[Matt Leming]: I don't know. I feel like it's Zach's fault. All right. Colleagues, we will have a meeting of the City Council Planning and Permitting Committee. Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll. Councilor Callahan? Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Malauulu? Present. Vice President Lazzaro? Present. President Bears? Present. Chair Leming?
[Matt Leming]: Present. Five present, none absent, the meeting is called to order. Tonight we will be hearing about the first draft of the Boston Avenue proposed rezoning from our partners at In Is Land Strategy Group. Without any further ado, Emily, would you feel free to take it away and start the presentation? Oh, sorry. Uh-huh.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much. Good evening, councillors. For the record, I'm Emily Keyes Ennis of Ennis Land Strategies Group, and I'm here with my colleague, Paola Ramos-Martinez. I am going to share my screen. Okay, I can see it up there. I'm just going to make sure that it's full screen so you guys can all see it. And then I'm going to walk you through kind of the high level of the presentation that we have. And then I'm going to. take you through the detailed zoning. So just to remind everybody, especially those who may be joining us for the first time, that we're talking about the Boston Avenue corridor and rezoning that. And currently we've got two sub areas, Hillside Boston Avenue and South Boston Avenue. And then we're also going to touch on Tufts University institutional zoning, just to update you with the public presentation that we did last week. We are in the second phase of our two-phase process, looking at these two topics, and here we are today at the Planning and Permitting Committee. I understand that we may be having a joint meeting next week, and I'm sure the councilors will be discussing that towards the end. So we had current conditions. Just a reminder that this is the existing zoning. The dotted outlines were the outlines that we looked at last year. And you can see the upper part of Boston Avenue, the sort of general Tufts area, and the lower part of Boston Avenue. One of the conversations we've been having recently is about where exactly those boundaries should fall. This is using those same boundaries from last year. These are the land uses within each of the areas that we're talking about. And then as we look at the upper hillside area, you can see these green outlines. These are our current outlines of where the zoning changes would be. So again, the dashed outlines were the areas that we discussed last year. The green outlines are where we're starting to fall for this year. Up in the upper corner, you can see the existing zoning. And then these bubbles are, as we start to talk about the zoning, we've got kind of three sub-districts at the moment. We haven't decided on the naming convention yet, so we're talking about lower, medium, and higher. And so we're looking at the higher here, the lower here, and I'm going to show you the medium in a minute. There is a possibility, based on our conversations today, that there could be some medium in the hillside neighborhood area. As we look at Boston Corridor South, so this is south of the proposed institutional area. Again, the green boundary is the current proposed boundary. And these two green boundaries came after our last meeting with all of you. This is what we showed the community at our meeting last week. And then certainly in this area, we're looking at perhaps medium throughout. And as we go into the zoning, we'll talk about what that means. Perhaps there's a lower happening here as well, but we think this area is, that medium is reasonably consistent with what already exists. So as I mentioned, we've got this low, which is the transition to the neighborhoods along Boston Avenue. Higher is this area of hillside, Boston Hillside, that's nearer to the river. And medium is the South Boston Avenue area. There's some differentiation of uses. So when we think of low, we are thinking of all three of these are mixed use areas. I think that's important to make clear. But the low has more of the lower density residential. Whereas once you move into medium, that lower density residential drops out and the higher density starts to come in. And then obviously the higher is very similar to the medium in terms of the uses that are allowed for residential. A couple of things to note in addition that the current proposal is dormitory fraternity or sorority house would not be allowed along these districts, but that co-housing would be and that townhouses and row houses, those attached one-unit dwellings. Row houses would be allowed in low, townhouses would be allowed in low and medium. In terms of office and commercial, the idea would bank and other financial institutions would be going through the Community Development Board along with two of our three sort of medical definitions here. One of the things that we did want to make sure is that because we're looking to have Boston Avenue be a very walkable district, that drive-throughs would not be allowed in low and medium, and they would be allowed in higher with youth standards. So one of the outstanding things that we need to develop with you is those youth standards. And the same thing for motor vehicle light service station, no in the low, and then allow it in the medium and the higher, but with youth standards. Talked about industrial and making sure, again, this is an area that is near a university, so making sure that research and testing laboratories and life science facilities are allowed in the medium and the higher. Talking about maybe some definition, printing and publishing, which is in industrial for historical reasons kind of throughout the Commonwealth. but might be something that, again, we want closer to a university, and the noxious use that printing once was is much less so these days, so it makes sense to allow it in the medium and higher. And then looking at some of the accessory uses and allowing them at the appropriate places. Some of these, like the keynote, were changes in the Medford Square. as well. So in our purpose, the original purpose from the draft that we gave you last time was really focused on the more general purposes of the other corridors. We have now narrowed the purpose specifically to be Boston Avenue Neighborhood Corridor District. So making sure that we're talking about the relationship to and from Tufts University along Boston Avenue. making sure again that these are mixed uses and we've got a variety of jobs, housing, options for living within walking distance and also walking distance to the T and then development standards coming in. Now in addition to the uses there are differentiations based on the dimensional standards primarily the height. We have currently set the base height as three stories for all of these because we think for the medium and the higher that there's more of an opportunity to capture some of the incentive zoning in this area. so that the low would go up to no more than four stories, the medium would go up to seven stories, and the higher would go up to eight stories, but that is in exchange for the public benefits that we've talked about throughout this. I think one of our questions for you all during this will be, is the incentive structure appropriate for Boston Avenue? We took the incentive structure that we developed for Bedford Square and brought it forward, but that may not be fully appropriate, so we wanna hear your thoughts on that. Lot areas, frontages, facade buildouts, all of these are going to look familiar to you in terms of the lots and the setbacks. Again, having that zero front lot line, but being able to set it back for a plaza. Building coverage, we, again, if we wanted to think about the incentive for building coverage change, we could maybe drop that, but this is a fairly urban, it's a corridor, right? It's a fairly urbanized area. And then looking again at the green score or the pervious surfaces and open space landscape, those numbers will again look very similar to Medford Square. We actually raised the minimum green score a little bit for this area because it's not quite as urbanized as Medford Square, but that can be for a discussion. So the dimensional standards, again, not far off from what we've been talking about already, the height transition to the adjacent residential districts, we keep the same. Setbacks for infill lots, allowing for multi-building lots. There are a few deeper lots in this area. However, by district, we think the sidewalk width would vary. I believe we heard from Director Hunt today that some of the sidewalks are 6 to 8 feet, so maybe the 12 foot is appropriate in the areas with the higher buildings, but maybe it's a lower width for some of the other areas. Do we need step backs? And that may vary for the medium and the higher rather than for the lower. and thinking about which streets we want the ground floor active frontage on. We've made some recommendations in the text. No change to the allowable waivers for heights, step backs, or setbacks. And obviously there are a few historic buildings in this area, so we've left the historic building language that we developed for Medford Square. There aren't quite as many. We did a quick check on MACRS. Obviously left the historic conversion as well for the same reason in the use standards. However, we will be adding new use standards for the drive-throughs and the light service stations, as I mentioned earlier. A couple of things for conversation. We have no current proposed changes to the development standards. We think as much as possible those ought to be consistent throughout the city. But we might want to talk about the incentives as I mentioned. And we may want to think more specifically about the parking reductions that we put in for Medford Square given that this is near Green Line stops. rather than solely reliant on bus transit. So that's something I think that's open for discussion. I'm going to take you briefly through Tufts University and then we can return to the draft language for Boston Avenue. But I wanted to show you some of the slides that we showed the public last week. So this is just orienting people to where the Medford-Somerville line is along the Tufts campus. This is the existing uses, so I think as we have talked about before, apartment two and the general residential is what Tufts is currently zoned as. This was the ownership maps between Medford and the Somerville side. The Somerville side is the lighter color. And then Tufts, the educational versus Walnut Hill, which is not the same as Tufts University but a common entity. This makes a difference when we're talking about the use the properties are put to and the ownership. One would be subject to the Dover Amendment and one would not. And then one of the things that we talked about at the meeting last week was this idea that there may be different areas of Tufts that have different purposes or different relationships to the non-institutional uses. And we should be thinking about the characteristics of those areas. And that comes into a couple of things. One thing that was discussed last week is the idea that Tufts would make an annual progress update to the community development board of those things that are expected to come in front of the CD board or building permits within the next year and some wish list projects that might come forward. And then for the actual zoning, thinking about what happens in the central campus, because this is a campus rather than a corridor or a neighborhood, what the rules should be for the campus portions that are facing Boston Avenue, those that face the residential neighborhoods, those that are within the residential neighborhoods, and that gets back to that zone map I was showing. And then how do we think about zoning for a campus in terms of things like parking, heights, setbacks and either the development standards or the green score, especially as we're not talking about multiple lots here. We're talking about essentially a single lot and the relationships of the buildings within those lots. So that's where we got to last week. I'm going to stop here to see if there's any initial questions, and then if you want to, I can run through the text of the zoning itself and call out the specific comments that I had for discussion either today or at a later meeting.
[Matt Leming]: Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chair Leming. Could we come back to the Tufts after we talk about Boston? Great. Thank you.
[Matt Leming]: Okay, so at this time, does anybody have, do any of my colleagues have any questions? Okay. Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: I have a bunch, but it sounded like you maybe wanted to go through the zoning text a little more.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, I just want to give a chance to see if anybody had any high-level questions, like obvious things. But if nobody does, then we could just go through it page by page.
[Zac Bears]: I think for me, I don't know that we need to go through page by page necessarily. If your presentation had the general questions, maybe it's better to go through that. And then if there's things in the page by page that you want to bring up, that might be quicker. Okay.
[Emily Innes]: Understandable. There's quite a few pages. I would say that one thing Director Hunt asked me to make clear is that light service stations refers to gas stations. That's what your zoning calls it. So those are ones where you're not doing major repairs. It's just maybe minor repair, maybe stickers and gas for the cars rather than something a repair shop would come under a different classification, your zoning. So just to clarify that. So let me then jump back to the presentation and I'm going to go through the, well, first of all, were there any questions on the uses that I laid out? And I can go back and reshow those slides a little bit more slowly so we can talk through them. And then I think the dimensional standards I'd like to pay some attention to and also making sure that we've got the sub areas in the right places is another key and then finally we can talk about some of the development standards if that makes sense.
[Matt Leming]: No, I did have a list of questions about the presentation but I'd also be fine with just continuing and just kind of if you have more to present we could just keep going and then... Okay.
[SPEAKER_10]: Excuse me. It's really hard to hear you over the air. So both of you, it was really hard to hear you over the air.
[Zac Bears]: Hard to hear me? Okay. Okay. I guess we can turn off the air.
[SPEAKER_10]: Or you can speak up. Need to learn to... I'm not sure we heard what you just said.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah. I just basically just said to continue the presentation. Didn't seem like anybody had too many questions, so we could go through it.
[Emily Innes]: All right, then I'm going to jump back to the, so actually let me jump back to, I want to take this a little bit out of order. This is the purpose. So if you're looking at your document, it's going to be, let me just give you the page number. I'm making everybody dizzy because I'm sharing my screen. Apologies for that. So it's going to be on page 16 if you want to look at that and then I'll have it up for people to view online as well. I guess we want to make sure that the purpose is what you would like the purpose to be.
[Matt Leming]: Sorry. Can you make a request again? President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks. I don't have any questions on the purpose.
