[Unidentified]: Testing, check, check. you. Alicia. We just wanted to coordinate.
[Zac Bears]: Special joint meeting, Medford City Council and Community Development Board, May 13th, 2026 is called to order. Mr. Clerk, can you please call the roll for the City Council?
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Kelly. Present. Councilor Leming. Present. Councilor Maloney. Present. Councilor Scarpelli. Councilor Tseng.
[Jeremy Martin]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro. Vice President Nazaro is absent. President Bears?
[Zac Bears]: Six present, one absent. Mr. Clerk, can you please call the roll for the Community Development Board?
[Rich Eliseo]: John Anderson?
[Page Buldini]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Sean Began?
[Page Buldini]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Page Buldini?
[Page Buldini]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Dina Carlogero? Ari Goffman-Fishman.
[Ari Fishman]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: And Chair Carr. Present.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Six present, none absent for the Community Development Board. The meeting is called to order. Thank you everyone for being here tonight. We are kicking off our discussion of the Boston Avenue corridor neighborhood corridor district zoning tonight in joint meetings. We've had several planning and permitting committee meetings as well as reviewing the calendar for this process at our last joint meeting where we have come up with a draft of the Boston Avenue corridor. There's also. to maps which are attached to the agenda online so folks can see the areas we're discussing. Tentatively, there's a Boston Avenue corridor upper hillside which runs from about Nick's House of Pisa and Winthrop Street to the Wackling Court, Whole Foods and 200 Boston Avenue. There's some residential areas in between that that aren't included. And then there's a Boston Avenue corridor south area, which includes some of the intersection of Harvard Street, Boston Avenue, Warner Street. and it goes down Boston Avenue a bit towards Ball Square. So that's the scope of that discussion. The paper is 26093 offered by Councilor Leming and myself, proposed amendments to the Medford zoning ordinance for the Boston Avenue neighborhood quarter district. And this is for referral to the Community Development Board. So tonight, the city council would be voting to refer the draft before us to the Community Development Board. The purpose of this meeting is to have a discussion after a presentation from our Planning, Development and Sustainability team and our Innist Associates Consultants or Innist Land Strategies Group Consultants on how we got to this point with the proposal. Once we've had that presentation and any initial questions or thoughts from members of the City Council and Community Development Board, we will then hear from any members of the public who would like to speak. I want to note that this is not the public hearing on the matter. The public hearing is going to come very likely on June 3rd. It was initially advertised in our previous schedule or discussed in our previous schedule for May 27th. On that day there will most likely be a procedural vote just to have the public hearing Wednesday, June 3rd, likely at 7 p.m. So that will be the opportunity for members of the public who want to make, state their opinions on the public record. At that point, there will potentially be a revised draft based on the discussions at tonight's meeting and the discussions at a, there's going to be a public information session on June 1st. So it would be June 3rd as the public hearing. You're welcome to speak tonight, but official comments as part of the record would be stated at the public hearing on June 3rd. So just want to make that clear for everybody who's in attendance tonight. After we've gone through the Boston Avenue Neighborhood Corridor District, we might have a discussion again on the Tufts Institutional Zone. The Tufts Institutional Zone at this point, we are likely to take a good chunk of time to get it right. Not looking to approve the Tufts portion of this before June 30th and not over the summer either. I think the goal is to have some draft language for the Tufts Institutional Zone and that's essentially the zone that would cover the properties owned by Tufts, the trustees of Tufts College, the campus and campus, very near campus areas of Tufts. have some sort of initial draft or version of that but not be looking to try to approve that by the end of June and coming back and having further discussions in the fall to make sure that we have the right structure and form for our Tufts institutional zone. I think that's a fair summary. I've talked for quite a bit now of what we're doing here tonight. If there's any questions from Councilors or community involvement board members about the schedule and timeline or Chair Carr, you would like to add anything at this time or just about the schedule and timeline, we'll do that and then we will get into the Boston Avenue Neighborhood Corridor District presentation.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, President Bears. I don't have much to add other than this is, again, this is not a public hearing, so any comments that are coming tonight really need to be repeated at the public hearing on June 3rd. And we're going to be asking questions, but we're not submitting any suggestions tonight for any changes to the zoning, whether it's boundaries or anything. We're just going to be Understanding what's being presented, give us some time to digest it. I think it's important that we have this as early as possible, which is tonight, so that we can think about it and bring some hard comments, some important changes to the next meeting, the first public hearing. So with that, I'll turn it back to you, President Pierce.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do we have any further questions or comments on the schedule timeline? Dean, let me... Could you could you turn on your just hit them. I just think I don't know what Mike you're there we go.
[Dina Caloggero]: Just a point of clarification. June 1st is a public meeting.
[Zac Bears]: It's an information session.
[Dina Caloggero]: And where will that be.
[Zac Bears]: I actually am not 100 percent sure on the location. We have a final location director.
[Alicia Hunt]: I do believe that we have confirmed Breed Hall at Tufts. I think that's the name of it. It's the one on the corner of Winthrop and Boston Ave, Breed.
[Zac Bears]: Breed Memorial Hall, yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: Breed Memorial Hall.
[Zac Bears]: The former church, yeah.
[Dina Caloggero]: Oh, the church on the hill.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yes, the former church. We have confirmed that location at Tufts and it will be live streamed. We've confirmed that with Medford Community Media as well.
[Dina Caloggero]: June 1st.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay, very good.
[Dina Caloggero]: Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks. And again, that's a public information session.
[Dina Caloggero]: Information.
[Zac Bears]: There won't be more, any decisions at that. The next, the public hearing for this will be June 3rd. All right. Seeing no further questions from members of the council or members of the Community Development Board, I'll recognize Director of Planning and Development and Sustainability, Alicia Hunt, and the team at the table.
[Alicia Hunt]: Good evening, Mr. Chair, Mr. President. With us tonight is Pa, Paola Ramos from Innis Land Consulting Strategies Group, sorry. And she will be presenting the Boston Ave zoning to you this evening. And she will be sharing her screen with the presentation.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Paula. Do we have any copies out there?
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: I gave the draft to everyone. There are some over there as well and the maps as well.
[Alicia Hunt]: Go ahead, Paola.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Through the chair, thank you. So yes, I am Paula Ramos Martinez. So we will be presenting the Boston Avenue corridor. Since it's the first time that we are showing that, we have some parts of it facing here. We already discussed them. We are now in the joint hearing. We had some previous planning and permitting committee meeting. Those, the first one and the second were more to establish the boundaries. They are a bit different than what we were looking last year. So it's basically we started with the same boundaries and then took the residential areas out. We did some non-conforming analysis to make sure that All of that made sense and we came with the boundary that I will be showing in a few seconds. And then in the next we had a public meeting the 30th of April where we got some feedback from the community. especially during, about the boundaries and about some of the, what type of uses they wanted to have in the area. And so we got some very valuable information. And in the last planning and permitting committee meeting, the 5th of May, we presented the first draft. We got some comments from the Councilors and City staff and what we are presenting today is that initial draft with the changes. So we started from last year with the Boston Avenue Corridor. These were the initial boundaries that we see in here. We have these two areas. One is the Boston Avenue Corridor and the second were the Medford Tops. We are going to be looking today at Boston Avenue. So, sorry. In here, what we see is the existing zoning that we have. So we have some commercial one, apartment one, general residential, office two, especially this in the northern area in here. We also have some overlay district. And then in the south of Boston Avenue, we have industrial, general residential, and some commercial towards Broadway, yes. Land use, we see a lot of mix. Where we have the commercial and the office, we do have commercial use. And then we have different intensities of residential. Where we have the apartment one area, we do have more density. And along Boston Avenue, some more intense residential. But we will be not looking at this moment. We will be looking more at the commercial and apartment areas. And in the south as well we have the religious use, some commercial, industrial, and then some apartments. So after different discussions with the city, with the planning and permitting committee meeting and the city staff, we established that new proposed boundary and it's the one you see in the green line. And these are the proposed districts that we have at the moment, which is Boston Avenue. You're going to see BA1, BA2, and BA3. Those are depending on the intensity. The higher the number, the more intense the mixed-use district. So as you can see in here, we have the Boston Avenue 1, which is a mixed-use district. And what you see is that the character of the area, we have very small lots for a commercial. and not very deep. So what we had in mind is to have mixed use that is the least intense and this is going to do with some of the uses but also the height and certain dimensional standards that we would allow. And then the bigger lots, we see very different footprints from the buildings, so giving us a complete different character than from the southern, the bluish part. In the north, we see the possibility for having a higher intensity uses. And that is why it's established at Boston Avenue 3. In any case, we will see what are the uses and what is the dimensionless standards. The south part, this is the south part of Boston Avenue. Again, we have this green area and that is the new proposed boundary. The residential districts were cut off from the previous boundary. And also the part that is more connected towards Broadway Avenue, that will be also looked into the next corridor. So those were the ideas of why it is reduced to the point that we have right now. So here we have the existing current zoning outside the green boundary. We see that general residential and that's mainly residential housing one and two units. We have industrial at the end towards Broadway and some commercial one as well where we have Ball Square. And then inside the boundary what we have is proposed that medium intensity mixed use. That's the Boston Avenue 2. We already have some residential and some mixed use that are right now this is a five story building four story building. So we are kind of keeping that intensity. So the sub-districts that we are proposing for the northern side, the hillside of the Boston Avenue is the Boston Avenue 1 and the Boston Avenue 3. The Boston Avenue 1 is that blue that you see in the map and is that transition towards the neighborhoods and the area that has that smaller and not very deep lots. And then in Boston Avenue 3 is the hillside area near the river where we have this bigger footprint buildings. The BA2, so the Boston Avenue 2, this is the South Boston Avenue and is that mid intensity. For the residential uses, we have given the draft and it has the complete table of use. I do have it and I can share it at the end if you have any other questions. I'm just going to go through those. Where are the uses that are different in each of these three different districts? What is the difference? What are the things that changed from the last time? So Boston in attached unit, one unit dwelling, row house, it will only be allowed in Boston Avenue 1. So mainly the lower intensity residential uses like a duplex, triplex, multiplex, those will be allowed in the Boston Avenue 1. They won't be allowed in Boston Avenue 2 or 3, and this is for discussion. The multiple dwelling more than six units will be allowed in all of them. Dormitory fraternity or sorority house, it's allowed in BA 3 with a special permit through the Community Development Board. Co-housing will be allowed in all of the three, and townhouse is allowed only in the BA 1. you There were some questions from the public last time about the different definitions that we have for dormitory, co-housing, and all the different types of residential that we have. So we have brought those ones as well into the draft so that we can have a discussion if there needs to be any changes to those. We will be looking at it later, but I just wanted to make that clear. That was asked and we have that. For the office and commercial uses, we have bank and other financial institution as a special permit in the three of them. Neighborhood medical, this is a small scale medical office. We have yes in three of them. Medical office, these are bigger scale, is a special permit in BA1 and 2, and it's permitted in BA3, as well as clinic. drive-through retail sales and consumer service. So this was one thing that has changed from the previous draft is a no in BA1, BA2, and BA3 is only allowed for the pharmacy. So it's drive-through only for pharmacy. And it has to go through a special permit and it has some use standards. It in place with drive-through. This is a no in three of them. This is also a change. And motor vehicle light service station is also a change. It's a no in all of the three. In industrial, we have printing and publishing, no in BA1, but yes in BA2 and 3. Research, testing, laboratory, yes in the three of them. Life science facility, no in BA1 and yes in BA2 and BA3. We also have the definitions for research and life science. There is a little bit of overlap, so we can discuss if we want to bring new definitions. And then for accessory uses, accessory dwelling units, BA1 is yes, because we allow the lower intensity uses, and so they could have an ADU. And for the rest, because we don't allow those, lower intensity is a no. Family daycare home, large, is yes in all of them. Noncommercial greenhouse, tool shed, or similar accessory structure, say yes in BA1, 2, and not in 3. And Keno is a city council. And this is one of the uses that we are thinking if it should go as a different ordinance and not in zoning. So the different definitions that we brought is co-housing. There was co-living that then we, last year, we took out. But we just wanted to bring it in in case we want to understand better those differences. We have the existing dormitory. This was not updated. So to discuss if this needs to be updated, fraternity or sorority house and lodging house. So I'm going to read them so we have time to discuss all of them. So co-housing is a group of buildings in common ownership which include a combination of single unit, two unit or multi-unit buildings and one or more buildings with shared living spaces such as common room, library, dining room, kitchen, etc. Co-living is a building in which a group of residents pay rent to occupy a single unit with private bedrooms and shared living spaces, including cooking and sanitary facilities. Such residents have input over the selection of the other residents living in the housing unit. This at the moment, the one in blue, co-living, is not in your zoning. So just to, if we want to include it or not. Dormitory, as per your existing definition, any dwelling other than a sorority or fraternity house owned or controlled by an educational institution and occupied primarily as a place of temporary residence for persons who are employed or enrolled at the educational institution. Fraternity or sorority house, a dormitory in which, during the academic year, membership in fraternity or sorority is required as a condition to residence. Lodging house, a dwelling in which living space without individual kitchens and with or without kitchen privileges is designed, occupied, or intended for occupancy by or led for compensation to five or more lodgers, including a rooming house or boarding house. but not including a senior housing facility, hotel or motel, dormitory, fraternity or sorority house, or other building of any institutional or educational use. We can come back to this one. I know that there are some questions about dormitories, so we just wanted to bring the definitions in. The other definitions to review, they're not housing related, is the life science facility. It's a facility for study, testing, and development of products or services related to chemicals, drugs, or biological matter, and research and testing laboratory. Those facilities used primarily for research, development, and or testing of innovative information, concepts, methods, processes, materials, or products. This can include the design, development, and testing of biological, chemical, electrical, magnetic, mechanical, and or optical components in advance of product manufacturing. The accessory development, fabrication, and light manufacturing of prototypes or specialized machinery and devices integral to research or testing may be associated with these uses, but excluding laboratories categorized as level three or four by the National Institute for Health. So there are some life science that could be included in the