going in. I know it's not complete. But it would hate to see the historic flavor somewhat of the city be replaced by big boxy non appealing looking buildings. Is there any influence to the development of new buildings going in and what those are going to look like?
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, that is an excellent question. So there's a couple of things in the way that we're looking at the zoning that Reflect what's going on in history and that's 1 of the reasons I showed you that you can see on the interactive map when things were built. So, on the residential side, we're looking at historic conversions to make it easier for people to put more units in the building. So to be less likely to tear it down really important. On the commercial, the mixed-use side, there's a couple of areas. I can think of one in particular, Medford Square. Now, we're not talking about that today, but it's a good example, is somebody challenged why we had put this lower, you know, Medford Square. We want more height. Why did you put just an MX1 in there? Well, the reason is the buildings on that side, the ones that back up to the river, the buildings are historic. There's not enough land there anyway to redevelop with parking on the site. We didn't want to create an incentive for those buildings to be redeveloped. So that's something that we can look at, right? How do you preserve your existing building stock, historic building stock? That's part of the culture, the history, the development patterns, the character of the feel of Medford. And so we want to do that in terms of new buildings in terms of infill development. There's a couple of different things that we can look at. 1 is development standards, which I've mentioned before. that can be used in both site plan review and the special permit. We can put some components of architectural design in there, and then how to think about putting in good infill that's responsive and reflective of the context. We do have to be careful sometimes. The context isn't what you would want it. I can remember one community that I was in where we were gathering on about this, and they said, we don't actually like our current buildings. Can you please give us something else? But in a community like yours where you like the buildings, you want to look at the development standards. The other way to do it is design guidelines. And there are ways of, there are different levels of design guidelines. I always say, if you want to make something mandatory, it should be in the zoning. You have to be very careful when you talk about design guidelines in the zoning in some situations, but that's one way of doing it. The other is to have a supplementary set of advisory design guidelines. You can really get in more into styles there. Most developers I have met would much rather have a set of advisory design guidelines and say, that's what the community wants, I'm going to come in with that, rather than come in and kind of guess at what the community wants to see. So it can be a powerful discussion tool. I like both development standards and design guidelines, if they're well done, because it allows the community development board, the developer, and the public to be all on the same page about what's being discussed. So that's certainly a way of doing it. Now there's a third option, which is a local historic district. And they look so if your building is on the national register, or you're in a national register district or state register district, you don't actually have any protections, you have the ability to apply for historic tax credits, If you are renovating an income producing process property, rather, you have to follow certain standards. That's a whole complex matter, but the buildings aren't actually in a local historic district. There is a little bit more protection and there's also more teeth in terms of design guidelines. So there's a whole process to go through that to get a local historic district and get the historic design guidelines. That is outside zoning in terms of it's not a zoning thing. I can't zone you a local historic district, but they can work together. So that might be something to consider.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Okay, great.
[Kit Collins]: If you don't mind, we'll go back to Zoom and then to you. All right, Rich, I'm going to ask you to unmute.
[SPEAKER_14]: Okay. Go ahead. I have a question. My area in South Medford is proposed to change from general residential to urban residential one. And I'm wondering how many units can be hosted? Is there any change in the number of residential units that can be hosted on a property list to be zoned as urban residential one?
[Kit Collins]: Rich, please correct me if I'm reciting your question wrong. I think you were asking about, well, it sounds like in your neighborhood in particular, you're saying that your area is proposed to change to UR1. You're asking, is there any way that the maximum number of units that could be constructed in UR1, could that be changed? Yeah.
[Emily Innes]: Wait, could it be changed or is it being changed? In other words, is he asking whether or not his area is being changed? Rich, you can probably hear me. Are you asking whether or not your area is, the number of units in your area is being changed, or if we can change the proposed recommendation for UR1?
[SPEAKER_14]: Well, right now I'm seeing on the proposed map, our GIS map that it's changing to urban residential one.
[Unidentified]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_14]: Right now, my property is a three unit, three family property. I'm wondering, can the number of units be expanded?
[Emily Innes]: Okay, so thank you for clarifying that. We're not really talking about the residential districts now. But because this is a very quick question, I can I can answer that. So urban residential one allows a two unit dwelling. It allows historic conversion. a townhouse, a three unit dwelling, a multiplex, which is a four to six units, and then it allows an accessory dwelling unit for the one, two, or the three unit dwellings only. So the maximum that district would allow is a six unit.
[Kit Collins]: Six unit.
[Emily Innes]: Yep.
[Kit Collins]: Okay. That's under the current proposal.
[Emily Innes]: I just want to clarify proposal. Yeah, that hasn't been passed. That's just the current proposal.
[SPEAKER_14]: Okay. All right. The map is also saying a three story maximum height for the proposed. That's what it is currently.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, that is correct. The proposed is a three story maximum.
[SPEAKER_14]: Okay. All right, I guess that's all my questions. It just looks like be able to add more units on the same floors.