[Emily Innes]: Fair enough. Then I'm going to go back to the uses having established the purpose. So I think the key thing that we want to understand is do the use differentiations among the three different districts make sense? Are you and we can sort of take it a little bit more slowly than that general overview. As I said before, in general, the low subdistrict will have more of the lower scale residential uses. So none of these allow single family as a right, because this is a mixed use district, but this would allow the row house, which is the attached one unit dwellings, the duplex, the three unit, the four to six units. and then the over six, but these are limited by size. And then when you get to the medium, those one, two, and threes drop down, and it's just the multiplex and the multiple dwelling, and then the same thing for the higher. No dormitory, fraternity, or sorority house here, co-housing, and then townhouses for the low and medium. So if there's any questions or do we need to tweak that a little bit?
[Zac Bears]: I do have questions on the uses. I don't love the naming convention.
[Emily Innes]: No, we wanted to talk to you about that as well. So the, and I'm glad you brought that up. The original, you know, we had all the mixed districts had MX dash and a number. So I think these were originally like MX1A, 2A and 2B. But then there was starting to get that confused. So originally the idea was that you would have just three mixed use districts and they'd be spread throughout the town. Then we started tweaking and tailoring them by district. And then, of course, people were very confused when we got to Medford Square because I think they were starting to get tweaked and tailored a little bit too much. So we changed it to the MS123. So B, A, N, C, D, 1, 2, 3 started to get to be a little bit of a mouthful. And we thought for this discussion it would, at least this initial discussion, it would be nice to give people a sense of the relative development scales. But I agree in the final zoning they shouldn't be called low, medium, higher. So I guess the question back to you is do you want to go back to or do you want to be like a BA123, so Boston Avenue 123, if that would make more sense. So it does have a little bit of implications for how you take your phase three forward, but it's nothing that couldn't be corrected at a later date if for now you just wanted to call it BA123, for example.
[Matt Leming]: I like VA 1, 2, 3 better personally. I'm kind of going back between these slides showing which is higher, lower, and medium.
[Zac Bears]: We can't hear you, Matt.
[Matt Leming]: Sorry. I ran very hard over the weekend, so very cold, dry air. My lungs are a little bit sore, so you'll have to forgive me. My predecessor as chair of the planning and permitting committee also was sometimes very quiet. It's just a position that lends itself to very quiet voices. But no, I was just saying, even kind of going between the slides here, I'm getting a little bit confused between lower, medium, and higher, so I think BA 1, 2, and 3 going from north to south would be the least confusing way to phrase it. With regards to the medium district which going by this map I believe that it overlaps the if you could. Yeah, I wish that this was paired with, like, the map, like, showing where, like, the... Yeah, let me jump to that, sorry, so you can see it. Yeah, I kind of, on my own computer here, I sort of have the, I kind of have, like, the medium and lower, yeah, now I don't see the use table, so... But what was, so... There's some discussion about putting the church within the medium district. So I'm curious if how the use table sort of interacts with that property and any potential future plans with it. Or just sort of what I'm kind of wondering with all of these is like the logic of all of those uses given where we think some of those properties are going.
[Emily Innes]: That's a very good question. I think on the medium, so I've got the map up here now, and just for people looking at home, here's where the church area is. This area here is primarily zoned industrial. You can see the gray over here. The colors on the map, just so you know, show that these are non-conforming uses. We just thought that would actually be a very useful one to have up here during today's discussion. And so I think our thought on the medium was zoning this such that the new residential uses would be conforming, or as conforming as possible. The church may actually, did you by any chance look up the macros on the church, or were you focused on the original border? Because the church might come under historic conversion as well. We'd have to double check whether or not that's true. But certainly for the rest of it, those higher level residential uses would apply. So the multiplex or the multi-unit dwellings would apply here. in addition to the commercial, the life sciences, the research and development. And I just called out those areas where there was a differentiation between uses and where it might be different from Medford Square. Obviously the full use table is in the draft zoning as well, so all of the uses that we didn't change would still be allowed there, primarily the commercial and industrial uses.
[Matt Leming]: On the point that you just brought up about the church potentially falling under historic conversion, what other properties between the three sub-districts can sort of stand out that would potentially fall under that? Because I don't think there would be as many as Medford Square, but what are we looking at?
[Emily Innes]: We are looking at the, within our border, the church itself, but it's only inventoried. So, okay, so it's not showing that it, it has been inventoried as part of a historic review. It's not showing that it is been consider it the time to have historic value. However, the way we've set up the process for the historic conversion, the Medford Historical Commission would have, would re-look at that at the time an application was made.
[Matt Leming]: Okay. And I don't think, risk saying this because I could be missing something obvious but with the other sub districts there's no like other obvious properties that we may be looking at that could be of historic interest. I don't think there'd be anything in those areas that it falls under.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah we're looking that it's all been inventoried but I'm not necessarily determined to be historically significant.
[Emily Innes]: For those wondering what we're looking at, Pella has the MACRIS map, so this is publicly available on the web. Anybody can look up the information. So MACRIS is M-A-C-R-I-S. All right.
[Matt Leming]: I'm seeing that Councilor Malayne has her hand up, so please, Councilor Malayne. What? Oh. Yeah.
[Liz Mullane]: Just touched it. Well, first I wanted to say that I also agree. I like the idea of the BA 1, 2, and 3. I think that really does help kind of identify not only the difference between the different areas, but specifically around Boston Ave. I just had a question going back to the slide that had the different definitions for the different types of housing. I know you've, yeah, thank you. And my apologies if I've missed this earlier, but can you explain to me the co-housing and how that differentiates itself from the dormitory, frat, or sorority?
[Alicia Hunt]: So the idea of, first of all, I'm just going to put it out there. I think you could allow sorority and fraternity houses. Sorority houses are technically dry. But that aside, co-housing is an adult thing. It's where families or people choose to live together in community. And often they'll have individual apartments or houses, and then some central space, central kitchens, central living areas, central sharing of community stuff. It can be done in an apartment building style, where you have apartments, but then people actively use the kitchens. And the big difference between an apartment building and a cohousing is that if a group decides to intentionally develop a building together to live there in community, and they actually say, you have to be approved, you have to choose to join us as part of a community living, as opposed to just Renting an apartment, you're not just renting a room here. And it was something that the city council asked to insert into the use table last year as a, honestly, it's more as a signal that we welcome, that if somebody, if a group wants to do living in community, it's welcome to come here. Because technically, they could do it as an apartment building.
[Liz Mullane]: Okay. Does someone have to make a determination on that, or? If they wanted to use the use co-housing. Okay. Okay. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Sure. Council President Bears. You go to Councilor Callahan, I'm guessing it's about co-housing. And mine's not.
[Matt Leming]: You were first. You got your hand up first.
[Zac Bears]: I yield the floor to Councilor Callahan.
[Matt Leming]: I understand that we have some co-housing fans on the council.
[Anna Callahan]: Yes we do. So just a little bit of history about that co-housing request. Probably my very first sort of requested listening session where residents came to me and said we want you to conduct a listening session was about co-housing. So there is a lot of residents here especially older residents who have a real direct desire. They wish the co-housing existed right now. They wish it were built in a year. The soonest it can be built, the better. We do have a number of residents here, a group of folks who really want this to happen. So having it in the zoning is like a first initial signal that we are open to that and that we do have people who live here who want that. So there are other avenues that we are using as well to try and make it happen but at least having it in the zoning as something that is a possibility is kind of a first step. Thanks.
[Matt Leming]: Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. One just high level note. Some places the words neighborhood and corridor flipped around in the and I think neighborhood corridor sounds better than corridor neighborhood.
[Danielle Evans]: Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Just a note. On the residential, I have some residential and then I have some, at least one on the commercial industrial uses. I know I've been talking about it. I really think we should take a look again at the dormitory fraternity sorority house definition. I think we should be looking at updating that to reflect some more contemporary practices on it. And in general, I'm hoping for the joint hearing, you know, we have received from Tufts a bunch of their comments. The property owner at 222-240 Boston Ave also sent in additional comments about student housing. And I think we should include those in the record. And I really think we should look at that definition and at least consider the option of allowing it in some form in the BA3 district. something updated there given that we're talking about the Tufts neighborhood given that we're talking about a significant property and are expressing specific interest in that specific use. I think we should take a deeper dive versus just off the top saying we have this definition that I don't think we even updated it in the 2022 recodification so I'm guessing it's a pretty old definition. I think we should take a look at it.
[Matt Leming]: Sorry just to just to paraphrase so I understand what you just were you're requesting and the he said in the BA one which is the area near the Whole Foods.
[Zac Bears]: I think that would end up being BA three and given the okay I think I think the higher the higher one okay and and I and I have some dimensional stuff around both of those things as well. So so their quest is to go to that and allow dormitories and be a three and not not necessarily just take the existing definition and allow it by right. But I think we should look at the definition look if there's an updated definition that could better fit potential purposes and public purposes and then consider allowing it by right or potentially special permit and be a three slash higher intensity. OK. Subdistrict OK.
[Emily Innes]: All right, I'm going to move on then to office commercial. So this, I think the big differences here are what is allowed by right, not allowed or allowed with community development board, special permit, and then this idea of use standards for drive-thrus and for gas stations.
[Zac Bears]: I do have a comment on this one. Council President Bears I think we should just not allow drive through our gas stations. I think that's just a simpler answer here should not.
[Matt Leming]: Director Hunt.
[Alicia Hunt]: So the reason that we're recommending the allowing of gas stations under special permit in part of it is because that it becomes problematic when there's like a gas station desert and it's really hard to find a gas station in your area. And we have heard anecdotally from people who live in that area and have recently lived in that area that it is actually quite hard to find a gas station in that area. And the one that I'm aware of on the corner of Boston and Winthrop They're a gas station, right?
[Zac Bears]: Boston and Harvard.
[Alicia Hunt]: With the wash. I was thinking the one with the car wash that they actually have filed to become a, they have the permits to become housing. So like the one that we know of in that area is planning to close. So that's kind of where we thought that it becomes problematic for the neighborhood when you live very far from any gas stations, so. The other thing that we were thinking with the queuing, with the special, with the standards, was that in the areas with the larger lots, we could put in standards that would require that you must have a sufficient queuing on your property for whatever your use is, right? So if you picture, or you're within a larger parking lot, and so we actually used raising canes as an example. that raising canes the way they are set up, I think everybody knows where they are, if their line gets too long, it snakes into another parking lot. Like it doesn't ever, like it would never actually go out on a road. And so we were thinking about in the larger parcels down by Mystic Valley Parkway, you could arrange your stuff so that you could have something where you're queuing was on your parcel. And under those conditions, it would be something that would be reasonable. But you wouldn't want a lot of, you wouldn't want it in the low area very close to the dorm where you'd have a lot of pedestrian traffic close to the dorm. But close to Tufts campus where you'd have a lot of residents walking around. That's what we were thinking.
[Zac Bears]: Sorry, if you want to go ahead, Emily.
[Alicia Hunt]: And the other drive-through was the drive-through pharmacy. Sorry, I was hearing that from both sides. The drive-through pharmacies are particularly useful when you have sick children or sick adults and you don't actually, you are the sick person and the rest of us don't actually want you in the building with us because you are actively contagious, but you must go to the pharmacy to get your medicine. and drive-thru pharmacies allow for that. So we have had, we have one in Medford in Wellington's circle, the CVS. We have another one designed in the station landing that closed and it does not look like it was Walgreens and it does not look like something like that is going in there. So that's where we were thinking if you had the space to have some queuing on your property, that a drive-thru pharmacy has a public good for the rest of us. That's where we were thinking with that.