research and testing lab. Sometimes as a marketing strategy, life science is placed in a different position. And that's why it's a lot of the time separated in a lot of the zonings. But just to, if we wanted to rethink about this. So then we go into the purpose. So the purpose of the Boston Avenue Neighborhood Corridor District is to allow a mix of uses, including residential, multifamily, and commercial, to meet the following needs. Wider variety of uses and building types to support jobs and economic development near established residential neighborhoods, providing options for living within walking distance of jobs, goods, and services. Flood transitions to and from the Chaff's University campus to allow integral approach to living, working, and learning along Boston Avenue from the Somerville line north of the Southern Street to the Somerville border at Ball Square. Mixed-use multifamily and commercial uses at a density to reinforce non-vehicular travel between the adjacent neighborhoods to the jobs, goods, and services within the Boston Avenue neighborhood corridor district. Development standards to provide landscape and height buffers from the new construction within the Boston Avenue neighborhood corridor district for the existing abutting neighborhoods. And then we go into the dimensional standards. We start with height. So we have the maximum height. I just want to remember what is the base height and the incentive. So the base height is your buy right. And then if you want to get those incentive stories, that incentive height, there is a public benefit list that if the developer goes through some of those public benefits, then they could build up to whatever the height, depending on the district. So this public benefits has attached not a point system but they already tell you how if it's half floor or one floor and if you have those you can get your extra height. But the base height by right. your bi-ride height will be the base height. And so for the Boston Avenue 1, that will be in stories 3, 38 feet. For Boston Avenue 2, that will be 4, 50 feet. And for your Boston Avenue 3, that will be 6. So what do you have in the map? The blue one could go up to 3. The green one in Boston South can go up to 4. Orange in the hillside north side can go up to six now if you have the maximum incentive Then we could have Boston Avenue could add one giving up to four Boston Avenue two could go three more so up to seven and Boston Avenue three it could go up to eight and Then we have for the lot area, we have the minimum lot size, lot area will be 3,000, 3,000 for Boston Avenue 1 and 2, and Boston Avenue 3, 5,000. Frontage, Boston Avenue 1 is 30, Boston Avenue 2 is 40, and Boston Avenue 3 is 40. Facade buildout, minimum. Because we have in Boston Avenue 1, we also have the lower intensity for residential, so duplex and triplex, we lowered to 60% the facade buildout. And then for the other ones, we don't have this. We go up to 80%. Active ground floor is 75%. Historical conversion can be done in all of them. Setbacks, front setback is 0 up to 20 if it is activated. Then we have side and rear as 0 minimum. Building coverage is 80% in BA1 and 2 and up to 90% in BA3. This could go higher if they go, but then they have to go through a green score. They have to do that mandatory. So green score, minimum 25, and ideal 30. And pervious surface is, if they don't do green score, then they have to do the pervious surface, which is 20%, BA1 and 2, and 10% for BA3. And open landscape minimum is 15%, BA1 and 2, and 10% BA3. So then for the additional dimensional standards and development standards, it's mainly from Medford Square. We brought that into Boston Avenue. So the sidewalk width is the same. We talked about going a little bit lower on the Boston Avenue since the existing sidewalk is not a lot. I think it's six to eight. And the lots are not very wide. So there is no possibility we might lower that. Step backs, ground floor active frontage. There are no proposed changes into the high transition to adjacent residential districts. This is again brought in here. Multi buildings in the lots, that's again in here. Same waivers as we had in Medford Square for height, for step back, and for set back, and then for historic buildings. The UC standards, we have the UC standard for historic conversion. We will have to bring the UC standards for drive-through for pharmacy. It's not still on the draft. We want to discuss that before bringing it here with the city staff. So that is still pending. And then we already had the discussion with the planning commission, but we also wanted to bring it in again. So the incentives, we don't have any modifications at the moment, but if you're thinking any modifications, we can include them. Development standards as well, we don't have any. current proposed changes so the ones that apply in Medford Square are still applying here and parking reductions is the same reductions and the same draft that was in Medford Square is in here. And before we go to anywhere else I would like to hear from all of you.
[Zac Bears]: Could we stop the share for a minute? Or maybe we might need to go back to its reference for questions. I was just asking Paula to stop the sharing. All right, so we've heard the presentation from Paola and now we can go to any initial questions. First, from members of the city council, I know that we have had a couple of chances to look at this already and ask some questions. Any questions from members of the city council? Councilor Callahan. For some reason it's not on. Try to plug the... There you go.
[Anna Callahan]: Thank you. Okay. So I have a couple of questions. One is one which I know Director Hunt and Emily Ennis and I discussed a long time ago. So I think that's why I'm being reminded now. And my question was, so we've had removed co-living because it didn't seem to add anything. It's simply a rental apartment. There's really no... reason for it to be in there, but the reason why we originally talked about it was to make a distinction between a lodging house, which is where the landlord selects people who are living in the same apartment or same unit together, and people who choose to live in the same unit together because they're friends or, you know, they have something in common. So seeing that lodging house is anything more than four people but it doesn't say anything about whether those people are choosing to live together. Like I forgot that if we, I don't, I think I didn't realize that when we remove the co-living, then suddenly anyone, any five roommates suddenly become a lodging house. So I'm curious about that because I don't think that was our intention. I think the purpose of like discussing the co-living situation was to differentiate between these things and to sort of make it so that we could allow people who wanted to sort of live. I mean we have a lot of we have houses with five six bedrooms. We have a lot of professional young professionals who are trying to you know be able to afford to live here. And with our housing crunch I think we want people to be able to live together. if they live together well, but also the idea that we maybe want to discourage lodging houses, which means the landlord is just selecting people and forcing them to live in the same unit together. So that was my first question. My second question is just about the difference between, yes, the difference between the pervious service minimum of 20% and the open space landscape minimum of 15%. If you could just go into a little bit of detail about the difference between those two. Thanks.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Okay. Yeah, so we were going through it with Emily about the first question, and so when we saw co-housing, we had the co-living, we brought the co-living again, and co-housing was not really able to substitute the co-living because it's more of a multiple houses, multiple buildings.
[Anna Callahan]: Correct.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: So that's why we said maybe we should bring it back. So I think that we will have that discussion again and see now what you said about the lodging, co-living. The problem was that for when we were looking this last year, it was very confusing for everyone because there was like smaller details. And so people were always asking, what is the co-living? Why do we have that? Is that a boarding house? But I think that we can give another round.
[Anna Callahan]: I mean, I was part of that discussion, and I think I agree that having a definition for co-living just was not helpful. So I don't think that we need a definition for co-living, but I think once you say any five friends who want to live together, suddenly they're a lodging house. I'm not sure that that was the intent. Okay.
[Alicia Hunt]: We can review that one.
[Anna Callahan]: Yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay. And can we just comment on that because one of the things I think we need to do is to to involve like the building commissioner and how this is interpreted and the difficulty here is that building commissioners change as we are all aware. So you really do need language here that the reasonable person who is the building commissioner. as that person changes, interprets the same way. Because one of the things that we have seen that we're not loving is what I think is a traditional lodging house, where there are eight bedrooms, each with its own attached bathroom, and they each have a lock on the door. They have one living room in kitchen and it maybe does present as a house, but those are you typically rented to like seven or eight people separately who are all living individually and some people will you know that is a less expensive way of doing it. It also. like over time can be problematic as opposed to you have a large house where you as a group of people have made a choice to live together. You don't lock your bedroom doors because you're choosing to live with these people. You may or may not housekeep together. You may or may not like often in a group like that might have a shared meal once a week or something maybe but that would be their choice. And one of the things we did during the recodification, which predates it, everybody on the council except for Zach and Councilor Bears and all of the CD board, this, they, sorry. Councilor Tseng was here for the recalcification, thank you, was that we took out the definitions of family. And I just share this because it has evolved over time. And when you process that, we're taking out the definition of family and we're saying, You decide what a family is. We're not deciding for you. It literally used to say like husband and wife and children and aunts and uncles, but no further relation than that. Like it literally spelled that out, which was really problematic. And what we said was what we really cared about was the crowding, that if this became an unsafe living condition, then the Board of Health would go in as a crowding situation. And if you have 10 people who are choosing to happily live here and this house is big enough and you're not having crowding issues that trigger the Board of Health, good for you, right? But how do we do that? And I think there is actually a choice there. Do we care? And we have seen built in the last six years in Medford, houses with five to eight bedrooms, with each bedroom having an attached bathroom. And they are being separately leased to individuals. And there was like sort of no way to say that's not allowed. That's a lodging house. How does that become a lodging house? Is it? And is it therefore actually not allowed under our zoning as opposed to it just being a single family house? And I think that's, but it's a question. I did have somebody who was very low income come to me and say, but Alicia, I could afford to live in Medford because I can rent one room in a house like that. without kitchen privileges, and now I can afford to live here. And so are we literally just discriminating against poor people, and you say, if in fact there are problems, then the police get called, right? Like, you know, if there's a problem, just like if you have a regular house, and you have a husband and wife, and they get violent, and the police get called, right? Like that happens. So I think that's part of what we need to think about when we think about these and in modern today what should be here. And I thank you for for raising it because it had kind of we had commented as we're being really progressive. And now I realize that maybe we're we haven't. So.
[Anna Callahan]: I think having the definition is great and I think having it allowed in certain zones is also fine. But I just wanted to raise this like it seems like from this definition any five people who want to live together are suddenly a lodging house and they won't be allowed in most of the city. The other thing I do want to raise is that I think there are. landlords who rent out individual bedrooms and have people who don't know each other living together, and those people may not actually realize that that's what it is because they're renting from afar before coming. So I think having something, and maybe this is more of a policy that we could pass as a city council, that if you are a lodging house, that you have to disclose that in your application, those kinds of things. It's not a zoning question, but I think it helps to have a clear definition of lodging house that includes something about the residents not having this that we removed from the co-living residents have input over the selection of the other residents living in the unit. Like I think that's an important piece of it that to me differentiates the difference between a lodging house and you know.
[Alicia Hunt]: And what I don't know and I think maybe we should look into is what are we allowed to do in terms of regulating leases, right? Like saying this is a lease, one lease for the whole unit with individual names on it that can get added and removed versus separate leases and people don't see what each other's leases say, right? So if you have a joint lease with four names on it and four signatures on the bottom, then you all know each other's terms. And I guess it is possible, right, that he could lease this unit with these terms and that unit with that, those terms, and you don't know the terms the other people have. It makes me nervous, but is that, what is our legal right or obligation to get involved in that? I don't know. I think we need to consult legal or something like that. So. Thanks. We'll just make a note, Christian. And I think that we should, that my office should reach out to legal and ask them this question, have a conversation.
[Zac Bears]: Before we jump into the, you had a question about open space and permeable, I think another thing to think about here is how zoning regulates structures and uses and like one of the main ways, right, we do not have a rental registry. And so we do not know when whatever, for whatever purpose someone may be renting a property, What category does that fall into? Because, you know, they do not have to register with the city and say, you know, I'm renting a two-family to a family, and that accounts for one type of rental, or I'm renting 20 rooms, you know, for two-month, three-month, four-month terms, and that's a lodging house, right? Like, those are significantly... Significantly different purposes and I think the other thing that's important to recognize here is that we don't have. There's one thing like when we're talking about zoning. If someone wants to build a lodging house, that's something that's going to go through a zoning process. If someone is, you know, taking a building that 50 years ago was used as a lodging house and then was used as a single family or a two family for some time and it's, you know, I don't know exactly what the specific cases of it are, but like the city's not even interacting with that necessarily. That might just be a private interaction between a property owner who's writing up leases to somebody and the city's not engaged with that because, We don't know that it's happening. So I think it goes back to kind of what can you do with zoning when even if you change the zoning to does private to private party you know contract even when does the city even become aware of it. And like then what outside of zoning is the city's process for. tracking and registering and applying some sort of permitting or regulation process to lodging or rentals, right? And I think those are kind of like, that whole thing I think is actually separate in some ways conversation from zoning. I think there's probably a zoning interaction if you're changing a use maybe or certainly if you're trying to build a new structure. But to me, like, some of these questions are actually not about, like, are not zoning questions. They're permitting and registration and questions. So I think that's just an important thing to put out there, because it might be something that's separate from this discussion. And yeah, and just back to one other thing, just to add one other thing quickly, you know, there's been a lot of literature review and study more recently about how the decline of the boarding house, lodging house model, in addition to the decline of any sort of state and institutional support, has led to increases in the number of unhoused people, going back to the point that Alicia was talking about, which is you don't have really many options at the low end of I can rent a room. outside of like a YMCA, where there used to be more of those.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I will share that I'll look into the ones that we were aware of two houses that were designed and built like this in Fulton Heights over the last five years. And I'm going to I'll ask around in the city and see if anything ever came of it. People were really nervous when they were built and there was some concern honestly about parking about the fact that they would have a lot of cars at those properties and what would happen. And the other concern was from neighbors was that they wouldn't be well maintained. So I can ask and find out if anything has come of those. And the other thing that and I'm not sure how this all would play into it but a landlord actually needs to disclose to his insurance company what's going whether it's a lodging house or whatever, so that he's properly insured in the case of any kind of fire or event. But I don't think the city would have any insight into whether that's happening. We might find out after the fact, but we wouldn't know. And I'm just going to throw in the fun fact is that when I was in college, the joke in Massachusetts wasn't a joke that more than five women living together was legally a brothel. because the blue laws were still in place. I haven't looked to see if it's still there, but we used to laugh about the fact that technically the sorority houses in some of the larger apartments were brothels, legally.