[Emily Innes]: Oh, so you're thinking of doing a conversion? So if you want to reach out to the planning staff, when Alicia comes back, we can put the email address in the chat. If you have more specific questions, we'll be happy to answer that about your specific property.
[SPEAKER_14]: Okay. So Alicia Hunt is the person to talk to?
[Emily Innes]: Yes. I will reach out to her.
[SPEAKER_14]: Okay.
[Emily Innes]: Great. Thank you so much.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you. And I will say for folks who have public comment, questions, concerns, suggestions that they want to make about the proposed residential district zoning, the next public meeting on that topic is this coming Wednesday, June 4, there's going to be a continuation of the public hearing in the Community Development Board. That is a Zoom-only meeting. Folks are always welcome and encouraged to attend, and you can also send written comment. It's best to send that in by Monday so that board members have a chance to read it. So all are welcome to participate in that process as well. The residential district zoning is still in the proposal stage, and that is the next public meeting on it. All right, we'll go back to the podium. Thank you.
[Sam Goldstein]: Hi, Sam Goldstein, 29 Martin Street, pretty close to Boston Ave. I was curious if we could maybe go back to the, excuse me, the proposed zoning map. I was wondering about the plan for Boston Ave between Winthrop and I guess the Parkway, but you know, the kind of piece of Somerville that sort of intrudes into Medford. But what, I guess what's the sort of proposal for either side of the street there? Um, it, it looks like, uh, the Southern side of Boston Ave is maybe not, uh, uh, so like, I guess on the other side of that, uh, just so South, South of the river.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah.
[Sam Goldstein]: So like, right. Just, yeah. So like, or just a little further North of where the cursor is there. What's the, um, What is that that plan to be and could you talk about, like, why I'm generally like, you know, pretty excited about, you know, this process just kind of carries like, where we're yeah, what the thinking is about.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, absolutely. So the purple here is to be next to be the red is urban residential to the bright blue is next to a. This lighter blue is mixed use 1B, and then the faded back green and yellow are the residential only, so ones you are two and ones you are one.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Okay. I'd have to zoom back up to just double-check.
[Sam Goldstein]: Okay. It strikes me that one side of the street is very tall and then the other side is not. I guess what's the thinking?
[Emily Innes]: So I mean, obviously you see the green and the yellow up here. So those are residential only districts. So this goes back to a comment a previous speaker made. And I answered where we're very much looking at what's on the ground now and enhancing that. So when we looked at the current zoning here, I don't have a zoom in. I guess I do have a zoom in. So you know, we're looking here, here's the existing zoning, you've got office, you've got general residential, you've got apartment one, and you've got commercial in this area. So we're looking at those pieces, the pieces in white above and below, those are existing residential districts. single family one and single family two, and a little bit of apartment two down here. So what we're trying to do with the corridors is we're looking at the corridors, of course, we want to be generally mixed use. But that doesn't mean that every single property in a corridor is zoned for mixed use. So one of the things you're seeing here in the proposed zoning, sorry for making you all dizzy here, is that you do have this urban residential too, which is residential only along the corridor. That's because you've got an existing residential only there. So, when we think of a corridor, we're thinking of a stretch of land. A corridor basically takes you from one place to the other place. And as we're looking at the stretch of land, We recognize most quarters identity of the border changes as you move through it. And so what we're trying to do of those changes, looking at what's there now. zoning to reduce the number of non-conformities, and then focusing the mixed-use portion where it makes the most sense, given what's existing now, given the relationship of those areas to the adjacent areas, and then looking at the change in the use and the identity of the corridors, generally. For looking at specific parcels and zooming in, I would talk with Paula and Jimmy outside if you've got very specific questions.
[Sam Goldstein]: Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think generally I'd support like more density in the area. It'd be great to sort of see the sort of, just frankly, like the commercial opportunities, different places to go in the area, be a little more expansive. It also seems like a lot of the residential and, you know, not to get too in the weeds, but it seems like a lot of the residential portions or residential buildings there currently are kind of like apartment-y. Yeah. But I can talk to someone in the hall about that.
[Emily Innes]: I'll just note, by the way, I zoomed into this one so you could get a better sense of parcel sizes. for the different uses. So here's your UR2 and the parcel size, and here's where we get into the higher level mixed use. So you can see the parcel sizes have changed, the uses have changed. Again, this area where we've got a mixed one, you've got sort of different conditions existing on the ground that might be able to get the basement, even with the... But there you go, different conditions existing on the ground. We're looking at the adjacencies of this parcel. So I mentioned earlier when we were talking about a little bit about the, oh, actually, I didn't mention this conversation. Sorry. I've had too many today. When we look at where the higher level, the higher density uses are, we look at how they step down into the neighborhoods. So you can see here that this mixed-use 1B is acting as a buffer to the higher density blue here before you get to the neighborhoods. On the other side, you have the rail line as the buffer. So we're looking at what we call adjacencies of uses and the densities so that we can step down and kind of feather any building height that's high here is feathered that back down into the neighborhoods.