[Zac Bears]: Did you have, I mean, I have a response but. Yeah. You look like you wanted to.
[Emily Innes]: That's exactly what I wanted to say.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. Yeah, I think that those are practical reasons. I just don't think that they apply here in these districts. I just don't, I don't think we want to be, I don't even think we want to be signaling the possibility of additional car-oriented use in these districts given their existing condition and like the goals that we have for the districts. And I mean, if we needed to keep, the gas station CDB in the area where Titan Gas is just because maybe they want to stay a gas station. I just don't, I mean that's maybe there's an argument for that but I just don't really see, I don't see parcels where it makes a ton of practical sense and we're going to get proposals in that direction and I think given the purpose of the district, I would have a hard time saying that I want a drive through anything in the district. I think there are other parts of the city that are more car oriented that are less likely to in the future shift away from car oriented use where those arguments are more applicable.
[Emily Innes]: So I'm usually not the person to argue against the walkable district, but I do want to call out that you have a large population of students here. And so some of them are going to be car based. And I wonder, and it's something that we can look at further as I get the death glare for arguing. I'm kidding. I wasn't really. But we'll look at it further. But I do think that that particular population we may want to consider amenities that might not be on other corridors in this area. So we can also have a look and see what is within an easy walking distance or drive from the campus on the Somerville side as well to see how much of a desert this is in the area. But just thinking that you've got a different possibly more mobile population in terms of somebody going to school and maybe driving to work after school as well. So that's kind of where we were thinking that this might make sense.
[Zac Bears]: I hear you. I think that they are more likely to be accessing those services on Mystic Ave or in Wellington Circle. I don't think we need to be building new new drivers. I think it's generally my position like and I don't think we want You know, basically what we're talking about here given the explanation is the youth standards would be so onerous as to largely make these impractical anyway. I don't see the reason for you guys to go through the work of writing the youth standards and I don't see, I just don't see it as aligning. So I would move that we just mark those as not allowed in all three sub-districts.
[Matt Leming]: I'm going to go to Council Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. I didn't go to Tufts but I went to Boston University and I think this district of Medford is the closest thing to. Alston that we have, which is where I lived when I went to BU. And I didn't have a car. Nobody knew how to car. I didn't have a car when I went to grad school because the T was there, and this area is close to the T, and it has buses. And I also couldn't afford a car. So I think that in the Boston area, the benefit of going to college in or outside Boston is that most people don't have cars and you don't need one. And you live in close proximity to all of your friends and the facilities that you need to access. And any job that you will have will be T-accessible. And that's why it's more expensive to rent something that's closer to Tufts or the train station And this is true in Boston and Alston and everything too. If it was the farther out you would get into like Brookline or, not Brookline, that doesn't count, Brighton or anywhere like that, that would be, even Newton, if it was like a rental, it was cheaper if it was farther away from the train. So these were the conditions I remember and I'm just thinking about this with Tufts. I think this is still true. I wish Kit was still here because she went to Tufts. I think in other more suburban university environments it's different. But I think that there's a reason why I can always get a parking spot right next to Tamper. I think that President Bears has the idea correct that Catering to a small percentage of students that may have a car, that's the exception, not the rule, I think. And that the appeal of that neighborhood is the accessibility to transit, and we should allow that to be what it is. And I think that the other things that you mentioned about the pharmacies and stuff are still true for the community at large. But not necessarily something this neighborhood is clamoring for. And the other thing about Medford is that everything is already fairly close to each other. So there is a gas station on Winthrop that's up a few more blocks north that I used to go to a lot. The owner has birds. And there's another one on Main Street, maybe, close to the police station, fire station over there. And these are all sort of close to where... And Mystic Ave is not... Everything in Medford is sort of close to each other, and once you're in a car, it's all kind of there. I have an electric car now. I wish there were more charging stations. But everything is different as we're progressing through time and our experiences are changing. So just for whatever it's worth, I mean, I'm just saying that I agree with President Perez at the end.
[Emily Innes]: That is why we bring these issues up, so we can have the conversation.
[Matt Leming]: Council Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. The original reason I pushed the button is I believe that Chair Leming went to a listening session about this or a community feedback session about this. Was it about this district? Did they give you any feedback about car stuff? I'm curious to hear.
[Matt Leming]: My microphone's not even on, so I'll repeat that. There were mixed points of view at the session. There were, so which often happens when you go to these things, but we did hear complaints about the traffic along Boston Avenue quite a bit. Emily, Paola, and Alicia were also present at the listening session. So maybe they'll be able to summarize some of the views just as well. Some of the other viewpoints that we heard were just the want for more greenery along within the area, which I think was accommodated by raising the green score requirements within this draft zoning. One of my personal asks, which I did want to get to, was to find a way to reduce the parking minimums as reasonably as possible, given that this is a student area near the green line. So I think the direction we're going in is that we want this place to be as unreliant on cars as possible. I don't know if that answers the question. Have any of y'all had a different impression or anything to add to that? Okay. It was also an interesting session because we didn't really have the draft zoning at the time. All we really discussed was borders, so it was very much like a free for all, like kind of, you know, let us know what you want to see in this area generally. Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Just, that was, I did make a motion. Oh, sorry.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah. The motion, okay, so, sorry. The motion, the motion was to change the, well.
[Zac Bears]: Change those three uses to not allowed in all districts, amend the proposal.
[Matt Leming]: I will say that usually when discussing these things, we've kind of avoided having specific motions here and it's just kind of been like whatever the consensus of the council has been, that helps to avoid. But if you do want to make that into a motion, then the motion was to change the three, was to change the drive-thru with retail sailors and drive-thru eating places in the higher district from CDB with youth standards to no.
[Zac Bears]: and the motor vehicle light service station, yeah, not allowed in all three districts.
[Matt Leming]: Okay. Do we have a second on that motion? Second. Okay. Great. Is there any further discussion? We'll take all motions at the end if that's fine. Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: Yeah, I appreciated the information from this side, from Director Hunt and his backup, but I didn't hear really any sort of reply to the question that that's a good question. But not for this particular area. And I was just curious if you think that any of these would be specifically helpful in this area. It sounded like you were maybe saying the gas station one. This area was, in fact, a place where that would be helpful. And I just want to see if I don't want to guess. I'd rather know what your opinion is.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I'll just say that I was searching for gas stations in this area and it's really far to the next ones from my opinion and I just know my so I own an electric car and I have a gas car and sometimes you just say oh my God we're going to need gas tomorrow somebody has to go get gas tonight. So we have it when we leave tomorrow and when you have to drive 15 minutes in one direction It's it's annoying right? It is the one and only time I use the one that's four blocks from my house But that's sort of what we've heard from people is that there isn't and when I google search there isn't So that's sort of where we stood on this one but you know And that's why so I'll say why would say it was with special permit and new standards so it wouldn't just go in by default it wouldn't just go in anywhere it had to have permission to do it so. That's kind of our position on it. Can I clarify on the clarification?
[Anna Callahan]: Yep. This is the one that's at Winthrop, not the one that's further south. Is that right?
[Alicia Hunt]: So medium would be south of Tufts, and high would be up close to the river. So that one down there south that's kind of closer to Broadway, I will say right now that medium section does have a gas station in it, but it is likely that that gas station is going to close in the next few years because they literally have building permits to put a different building there. And that's sort of what we were looking at. The upper one does not have a gas station.
[Anna Callahan]: The upper one, I go to the gas station all the time.
[Alicia Hunt]: But I think there is actually one in Somerville. Yeah, Boston. Right. Is that Somerville? So Somerville, that is literally in Somerville.
[Anna Callahan]: Does that matter for people who are just looking for a gas station?
[Alicia Hunt]: No. So that is where there is one right now, as long as that one stays there.
[Matt Leming]: Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I just, I live in this neighborhood and I buy gas for my car. And there's Titan Gas right now, maybe it goes away. You have Sam's at Boston and Route 16. There's a gulf station one block section up on Route 16 in Somerville. There's two gas stations on Mystic Ave. There's two gas stations on Broadway in Somerville. Like, I think they are welcome too. to hold the burden of gas. It's a five-minute drive to three or four gas stations on a bad day. It's a 12-minute drive to three or four gas stations on a really bad day. Yeah, that's just my rationale here. And I, to be honest, I don't buy, sometimes I go to Sam's, but I often am on Mystic Ave, and that's where I get gas. So I think And I think quite frankly that like mystic have isn't much for now and hopefully it changes considering the zoning that we passed. But that's a 25 year project. It's just a much more reasonable place for people to be going to get gas than like building a new gas station somewhere on Boston.
[Anna Callahan]: And if I may finish my thought. Yep. Thank you. I did used to live in that southern part and I now live three blocks north of the northern part. And so I know all that really well. And there are like on Broadway there's like two gas stations in a row. There's another one just up the street from there like Broadway is not far away. I know there's Somerville technically but like it's a person buying gas. I didn't even know the one at Boston and Route 16 was in Somerville. It sure seemed like it was in Bedford to me. I don't think that there is a dearth of gas. Personally, having done a lot of my gas purchasing in that area, I think there's plenty.
[Liz Mullane]: Is there a way to be able to split this motion? Because while I agree with you about the gas station, I was kind of, I do kind of agree about having the drive-through for people who need to go to CVS or Walgreens to be able to get through and not have to get out of the car, be able to use that. Is there a way to separate that out to at least leave that in the higher area for the CDB board to make a determination on?
[Matt Leming]: Council President Bears would you be amenable to the request to split the motion into into two different motions.
[Zac Bears]: I'll just do it just for the eating drive through and the gas stations. Yeah, I'm saying, yeah, if we want to leave the CDB with you standards for the higher slash BA3, I could see if that were ever to be redeveloped, which would also need us to have basically a line zoning with Somerville because that parcel, in addition to Sam's Gas being in Somerville, Whole Foods is in Somerville and Medford at the same time. The building is split in half by the city line and the path, the horrible path on the, on the riverside of Auburn Street also is DCR-owned, partially meant for partially in some rule, it's a jurisdictional nightmare. So I could see maybe a drive-through CDB. That's like the only site I could really see maybe something like the Walgreens at Station Landing having something like that, but also it's a smaller footprint. I don't know. But yeah, if we want to leave that as CDB with these standards, that's fine. So I'm happy to just have it be that we change the eating place with drive-through and the gas stations to not allowed.
[Matt Leming]: Okay, so the motion now amended by Council President Bears, seconded by Vice President Lazzaro is just to change the CWU standards in the higher area just for eating places and motor vehicle light service station gas stations.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, just not allowed in all three sub-districts for eating places and gas stations.
[Matt Leming]: Okay. All right, well, we'll take all motions at the end after we've had a period of public comment on this. But do we have any further comments, queries, questions on this particular slide before we go on to the next one?
[Zac Bears]: I think just one more, if I may.
[Matt Leming]: Yep.
[Zac Bears]: Mixed use is all allowed, all three, all. Yeah, great. Okay.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, they are mixed, all three are mixed use districts. Right, so if there's no others on office commercial, industrial, printing and publishing, research and testing laboratory, and life science facility. Any changes there? Accessory dwelling units obviously allowed in the low but not in the medium and higher because they don't have the right buildings. Family daycare home large allowed in all three. Noncommercial, greenhouse, tool shed or similar. Accessory structure in the low and the medium because they have the housing types that would allow that. Higher does not. And then the Keno City Council as is consistent with Medford Square and previous practice. All right. In that case, we get to move on to dimensional standards. So we'll start with the height, just because I had to break up the table somehow, so it wasn't going to be tiny on the page. So it made sense to start with height first, and then we can move into the others.