[Zac Bears]: When we were doing the recodification, and I neglected to mention Councilor Scarpelli as well, of course, being here, but court decisions struck down the ability of cities to regulate what types of people can live together based on blood or fail, like that is not illegal, that we cannot do that. So that's why it's not in the zoning ordinance in addition to many other good logical reasons it's also illegal.
[Alicia Hunt]: We also I feel like I just want to flag I think this is not an issue that we can solve just here in Boston have zoning that but I'd like us to flag it and look at it. We have a number of interns also starting next week. So having them do some research on how this is being handled in other communities in Massachusetts is a wonderful summer project for one of our interns to look at and that. This definition is a, these definitions are for the whole zoning. And so rather than trying to rush through and fix it with the rest of the zoning, what I'd like to suggest is we may or may not change something with this, but that we should do some further research and expect that when we come back in the fall, we'll have more depth of information to review for this.
[Zac Bears]: Just one last thing, I do think it exposes a larger problem in question, which is, what is the city's regulatory framework when it comes to the rental of units in any way? And the fact, as we said two years ago, the city does not have a registry with information to know what's being rented to and for what purpose. And, you know, again, that got caught up in a lot of other discussions and kind of turned in a certain direction. But I think that's like a problem that we actually do want to solve because, you know, for some folks that feels scary. I get that. But there's a lot of things that are going on. We're having more information would benefit the city and understanding a what's happening in the city. And our laws are both our zoning and our regular ordinances actually even reflecting what's happening in the city and giving us the ability to to control it for it. So here just you had another question about the difference between the open space and the permeable.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yes, so the permeable surface is when the green score does not apply, then we will be looking into the dimensional standards that will apply would be permeable surface and open space landscape. The idea is that there is a minimum of permeable, and that can be just pervious surface, so like parking surface, asphalt, or any kind of pervious material. And then we want to make sure that there is a percentage that is also green and vegetation and trees. And so that is the minimum open space landscape. So you can complete, you can count the open space landscape as permeable. So that 15% can be count within your permeable. And then you can add that extra 5% with pervious surface and then you're fine.
[Zac Bears]: All right, thank you. I'll go to Councilor Tseng and then Councilor Malayne. And then I think that's all the Councilors who have questions right now. Councilor Tseng.
[Justin Tseng]: Hi there. Thank you so much for your work on this. I think you can see that a lot of thought has been put into it. And it means a lot to me because Boston Ave is one of those corridors that I personally spent a lot of time in. I've lived close to it, and you just see how much potential there is with how close it is to the green line, the connection to the Tufts campus, the residences around there, the kind of community feel around there as well. I think looking at it, everyone can see that our current zoning hasn't given it the room it needs to become what it could be. So I think that this proposal is a really positive step forward for that. And I really appreciate that this builds on the work that we've already done. I was comparing this to the other zoning reforms that we've passed and with the With the structure with the incentive bonuses and ground force land standards and all of that. I think it lines it's very consistent lines up and where it where it is different. I think it's really positive like it makes sense for that neighborhood, especially with the kind of more kind of room for economic development and accessory dwelling units. I think that's really positive. I just had a pretty simple question about the things that were flagged as open questions in the document itself. I saw that there's still notes about the distance thresholds for parking reductions, parking as a principal use location, pharmacy drive-through standards. I know you talked a little bit about the pharmacy drive-through And of course we talked about definitions tonight as well. I just kind of wanted an update as to where we are on those pieces that are still flagged.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yeah, so we had some comments on the draft. Some of them were already discussed last time on the planning committee, in the previous planning committee. And there are some that are still, that we still need to work it and talk to city staff with Director Hunt and Evans. So to see if what we want to propose makes sense or not. So we need just a little bit more time with those new standards. We just want to make sure, and this also came from the city, that the drive-through would have enough space so that it wouldn't back into the street and create traffic issues. So we want to make sure that the drive-through in that area has standards, that use has standards, so that we make sure that they work and don't create any unwanted problems. Do you want to say anything more? And then the definitions is something that we wanted first to confirm So I think that we will continue to work on them not for the Boston Avenue if that is the decision There are some distance from the Green Line stations that we were talking about for the shared parking we were talking about 750 feet from The So we have some parking that is off-site. So how long that distance should be. And we have 754 residential uses, 1,004 non-residential. We just wanted to make sure that those are still okay. There are some, so we have right now And then we have the west Medford, the station, train station. So we just wanted to make sure that there is a little area where the half a mile, it's not really, it's outside those two circles, let's say. We had a half a mile circle for the Medford hubs. and have a mile circle from the train station, there are areas that are not covered. So if we continue with that 0.8 reduction for residential, that is why that's the discussed distance from green line stations. It's really, it's just a little bit, so we can maybe include them, or if we want to do any kind of distinction and make sure in the reductions for parking that that is also taken into account. And I think that those were mainly the comments that we had.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you very much and certainly I can see a lot of the work that's happened since the last planning and permitting committee meeting. So thank you all for that. I just had going back to the definitions and the table because I know we had some back and forth around the different definitions for the housing. Looking at the amended document you gave us on page 5 under the residential uses, we're kind of still putting dormitory, fraternity, or sorority house all under the same line. I was curious if, since we're keeping those as two different types of definitions on page 15 between dormitory and fraternity or sorority house. Did we want to separate that again in the table? And do we still want to keep it for each of the different areas, no, no, and then CDB for both of those? And I guess my other question was, I know there was conversation about what the definition was specifically for the fraternity or sorority house. I don't know if this was the determined or the finalized one that you had in there. the dormitory in which during the academic year membership in a fraternity or sorority is required as a condition to residence. And is that sorority house usually maintained or owned by the sorority or fraternity themselves, or is it by the educational institution? And then my last question was on page 15. I know there was a couple of question marks at the top of the page of different definitions. And number two for the animal shelter, small animal rescue, it says small animal boarding, not dogs. and as a dog owner and have two small dogs that would probably fit into the small animal category. I was just curious what exactly that definition was to see if there were still some options for my dogs or anyone else's.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry, I was just consulting with Danielle. Danielle and I both have direct experience managing sorority houses, actually. We've both been for. In my case, they're called Fraternity House Corps President, because it was a woman's fraternity. So we've both done that for different national organizations in the Boston area. So I can say explicitly that the house is not always owned by the university, that it is often, in some cases, owned by the national organization. But what we would recommend including in here is the language. Sorry. So that's why we thought it should not say owned by the university. However, it should say membership in a fraternity or sorority recognized by a local university. Because if a university pulls its recognition of an organization like that, then we probably don't want them to continue to live as a group in a house in our community. Because that's the kind of reason why the university would pull. other than say Harvard, who has just sort of derecognized them all blanketly. So that's, but we wouldn't have a Harvard organization here. So that's sort of why we were recommending that language. And no, right, so I answered your question. They're not owned by the university always, but they are sometimes.
[Liz Mullane]: Yeah, no, I think that would be helpful, because I know what you're, I went to a university where they did have to actually pull some of those. So it is good to know to have something in there. So we have who's has ownership or who's going to, Step in, if that's no longer recognized. So I appreciate that.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, I've been there when different university will pull recognition. The house is owned by the national. In Boston, where you have so many universities, what might then happen is that the national organization would put one of their members groups from a different university into that property. And then if they came back, they might flip the house back between the two universities. or they might sublease to another recognized organization to use a house for a couple of years while they reorganize. And basically what happens is they'll usually remove all the members of that fraternity or sorority, and then they'll reorganize four or five years later, and then they would still own their house and want to reuse it. And we have some of them in the Somerville-Medford area, but they're not in Medford right now. They're all in Somerville.
[Liz Mullane]: And then I guess, Director Hunt, does that mean we want to split that number seven to separate out dormitory from what's considered a fraternity?
[Alicia Hunt]: So in fact, the rationale for it is that if one was going to allow it, the appropriate locations for fraternity or sorority house would be in the neighborhood close to the university. Sure. And often, so you're aware, they're often supervised by a board, an alumni board, who oversee what's happening. There's always a live-in person who lives in the building. So there there are a lot of controls on them and on the sorority side as far as I'm aware they're all dry. They still all dry. Yeah. Whereas a dormitory might be more appropriate like if one was if somebody wanted to put another dormitory over in the. what are we calling it, BA3 area, that's where we would want to see more tall buildings off the campus. The areas that we're seeing BA1, we're not sure that we would want to see a dormitory on those, on those streets there. Sure.
[Liz Mullane]: Yeah, no, I think that's fair. I wasn't, you know, adding more into it. I wasn't sure if you just wanted to distinguish between the two if they come through, but.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right, each use should have a separate definition, and each use that has its own definition should have a separate line in the table.
[Liz Mullane]: Yeah, that's what I meant.
[Alicia Hunt]: These have always been grouped. Yeah, I wasn't trying to change what you were already doing. Right, these have always been grouped in Medfords, but because they have separate definitions, they should have separate lines. It's sort of like proper housekeeping, even if the allowed yes and no's are all the same.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and I just want to add, I think, We had said last time we should look at this grouping of definitions and generally modernize it.
[Unidentified]: Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Because I think even dormitory, again, we're having this discussion about what is an on-campus dormitory at Tufts versus what does a privately managed student housing possibility look like versus fraternities and sororities are private but oversight by universities generally, I think like just cleaning that whole thing up and having a clear structure is valuable.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that's definitely very helpful. Right. So conceptually, there exists such things as private dormitories that are owned by another organization that leases rooms to students. Those exist in the world. Whether or not we want to allow them, but they are a thing. So this definition of dormitory only allows them if they are owned or controlled by the educational institution. And I will have to say that my experience with them not owned by the institution are not in the Boston area. I'm aware of them, frankly, in Paris and in New Zealand, where they are owned by another entity. And you might have students from different schools all living together. And I don't know if people do those in the US. that we should allow student housing, and that would a student housing be a dormitory? Under our current definition, a dormitory is owned by the educational institution.
[Liz Mullane]: Okay. Yeah, and I still, I mean, and I also think that it should go through the CDB as well, when it comes through, however you separate it. Wanted to make sure if they're distinct and different to have them labeled that way.
[Alicia Hunt]: I just want to reiterate, we're not planning to make changes for this version at the start of the public hearing, but we could come with a list of here's what we've already heard as a separate document so that you're aware.
[Liz Mullane]: And then just the dogs.
[Alicia Hunt]: Oh, sorry, I missed the dog question. What is the question? Why they were specifically labeled as not- Oh, so there was some discussion of, and this is, do you want to speak? It was about the animal rescue, the small, small animals. Do you want to talk about it at all? It's, is it, is this listed here? Yeah, it's on page 15 at the top. Let's see, I'm looking at Danielle because she has some recent experience with small animal rescue, which is different from a veterinary clinic. It's different from a dog kennel. So I don't know if you want to.
[Danielle Evans]: Yeah, so Alicia has outed me as a frequent flyer at the guinea pig sanctuary lately. It's so cute. Anyone who's Facebook friends with me would see those. But they are in Salisbury, and they opened there because they were having trouble with zoning where they were before. And it's just a charming little place. And should we be able to allow things like that here? They're different from kennels. How would we handle? that kind of use, like an animal shelter or things like that.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. So there's been talk about doggy daycares. We are just sort of Stating that there is a different kind of thing for small animals. It doesn't have barking dogs, right? Guinea pigs, you can't hear them from outside the building. And apparently there are organizations that are trying to put together shelters for these smaller animals. And whether something like that should be considered and allowed under our zoning. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Thank you, Councilor Millan. Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you. I agree. Guinea pigs are very cute. My social media feeds have been showing me videos of them, but in terms of parking requirements, I had a question about that. So, I think it's In my head, it's a goal to make this area less reliant on cars, just given that we've heard feedback about traffic and it's an area with a lot of students in it. And what I'd like to know is, what are the concrete policy options for that? I feel like it'd be too simplistic to go through table A and just shave off 0.2 units, like just shave off. 0.2 and each of the minimum parking requirements there, but I would, I would sort of like to know what. Uh, like, what what options to make this area less reliant on cars exist for less reliant on cars in Medford square exist for us that we could choose between.