[Sam Goldstein]: Okay, yeah, I mean, I'll talk to someone in the hall a little more, because I have some questions about that. Yeah, but generally, like, just want to express my, you know, enthusiasm for having like a bit more density and frankly, like, specifically, like, sort of more stuff to do with it's like, you know, within walking distance of me, so.
[Kit Collins]: Great.
[Sam Goldstein]: Yeah, thank you, appreciate it.
[Emily Innes]: Great, thank you, thank you very much.
[Kit Collins]: Thank you for the question. I would also say to that point, this is a market is a Q and a. This is also a excellent point in the process. I mean, all points in the process are excellent points in the process to participate, but we are very eager to hear your suggestions on anything from. Why should be X to I have a suggestion about the boundaries of this corridor. Why does it go here and not here? Comments like that suggestions are very valuable and welcome at this stage.
[SPEAKER_18]: about development, but it's a reality, unfortunately, especially the way that bus routes are in Bedford right now, and they're few and far between. So it's not something so simplistic. So I am concerned about that.
[Emily Innes]: Come on June 9th, we'll be talking about parking on June 9th.
[SPEAKER_18]: That'd be great to delve into that part of the parking where you're talking about this area, you're talking about?
[Emily Innes]: The whole parking in general. Okay. That is a little That is a listening session on June 9th. So we really want to hear what people think about the library. Yeah, that's the 1 of the library, right? Yes, I believe so. Yes. Sorry. Any other questions in the room. I do want to make sure that those of you who are interested in that time to.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, feel free to to step out and talk to them. They're bored.
[Emily Innes]: Why are we all the fun in here, did you tell them that?
[William Navarre]: All right, William Navarra, Magood Square. Given lots of people commute further from the city to get home than they'd like to, I'm very glad to see this process is gonna make space for new houses and apartments. It's really a big problem in our day, just how far people have to move from the city. Yeah. I wonder if I could hear a little bit about how making existing non-conforming single story commercial, how that could potentially allow apartments to go on top of those buildings. Thanks.
[Emily Innes]: I'm glad you mentioned that because I think somebody else earlier talked about the change to existing buildings. So yes, you have quite a few single story commercial buildings. The question becomes, and this is outside zoning, this is more on building code, are those buildings already structurally capable of adding an additional floor. So if yes, that's a relatively easy process. If no, those buildings would have to be redeveloped. And there are different ways of doing that. If it's something where it's a nice facade, the facade could be saved and everything could be built behind it. Some of them, the facade of the building are not worth saving, but that structural capacity would be important. So yes, zoning can say, you can do this, you can add that height, but it's going to be building code, cost of construction, property owner desire, developer desire, that's going to actually influence whether or not something gets built. And that's why I talk about it being a 20 to 30 year look forward for zoning because some things could happen more quickly and other things are going to require a change in one or sometimes even more business cycles.
[William Navarre]: Whereas today, if they wanted to add housing, they'd have to not only tear down the building, but they couldn't even bring the business back with the housing, right?
[Emily Innes]: So that is a good point. In some areas that are zoned commercial only, they wouldn't necessarily be able to have the housing use. So there's no incentive to do anything with that building.
[Alicia Hunt]: And like what you're saying, we have a number, we have a lot of businesses in areas where businesses aren't technically allowed by zoning. So that is actually a more complicated, like how would they be allowed to do that? Would they be allowed to tear down and build back? People think I'm deceptive when I say it's complicated, but it is, right? They'd have to go get a finding from the Zoning Board of Appeals, whether or not they'd be allowed to do that. It depends. It depends on how the neighborhood feels, right? It depends on a lot of things. Part of developers, like certainty. People like certainty when they're going to build something. So part of this is to figure out what we want to allow and then give them some level of certainty of that. And then say what we don't want to allow, right? And it'll be right now when somebody comes in and says, I really want to do ground floor commercial and residential above. And it's in a place like there's literally there was a Zoning Board of Appeals hearing tonight. There is one of those blocks that has commercial on the ground floor on Main Street. that a developer wants to come in, reconstruct the building, put some parking underneath and behind the building, put, I think it was nine apartments on top, and put back ground floor commercial, not allowed by zoning. But why not, right? It would just be making it a nicer, newer building with some residential above it. So it actually did receive a variance tonight at the zoning board. A very similar proposal on that same location was denied five or six years ago. But I think that the zoning board took into account the fact that people are saying we would like to see ground floor commercial with apartments above them, especially in locations that already have ground floor commercial. And I think a lot of business owners will say that they like to have people who live near their businesses who can walk to them. I don't want to speak for all business owners, but it does help the business model when the neighbors come and frequent the business. We want to start to wrap this up. There have been a lot of questions. It is 8.50. People have been here a long time. But I don't want you to think you can't ever talk to us. The staff are still out there. And like we said, there are upcoming meetings as well. And you can always send email to the city Councilors. Their email information is on the web. Seems to be pretty easy to find. And to address comments to the Community Development Board, you would send mail to OCD, so it's the letters, office, community development, OCD, at medford-ma.gov.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you. Thank you again, all of you, for being here. Really enjoyed your comments and thoughts. Thank you.
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