[Matt Leming]: Just for, so everything gets three stories by right, but the higher can get up to five stories with incentives.
[Emily Innes]: The higher can get up to eight stories with incentives.
[Matt Leming]: Okay, yeah, sorry, sorry. So that's plus five, yeah. Five additional stories.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, exactly.
[Matt Leming]: Okay, that's, could you kind of delve into the decision making behind that, because that's, I mean, normally what we've been seeing is like, in Medford Square especially was like, 7 plus 2, but this is like, that's more incentive stores than there are.
[Emily Innes]: Yes. So this came out of the conversation. So after the public listening session on Thursday night, Paula and I met with Director Hunt and all of her staff members, Danielle and Christian, to talk this through. And one of the questions that came up is given The particular characteristics of this area and the incentives that would likely be desired, would you need kind of an extra incentive to get the developers to they would want to move higher and maybe we would get additional community benefits if there was a greater differential. I think in Medford Square there were already a number of buildings that were higher than the base height of 3 so it didn't make sense to make those nonconforming by having a base height that was lower than the existing. I'm thinking of some of the historical buildings that were already at 3 or 4 in addition to some of the newer construction. Some of the residential that were already higher depending on the topography. So that is where the discussion happened on Friday. So this is our proposal to you. We had originally I think looked at maybe three stories to the low at a base of four for medium or higher. So three stories for I'm not going to go into the nomenclature. We'll get completely confused. We'll stay with what's on the page. So then you would go from 3 to 4 in the low, and you would go from 4 with an additional 3 in the medium, and 4 in the higher to an additional 4 to get up to 8. Does the difference of a story make that much? So we've decided for purposes of discussion, let's go with 3 across the board, and then we can talk about what makes sense with all of you in terms of how much do you want to create an incentive for that higher height versus allowing the three as of right.
[Matt Leming]: Okay. Could you illustrate sort of an example of what are the incentives written in? What would a developer have to do to build an eight-story property in the higher district? Is it affordable housing? Does it go into the green score? Just talk a little bit about that.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, I'm gonna go switch over. Let's see if it switches for you. Yes, it does. So what we did was for purposes of discussion tonight is go ahead and take the incentive table from Medford Square. So we had the incentives for affordability, either a deeper affordability or more affordable units. And you can see sort of on screen, it's probably a little easier for the people on Zoom. that we had a certain amount of incentives required for one additional floor or for two additional floors. In addition, we had a second incentive for community amenities, which is something that is provided and then maintained by the developer, and it depends on what it is, but they either get an additional half story or an additional story, so the half story is for Seating, pocket parks, playgrounds. The additional story would be the solar installation that ties into a community solar program or additional parking spaces. Assent of three were community amenities that would be publicly maintained. So the developer would pay for them, but the city would have to maintain them. Those are generally the streetscape improvements above and beyond what they would normally have to do. Incentive four was vibrant neighborhoods and just, again, for people who haven't been part of the process in the past, the names for the incentives come from the goal of the comprehensive plan that they're tied to. So vibrant neighborhoods, concealing parking, providing reduced rents for minimum tenancies for commercial uses on the ground floor. maintaining the rents for existing ground floor tenants, rehabilitating eligible historic buildings, and this gets back to whether or not these incentives are appropriate for this area. And then the final incentive is the environmental resilience, and that is meeting the ideal green score as opposed to the base or certifiable as LEED Platinum or equivalent. So all of these incentives were tied to, as I mentioned before, the comprehensive plan. And then we've done them in groups of additional half stories or full stories. So the idea is that it gives a developer a menu of choices. So that allows them to respond to different market conditions at the time that they are proposing their development.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you. Yep. Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, thanks. I think it makes perfect sense in BA1 lower, right? And that's kind of the model we've been using, Salem, Mystic, Medford Square. I think in the BA3, kind of the inverted low base, more incentive than base, I think it kind of shifts the, and there's a huge difference between someone who's building a three-unit building in that area, or three-story building in that area and an eight-story building in that area. And I think the incentive was designed to say, you're doing some kind of scale. We're trying to signal some kind of scale of project, and we want to say you can go a little bit more than that if you do these things. I think this says, we're signaling a very low-scale project, and if you want to jump through a bunch of hoops, you can do a big project. So I think it's sending a different signal, especially in the BA3. I think it might be a great model when returns are high and interest rates are low. I think it might be a bad model when that market is not in that way, which it isn't right now and doesn't look like it will be for a while. And in general, I think we're already in the O2 certainly and then with the Walkland Court project. Like I think my biggest concerns with this are in the BA3 because I think it's the most developable area and I think we're already signaling something else with construction that's already occurring and with the zoning. I think the O2 is 8 by right. No incentive and that's like we're already saying right now if you want to build a lab you can have eight stories tomorrow. Now if we want to go six plus two which I think is more in line with the incentive structure that we've been using across the city I think that makes sense. But I don't think we want to say we would prefer you to build a three story building here because the adjacent buildings are I think the 200 Boston Ave is six or seven stories. The walk in court towers are going to be six I think. So I think it makes more sense in the BA3 slash higher for us to do a 6 plus 2. The medium in the BA2, I think that's a mixed bag because you have some buildings that are 3 or 4 story. I mean, is that Tufts building 5 at Boston and Harvard?
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: I think that's 4.
[Zac Bears]: That's 4.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: The residential are 5.
[Zac Bears]: And the residential at Sphere are 5. Yeah. So I mean, you know. I think would, huh?
[Alicia Hunt]: Technically, the Cummings building, the 200, so just for clarity, if I'm talking about the one at the Green Line station on Tufts campus, I will refer to it as the Joyce Cummings Center, because people have been confused. The Cummings building is owned by the Cummings Foundation, and it's 200 Boston Ave. Technically, it's only four stories, but its height is like 100 feet or something. It's quite tall. Because it's designed as industrial. So when you look at it, if you were to put a residential building there, it would probably be six stories. From a massing perspective. But it's technically only four.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I think going here, three plus one, five plus two, four plus three, five plus two, six plus two, I think that would be... My personal preference I think it aligns more with the existing incentives and mainly you know if we want to leave the medium where it is because it's just such a weird bag. It is Titan Titans permitted for four or five.
[Alicia Hunt]: Danielle and I think it's for four. We haven't looked at it in a while but I'm pretty sure. So we've heard from developers who would like to do so on this area. They are thinking about eight stories. Nobody's going over eight because then as we've mentioned before you go into the high rise construction rules. Some developers will be happy with five or six. So that's why we didn't actually want to go too high because then they'll take no incentives. The other thing I'll just raise is the topic we've discussed of 40 hours which is where you have your base zoning. And then you give people and if they do 20% affordable housing they can go taller to whatever you've said in your zoning but they have to do more affordable housing and part of why the city would like something like that is because. When they do that, if they use the 40-hour zoning, the city gets incentive payments from the state to offset some of the impacts of the building. And if school-age children move into that building, you can get incentive payments from the state to subsidize the schools for those specific students. If the zoning was eight stories, nobody would ever take any incentives in this area, not in the next several years. Six they might take it to go to to go to eight. I think we've kind of dropped the idea of trying to do 40 hours zoning right now at this time. But we sort of also were thinking about leaving the window open that we could come back and add that as overlays places so we didn't want to give base zoning so high that nobody would ever like why would you bother with it. You certainly wouldn't change your base zoning lower for it.
[Matt Leming]: Would it be reasonable to do something like, I mean, I definitely see where Council President Bears is coming from, but I feel like 6-2 would, I do like a lot of what I'm seeing in the incentive table. The direction I was thinking was do something like 4-4, 5-3, and then potentially reduce the number of incentives. I don't know if anybody will take advantage of the historic conversion incentive in that particular area. And.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. I'll tell you that the Elizabeth Grady building has actually already been through the historic commission in the last few years and they said it's kind of historic but it doesn't need to be saved. Please document it and then you can tear it down. So that does ride with the owner though. So if it was sold somebody else might go through it. I kind of think that six. Plus 2 or 5 plus 3 would be fine. A little bit of me thinks that 6 plus 3 would be fine. I don't think anybody would use it but I also think that we heard pretty loudly from some of the neighbors that they were very concerned about the heights. So one of the things that we have been talking about is whether we can. Do some massing studies that sort of show basically some shadow studies that show if you did the tallest building where would the shadows be when and for how long. Because one of the things we did hear from the public meeting the other night was people who live nearby who are concerned that any tall buildings there would shadow their their homes. And we did some quick back of the envelope like eyeballing it and. Some of the homes would get shaded at night and in the morning. Oh Danielle is running a program for me right now. Where are we. What part of the city is this.
[Danielle Evans]: So these are in Boston and I just own that for the low four stories.
[Alicia Hunt]: So she actually has this software, Arc Urban, that we have just been learning how to use in the past few weeks.
[Matt Leming]: Is it possible to share your screen? Do you have any cool visuals for us?
[Alicia Hunt]: Give Danielle a minute to log into the zoning or Zoom.
[Danielle Evans]: I don't have my mouse, so I can't spin it around.
[Matt Leming]: Do it as well. It just sounds like you're looking at something cool.
[Alicia Hunt]: We are. So what she was able to do was take a parcel, just not worry about setbacks or anything, just say if this was a four story building or six story, then show us where the shadows fall at what time of year and where. The fact that it's that easy to do is kind of cool.
[Danielle Evans]: Sorry.
[Alicia Hunt]: We just bought her the license to be able to do this.
[Matt Leming]: If you're going to have your toys, then please share them with the group.
[Alicia Hunt]: Danielle still has to log into the Zoom, so we might want to discuss something else and come back.
[Zac Bears]: I just want to say, I'm guessing, and I don't have the software, but I'm guessing that at Boston Avenue and North Street, your shadows most of the year are on the train tracks and the Cummings building.
[Alicia Hunt]: And maybe the new senior building.
[Zac Bears]: Maybe there a little bit, yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, because it is higher. So everybody is aware where the new senior building is going is a little lower than the train tracks and is a little bit lower than the land. And then it actually slopes up a full story up to Boston Ave. So you can actually have, and one of the things we had sort of talked to, we've heard from a lot of developers interested in that area. They've just nobody's come to an agreement yet that if they did parking at the lowest level at The Boston Ave, it would be underground, right? So you would walk into a lobby that would be over your parking, but at the back of the building, it would be open to the free air. It would be podium style because the land slopes. So that actually is very interesting to developers because from our perspective as residents, the parking is underground, but from the property owner, it's a lot cheaper to build than if they had to dig it out, the whole thing. So are you in? Yeah.
[Matt Leming]: I'm going to give you this. And you're a co-host. One request we did receive was for cooler visualization software. So it helps people sort of imagine what new zoning looks like. It is important.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I think just in general what Alicia was saying, does make more sense to me, kind of the incentive structure that we were using before. 6 plus 2, 4 plus 3, 3 plus 1. I think that's more in line. If you want to do 5 plus 2 in the medium, I don't have a problem.
[Matt Leming]: That'd be good with 5, 3, personally.
[Zac Bears]: I'd like to. And so that would be 100% lot coverage, huh?