[Alicia Hunt]: So one of the things that we were discussing is I was digging a little deeper into the Mystic TMA and I realized that we had put their basic membership as a requirement and when we went to the website and we were refreshing ourselves on it to see sort of other ideas and exactly what was included, We realized that we actually wanted to be, we were, we wanted to recommend that it's a higher level of membership that we require of buildings in order to include the things. We could break out some of the stuff that they do and ask that it, hold on, I'm gonna Google it and pull up the list, mistake. River TMA. Oh, it's Lower Mystic TMA. If anybody wanted to see it, the URL is actually lowermystictma.com. And if you look under for companies, they have descriptions and then they have a table that talks about the different membership levels. And under there, it's the partner level. They do ride matching, trip planning, but then they also have an incentive program. They provide the emergency ride home program, a carpool subsidy, vanpool formation assistance. Those are all things that you would never ask a building to do for themselves. It's more of a regional thing. And so having a building be part of a group like a larger group that's doing these things is actually what makes sense. There are a few things that an individual building could do on their own like MBTA subsidies and blue bike subsidies, car share subsidies. But it's more cost effective if they're part of an organization that is doing that and is managing it for them. Building managers don't want to start doing this themselves. So this is an organization that is in fact providing it in this area.
[Matt Leming]: Wouldn't that require the city have a transportation demand management program in order to kind of work out with the TMA?
[Alicia Hunt]: No, what we're suggesting is that we just require that any building has to join a local TMA. And the only local TMA in the area is the lower Mystic TMA. So if we say you must join a transportation management association at the level of partner or hire. then these things and provide those services to your membership or to your residents, then you've done it. And actually we could require it of larger commercial industrial buildings as well with employees because these are also available to employees. It's not just for people who live there. I don't know that, like MIT provides a lot of this to their, employees just because they work there. For a while, actually, we had access to some of this through the city because the state was providing it. I'm not sure if that's still something that the city could even subscribe to. But the city could be a member of the lower Mystic TMA and then provide these to their employees. I'm trying to think of the name of a large business. Tufts probably provides a lot of this to their employees already. I actually think they may be a member of the lower Mystic TMA. But I don't want to say that for certain. But anyhow, we don't have to pass an ordinance or anything. We just put it in the zoning that if you want reduced parking, you must join the lower Mystic TMA or you must join a regional, a TMA that services this area.
[Matt Leming]: Okay, and I'm sorry for just just 1 small follow up. Is it. Is it are there any other cities that have that sort of requirement to join like, a straight. Minimal, like, a straight up requirement to join if they want. Is parking items because I, like, I, I fully agree that that's a that's a very that's a very good idea. But my impression was that it was mainly done. Under under a implementation. Where it's incentivized instead of required. Sorry.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. So I know that Everett has an ordinance that requires it and actually Lower Mystic TMA has a level of membership that is specifically to meet the Everett ordinance. They actually have one that's called permitted and that has some additional stuff that they have to pay for the site plan assessment and site plan implementation. That's part of their permitted level of membership. In fact, Everett hired the Lower Mystic TMA to help them develop their ordinance. I have notes from when I met with them, and I was just trying to see if I had the answers to any of your questions in that.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, the ever ever it has a very sophisticated TDM program. I know there there's this kind of like the the Model for a lot of surrounding communities. It's usually what the lower mystic TMA points to when they're giving examples of that So
[Alicia Hunt]: Right, I found in my notes that Tufts was not a member, at least not when we talked with them. Oh, is this really from April 2024? But it was a conversation they were having at that time.
[Matt Leming]: But in conclusion, apologies again for the back and forth. The recommendation would be offer reduced parking minimums in return for reduced parking minimums on the condition that they join the TMA.
[Alicia Hunt]: So we definitely think that so part of this is a large portion of this area is so all the area that we are considering right now to be the level one. is within a half mile of the T. And all the parts on the South Medford, the South Boston Ave section, are within a half mile of a T stop. So technically, under our current ordinance, they would qualify for the .8 parking. The part that is definitely not is on the northern, the orange, the BA3, and the little, little piece of BA1 is like, two parcels outside of the half mile, right? So the half mile radius ends about one or two parcels before that zone. And so it would be our recommendation that requiring them to do that as well as to join at the permitted level, or not permitted, the partner level, as well as required bicycle parking and sufficient ride share drop off and package drop off area and a sufficiently large frankly package room. would all be required in order to have .8 parking because they also have buses that run there. So that's sort of where we're going with that. It's like outside the half mile by like literally feet. So have them be able to give us these other things, the bicycle parking, covered bicycle parking, sufficient package rooms, sufficient drop off places, places for vehicles to pull off the main road. the, you know, the Amazon, the Uber, the Lyft, Zipcar, etc., to be able to pull off and drop things off. Was there anything else? I think those are the ones that we had thought of. And I will say if somebody is aware of another thing that we should require of large buildings in order to be able to have the lower parking, happy to hear those. It just seemed to us that those would be the things that would push people, right? If you live just over a half mile from a T-stop and you were getting discounted T-passes, you might be motivated to walk over to that T-stop and use it. So that's kind of where we were coming from on this.
[Matt Leming]: I would recommend just reaching out to the TMA and just discussing those policy options with them and sort of passing it by them just to see if that's something that they think could work out with their structure. That's my only request to the teams to get some feedback.
[Alicia Hunt]: We've actually the CD board has required a whole bunch of recent buildings to join the TMA. So we might follow up with them and find out if that's occurred. None of those are open for occupancy yet. But there is a step that they do right before when they're doing the lease ups where they do a lot of education for new people. And then when they have lots of people moving in they'll have like a table in the front lobby to let people know about these options.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Just so we are clear, in this proposal we have that anything that is within the Boston Avenue has the minimum parking of the 0.8, meeting the requirements that are in the section reduction to parking space, where we do have the TMA. And I think also the bike parking we'll need to look at. But we don't have that membership. We have the basics. So we will need to change those things. Is it only for, because right now that could also be without, when we are not in the Boston Avenue, everything that is located in that half a mile has directly that .8. So it will be only actually for the areas that is not within that half a mile that we will apply the reduction.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I think this is something we should put in front of the boards to think about and comment on. If I can state this clearly, I think what Paola is correcting me, that I said that if you're within a half mile, you get .8 automatically. The way this is currently written is that that's not true on Boston Ave. On Boston Ave, you don't get the .8 automatically if you're within a half mile. You have to do these other things. Which and honestly I put that to the board. Right. Do you want to say if you're within a half mile because the original honestly the half mile of high frequency transit was done with the Green Line stations in mind.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: So unless we reduce the point.
[Alicia Hunt]: Well that's so that would apply in the B.A. three.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yes. But if we want to reduce further if you are in the B.A.
[Alicia Hunt]: one I don't know that we want to. Yeah. And we carried through the same parking, shared parking ratios for dual use, right? If you had commercial and residential and you wanted to reduce the amount of parking spots. And I will say there's an example in there to help people understand how that would apply because it's not, it's not obvious at first blush but once you read the example it makes sense. Danielle wants to ask a question.
[Danielle Evans]: Thank you. It's a question and also to clarify, because we, I believe in this section we're allowing the the special permit granting authority to grant waivers to reduce parking, but that, they can, so they're empowered to reduce parking beyond the 0.8, correct?
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: I think if there is
[Danielle Evans]: Because the, the 0.8 is, the 0.8 is automatic, not discretionary if they get that. But if they wanted to reduce it further beyond that, I, I think that, that is a, an authority that they would have without having to go to the zoning board. And if so, I mean, do, should there be guardrails on that or should there be strict criteria of when you could do that?
[Alicia Hunt]: So right, so Paola just pulled this up for me that on page 29, I feel like I should tell you the section number, but you have to read it up, go up. Under development standards, which is 94-988, when you get down to parking, after parking is waivers. And this is, it says, at the request of the applicant, the site plan review authority may waive the requirements of 9888 development standards in the interest of design flexibility. But that is where the parking is, isn't it? Okay, so that's design standards, parking. So we don't actually have a waiver statement at the end of the parking section. So actually that's something we should add in if we want it. I'm looking at you. You didn't find it either right. It's in the waiver section. What section. Sorry. I'm just. So under 9 8 4 dimensional waivers. is a parking waiver so that under no that's under eligible historic buildings parking. So that's just if it's a historic building it has a waiver. Right, so that is something that's in our regular zoning ordinance, not in this subsection. So we need to see, does that apply here or do we need to call it out here? Because it does seem that if, you know, if somebody comes forward and puts, here's why, and the board agrees this makes sense, the board should have the legal authority to do it, rather than saying, you must go to the zoning board for a variance.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yeah, it should apply, but we should. It should apply but we can make sure that there is something in this chapter that refers to that.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Sounds like there's some more research to do there. All right, I've seen no further questions by members of the city council. Do we have any questions from members of the Community Development Board at this time? If you could just press the button on your mic so I can turn on the right one. It's the little head. Yeah. All right. Member Began.
[Sean Beagan]: Okay, thank you, Mr. Chair. So a couple points to note. So on the table of uses for BA1, we have as allowed uses attached one unit dwelling, detached two unit, and a three unit dwelling. And do we want those uses under this new proposed boundary? It seems to me that those would be residential. smaller residential uses that I don't know that we need those in this new proposed smaller boundary that we have for Boston Ave. We also have, and I think that might have been a carryover from the Medford Square zoning, and I think we got rid of those uses in Medford Square, if I remember. And then you also have adult use marijuana in here. is a ZBA but my memory of the current adult use marijuana ordinance, you couldn't have adult use marijuana in this area. It was the only zones that were, that was allowed under the current marijuana ordinance was Mystic Ave and industrial zones. So I think that probably has to come out. And then in regards to parking, My understanding of the current zoning ordinance in Medford is that the permitting authority, whether it be CDB or ZBA, can waive as much or as little of the parking requirements as they want if they think it's in the best interest of a project. And that's in the general ordinance, because I remember reviewing that when we were doing a Salem Street project, so. And I think we're, I think the permitting authorities need that power because frankly, even with the smaller reduced parking minimums of .8, I know there's going to be applicants that need, are going to need parking relief from those requirements. That's all I had right now.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Any response on you guys? You don't have to.
[Alicia Hunt]: I would just, the reason that we have the two and three unit dwellings allowed is because on these blocks they currently exist and they seem to be fine. Like, if they wanted to be knocked down and replaced. Honestly, right now we have people who want to knock four unit down and put in. think they said 40 units which I thought might be a bit much on that parcel. We'll see. But if they wanted to put back a three unit a new three unit on that block it seemed reasonable to us. But that's really go walk it. And what do you guys think and what do you want. So. Oh, the marijuana under, so there is another ordinance that addresses marijuana and where it can go. There's both language in zoning and there is language outside of zoning. And so if we were to allow it in other neighborhoods other than the commercial and industrial where it's currently allowed, I believe that we would have to go back to that other ordinance and update that to say that it's allowed in other areas as well. And honestly, that was when it was being passed at the time, how people felt about it. The reality is that we have issued three permits, but only two have gone to construction. One is open. The third permit has been issued. It's on Riverside Avenue. They've been in contact with us, they still intend to open over there, but the reality is it's been like five years, so maybe they won't. And then there would be, we do get inquiries kind of regularly saying, Do you have a retail marijuana license available? I have a client who'd be interested in opening a location in Medford. And we usually say to them we do not because they are all currently have agreements with the city for three locations. So I think it's something to just take seriously. Is this an appropriate place to have it? whether that would be acceptable, and if so, it may or may not ever happen, right? It depends if these other three are successful. Over the next 50 years, somebody will close and somebody else will open somewhere else, if you think in the 50-year time frame. So we were putting it in front of the board. We'd heard it might do well in this neighborhood, so.
[Zac Bears]: All right. And Chair Carr, I apologize, I didn't see you, but Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, President Bears. This is a great first start, in my opinion. I do have a few questions. I do have a few comments. I do want to ask kind of about a little bit of the philosophical underpinnings of this BA1 section of zoning. It was described, I believe, by Paula as a transition from, I guess, a higher scale to the neighborhood. That's, I think, how you described it. And I When I look at what's in there, I see dozens of houses that look indistinguishable from the general residences. That's just the other side of the street. Like, I see 7 or 10 houses that are now in this zoning that could be up to 50 feet high with incentives. Potentially, and right across the street are a dozen houses that look almost identical in terms of age character scale that are left off. And I, I feel like this is a kind of a leftover from the Salem street approach, which was to up zone almost everything. And I just want to understand that better. Maybe Paul, you can speak to that. And why we seem to be capturing some houses just because there might be a handful of buildings, larger scale buildings within that district, but not the whole, like, why are we stretching it beyond the intersection of Winthrop and Boston Ave, just as a broad general statement. If you could address that, I would certainly appreciate it.
[Zac Bears]: I'll let Paula chime in. Some of the reason is because the current zoning is apartment one. So anything that is general residential, I believe we left out, but if it was currently in an apartment district, that was one of the kind of didn't want to down zone, essentially, I think was one of the principles, even if the built environment doesn't reflect what the current zoning is.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you for that answer. I guess I, I guess I disagree with the respectfully council members because, you know, there's, if you look at the zoning method had for the last 50 years. There's some insane things in there and if they had built what's in there, we would all have a poor city. So I don't feel that the. It's a reasonable answer, but I don't think it's the right answer. But obviously, this is my 1st time looking at this. I want the entire city board to debate this, talk about this and look at boundaries careful, look at scale and massing carefully because I feel like this is a lot of this is very good. I think this is a great starting point. And some of the things that we did in Medford square as a group of the city council. and the city board are carried over here, which are good, because I thought we made some good progress and not everything applies, but a lot of it does. So we can obviously talk about that as we go forward. I do, there is a, Some of the text of the historic requirements for historic buildings, I've presented those to the Methodist Historical Commission on Monday night of this week, and they actually have some questions and some comments, and I sent Danielle an email. We don't know to debate that now, but I do want to kind of get that into the pipeline. I think there's a slight bit of contradiction between the Historical Commission's charter, if you will, their rules and regulations in a different section of the zoning that the new section, we think there needs to be more clarity there. So I think it's a language correction. Again, we don't need to get to that tonight, but I just want to put it on people's radar for something to look at when we revisit the text and we get further down the road. I would like to, I believe, echo what Councilor Callahan said about co-living. I think, I feel like there is, as long as it's not a health issue or a sanitation issue, et cetera, and people are not being lie to and coerce. I don't think it's really the place of the city government to be telling five people how they can live or what groups of people can live, as long as those fundamental issues are addressed. I think Councilor Bears, President Bears, you addressed those very well, that there's a little bit of some zoning, but some more kind of enforcement and more procedural outside of zoning as well. So those are my initial comments, but I do think that, again, we're only seeing this for the first time. I feel like we're going to have some discussions about boundaries, some discussions about what belongs here, and we will get into that as we go forward. I want to move this properly and fast, but also very thoughtfully. So I'll hold any further comments until later, but thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thanks. And just one other piece of context, and I appreciate the perspective, Doug, on the, I agree, the original zoning for the city certainly passed after much of the city was built out, has some pretty wild stuff in it to, in many cases, limit things that we probably want to allow. Just a little more context on the apartment one. I think there's also a contiguousness thing about the block. Basically the half block between pay get road and Winthrop Street. And you know, do we want to make. that district is like non-contiguous because of the built environment. So I just wanted to give a little bit of the context from the meetings that we had. We kind of were like, yes, the apartment one district, A, it's the apartment one district and it goes basically this far because there's stuff at the far end of it that you probably do want to include in something that allows a mixed use. You know, there's about a block or a half block of single story commercial. There are, you know, a couple of large apartment structures and then you have, two or three families sprinkled in there. And some of those even I think are, well, there's just a lot of units, you know, at least three units in some of those structures. So that was just kind of some of the thinking. I think it certainly could be refined and adjusted, but that was basically why we were like, this block makes sense, but the next block doesn't. And some of that was just what the zone is now. And some of it was that, you know, do you wanna have, two or three parcels not contiguous with the rest of the zone, but obviously fitting into what we want on the other side of that block. So that was a piece of it as well.
[Doug Carr]: I appreciate that context, I do, and I think we should obviously dive deeper into that because I feel that if you take that approach that you have to go to an entire street to make a block, then you are changing the context a lot. You know, you are really upscaling significantly from Pickett Ave all the way to Winthrop Street in a way that I guess I question. You know, obviously, people reasonable people can disagree i don't i don't think it's i just think if people saw what that could mean from a scale perspective they might think well that's just not the character of street that i that i want especially if two or three houses do it and one doesn't and suddenly they're the dwarf surrounded by giants you know i There's something to be said, and again, for continuity. And some of these buildings are almost 100 years old. I don't think they're significant by the definition of historic that we have for the more, I'd say, institutional and other religious buildings. But I think there's a question here of character and scale that I think we need to debate as a group. And I'll leave it at that.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Yeah, and I appreciate that. And it looks like Paula and Alicia have some stuff there, too.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. And we just wanted to clarify what's currently allowed there is apartment one. And there are a lot of buildings. Most of the buildings there are more than none of them are single family. per the use map, there are at least three and there are a bunch of four to eight and eight plus unit buildings there. The zoning that's currently proposed is a three plus one. So a lot of these buildings are three stories already. This is allowing four stories. So I respectfully disagree that four stories next to three stories is towering. And the rest of our zoning, like the housing, the general residential area, is allowed two and a half stories. But I think that there are a lot that are actually kind of hidden three stories. And to be clear, two and a half means that the peak of your house is actually at the height of the third story. It just means that you have slanted roofs and that you're not a flat rectangular. But a lot of these are full three stories as we look at them from street view. The other thing that we were thinking about is that over time, as this develops, having a vibrant business area, and there are a lot of popular businesses there. If you go over there on a Saturday, it's hard to get a coffee because the coffee shops have lines out the doors. It's just really bustling, and it really feels like it could support more businesses if there were more storefronts over there. We know that the storefronts that are vacant are not vacant because they can't find people to rent them. They're vacant for other reasons. So that's sort of why we were sort of expanding that to help make that area a more vibrant area with more being more attractive for the neighborhood.
[Doug Carr]: And I appreciate that. And that's a great explanation. I thank you for that. But I think what we should be saying is that we're basically planning long term to essentially wipe out all those buildings. You're going to need retail. If you want to extend that retail district, that's an honorable and reasonable thing to do. But we should just say it because those houses are coming down there. We're not going to convert a three family, a three decker flat roof on Boston Ave into a coffee shop right with a staircase that not ADA. They're all coming down on it. And again, I don't think that's a bad thing as long as we. clearly state that's the intent. And I don't think that was clearly stated. It's kind of buried in there. You can read it, but now that you say it, all right, I kind of get that, you know, it's, but we should just be honest with people. It's like your house may not be here 20 or five years from now because we're looking to expand the commercial district along Boston Ave. And we drew a line. That's a reasonable thing to do. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the intent would be if someone in that one block area could compile all of those properties and come up with a plan that would go through the process of site plan review, then maybe there would be that change, right? I just, like, I don't disagree, like, the option would be there. The intent, I think intent is a word. that's a little more complicated, you know. That might be a goal that we would want in the future. But I think, I don't think, we don't have common ownership. It's not like the intent today is to say those buildings are all in common ownership so in two years we want that to be, the city is saying we want that to be what it is. I think it's saying that, I think Alicia was talking a little bit about what's that 25, 30, 50 year horizon that it would be reasonable on 10 to 20 years horizon that if, If someone said, okay, I think I can put all these properties into common ownership and then I can lengthen the commercial block because we want more businesses in this neighborhood and it's a thriving neighborhood, that's something that would fit into our zoning. So I agree like that. To me, that is the intent, right? I think the Medford Hillside and the things that are that block next to Boston Avenue and Winthrop Street, like that is the commercial heart of this neighborhood. And we want people to be able to go there and buy things or go to entertainment venues or live there. But I think when we start to say the intent, I don't think the intent is that we think that in two years, suddenly that block's gonna be different. And so that's just, maybe I'm hedging a little bit there. You know, I just worry when we say the intent is that those buildings are not going to be there. We can't make that. You know, the city is not going to buy them and knock them down. So, you know, I just want to be clear that that's not what that means. I hope that's okay. Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: I appreciate the opportunity to give a short response. I think it's really important in our entire conversation about zoning that people here as well as the public understand that zoning is about allowing things. Zoning does not mandate any change. Zoning does not force change. Zoning just means that something could happen. you know mean that your house will ever be changed like nobody can change your house and often zoning changes and 10 years later the majority of the properties within that zone have not changed. So I think let's be, I want to push back a little bit about this idea that when we change zoning, our intent is for every single property to be changed. Like that is definitely not going to happen. And I mean, maybe there's an idea that somebody would buy up every single property. I mean, is that a likely thing? I mean, maybe in this one location, if you know something I don't know. But I really want to push back against this idea that like, We here who are deciding upon zoning have the concept that the zoning we are choosing, the purpose is that in some near future, every single property will be changed. That is definitely not how I'm looking at it at all. I think it's also not a realistic way to look at it. I hope that if we need any advice on that, we can ask the zoning consultants about what change in cities similar to ours usually looks like. And we have asked that question in the past and it is not you know the answer is not that like in 20 years every single building has changed like that's just not how zoning works. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: All right we'll go to Page Buldini member Buldini.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you so much. Sorry to not be there in person, and I appreciate everybody who is there. I have a couple of questions. I very much appreciate what Chair Carr said, because I think it is very important that we do talk about the vision for Boston Ave. And yes, I do appreciate Councilor Beres, or President Bears and Councilor Callahan. When we discuss zoning, we are trying to, you know, provide a groundwork for the vision. And I listened to the planning and permitting meeting last week, and I do know that there is thoughts around walkability and an area in which we should have residents that can commute via bicycle. So I think we do need to be mindful of exactly what we're thinking about when we see the vision for this area. So thank you, Chair Carr, because I do appreciate exactly how you said that. But I have two questions. One of them is about co-housing, because I am excited to learn more about that. But my question about co-housing is, how come the Boston Ave corridor has completely different, the table for dimensions, than Medford Square? And what's the vision on co-housing being specifically different than it was in Medford Square? I think I'd really like to know where the thought is at. And Paola, I have another question, and this could be a really just simple, this is how we do zoning. But when I was looking at the map, and this just might be my brain, I saw the BA1, 2, and 3, and I'm just interested why we have BA1 in the middle. and then BA2 and 3 to the left and to the right, just when you're looking at a zoning map. And again, I can appreciate this just might be how we do zoning. But when I see BA1, it could be like Wackling Court. Then we go down to the hillside, BA2 and BA3. And I'm not talking about the dimensions, but just literally looking at the map to make it very easy for the community to see it, so that they can understand where their neighborhoods are. So just if I could ask Paola just to help me understand that so I can share that with the residents that asked me as well and that are on this meeting. So thank you, because I see a lot of Hillside members here. So co-housing, just a quick question about that. And then my last question would be about the setbacks. I do appreciate and understand how important it is when we think about setbacks. But a specific experience I experienced as a business owner on Boston Ave is we have tight sidewalks, but we also have tight roads. And I appreciate we can have a bike lane. I think that's super important. But due to the snow removal and just the abundant amount of snow, we unfortunately did have the bike lane impacted because cars were parking in the bike lane. So I do really want to be mindful. Also, if we change the setbacks on specific parts of Boston Ave, we're limiting those commercial spaces, specifically the cafes, to have outdoor seating. And I think that is one of the wonderful things about my neighbors is the community is always sitting outside. Kids are up there. Dogs are up there. And I just really want to support the business community. And I don't want to limit that. So I think those are four questions. And I can repeat them. But I would love some clarification, please.
[Zac Bears]: I will super quickly jump in while it looks like they're getting ready over there and say the BA123 is to try to match the Medford Square and the other zoning where one is the lowest intensity or height and like three is the highest. So like the one is three plus one. I'm gonna get it wrong. The two is four plus two. 3 plus 2. And then, no, 4 plus 3. And then BA3 is 5 plus 6 plus 2. All right. See, I got it. But from lowest to highest. But I'll now turn it over to them for the rest of it.
[Alicia Hunt]: Conceptually, you would always look at the whole map, right?
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yeah, so usually different districts can happen in many parts of the city and then it can change. So if we do them by location, if then we put that district somewhere else, and right now it's very specific to Boston Avenue, so that could happen. But usually we put it on intensity because then it can change. A mix is one can happen in other part of the city and then that location changes. And so you're 1, 2, 3, then now it's completely different. So it's basically for the flexibility. Usually 1, 2, 3 does not go with the location, geographic location, but it goes by intensity.
[Alicia Hunt]: So the idea is that the one is signaling lower intensity for this area. The two is sort of a medium exactly as President Bears said. And right now for this exercise of doing the zoning we're looking at this small area and these maps and you might want to read them left to right. But normally you'd look at the whole city and you would find it and it wouldn't you wouldn't be thinking about these as a left to right kind of thing. This would just be a spot in the city that you're looking at. Your experience is an artifact of the fact that we're only showing you this small area.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: So the co-housing and those definitions, we will continue to look into it. Co-housing is more about multiple buildings, so it's different from co-living, and it's having multiple buildings in a lot where you live in your unit. Let's say you're, I don't know, ADU, another person lives in another part on another building, and then there is one building that has every share, like a big living room, big kitchen that everyone can share. So it can be in multiple buildings. That's more cohousing.
[Alicia Hunt]: The other thing I think if I understood you why would we have different definitions for these things in Boston Ave area. And we just want to be really clear that's not what's happening here. So in fact if you look at the cover page. It says what sections we're looking to amend of the whole zoning code. So for the definitions we're looking to amend the zoning section or the definitions section of the zoning code. So if these different definitions were adopted. that are on page 15, they would apply to the entire zoning code everywhere in the city. And actually, I think that's really important for people to realize, that it's not that there'd be a different definition in one part of the city. So we have done some things, and there are parts of the zoning in general that have specialized definitions. The wireless, there's a section on equipment. It has definitions within it. There is a section on vacant storefronts that has definitions in the zoning within that section. Those are very much with that section. In this case, we're not recommending definitions within this section of the zoning. We're recommending that we change some of the universal definitions in the whole code. So I just want everybody to be very clear on that. Was that the question? Because I may have gotten lost at some point.