[SPEAKER_10]: So this location is... That's Hillside Hardware.
[Alicia Hunt]: Are you down by the Green Line Station?
[Zac Bears]: No, that's Hillside Hardware across from Danish Pastry House.
[Danielle Evans]: Oh, that's across from Danish... Sorry. Okay. So this was... Was this part of the... This is Hillside Hardware? Yeah, that... What was this proposed for? Three with one?
[Zac Bears]: Three plus one, yeah.
[Danielle Evans]: Yeah, so...
[Alicia Hunt]: So this would be on May 21st. So usually we look at this.
[Danielle Evans]: What are the dates, Paola?
[Matt Leming]: Oh, that's so cool.
[Alicia Hunt]: So she's showing you, if it was May 21st, where the shadows would be.
[Zac Bears]: This is 100% lot coverage, huh? Yeah. Right.
[Danielle Evans]: I have this at 80% lot coverage. Yeah, so this is just 80% lot coverage. The 3 plus 1, 3 over 1, so four story buildings. with no step backs. I think I'd put in a five foot front step back to accommodate the larger sidewalks. But yeah, so this would be in the spring.
[Zac Bears]: That also would assume they'd tear down everything.
[Danielle Evans]: But this is... Yeah.
[SPEAKER_10]: All the trees?
[Zac Bears]: No, all of the buildings.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right, I think the one... How hard is it to flip to go over to the Boston Ave and put an eight story building there?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, like everything in the commercial stretch.
[Alicia Hunt]: It's hard because it's multiple parcels. Or can you select multiple parcels? I have no, I personally have not used this, so. Like can you put.
[Danielle Evans]: I think I'd have to create a new.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah. All right. Well, I thought it was.
[Alicia Hunt]: We can stop sharing for a minute. She can share the shadows on this existing building. So this is the existing building. Can you just make it play?
[Danielle Evans]: I don't know why it's defaulting.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry we were just trying to see if we could see the current shadows because that's one of the things we'll also look at. This is something we'll try and look at before next week.
[Zac Bears]: The Cummings building looks like it's four stories but not really four stories and this looks like it might have been miss modeled.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Elizabeth Grady looks right.
[Alicia Hunt]: But what it is also telling you is where the shadows would fall in the evening. So they will go on some houses in the evening. So right 6 o'clock at night you're hitting their yards.
[Zac Bears]: This is what it is.
[Alicia Hunt]: That's 6 o'clock at night. May 21st.
[Danielle Evans]: This is 5 o'clock. This creeps across.
[SPEAKER_10]: I think this is yet to hit those houses.
[Matt Leming]: All right. Well I'd be that'd be cool to see some of those. some of those during like one of the joint hearings. But yeah, for now, let's move on.
[Zac Bears]: Certainly no copper mill 25 stories in Davis. I know.
[Emily Innes]: So just to clarify if I may, for low we're keeping it at 3 plus 1, for medium we're making it 4 plus 2 or 4 plus 3.
[Zac Bears]: Is it a total of 7 right now?
[Emily Innes]: We had a total of 7, so 4 plus 3?
[Zac Bears]: I'm cool with 5 plus 2 or 4 plus 3.
[Emily Innes]: 5 plus 2, okay. And then the final one is the 5 plus 3. 6 plus 2.
[Zac Bears]: 6 plus 3. Let's do 4 plus 3 on the medium.
[Emily Innes]: 4 plus 3 and 6 plus 2, okay.
[Matt Leming]: Well, the total right now is 8. It was on the high, right?
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, 6 plus 2.
[Matt Leming]: Can we do a 5 plus 3?
[Emily Innes]: So 3 plus 1, 4 plus 3, and 6 plus 2. Yeah. OK. Great. Thank you. All right. Lots and setbacks.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. It seems like there's a disagreement, though.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah. I do like some of the incentives I saw there. So I personally would rather do 5 plus 3. I know that's a bit of a minor one.
[Zac Bears]: But if I could, I just think I have my question is, maybe it's semantic. I think the flip side, like we all love the incentives, and I would love for them to do all the incentives, and I would love for us to be able to say these should all be mandatory standards on the development, but I think we're living in an environment where projects are not being built. We're not seeing a lot of growth. And to be honest, I think the incentive structure should probably be something we look at every two, three, four, five years and adapt to. the market conditions at the time. And that's why I'm saying the six plus two. I would rather have somebody build a six story building than a five story building all else equal. And I think if in three years we're in a different development market then we should look at the incentives and adjust that. That's just kind of where I'm coming from on it. Because I do think that the worst thing we would want to do. I think the 3 plus 5 might encourage someone to just sit on something for five years, which I think is worse than doing something sooner.
[Matt Leming]: Well, 3 plus 5, yeah, I think we're in agreement. I think the 5 plus 3 is just a very minor tweak from what you're suggesting with the 6-2. I think it's a pretty minor one, but when people are building there, one thing we do here quite a bit is we don't want to displace folks in an incentive table that, for instance, would add an additional. half story if you keep rents stable for folks who are currently living there for a redevelopment project. I think things like that are pretty valuable.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I agree that it's largely semantic. And in the BA3, there's no building where that incentive would apply, except Whole Foods, and I don't think we care about Whole Foods if they were renting Maybe the liquor store's in Somerville, so we're good. It's the Whole Foods. It's half of the Whole Foods in the BA3. And I think on the affordable, right, like we want more deeply affordable, but do we get more affordable units if they build six stories at the existing inclusionary or five stories? You know, you get more if it's six versus five at the existing inclusionary. If they choose to, if you make it five plus three and they're like, we're just going to stay at five, you're losing units. So I think we're, you know. I don't think we know what the break-even point is on any of this, but I'm inclined to say right now maybe it should be a little bit higher than it should have been eight years ago and hopefully would be again in four years or five years. That's just where I'm coming from on it.
[Matt Leming]: All right. Well, it's a pretty minor point anyway, so we can just leave it at 6-2. All right. Would you mind sharing your screen?
[Emily Innes]: So the remaining dimensional standards, we've got two slides of those. One is the lot area. I think these had also been based on a combination of the original others corridors and the Medford Square. We can of course take another look at that frontage based on the lot area size, facade build out minimums. active ground floor I think we're probably on an agreement that that would apply to Boston Avenue and then I think there was maybe it's when throw up was in the text as well. It's a quarter so that makes sense. Historical conversion still allowing that although it sounds like it is less important given what we've seen on macros and then the setbacks are consistent with what we talked about in Medford Square. The question is do you want any variation to these based on your knowledge of the area?
[Zac Bears]: What do non-conformities look like with these dimensional requirements?
[Emily Innes]: Unfortunately I didn't bring the, I don't think I've got the, I don't have the maps in this. We can go back and rerun it with these requirements and just see if it makes a difference to the non-conformities. So I think we had done that on one of the previous ones as well. Just how much does it change the existing? Yeah. Yeah, Paolo's pointing out that because of the lower scale housing and parts of the corridor where we saw some significant nonconformities that we might want to do some tweaks there. But we can test it and get back to you for the next meeting. Great. Yep.
[Matt Leming]: Any other questions? Okay.
[Emily Innes]: All right. And then the last one was building coverage. The green scores, again, we ticked it up as Chair Leming pointed out. We heard a lot from people that at the meeting on Thursday that they would like more green in the area. So we ticked the green score up a little bit from what it had been for Bedford Square. It is more consistent, I believe, with both the Salem Street neighborhood corridor and Mystic Avenue corridor. And then the pervious surfaces and open space landscape I think are consistent with both of those, as well as Medford Square. I'd have to just double check on that. We left the ideal score in place, didn't change that.
[Matt Leming]: Only question is, sorry, you said that the screen score minimum was higher than what we saw.
[Emily Innes]: We ticked it back up to 25.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, what, so yeah, if I tell a constituent that we raise the green score minimum by five points or 10 points, then they don't know too much about what that means when they're talking about trees. But so what, could you just try to say like what substantive effect would something like this end up having?
[Emily Innes]: I'm turning that one over to Paula.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yeah, so this is the one we usually have for the corridors, the 25. We lowered in Medford Square because of the building coverage was very high and we had a lot of historic buildings. And so also for that preservation, we lowered and make it more possible. The development, we lowered to 20. But for the rest, it would be the same as the other corridors. What the green score has is a menu of options that they can choose from, being pervious surface, green roof, if you add trees, garden, bioretention, like bioretention.
[Emily Innes]: Bioswales.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Bioswales, I was with the garden. Rain gardens. Rain gardens, that's the word I was looking for. So you have different points and it's depending on how big is your lot. So you will get some points. But it's mainly, we have done some studies with different projects that were happening at the time and it was I'm not going to say super easy, but all of them were very, very close to the 25 points. So it would be maybe to plant a bigger tree than what they had in the project or to do a little bit more of the pervious pavement. But we did look into existing and the 25 was what it meant.
[Matt Leming]: Okay. So if a constituent tells me how does this get more trees on Boston Avenue, I can say, honestly, it incentivizes them to plant bigger trees, and that would be an accurate way of describing some of these zoning changes in comparison to some of the other
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: So at the moment in the current zoning there's nothing for the landscape, for trees or permeable surface, so this will add a lot in the standards. So more green, yes, because we also have some incentive in, so some bonus points. where if you do the greening and the landscape towards the public way, then you get more points, for example. So it will help also for flooding, air quality, soil quality. I mean, these are all environmental standards. So you will get more of that. We also have in the incentive zoning for the greening. So the way that they will see more green in their streets would be thanks to, yes, green score, but also incentives, incentive zoning.
[Matt Leming]: And do you see the green score? I know this is future stuff, but do you see the green score here being consistent with what we would likely have in the Tufts Institutional Zone? Because going by memory, I haven't memorized the memo that Tufts sent, but I do recall that they wanted the green score lowered or waived. My knee-jerk reaction to that is no. But do you think it makes sense to have different requirements for these areas of Boston Avenue versus what we would end up seeing in the Tufts Institutional Zone?
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: So I think that Tufts, Medford Tufts should be taken, it's different because it's a campus. So I don't think my first reaction, and I think I would need to also talk to city staff and to look at it a bit more in depth. But my feeling would be that it's more applied to the area, the green score, than to project by project. So I don't think that might be, that the solution is taken out, but looked at from a campus point of view. It might differ.
[Matt Leming]: All right, thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: If I might. Yep. So one of your questions is like, what would five points be? And so one of the things to know is the way the calculations work, and there's a spreadsheet, is that it does vary by the size of the lot. But I said, what if you took a 10,000 square foot lot, right? So that's kind of a standard size. It's like a double our residential lot. So at 10,000 square foot lot, three medium trees would get you five points. So I see that one of the reasons that Tufts might object to doing this is because the calculations on a campus of that size, asking them to figure out the planted areas with a soil depth of 24 inches or more, and how much, what are the bioretention, the square feet of bioretention areas? How many medium shrubs do they have? How many large shrubs four feet or taller? How many small trees? You can see that all of a sudden on a parcel where you're building a building, that's a really reasonable number and we want people to, we want your landscape architect to tell us how many small shrubs and large shrubs and large trees and small trees. If you start looking at that Tufts campus and you were asked to catalog these things, it would be exhausting. You'd have to pay a lot of money to a consultant to figure it out, which is why we may want to think about it some other way, because we want to hold them to standards. But I also don't think it's rational to ask them to go out and count the number of medium shrubs currently existing on their campus. That just feels like ridiculous. But three medium trees on an average size 10,000 square foot lot is five points.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you. Any other questions about this part?