[Page Buldini]: No, that's okay. So it was just a clarifying question. I'm literally looking at the Medford Square District table. It's section 94, 3-2C, table A. And with co-housing, it has different recommendations for MS 1, 2, 3, and 4, co-housing comes before the CB board. Where when I was looking at the one from today, it's just different. It's BA1, yes. BA2, yes. BA3, yes.
[Alicia Hunt]: Those are just different. I think what basically, it got overlooked in the Medford Square area. One of the things that we did for the process this time that we didn't do last time, is that Danielle and I and Paola and Emily sat in a room together and went through every single item in our use table to say whether or not it belonged as a yes, no, or special permit in Medford Square as a first pass to give you that recommendation. And the last time it We didn't do it that way. And so I think we didn't think as closely about all of them. And so I think there's been misunderstandings about co-living throughout. If I was doing Medford Square over, I would make it allowed every the co-living allowed throughout because I don't see why it would be limited. But people were confused and it didn't feel like a good time to to go on that one little item.
[Page Buldini]: Okay. Thank you, I guess. And then setbacks. Just a quick question about the change for the setbacks. Which change? Sorry. That's okay. I think, let me, I'm on my computer, so let me try to pull it back up.
[Alicia Hunt]: That these setbacks are different than in Medford Square? Yes.
[Page Buldini]: And I think it was when Paola was explaining it's because of the sidewalk sizes, but I could be wrong.
[Alicia Hunt]: So there's two different things going on. There's a different area where we actually talk about the sidewalks. And just to be clear, because I think I caught something that Paola said, it's the depth of the lots that are not so near Winthrop Street. The lots are not very deep and the sidewalk is not very wide and the road is not very wide. So if we required 12 foot sidewalks there, there would not be very much parcel left to build on. So we thought that we should look at that number and maybe that number would be better to be eight feet at that area just to to not eat up people's parcels too much. So that's the section. So the way it's written in here is that the 12-foot sidewalk should be created, but if it's not feasible, if there is insufficient parcel depth, then the setback could be reduced to allow an 8-foot sidewalk, and that that would be something that would be done at the CD board level. And then the active, the maximum setback of 20 feet is because you don't want things set way back and far away from the road where you want to have an active social feeling. Was that the piece of the setbacks that was different? Yes.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you for explaining it. I just want to make sure, especially if we're doing mixed use, as I believe it should be specifically in that area, that we don't take away sidewalk space for if it would be like a cafe or something. That's super important up there. Thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: If they wanted to build for a cafe space, the 20 feet would absolutely allow for it, like for an outdoor space for the cafe. And if they wanted the cafe to be right up, then we're just asking for an eight foot wide sidewalk. So, you know, it's safe.
[Page Buldini]: Wonderful.
[Alicia Hunt]: We need to have a good space for them to line up when the line is going out of the door and onto the sidewalk. We want space for their line and space for people to walk past the line and go on to the next business.
[Zac Bears]: All right, Dina, if you could press the, yep, great. And then we'll go to Ari.
[Dina Caloggero]: Paige asked one of my questions. Okay, so we were talking a little bit about definitions. And so definitions would apply to all zoning, right? as well. So one of the definitions that we just always seem to be bumping up against every time we zone is high frequency transit. Could we please define it? Let's define it this time. I think it's really important we do that because we're always bumping up against it when we discuss the parking minimum. So let's do it, folks. We can do it. I think this is a good start. I am very, very eager to listen to some additional public comments. from the residents that will be affected by the zoning in this area. And I do agree with Councilor Callahan that zoning gives permission. But the permission that has to be given has to be gradual at the same time. So we need to have items in here that prevent a 98-foot building to be put up against a house, right? So I'm looking in the document, and this is the first time that I've really even looked at this. But we need to have provisions like what we did in Medford Square, right? Step backs, setbacks. I noticed that the daylight minimum standard has changed in this. We should also put in the design guideline shadow studies as well to protect the residents and right shadow studies. And I'm looking at this and I know that area of Auburn Street. So we're looking at walking court and it's in a B.A. three area. And I know it would be through incentives but the height could be 98 feet. So I'm on Auburn Street. And there's a 98-foot building. So it's really important, again, that we have the right provisions and protections in those areas so we have gradual permission to do those things. So I look forward to walking around. the area, looking at the boundaries. I have to admit, I look forward to it this time because it's spring and summer and it was quite cold when I did it in Medford Square. So looking forward to that. Boston Avenue, there's even less parking than Medford Square. And there's a couple of shops up there that I really like. But I can't find parking sometimes. So I think we really need to look at the parking in relationship to the high-frequency transit guidelines and what we're going to put in these areas. I agree with Paige on the co-housing. Where I live, we've had two-family houses that were redeveloped. There's nine bedrooms in a two-family house, right? Nine bedrooms. And guess how many cars? eight that park on the street. So as much as we want walkability we need to face the parking issue as well. We do. One of the things I noticed was that on page nine there's no gas stations. There's no gas stations no motor vehicle repair. Now I'm thinking there's daily there's a gas station all the way down the end of Boston Avenue. And then there's Titan, but I don't think there's another gas station around there. And if you think about it, if you look at the north end, there's no gas stations, but there's a couple on the outskirts. The gas is crazy priced and people have to go out into the area to do that. People have cars and they need gas and they need them repaired as well. So I think we should take a look at that. I think co-housing should be the community development board. And the other thing that I had We really need to define neighborhood medical office versus medical office because I don't want to revisit the whole issue that we dealt with with Salem Street, with the MX1, MX2. We were talking about methadone clinics. We want to make sure that we clearly understand the differences between each one of those areas so we know what exactly we're giving permission to be built in those areas as well. Those are just some of the general comments I have. Again, I look forward to walking around, listening to the public and what they have to say with this. And I thank you for the work you put into this, for this first pass of the document. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. And I'll go to Ari.
[Ari Fishman]: Thank you. And thank you to Innocent Associates for this great first pass. I think we are starting off a lot. Further than we did on the last round and building on a lot of the collective lessons learned. I'm excited to be starting this conversation. A few kind of comments to throw in many of them in conversation with the earlier bits. The first one is, do we have a specific itemized document of changes that are coming up that we would like to make at the end, kind of a cleanup? I'm thinking specifically of the comment Alicia made of, oh, we would absolutely want co-living and co-housing in Medford Square. That was just not the fight. that was picked at that time. That's a very specific zoning change, and I expect there to be many more like that that will come up as we identify different issues. And I'd love to have that as a document for us to be able to refer to and kind of have a cleanup at the end of this zoning process and not wait until an additional process, because while some communities zone regularly, Medford does not have a history of doing so. My second comment- Really quickly on that one, Ari.
[Zac Bears]: We have kind of a third track going, which is called, we're calling it PDS building cleanup, which is we've had at least one meeting in the planning and permitting committee where we have a list of a bunch of stuff from PDS, a bunch of stuff from the building department, and some of the things that you just mentioned. where we want to do essentially a cleanup of the whole ordinance, and we're keeping a list. I'm seeing Danielle nod that we have a long list. So just so you know, we are doing that, and we want to do that. It's kind of its own process, and the intent is to do that, but outside of the INIS process that we're doing for Medford Square and Boston F. Sorry to interrupt you.
[Ari Fishman]: Lovely. I was hoping that would be the answer. I figured it would be. And I'm glad that we all can know that now. My second comment is about this idea of changing the neighborhood. I respectfully disagree with chair car. I don't think there is That zoning is about a clear intent in this case. This isn't something like the transom overlay. We are creating the permissions and allowances. And this is a vibrant area that is growing. Tufts is always growing. There are large buildings and very vibrant businesses there. And we are saying that if someone wants to upscale, they're already, frankly, not single family houses. that that is a reasonable thing that doesn't need special permissions. And I think that that is a permission that, even if you think is not appropriate for everywhere in Medford, is, I think, very, very appropriate to this specific corridor. And that we should be kind of remembering that this is not about a specific intent, unlike Transom, where there was a specific vision. And that the vision here is much larger. About co-housing, kind of onto my third comment. I'm a big fan of co-housing, co-living. I think lodging houses, there are understandable concerns. I think they're a very important Part of the low cost housing picture that has really disappeared over the last 50 to 100 years and that we should not be banning and I'm excited to see us permitting it with kind of the necessary. Safety constraints with. Parking that's something that will obviously discuss. We always do. I think there are plenty of tools in our toolbox that. for specific projects where we can limit the impact of that. This is also a corridor that is very close to the Green Line. And from experience of living in co-ops in my 20s, there's a lot of people who are very excited about not having cars who live in that sort of community, especially more on the planned co-living or planned co-housing. Sorry. But the planned communities, a lot of people who are intentionally car-free. It sounds like we've talked about setbacks, but I'd like to explicitly talk about wanting to make sure there's permission and encouragement for outdoor seating for cafes and other businesses. I think that is something that brings a lot of value and personality to that neighborhood, as well as all neighborhoods, and that can be an often unintended consequence. And then the last one is just a small comment about animal shelters. I'm not really sure where we are on that. There is a cat rescue outside of Medford Square that I think is not a model for the rest of the city. So if we talk about it, I would want to make sure how are we talking about doing this responsibly and ethically. And that's obviously zoning is not enforcement of sanitation laws, but that I think it is something that can be important and can be done, not ideally. And kind of broad vision, I'm really excited to see this as a vibrant place with lots of housing and lots of businesses. There's a lot of people there and kind of living there, going out for coffee, going on the green line, taking the bus, going to school, going to local jobs. And this is a vibrant area that will hopefully continue to grow over the next 20, 30, 50, 100 years.
[Zac Bears]: All right, and I will recognize Director Hunt.
[Alicia Hunt]: Good evening. Just because both of the last two members mentioned the whole setbacks in the residential, I do want to flag for people that this, we did carry this through into this version. So, if you were to look in the 983 dimensional requirements after the table, the next page, which is currently 18, has both setbacks, but it has side and rear setbacks. If it's adjacent to a residential district with a residential use of four units or fewer, the applicant shall provide a landscape buffer of at least 10 feet from the line. And so that would be right now, this is all surrounded by general residential, so all of that would require it. And then we included the height transition, which is the whole 45 degree angles. So if you are allowed to do something tall, but you're adjacent to residential, then you have to do the math on the angles and stuff. And somebody had commented that the daylight standard was not here or different, but it is It was carried, it was copied and pasted over, so it is the same as the version that was passed in the end of the Medford Square. Right, right. And again, the maximum setback of 20 feet is allowed to create an act of public pauses in there. So I just wanted to address there won't be a change to address those comments because those are already in there, unless somebody thinks that what is in there should change. Yeah, and we also included the step backs, which is the six story and above has to be stepped back so that it doesn't look like a straight up tower that it, you don't see it as clearly.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Thank you, Ari. I'll go to Chair Carr and then John Anderson.
[Doug Carr]: Appreciate that. I think what would be helpful for the city board going forward is something that Ennis did very successfully in Medford Square, which was a series of sections on some of these transitions so we could see the setbacks and we could see how it goes from five stories to four stories to three. There are brilliant diagrams that I think help visualize for the whole city board these transitions so that we could understand them better and clearly some of the ones here where we're going from single family or general residential to upwards of 80 feet, like those are the ones that are going to be the most critical. So I leave it to Ines and the group to try to just pick and choose the ones that I think would help tell the story and prove and demonstrate visually, graphically, how that transition can happen so that we do not negatively impact a person who's been living there for a decade or 20 years or a house that's been there for 100 years. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, and I'll go to John Anderson.
[John Anderson]: Thank you. My comments are sort of in random order. I've just been sort of scribbling things down as topics came up. First, I hate to do this, but I have to respectfully disagree with Director Hunt about two and a half stories versus three stories. I think they do make a big visual difference, but, you know, I guess that's a matter of personal opinion. We have Tufts Institutional, of course, cut out from the corridor. I guess my question is, is Tufts Institutional because that is land owned by Tufts? And where does Walnut Hill fall into this? Does Walnut Hill have properties that are in the corridor? Is Walnut Hill considered part of Tufts for this discussion or not?
[Zac Bears]: Generally, the institutional zone is around the campus proper, mostly properties owned by trustees of Tufts College. There are a couple of things on either side of the line. There's a couple of trustees of Tufts College, maybe one that falls into the boundaries of the Boston Avenue corridor. There's a couple Walnut Hill properties. I think, actually, that's in some of the documents that there's a map that Innes made showing that ownership. But generally, the Tufts Institutional is the campus and the nonprofit, Dover Exempt, relatively geographically contiguous Tufts.
[John Anderson]: Yeah. Are there buildings in the corridor that are Dover Amendment protected?