[Emily Innes]: So the next section to talk about, I think, is the sidewalk width comes as a calculation from us, but just to let you know that the principle still sounds that we want to make sure that there's sufficient depth of sidewalk so that, as with the other ones, the other quarter districts and with Medford Square, that the property owner is making up that width. on their property for new development. Obviously we're not talking about an existing building here. We just want to double check where 12 makes sense and do we think that makes sense throughout or, as we discussed on Friday, are there areas where that doesn't make sense. The step backs, I think that is a function of the width of the street. Once we confirm the districts with you, we will double check and see if we would like to make a recommendation for step backs there. And then the ground floor active frontage, I think we already talked about the fact it's going to be Boston Avenue and I think maybe it was Winthrop Street. I think the things that we do want to talk to you about there is do we have modifications for the incentives? It sounds like perhaps removing the historic conversion incentives from there. And let's talk also about parking reductions. Are there any other changes to the incentives and how do we want to talk about parking in an area that has at either end a green line station? So if you remember from the Medford Square, and again I'm just going to quickly zoom down there for a second, is we had a couple of different things. We had the reductions to the parking space requirements that superseded the shared parking of the city by giving some additional ways of doing that, and that included reducing the residential parking requirement down to 0.8 parking spaces for the shared and then a table for dual mixed use. And then we had the ability to share parking across multiple buildings as well. We also allowed accessory parking facilities within 750 feet for residential and non-residential within 1,000 feet. so you didn't have to park on site. So those were two of the issues. I think the question that we would be happy to explore with you is whether or not that 0.8 should apply differently or if there are other ways that we want to think about parking within a walking radius of the Green Line stations.
[Matt Leming]: Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: On the incentives. I think generally good, is there any, given the way that the incentive is structured for the facades and historic preservation, no one's going to get an incentive for preserving something that's not historic, just, yeah. So, I mean, I don't think there's necessarily a reason to get rid of it if it, maybe it never applies, but maybe it applies once in a blue moon. I don't know that there's other incentives to include. I think we've built that out pretty robustly over the last, like, four or five iterations. On the parking, I'm fine with this being using the same model that we've used. I do think there's a couple of, you know, the BA3, pretty clear you can do a lot there. There's a lot of flexibility in that area. There's the existing underutilized parking structure that could serve as shared parking for something. The BA1 Winthrop in Boston is tougher, but there's a city-owned, I think, parking lot that could be included in something if something were to happen there. There's some slope changes that could be useful. Yeah, I mean, I think anything that you're gonna do there, there's gonna have to be some sort of you park across the street somewhere, I think is gonna be clear. I guess one question I do have, let's say the Hillside Hardware Building is moving to a four-story, something new. You can't park it on site, obviously. Let's say the city was willing to do something. I guess, is there any... We have the distance requirement, like, it can't be too far away. but are we requiring any sort of like accessibility? I think there would be my one question with the hilly nature of and like the small just area, like would they have to improve the intersection to make it accessible? Or I'm just wondering kind of what Not that I'm necessarily against that or for it, but there's obviously a cost implication and there's obviously an access implication. So I'm just wondering if there's anything in the shared parking arrangement that considers maybe some topographical or accessibility differences between an accessory structure that's not on the same lot.
[Emily Innes]: That is a very interesting question of what you're talking about is you've got your use here, your building here, and then within that 750 to 1,000 linear feet, if the access is along, for example, if the only access, because that's offsite, is along, for example, a public sidewalk, does the developer have any sort of requirement to upgrade that? I think that's a question that, yes. I saw you leap forward. Yeah, of course.
[Alicia Hunt]: So to be clear, if the project was under site plan review, we would look at the accessibility along that route, and our director of traffic and transportation would say, we need an improved crosswalk there. And one of the things he tries to look at is the, One is absolutely 100 percent the nexus. Right. Is it relevant. But then to what is the scale. Right. So he's going to ask much more from a 200 unit building than a 20 unit building because of this like proportionally to the project. This. This crosswalk might be no big deal, but to another project it might be really expensive. To be clear, when you do a crosswalk today, you must make the whole thing ADA accessible. So you have to do curb cuts and everything, which makes it way more than just paint on the road. And sometimes you have to change the drainage as well because of that. So some things can get more expensive. So when it's that said, if it's site plan review, we would absolutely look at it. If there's not site plan review, now hold on, is site plan review six units or? I think it's six units. So any project with six or more units has to go through site plan review. So then we would look at those things and that is absolutely would be reasonable. Is this a reasonable walking path to where you're headed and what can you do about it. We run into problems when we're on state roads because we can't require things on state roads. We can suggest there are no state roads here. So that should be because and I think what you're thinking is what I'm really hearing is if the parking for that corner was the garage where you walk straight flat down Boston Ave. That's one thing. If the if the parking is up Winthrop Street. You have to go up practically two flights of, the equivalent of two flights of stairs to get to the parking at the top of that hill. So what's the path of travel there?
[Zac Bears]: I was just wondering, I think given the small footprint of what will, the lower slash BA1, What parking requirements make it so that it's just we have an abandoned hillside hardware for the next 10 years. Right. Like is the end is that is that going to be the determining factor.
[Alicia Hunt]: I honestly I have said to Tufts on several occasions because they are the owners of that property that if they came in with this was a year ago two years ago if they came in with a proposal where it was housing that was by lease occupied only by members of the Tufts community who would have the right to park on campus as part of those leases. I thought that that was likely something that our CD board would give a parking waiver for with a condition that the residents of those units would always have the right to park on the Tufts campus. That if they wanted it to just be pure market rate apartments with no rights to park on campus then I didn't know what would happen with the CD board. So I've been putting that in front of them for a while now. The latest is they want to see what happens with the zoning here.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and that's part of the question, and I mean, I think given, you know, Danielle was just putting it up for the shadows, but I think that whole, again, you have a lot of single story commercial that could, it's mostly utilized in this area, which is good, different from some other parts of the city. It'd be great if someone was kind of pulling some parcels together to do something a little bit more expansive, and then, Maybe also, I think there's a use agreement, or maybe it's just shared ownership between the Tasty Cafe building and the Solari Insurance building and the empty parking lot across the street, right? So if you could really pull together all of that, then you'd be talking about maybe something significant and meaningful, both in terms of housing and improved commercial space. Maybe additional commercial space in some ways, or at least not. You know that parking lots always full it's not sufficient it's old it's poorly designed you know something better on that lot. With housing on top of it would just be a huge improvement. So just wondering. But I think that's hard, right? You're talking about a lot of different interests aligning to accomplish something like that. So my only concern about applying the same stuff that we're doing in Medford Square, and I have concerns about applying it in Medford Square too, to such a small footprint is whether or not it just makes it functionally near impossible to build something. I don't know, I appreciate, I think it's Walnut Hill owns the hillside hardware property, so Tufts is taxable property ownership arm. But that would be, would that fall under the shared parking? Like if Tufts were to say you can use spots in Dowling or you can use spots on campus, that would?
[Alicia Hunt]: Under this current version of the zoning, it would definitely be allowed under the way this is written. The problem with our previous, the currently existing shared parking is just the limitation, how close it has to be. Where I honestly think they could have come in and asked for a waiver on that. for a commercial building with allowed parking at Dowling Garage, I think, would have been. What's missing here is parking for the commercial businesses. Like, where do the employees park? I don't know. Where have they been parking? Maybe they've been living upstairs. I have no idea.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. I mean, the businesses are open.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah. Yeah. And so we have been looking. I think that if you were talking about those other parcels that are not owned by Tufts and parking across the street we would just look at what is the how how hard is it to cross what's going on here. What's what's allowed. I was just looking at who owns what over here. That's not. And whether they're in joint ownership at all. It appears that the parking lot is privately owned and it's not the same person who owns either building on either side of it.
[Zac Bears]: Is it the same as the person who owns the commercial strip next to Hillside hardware.
[Alicia Hunt]: Oh, there's one across the street. So there's one that's by, so the John W. Lee Hay Estate Trust owns the strip of the single story commercial. And the building next to it. And then the parking lot is owned by John W. Lee Hay. Okay, so that sounds. It must be the same. It's the same name, just not under the trust.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, interesting.
[Alicia Hunt]: They're OK. So we believe that the businesses they're currently lease in that parking lot.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: So that their employees have somewhere to park.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. OK. Thank you.
[Matt Leming]: Is there any any further discussion on incentives development standards or parking reduction. All right. Move on to Tufts institutional zoning.
[Emily Innes]: I'm just going to move to the slide here that has just again the things that we have been thinking about. We'd love to hear your input on this idea that we've got a campus but that the campus has different conditions. depending on which areas it's facing. And then also thinking about the types of things that we have to think about when we're talking about a campus. So how do we think about where parking locations and circulation, I put wayfinding in parentheses here because it's not really a zoning thing, but obviously it would have to be in there. But how do you think about parking that serves multiple buildings? How do you think about new buildings that are relying on that? Thinking about heights and transitions within these different blocks of the campus. Thinking about setbacks along the different, you know, public facing areas of the campus. And then as we talked a little bit about earlier, how do we apply development standards including the green score. to a campus environment. And these are things that, you know, we'd love to hear your initial thoughts on. Obviously, we are continuing to explore that, which as soon as we tighten up the Boston Avenue for your next meeting, based on what we've heard tonight, then we'll delve into Tufts and start pulling that together. And I'm just going to go back to the campus so you can kind of see the layout and our initial crack at the different areas that seem to have similar characteristics for the discussion. Oh yeah, of course, sorry. Let me get it so you can see most of it. There you are. And just one other thing is we've got this area that's outlined in pink here. So this is an area where there's some ownership by either Tufts or Walnut Hill. One by Walnut Hill, the rest by Tufts. But there's also private ownership in this area. It's a residential neighborhood. One question might be, is this part of the campus? Should we consider it part of the campus and its own subarea? Or should this be considered part of a residential area? You can see these other neighborhood areas. This is on the Somerville side where it is faded in. You can see that there's other, this is consistent, sorry? Oh, sorry, this is Medford. I thought it was, ah, there you go. Never mind, where my cursor is is Medford. Below here is Somerville. Sorry, I thought because of the fading. But it's just because it wasn't considered part of the campus. So do we consider this residential neighborhoods consistent with this or is this part of the campus because it's also contiguous to these other areas of the campus? We'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
[Matt Leming]: What are the current use? So Tufts owns those houses. Are they like fraternities or like what are they? Yeah the one in the little pink box.
[Alicia Hunt]: So that area that's outlined in pink which by the way at our public meeting some people on zoom referring to it as red. So I just want to make sure that. people understand we mean the same place. A lot of that right now is actually the Tufts area is Tufts Coho. So it's a kind of housing that they have some agreements with the city on where it's undergraduate. It's apartment style. They took the houses they renovated the houses. Each one has a It's not like a graduate tutor or they have some sort of res life, like an RA in each one of them. And there are apartments for the undergraduates as well. And then they maintain like common backyards and stuff for the ones that they own. All the other buildings are residential buildings, and I will disclaimer this, I have been told by Tufts that one is owner-occupied and the rest are all renting to Tufts students. If that is not true, somebody can let me know that, but I've heard that so many times that I believe it. So that's what that neighborhood is. And Tufts has said that if any of those houses come on the market, they're interested in that. One of the topics that kind of came up is, should there be a base zoning such that if one of those private landlords wants, private owners wants to do something, they're all, as far as we're aware, kind of remote absentee landlords. That might not be true. But if one of those landlords wants to rebuild his and do something there. What do we want that to look like? What should that look like? How should he be or she be able to do that? As opposed to if Tufts took control of the entire thing and incorporated that into their campus, how would we feel about that? Like, would that work? And I do think some of them are public ways but then Cape and Street East Packard Avenue North Hill Road are all private ways.
[Matt Leming]: My. Well OK I'll let my. Does anybody do any Councilors have any thoughts. My, personally, my initial thoughts on this is, I mean, I understand that the current use of that, of a lot of those houses, is student housing, of course, because it's near Tufts, it's surrounded by Tufts. My initial reaction is that if Tufts actually did own all of those houses and started to incorporate into the campus, it would make a little bit more sense to reconsider zoning for the area. It's clearly designed as a residential neighborhood as it is. And there's still a good number of houses there that they don't seem to have any ownership over. So my gut reaction is that it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to consider that part of the campus. But I'd be interested to hear what my colleagues say. Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I think I just have more generalized thoughts. I just think this is kind of hard to read and fully understand.
[Alicia Hunt]: If I might make one other point about that corner, it's currently zoned apartment two. So currently, if somebody wanted to amass a couple of those buildings and build a six story building there, they could do that. It does, right, it does have the whole, they'd have to, what is the setbacks? The setbacks would be relative to the current height because that's what's in our current zoning, right? Like height plus length divided by six or whatever. And they'd have to accommodate the current parking requirements. of our current zoning, but it is zoned apartment too. It's not zoned general residential, which most of the surrounding areas is. And I, I think that should be like considered. I know we're not discussing, I don't know, whether, whether we actually kept it not institutional and then made it general residential. But, I don't know, I'm speaking at a turn there. Right. The other idea is to would be to have some other base zoning with Tufts as an overlay. So only if property is owned by Tufts do they use the institutional zoning. And if they are if it's owned by anybody else like should that be the mixed use. Should we make that the mixed use low rise unless it's owned by Tufts in which case they can use the institutional zoning. That would be one way to handle that and just say you know if somebody rebuilt all along Boston Ave we'd rather they put businesses on the ground floor with residents above.
[Zac Bears]: I guess my general question is how do these proposed six sub zones relate to the zoning considerations.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, these were not intended to be six subzones for zoning considerations. It was just to aid the conversation when people were talking about different parts of the campus to say, okay, this has, this subarea seems to have these sorts of characteristics. This subarea seems to have these sorts of characteristics. This is not a proposed district at this stage.
[Zac Bears]: Okay, so these are not like necessarily the six blocks are not necessarily related to the building context of like central campus.
[Emily Innes]: Exactly.
[Zac Bears]: Facing Boston Avenue, facing residential within residential. Okay.
[Emily Innes]: It was just so that we could point to something during the public conversation or indeed this conversation. Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: And I guess like in general in that first magenta area were Yeah I mean the existing zoning says the topography there is wild too. That's like another thing I think to factor in those those are steep dead end roads and it's a weird weird little block.
[Emily Innes]: And I should just clarify for the Councilors, we're not looking for, you have to make a hard and fast decision tonight. In this case, where before we were looking for guidance on how to tighten up the zoning before you have your joint meetings with the CD board, in this case we're looking for initial sort of considerations or thoughts that we can start to merge in with the stuff that we heard last week, with the memorandum that you all received from Tufts, and start to put those into a format that allows for deeper discussions and decision makings. But we thought it would be appropriate to just zoom in a little bit more than we had done at the previous meetings about this.
[Zac Bears]: One other question. It looks like there's maybe There's lines in the fields on the east side. Are those like public ways that could exist or?
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, the driveways essentially. Is that what those are? Yeah, it's just how your GIS picked it up, but I don't know if they were originally public streets or if paper roads, sorry, they're paper roads.
[Zac Bears]: Those are roads on, yeah, so they, but Tufts is.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, you can see that, you know, part of that paper road is going over the tennis courts, it looks like. Yeah. Yeah, they're just leftover GIS remnants.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. Because, yeah, they definitely extend the grids in that, at least some of the grids in that neighborhood. So I was just wondering what that was. Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard to generally, I'd be interested in seeing, like, how you want to approach the context here.
[Rich Eliseo]: Yep.
[Zac Bears]: And I think there's a couple places where it's like, is this facing a residential neighborhood or is this within a residential neighborhood? And I think you're going to have a difference of opinion on that, especially from a Butters. But.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, and we're happy to bring back some of our thoughts. I think just on the heels of the listening session we did last week, we wanted to also give you all the opportunity to provide that initial feedback. But we're happy to come back with proposals and say we think, you know, we've divided this into X number of sub-districts. This is why and this is what we think could happen here. If that is more conducive to your ability to, you know, react to it and give us thoughts. Okay.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And I'm sure the Community Development Board will have thoughts as well, and certainly residents. Yeah. And I mean, in general, I just, this one's tough. I mean, we've been asking for it for 11 years, an institutional master plan from Tufts. I don't think, here's what we think is going to happen next year, and here's our wish list is really a sufficient planning process you know, $5 billion institution, but.
[Emily Innes]: The comments we had on the previous page. Yeah, we, in discussion with city staff, just put that to, sorry, going the wrong direction. I know that's not on any of the work we're proposing. For discussions. But. And, yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I mean, if they had to present an institutional master plan to the public, I think we'd have a much better understanding of the risks, potential, especially on those, like, is this facing a neighborhood? Is this within a neighborhood? What's the borderline there? What are they building up to the edge? So my inclination would be to be relatively conservative, especially on the northeast side of the tracks, because I, you know, yeah. I don't know. That's it. I don't have more well-formed thoughts on that at this time. Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: So I think that is what we had for today. I know you all had some specific input. Paola's been taking notes on our behalf, but some specific input on Boston Avenue. So we would be clarifying that to provide you text for next week. And with that, I think that's the end of our presentation. Happy to hear any other thoughts.
[Matt Leming]: Wonderful. Thank you very much. Are there any finishing thoughts from my colleagues before we move into public comment? Councilman Lane.
[Liz Mullane]: I just want to say thank you again for putting all this together and walking us through all these different deep dives on it. I think it was really helpful to kind of get a better contextual view as well as being able to go back and forth between the maps and the written piece of it as well. So I appreciate all of your work on that. Thank you.
[Matt Leming]: All right, with that, we will move into public comment. We're seeing that the room is absolutely full of folks just waiting to comment publicly now. If you're on Zoom and you would like to make a comment, please raise your hand. I'm going to go first to Jeremy Martin, gonna ask you to unmute. And you have three minutes. name and address for the record, please.
[Jeremy Martin]: Good evening, Jeremy Martin, 65 Burgett Avenue. I hope with the limited public attendance I can give you a little more than three minutes. If you'll have me, I know you're getting tired of hearing from me, but it's not going to stop. I think there's a lot of great stuff in these proposals. And so I hope that you see the comments that I'm offering as really an effort to try to make them even better, which I know you all are trying to do as well. I want to start by thanking some of the Councilors I heard push back on some of the more car-centric uses that may be allowed in the Boston Avenue corridor earlier in the meeting. If we are really touting this as a transit-oriented corridor with two green line stops, there's really no need for gas stations. As many noted, there are many nearby and drive-through uses insinuates surface parking lot. Again, that's not something that It feels right in this future corridor. Absolutely, we should be looking at reducing parking minimums to reflect the mixed use and transit opportunities here. On the building heights, I think, Matt, you acknowledged, Councilor Leming, you acknowledged that one of the things you heard loudest at the meeting last week was concern about building heights. And yet some of the dialogue in this, conversation tonight seem to be trying to push the heights up above eight into nine in some cases. I hope that you all will revisit that. I support, personally, a higher base floor count, four, maybe five, but a lower incentive height. We have to remember that there are single-family and small houses, two-family houses immediately adjacent to this corridor, and those extreme heights have really big impacts. I appreciate seeing the shadow studies, but I hope you'll look at a shadow of a building that's built on the north side of Boston Avenue and not just the south side because it will shade the neighborhood across the tracks as we are well aware. Moving to some of the green score comments, I hope that we do not give anyone, especially the largest developer in this area, any relaxing of the green score. At a minimum, they should be held to the same standard. I wish they could be held to a higher standard because they have the means to do it. complexity of the green score and applying it on a campus is just another reason why we should find a different way to look at the campus, not as a single parcel, but as building sites, development sites, there has to be a way to bring some control and definition to the way that the campus is developed. And by the way, the hardware store has been transferred from Walnut Hill to Tufts trustees. So the next time you see a proposal there, it will be a Dover project, which means you won't see it. It'll go to the CDB only. appreciated the comment just a few minutes ago about the sort of misalignment between the zones that are being considered for the institutional zone, whether they're neighborhood facing or embedded or core campus. It'd be really helpful to see that mapped. I know you're trying to start a conversation with the map that you've been using, but it is confusing to not see those types of zones applied on a map. Some of those zones that are on the current map span from public neighborhood street all the way into the core of campus. So please, I hope we'll see that the next time we meet. And then Lastly, I hope that we can find ways to simplify this district some. What seems like is being proposed now are three intensity zones in Boston Avenue, plus the residential areas that are being left out of this current rezoning plus the institutional zone, that's five different districts along one corridor. And I think we can simplify that so that it is not as confusing and there is less variability in different places along the corridor. Really, again, think of it cohesively, comprehensively, and not in bits and pieces. And lastly, I'll just say, I'll ask, why isn't site plan review required for all projects, even if they have fewer than six units? You know, if I could see someone building a four-floor, four-unit building, five-floor, five-unit building with high-end units, they should go through the same site plan review as somebody building six. And this is an opportunity to use that site plan review to make sure we're getting the things out of developments that our city wants and needs. Thank you for the time and for entertaining my daughter again this evening. Thanks.
[Matt Leming]: And multiple public commenters there just now. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the comment, Jeremy. Yeah, one thing I will say about about the building heights. Yes, you're absolutely right. Building heights did come up a lot during the community meeting that we had on it. And the consensus of folks at the meeting and really everyone that was involved in the process was that the 10-story dorm that Tufts is building, I don't think any of the neighbors really, really wanted that. So the consensus was that, you know, we don't want 10 stories, that's too high. But we were, but sort of what we were kind of trying to suss out there was, all right, what, like, what would be sort of an acceptable, an acceptable height standard? Having, you know, six, two, five, three near the Whole Foods doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to, that every single development is going to be eight stories, but many of the, many of the, development there, like Wackling Court, for instance, are already going to be six stories regardless. But I will acknowledge it's a complicated issue, and when I was describing my, when I was summarizing the meeting and the feedback that we heard from residents earlier, I definitely should have I definitely should have talked a little bit more about that and what some of the residents were saying there. So I do apologize for that. In terms of the comment, another thing to address about the Why isn't site plan review required for all projects? I think either Planner Evans or Director Hunt would best be able to address that and some of the complexities involved in that if you wouldn't mind chatting about that a little bit. Yeah, so I believe Jeremy's point was he was just saying why isn't site plan review required for all projects?
[Danielle Evans]: So the question was why isn't there site plan review for smaller than six units?
[Matt Leming]: Yeah.