[Zac Bears]: I'll go to Director Hunt on that.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I think the way to address it is that it's Dover protected if Tufts owns the property and says we are using this for an educational use. So right now there is a building in the BA1 area that is owned by Tufts, but they have not stated that they are currently used, it's not in use, it's a vacant building, right? So it's not being used for the educational purposes. They could come forward with a proposal that says, here's our educational use, this is Dover protected. They might not. So to sort of enhance what President Bears was saying is that the idea is part of the area is a campus, feels like a campus and should be treated like a campus, right? If you go up on the green on the hill, do we care how far apart Tufts builds various buildings or when they attach them to each other or whatever? That's their campus and it should feel like a campus. When Tufts owns buildings on our city streets, Then they should actually feel like they blend into the neighborhood. And so there are some I'm looking to see if we have street names on here because I don't know them off the top of my head. But this was sort of the other item. Right. So they own properties on Tesla Edison Cape and Street. Emory that area but that's part of the neighborhood. So right now those are not on the table at all. That would be under the residential zoning but it's our general professional opinion that those should not be zoned like a campus. Those should be zoned like a neighborhood. And so that's where the distinction is between Tufts institutional zoning. And along Boston Ave, whether or not they own it, we feel like it should be zoned like a small downtown commercial district and not like a campus. That's kind of the distinction that we're getting at with the two different zones. And part of what President Bears had said earlier about not really going to have a fully baked Tufts zoning this quickly is because as we go through it, We don't think we should just take the Medford Square zoning and adapt it to Tufts campus. That doesn't make sense. We should just look at it and say what kind of zoning is appropriate on a campus like this. And we have said to Tufts, to the consultants, to other people, can somebody give us a copy of institutional zoning you like from somewhere else, and nobody has come up with an example. They've all said, no, we don't like that, we don't like that, we don't like that, and we don't like that, but nobody's given us a template to work with, which is meaning it takes more time if we all have to come up with this from scratch. At this time, it's on Innis Agency to come up with this from scratch, not my office.
[John Anderson]: So even Harvard doesn't have such a thing?
[Alicia Hunt]: We don't like it. No, that's the thing. Tufts doesn't like the zoning that Cambridge has for Harvard or their zoning for MIT. There's a lot of zoning for different universities in Boston. They said, don't look at those. There's zoning for Brandeis. They're like, no, we don't like that one. Nobody's come up with one and said, actually, this works well.
[John Anderson]: But maybe Waltham likes the zoning. We might be the first.
[Alicia Hunt]: Maybe we'll come up with the first institutional zoning that people like. I don't know. I get a little punchy late at night.
[John Anderson]: About co-housing, I noticed for parking, it said 1.5 per dwelling unit. How do you determine the number of dwelling units in a co-housing situation?
[Alicia Hunt]: Great question. Great question. Usually so there's co-living and co-housing co-living. If you remember was like one house with a lot of people in it. Co-housing is typically multiple small units. that have also some larger shared spaces that they use together frequently for cooking meals and stuff like that. So technically you would have it. You would be able to count up the multiple small units that exist is 1.5 the right number. I don't know, but I agreed to not debate residential parking limits other than what we've been doing so far. Right now they could apply for the lower, you know, do the incentives, join a TMA, have bike parking, that kind of stuff, and they could have the lower parking too.
[John Anderson]: So co-housing versus what was the alternative?
[Alicia Hunt]: Co-living, which is what we were talking about. At the beginning of the meeting, we were discussing co-living, which is the idea that are you regulating who all is in the unit together with each other, right? One big unit, that was the example of each bedroom having its own bathroom. and a lock on the door is very different from everybody has their own unit that they lease separately but they agree to a shared. And the huge difference is like other that like they agree to their shared community values and living together as part of living there.
[John Anderson]: Right. But OK but co-living I still don't understand how you would define dwelling units in co-living. Just number of bedrooms?
[Alicia Hunt]: Is that in the list at this time? I think it's not in the list at this time, right? It's not. It's not in the use table.
[John Anderson]: So co-living's out.
[Alicia Hunt]: We didn't feel that it was necessary. I think, I don't know if you want to, Councilor Callahan, take it away.
[Anna Callahan]: If I may, thank you. I will admit that I'm slightly sad that the word, the definition of co-living has ever been brought up again because it literally, we removed it because it doesn't mean anything. It was, we had a reason why we thought we, it might be useful in some way, but it really is like a rental unit. That's all. It's just the way that all sorts of people live in a rental unit that don't happen to be a family. But we've already removed the whole definition of family. So literally, it just means a rental unit. It doesn't mean anything. So we should just not, don't worry about co-living. Co-housing is actually quite different. There's one in Malden. There's one in JP. There are two in Cambridge, and that is architecturally a very, very different thing. So you're not ever going to confuse a two-family with co-housing. Co-housing has like 20 or 30 units. Every unit is a completely separate, just like an apartment, except they're often a little bit small, because they will have they'll have like shared rooms. So there will be a different building often that might have a cafeteria, like a kitchen and a seating area where people can, where maybe up to 20 people could eat together. They might have, and then different places, depending on who lives there, have different shared rooms. So they might have a guest room that anyone can sort of sign out and have an out-of-town guest stay in. And that would be in the, like a, jointly owned building. These are architecturally very different and usually people spend like 15 years putting together a community and then building in different architectural buildings. So co-housing is actually a very, very different thing architecturally that we do not have any of in Medford. I'm happy to talk more about it. Anyone who is interested, I would love to talk to you more after the meeting. But co-housing is a completely different, and co-living is literally, it's just, let's not even mention it because it's just a rental unit.
[John Anderson]: I'm surprised there's no co-housing in Medford. I seem to recall reading about one that was being proposed 10 or 15 years ago. I guess it never happened. There is no co-housing in Medford currently. Okay, not to beat this to death, but here goes. So co-living, so six or eight people decide to share a large house. That would be one dwelling unit.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and we can't regulate or control that, so it's not definable and it's not really a zoning question.
[John Anderson]: So they get one and a half parking spaces at one car, okay.
[Zac Bears]: Well, I mean...
[John Anderson]: I'm just trying to understand.
[Zac Bears]: I'm not... No, no, no. I'm just trying to illustrate the point, right? Sure. There might be a single family house right now that has six bedrooms, but it already exists, so the parking is completely... If it already exists, it could be used for that, and the parking regulation doesn't even come into effect, right?
[John Anderson]: Well, or they're just parking on the street.
[Zac Bears]: Right. I'm just saying like so many of the units in the city have almost no relationship to the things in the parking code because they predate the zoning or are otherwise like they weren't they're not under construction. Right.
[John Anderson]: Side setbacks of zero. That means buildings are built right up against each other with a shared exterior wall. OK. The fire department has no problem with that.
[Alicia Hunt]: There's there's building code to allow it. If you walk down Medford Square you'll see a lot of buildings like that. Basically you just have to have fire rated walls in between them. You either have to have fire rated walls or I think the number is 10 feet separation. So it's builders choose to do fire separate firewalls.
[John Anderson]: OK. I looked at the recording of the April 30th public meeting and I'm trying to figure out what I learned from it. The residents were asked to provide input as to how the zoning should be done in the corridor. They didn't have this level of detail. They had the maps. They had the maps. I don't think they had any concept of what was being proposed. The biggest thing I heard was, no more tall buildings. I guess my question is, who are the stakeholders? that we're working, that who are the stakeholders who we're serving with our zoning proposal. And I was really glad that you included the, where is it? The purpose, the purpose. And I didn't see that really being communicated to the residents. And I think that's an opportunity. Page 16 talks a lot about reinforcing non-vehicular travel between adjacent neighborhoods. It sounds like the village concept, a self-contained village where people work and live and shop in the same contiguous area, which would include adjacent residential areas, I guess. I'm having a hard time visualizing that on Boston Ave, which is also a main thoroughfare of sorts during rush hour. Am I the only one who thinks that this is a problem? I guess so. We'll see what the residents have to say. I just would encourage... enough communication so the residents know what's being, what's really being proposed. Thank you. That's it.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, John. Do we have any more questions from members of the Community Development Board?
[John Anderson]: All right. Excuse me. I have one other, I have a request. I love the new maps. Would it be possible to get ones with a building number, street numbers on it? That would simplify walking around and understanding what's really going on. It would simplify it tremendously. At least the ones on the board, yeah. We had a similar problem in Medford Square, where the maps, the color coding was very confusing, and I had to ask three times for that to be fixed before it happened. So if early on we could get maps that help us with numbers, so you can walk around, you know, walking court is not so bad, but you get into some of the other areas and you get tired of sort of counting little boxes.
[Zac Bears]: I don't know if Director Hunt or Paula, you have some?
[Alicia Hunt]: We were just discussing what you could or could not see. I mean, we could try and print, like GIS could display those numbers. We could do a version for the board members to use for their purposes. If you printed numbers big enough to read them you wouldn't be able to see the outlines of the buildings that you currently see. Right. So it's sort of like what do you it might be. You might also need a magnifying glass to see the building numbers so. And the names of the streets are there. So you would know you've hit a new block by the name of the street. Maybe we can take that offline because it's just a logistical thing.
[Zac Bears]: Let's just discuss that after the meeting.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: I just wanted to mention the interactive viewer. And there you can just put the name of the street, the number, and you can access directly to see exactly which building you want. We will have to upload for Boston Avenue. OK.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Yeah, we're going to take this discussion offline. Thank you. Seeing no further discussion by members of the Community Development Board or the council, anything else you want to say to close out before we move to some public comment? Chair Carr?
[Doug Carr]: Let's proceed to the public comments.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Okay. So we're going to move to some public comment. If you would like to speak on Zoom, and again, I just want to clarify, I know I said this at the beginning of the meeting, but that was now two and a half hours ago. So this is not the public hearing for this proposal. This is an initial discussion. The city council is the only body taking a vote tonight. We would be voting to refer the Boston Avenue Neighborhood Corridor District to the Community Development Board. If you'd like to speak at this point, You're welcome to make a comment, but if you want your comments officially recorded for the record, you should come to the June 3rd public hearing, which is the next time that we'll be holding the public hearing on this matter as a joint body of the City Council and the Community Development Board. We do have, you know, at least one person who has who wants to speak tonight here in the room. They represent a property owner in the area. So that is one person. If there's other folks who would like to speak, please raise your hand on Zoom and we'll alternate between in-person and on Zoom. So we'll start in-person in the chamber. You can come up here if that's okay. And we'll just move this microphone over here. Yeah. And if you could, Yeah, we'll get you. All right. So your microphone should be on and you should be able to share. There we go. Looks like we have about four people. I'm going to keep it to about five minutes each.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you. I appreciate the time. My name is David Roach. I'm an independent development advisory consultant. here working with one of the property owners in the proposed BA3 zone. I just want to start by saying that thank you to the members of the council, the board, and planning staff. You guys have done a fantastic job with this process so far. It took a few minutes before I came here tonight to buzz through the agenda packet. And one of the things that we're really hoping to see and get is certainty moving forward. So for example, to see that there's a requirement for a shadow study. And as a developer, that's one of the things we always get concerned about. Not because we're opposed to doing them, but because there's never any sort of metric defined as to what is actually a good and bad shadow study. And to see that there's the two-hour daylight requirement, just reading that as an example, tells me that you guys have thought this through when you're trying to be helpful to giving everyone certainty so we can move forward together. So it's just very encouraging to me. The issue that I wanted to speak on tonight, and again, you don't need to hear much about me. Worked in development, worked as an engineer, and I've had a lot of experience with this. We wanted to suggest an additional defined use. It's known in the business as purpose-built student housing. We can call it private student housing, you can call it what you want, but it's a use that doesn't really fit into the categories as defined. It is what Director Hunt said is done elsewhere. I'd say it's actually done quite frequently around this country, in fact, even in this area, often it ends up becoming a public-private partnership, but in this case, you know, we're suggesting that it just be allowed as a private use, which is student housing, but not necessarily owned or affiliated with the university. This is of scale. We're not thinking about this of small developments, but a larger scale development that would be managed. So it would feel a lot like the dorm definition, right? It would feel like a dorm, but it's not owned by the university. It's private, it's taxable, and there's ways to enforce that it's actually used only by students. It's not like an apartment building because it wouldn't be set up to be open to just the general public. It would be specific for students. These developers like to do this because for two reasons. When folks send their kids away to school, they want to know that they're living in student housing. And the universities are more likely to funnel students to these developments if it's truly student housing versus something that is taken on the general public. So we'd like to see this as a defined use. What does this solve? I think it's pretty clear that they, you know, with not all the university students being housed on campus, and we're going to, you know, Tufts is the most proximate university obviously, this has an impact on the affordability and the availability of housing to the general public. We can keep the students in the family size units, but if you create another opportunity, either a dorm through the university or something like this, you can really alleviate the pressure that that creates in the local housing market. So a 600-bed building, which would be a larger building, could reduce the displacement of 150 to 200 apartments that could be opened up to families or other young professionals or otherwise, because this would create an opportunity to get them out of that housing stock. Currently, there are 2,000 plus students living off campus in Medford, both undergrad and graduate, 3,600 between the two communities of Somerville and Medford. I went on CoStar, which is a private, you know, is an aggregator of rental information. The average monthly rent on CoStar in Medford, which is, this is going to be the larger development, so this doesn't poll every single unit in Medford, was just over $3,000 a unit. If you do a half mile radius around the center of Tufts, it's 4,300. The impact that Tufts has, you know, the students themselves have on the housing cost is significant. I can't necessarily attribute all of that difference to the students, but there's certainly some portion of it. So you can establish a use and require that it, you know, either they have an MOU with the university, that they accept the students, they're going to enforce the code of conduct, You know, these buildings would be staffed to professionally manage their scale. And you can have an enforcement mechanism that, you know, that would run with the building's certificate of occupancy. So the building department has the ability to enforce that. It is truly occupied by students and that's what developers of this kind of thing want. Parking. is another thing that is different with students. Students tend to have fewer cars. They're there for a short period of time. They're there to learn. They're not there to go drive around. I know that that was the case when I was in college locally here. Tufts reports that 16 percent of students occupied by single occupancy vehicle but the majority of that number is probably off campus, you know, commuters and not necessarily residents of the area. So there is evidence that there's not a lot of demand for cars for students. We'd suggest something in the order of 0.15 to 0.25 parking spaces per bed be something that we'd include in a use like this which is consistent with the dormitory definition of one space per four beds, just because there just isn't that demand. And I think this would operate very similarly to that.