[Danielle Evans]: I, I just think that would be way too much work and would really slow things down. And if we have tight enough design guidelines and good zoning, then hopefully just building permits and administrative review is enough rather than to have the expense of the public hearing and process and the time. It adds like months and lots and lots of money, so.
[Alicia Hunt]: It would definitely make it that only the wealthier, better financed developers could do the smaller projects, like one, two, three unit projects would only be done by somebody who could hire an architect, hire a landscape designer. Hire an engineer hire a lawyer typically these smaller projects two and three units. It's an architect and a contractor. It's not all this other. It's a lot of hurdles they have to jump through to go through site plan review as well as the legal notifications the paying for the abutters notifications. and then the length of time, and then paying all those experts to be on all the meetings with the staff and the public hearing meetings and stuff. It's a lot of work for somebody. We really do see when we've had some nine unit buildings come in front of us, and you can see that it's kind of tough for them. But it's the right thing to do for them. When you're talking about two and three family houses, you're talking about a homeowner couldn't do it themselves anymore.
[Matt Leming]: Yep. So yeah a lot a lot of the reasoning for doing zoning is just to clarify what Medford wants to begin with and thus to decrease the administrative burden.
[Alicia Hunt]: And you would have to triple the staff staffing that because we have so many that come in front of us that Danielle currently staffs the CD board and she cannot keep up. We've been talking about how she can distribute some of the site plan review work. to some of the other staff, because it's too time consuming on staff. We would literally need significantly more staff. And the board that hears these already meets twice a month. It's the only one of our public boards that always meets twice every month. And with the zoning, they're being asked to meet three and four times a month. So I'm just putting it, the amount of work that it is. Yeah, they also get a much lower stipend than the ZBA. Just throwing that out there.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, yeah, so thank you very much. I think the point is much better, is driven home much better coming from the two of you than from me. I'm gonna move on now to Judy Weinstock. I will give both Jeremy and Judy a lot of credit. They've been consistently showing up to these Tufts Boston Avenue zoning meetings for well over a year now. came along as well to the recent community forum that we had on it. Judy, going to ask you to unmute.
[Judith Weinstock]: I think I am unmuted. Am I?
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, we can hear you. Sorry, I was asking the clerk about some settings.
[Judith Weinstock]: Judy Weinstock at 144 Breguet. Thanks for the acknowledgement there, Matt. That was appreciated. Yeah, no, I mean, I think I don't want to speak for Jeremy, but I think we both feel, as do many of our neighbors, that we actually have to be present for this. This is just too important to not be present for and to understand and to participate in. With that, my thoughts so far are a little bit more generic than specific. But I do have one pretty specific thing. The property at Boston Avenue that people are talking about, that's the Cummins building. We talked about a little bit at the public meeting where the Elizabeth Grady building is. I understand from both that meeting and other meetings that the landowner is interested in doing something related to housing, specifically student housing. And I have to tell you that for me, I think that there's a lot of confusion for me now when I see the grid that talks about dormitory fraternities, sororities, and then as one category, apartment buildings and apartment accommodations as another category, co-housing as another category. I think it gets, the lines for me are pretty blurry there. There is clearly a high sensitivity in the hillside at the idea of having another developer other than Tufts begin to develop something called a dormitory. I understand everybody wants to accommodate development, but I'm not sure that without a better understanding about what the definition of all of those building types are and who the oversight of, for example, a dormitory at that location, Where that would fall, it's pretty murky to me. And I feel like for me at this point, I don't think that I could feel supported, nor could I support the idea of a developer putting in a dormitory for students at Tufts. In theory, If they want to build an apartment building that they rent to students, OK, you know, I guess, you know, that has comes with a different set of issues. But a dormitory in theory has oversight by the university, oversight by the Tufts Police Department. And I don't imagine how that could really work well, given this. 10-story dormitory that's going up where Tufts is hoping to capture many, many more students, juniors and seniors, than they previously have captured. So I guess I don't feel like it's a great idea. I will say that, of course, I know when you're looking at your new software for the shadow studies that you can sort of automatically generate Yep, there is definitely high sensitivity and in part because of the Tufts Dormitory, but not exclusively because of the Tufts Dormitory to building heights in the hillside. As there should be, even though there's not been a lot of discussion about the health and safety effects of diminished light and increased amounts of nighttime illumination, Those studies are actually out there. They're just not very mainstream at this point in time. And I will say that the winter impacts are the most severe and have the most dramatic effect on homeowners. At least that's been my impression. So hopefully you would always also look at the winter impacts of any shadows that you do. I will mention I was at the public meeting and yep, car traffic on Boston Avenue came up. And I don't know that that necessarily necessitates a discussion about reducing car traffic. I think it's the function of having Boston Avenue be basically the only main thoroughfare to get into the heart of the hillside and other areas of Medford off of the Alewife Brook Parkway at rush hour. Because I traveled that back and forth to work for many, many years and it has gotten increasingly worse, there's no doubt. But I think it's really because understandably the residential streets in the area are highly restricted to traffic flow during those hours. They don't really want people going onto the residential streets, which I understand. In terms of the Tufts zones, the Tufts institutional, I do know that this is a huge project. I don't think this is a small thing. And I do encourage, if there can be, for example, in the pink zone, something that accommodates both Tufts and the residential nature of that neighborhood, And that can be done in a way that doesn't restrict toughs unnecessarily and also doesn't burden the neighborhood tremendously. I really think that's a great solution. And I think Emily was talking about that a little bit. I also do think that when you begin to really look at the institutional stuff, and I know this is where we'll probably be headed, I hope, is that those different zones, even though they're not outlined today, specifically because of, with a direct implication of what the zoning should be, it completely matters that the parts of the campus that are on my side, on the Burgett Avenue side, with the athletic fields and the athletic buildings, as well as the Joyce Cummings building, that really faces residential everywhere, everywhere on three sides. So that I'm hoping that those institutional standards can in fact be adjusted for the neighborhood in which the parcels live. And I think with that, I'm sorry, I probably went on too long, but thank you for the time.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you, Judy. Let's see. One part about there, one part that you said earlier was you would appreciate just like kind of a rundown of the differences between the different types of housing that were mentioned earlier and what's allowed and not allowed between the three different zones.
[Judith Weinstock]: Yeah, and I mean, I think that for me, it was specifically because of this parcel where the Elizabeth Grady building is where this owner is talking about a dormitory structure, which seems to me to not be the business of private developers. Dormitories are usually run and operated by the institutions that they are dormitories for. And the structures that in my view are required to manage a dormitory would not necessarily be required from an independent developer hauling their building, not an apartment building, but a dormitory.
[Matt Leming]: I don't want to speak for him, but I believe one of the requests from President Bears was to sort of change the definition of dormitory and rethink what that means within our zoning. So, Council President Bears, I don't know if you wanted to discuss that a little bit more or if you did want to address that, because that. Go ahead. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, thanks, Council. I mean, yeah, I just think we need to update that definition so that we have clarity. And I think there are types of student housing that we've seen a lot more of a model of more recently, where you do have private ownership and private operation. And there's been more private operation even of institutionally affiliated student housing. But I think that's different from, I think, I'd have to go back and look at it, but what I think is a pretty out of date dormitory fraternity sorority definition that probably doesn't reflect what. Certainly I know that it reflects what this property owner is talking about and I think in general probably doesn't reflect. It's not defined enough to answer the question that you're asking. So that's why I think we should revisit it and take a look at it. OK. All right.
[Judith Weinstock]: Yeah, I mean, for me, I guess I'm just I'm really quite interested in what the difference would be between what that landowner is contemplating versus an apartment building. Like what are really the distinctions that one would make? So yeah, I think looking at those definitions inclusive of apartment and even co-housing to be perfectly clear what those delineations are would be really helpful.
[Matt Leming]: All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. I'm not seeing I'm not seeing anybody else on Zoom with their hands raised. So I'm going to go ahead and close public comment at this time. We do have one. We do have one motion on the floor to vote on, which is. the motion to remove, I believe, gas stations and eating drive-thrus from the higher slash BA3 district. The other, oh wait, the other Council President Bears, did you have something?
[Zac Bears]: Nope, you finished your sentence.
[Matt Leming]: Yep. The other is that in order to sort of keep going with the zoning schedule and have everything at least with Boston Avenue, likely not Tufts, but with Boston Avenue, sort of done by June 30th, which is when our contract with, and as land strategy ends, We would need to refer this out to a regular meeting tonight in order to keep with the schedule that we previously agreed upon at the last joint hearing.
[Zac Bears]: So- I was gonna motion for that.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Zac Bears]: We had had a plan to discuss that the 13th with the Community Development Board. So we need to make sure that this is on the agenda for that. I would move to refer this paper out of committee to our regular meeting and place it on the agenda for next Tuesday and next Wednesday's meetings.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, thank you. The other issue to be aware of here is that the meeting on the 13th, because it does require two weeks notice, wouldn't necessarily be an official public hearing. We do have another one scheduled for the 27th, so the meeting on the 13th would be just a joint general meeting with the Community Development Board, and then we could motion to open up the public hearing, which could then be advertised for two weeks later. The reason I would like to get this over to the CDB pretty quickly is because it took us four months to get done with Medford Square. I don't think this needs as much time, but if we do want to have a June 30th cutoff date, then we do need to sort of have time to have those joint discussions if we're gonna get both bodies to agree upon that. But with that, we have two motions on the floor, both from Council President Bears, seconded by Council Vice President Lazzaro. Director Hahn.
[Alicia Hunt]: I just want to ask a clarifying question because what we would like is that there's an updated version of the zoning from with tonight's comments on your agenda next week and that that's what gets referred to the CD board, not the literal version that was on your agenda tonight. And I just want to make sure that that's, that it's the version with the edits.
[Zac Bears]: As amended.
[Alicia Hunt]: As amended that you then refer out next week so it has fewer. Okay, thank you.
[Matt Leming]: Right. On the motion to strike the two uses related to drive-throughs from the higher slash BA3 district, Mr. Clerk, when you're ready, please call the roll.
[Zac Bears]: It's also BA2. It's all three.
[Matt Leming]: Okay.
[Matt Leming]: Sorry. I was getting confused between higher, lower, medium, and BA1, 2, and 3. Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: It's the eating place drive-through use and the light service station use in BA1, BA2, BA3, not allowed. Okay. That's the vote.
[Matt Leming]: Okay.
[Rich Eliseo]: So just the eating places with the drive-throughs and the motor vehicle light service?
[Matt Leming]: Yes. Okay. When you're ready, please call the roll. You can voice vote that one. Let's call a roll. Rolls are fun.
[Rich Eliseo]: Let's do it. Councilor Callahan. Yes. Councilor Millan.
[Liz Mullane]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro. Yes. President Bears. Yes. And Chair Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Yes. Five in the affirmative, none in the negative. Motion passes. On the motion to refer as amended to the meeting on the 12th, all those in favor? Aye. Opposed. Motion passes.
[Zac Bears]: Motion to adjourn.
[Matt Leming]: I'm on the motion to adjourn by Council President Bears, seconded by Councilor Lazzaro. Is that a fee roll?
[Zac Bears]: It was Mullane.
[Matt Leming]: All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Five in favor, none opposed. The meeting is adjourned. Thanks, everybody.
|
total time: 23.23 minutes total words: 1966 |
total time: 23.63 minutes total words: 2433 |
total time: 1.55 minutes total words: 160 |
total time: 2.32 minutes total words: 244 |
|
total time: 3.78 minutes total words: 138 |
|||