[Zac Bears]: Sorry, David. That's quite all right, as long as that wasn't me. Well, no, that was the timer.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, fantastic. So that was the end of it. So we're suggesting that this be considered as a use. You know, there's other things that we have opinions on of what came out tonight. But this use, it doesn't fit into the bucket of dormitory. It doesn't fit in the bucket of multifamily. It's a specific thing that's in between.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Thank you. And I think if you could share some of that with the planning We have a copy and we can share that with the members of the council. Yeah, so we'll share that with all of the Community Development Board and the Planning Development Sustainability and appreciate the comment. Alright, anyone else in the chamber? I'm not seeing anyone right now, so I'll go in order of the folks I saw on Zoom. I'm gonna allow you guys to turn on your video and we'll go to Judy Weinstock. Name and address for the record, please.
[Judith Weinstock]: Hi, everybody, Judy Weinstock at 144 Burgett. I wanted to make a suggestion, perhaps Paola and Alicia and Danielle can decide if this is a good idea or not. I actually think that this definitions issue that we're having between co-housing, dormitory, fraternity, sorority, apartment building, and thus and on and on and on, not to mention this brand new category that was just presented, I actually think we need a table of requirements because trying to define these things in prose just actually hasn't worked. I think it's very confusing. I think that if there are characteristics that are associated with each of these different forms of housing or living situation, that they ought to be enunciated in a table. that would make it just so much easier. It would be like the use table where the characteristics are in columns above. And if the type of housing met a particular characteristic, they'd have a check mark. And if they didn't, they would say no. And I do think that it will help the public to really understand the differences. I understand that the categories across the top could be incredibly broad and long, but they need to be specific enough that you can actually tell the difference between this dormitory proposal that was just proposed and the dormitory that, by the way, will house 650 students at Tufts when it opens in two years or a year and a half. What distinguishes those two proposals in a manner that not just the board can understand, but that the public can actually understand? Um, you know, I think there's gonna be lots of time. I hope to talk about things like parking. I have some feelings about parking. I also agree with Doug car around considering. Intent doesn't mean that the city is trying to force down the throat of its inhabitants specific projects, but everybody knows that sort of, you know, follow the money. And when you allow for certain types of uses, developers who are the people with the most money in the world of real estate will find a way, right? And so having real consideration for what do you want your neighborhoods to actually look like matters a lot, not just to have them possibly walkable, but be realistic. If there's no supermarket within a mile radius, most people will probably drive to a supermarket. So I think there's going to be a lot more time to talk about those things, I hope. But this definitions thing with the types of housing that's being proposed really needs a whole lot more clarity from my perspective. I find myself pretty confused without understanding it in a lot more detail. So I hope that we'll get there. I hope that some type of table can be developed that will help distinguish what the characteristics are of each of these different types of housing. And I think for tonight, that's it. Thank you all.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Judy. Right. Going to go next to Jeremy. Jeremy, name and address for the record, please.
[Jeremy Martin]: Hey, good evening, Jeremy Martin, 65, Burgodev. Thanks for another opportunity to comment on this. There's a lot of great work that's been done and very much appreciated. Let me try to keep my comments tonight focused a little bit more on how materials are presented, but I do have just a couple of small things on content. I think it's really helpful to start the presentation by seeing the existing zoning in context, seeing the street from end to end, understanding that. I think we're missing some important information when the new proposed maps are presented that we have not yet seen those in context. We've only seen them in two zoomed in maps. And I think we really need to zoom out again and think about this as a complete corridor. With that, I appreciate that there's being, you know, more care, more time given to the Tufts institutional zone. That's something that I've asked for. And I know that everyone recognizes that it needs a certain level of, you know, specificity and care. I hope though that we don't just completely set it aside. Because I think when you're looking at a corridor, it's important to think about how these zones that we're creating on Boston Avenue are going to relate to a potential institutional zone. And so while we may not finalize that institutional zone in this process, in this time frame, we shouldn't just forget about it. It should be a part of these discussions. I think you're going to talk about it some tonight, but it should be on the maps. And what that means for Boston Avenue, what the potential institutional zone on Boston Avenue looks like should be a consideration so that we understand this, again, comprehensively, end-to-end for the corridor. There was a lot of discussion earlier about, a really good discussion about zoning as a permissible rule versus telling people what they need to do. And I appreciate the discussion of that. Though we aren't saying what will happen, we are saying what could happen. And I think it's important for the community to understand the potential of what could happen with this zoning. And again, I think Doug, uh, chair Carr referenced this, um, in talking about some of the sections that have presented for other parts of the city, but seeing an elevation or a simple 3d massing model, which I think have been provided in other areas of the city to see the implications of a, of a six plus two, um, in some of these areas, or, or even the relationship between parts of the community that we aren't rezoning right now and these places that we are. to understand the potential implications of this would be really helpful for people to understand. I just think there's a lot more detail that needs to be presented to the community so that people who aren't following this closely, who want to understand it but aren't familiar with zoning can understand the implications of this process. I heard mentioned earlier that the green score doesn't apply to all of the potential zones here. And I would just appreciate, it doesn't have to be tonight, but some clarification on when and where green score does and doesn't apply. I think that's a really important tool for our city, not just to cover permeable and impervious pavements, but tree protections, improved landscape, improved public realm. So, In my mind, green score should apply to any kind of development that is in a mixed use corridor. Any kind of mixed use project should have a green score applied to it. So just appreciate some. clarification there in the future. And then specifics, there's been a lot of talk about dorm and living definitions tonight. Maybe this matters more for the institutional zone than it does for the Boston Ave corridor, but please take a look at that dormitory definition because what is being built on Boston Avenue right now does not meet that definition of a dorm. It is not owned by the university, and it will not be operated by the university. And the residents raised this when that was before the Community Development Board. It was set aside. That's the past. But we need to be, this is another example where we need to be really careful with our zoning around the institution so that there are not loopholes that can be used to build an apartment building that says it's a dorm. We have plenty of access to gas stations in this neighborhood. We don't need more car centric uses. We need to accommodate cars, of course, but we don't need more of those uses. So I am glad personally to see that we're moving away from that. And then last I'll say, I think it's, I know people on the call that you're hearing from tonight have given a lot of feedback. I know more people will give feedback as this reaches a broader audience. I think it's, helpful to hear where community input has shaped these proposals. I'd love to hear very specifically, like, we heard this, and so we acted this way, not just clarifications that people are asking for, but actual outcomes of people showing up to meetings, giving feedback. being consistently part of these discussions. If we want community input and we want people to be engaged, we have to show them that it results in something and that means something. And so I hope that, again, as these Proposals are presented in more detail to a broader audience that people can feel like they are and see where they are having an impact through providing input to these bodies. Thank you all for all the great work that you're doing. Very much support this and look forward to more hearings and more comments. Thanks everyone.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. And yeah, on the visualizations, that'll definitely be something. that, you know, we had some kind of very, very early looks at amassing suggestion for at least one parcel at our planning and permitting committee meeting. I know the PDS staff and as folks, it looks like we said, I saw some nods about the sections. We might be able to do some of that for June 3rd. So we will definitely have some of those visualizations and, you know, I think we'll talk more about it at the public hearing as well kind of. now three plus years of the public process and, you know, what is coming from the comprehensive plan, what was the vision for this area and the feedback we heard there, all the way through meetings in 2024, 25, and now in 2026 where we incorporated the input of our residents. appreciate Jeremy, you and others who have been consistently part of this and spreading the word out in the community about the process and trying to get more people involved because it's helpful to have folks in the room sharing good suggestions. I think some of what you heard, I'm sure some of what I said was something that you said at some point tonight. So I think that's something we're trying to do as well. There was one really specific question. I don't know if Alicia or Paola, you could answer it in two seconds. What's the threshold when the green score applies? Yeah.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yeah, so when it doesn't apply, so every project that has to go through site plan review has to go through green score. If they are not going through site plan review, so basically lower intensity residential, like two, three, four units, they wouldn't have to go for a green score. And basically it's because those type of developers, you wouldn't have landscapers or, you know, Usually it's very green. It's more permeable. We are not worried. Usually we have lower maximum building coverage. So that's why we don't go through a green score for those. But any other project that has to go through site plan review will have to go to the green score.
[Zac Bears]: And you noted that one of the for those lower intensity or the projects that are not subject to site plan review there's an alternative metric which is the
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: you will have the minimum permeable surface and the minimum open landscape, which is 15% of landscape and 20% of the permeable.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Thank you. All right. And now I will go to Laurel Ruma. Laurel, name and address the record, please. And thanks for being here.
[Laurel Ruma]: Hi, everyone. My name is Laurel Ruma. My address is 149 Burgett Avenue. Thank you for making the time for this tonight. I don't believe Tufts also needs to go through the Green Score site plan review, if that's correct. So there's another exception to the rule. I would certainly not be in favor of another 600-bed dorm, whatever you want to call it, just down the way on Boston Avenue with two going in here. As you can imagine, the concern of the neighborhood even though the horse really is out of the barn, unfortunately chair car about the keeping character of the neighborhood, the idea of having an alley of 10 story dorm buildings is just horrific. So, let's be realistic in what we're actually wanting for this corridor and that size building is just certainly not one of the things I'm looking forward to in this process. And the other thing is choose the reality of Tufts plan to have 75% of the students back on campus. That's part of the business plan. So having a private dorm compete with the business plan, I'm sure that's not necessary. I mean, of course, it's a free market. You can do whatever you want. But in general, just having that many large dorms on our side of campus instead of anywhere else is certainly not something I would support. Um, so the other the thing I mean by the horses out of the barn like already you know we're going to see a lot of development, where we are in Boston have is the place to put it, Winthrop in in Boston is critical, but the entire corridor is really so if you look from route 16, all the way down to ball square. There's so much opportunity and the reason there's so much opportunity is because. of those tough students, once those dorms are complete, their range and where they go is going to expand. And it's going to go all the way to the Whole Foods, all the way down Route 16. So the idea of having mixed-use opportunities from Route 16 to Ball Square is really encouraging, because that's what you are building here. Whether or not we want to keep the character of our 100-year-old houses is absolutely a moot point at this juncture. That doesn't exist anymore. The way the zoning works with a city is developing the way the entire regions developing, we can no longer expect to stay in our single family homes forever and ever and ever. It's the way the economy is moving as well so to carve out specific residential areas to keep them residential. I suppose that's fine as long as they are you are one or you are two, and they're affected by everyone else like as we are in this like bullseye right at the Tufts Greenline station. Because I don't see us living in this bubble I don't see single family homes sustaining on Boston Avenue, there was already two, three family homes. Why not, you know, make that opportunity to actually create stepped up step down neighborhoods instead of having a 10-story dorm building and then a three-family home. There's certainly opportunities here for gradations, and I think that's something I would certainly like to see leaned into. Let's make a more diverse neighborhood, not just six to 10-story buildings and then three-story houses. And the idea that these buildings are going to dwarf houses, yeah, well, welcome to our reality at this end. As we all know, what runs downhill, like this is just the way it is. We have 10 story buildings built on a hill. If we didn't want that, then we shouldn't have apartment to zoning that allows such buildings to be so big and tall surrounding an area. of residential houses but like I said, we're barely an area of residential houses and in the future certainly won't be. The other thing I have issue is these locks, if you look at the plan are some of the largest lots available in the city. that still have single family homes on them. And I hate to think that we're missing out on an opportunity to possibly do something bigger and better on some of the biggest lots available on this Boston Ave corridor that's there currently set aside for residential only. So, you know, there's something to be said about let's be creative and what's possible. And perhaps those business I mean, sorry, those homeowners understand that they have one house on 10 square 10,000 square feet. And that's, frankly, not fair way and work, they have a massive opportunity to put even more there. So, you know, from the Titan building on, and then the Clement Elementary School, whatever that building is that's currently unused, that should certainly be a massive opportunity for 10, eight to 10 story building, because it is already a massive building, a massive lot, a massive opportunity.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Laurel, and I appreciate that. And like I tend to agree with you, the scope has narrowed significantly. You know, we are you mentioned you are one and you are two, which existed at some point in the discussion. But the residential discussion has you know, we've been limited. The mayor has basically said we're not having that discussion. So that's why the scope has narrowed so much. And, you know, my hope is in the next round of The next RFP and the next discussion when we're coming back to this more holistic and comprehensive approach, we can look at the step down elements that you're talking about. Because when we started in 2024 and based on the comprehensive plan, we really did have more of that approach or at least trying to get to that approach that you mentioned of looking at these areas in totality and not saying let's just look at this really narrow strip. of Boston Ave and just the parcels adjacent to Boston Ave and not look at the residential only areas because there really is in the long run a need to look at it as an integrated corridor. I think we're trying to preserve as much of that as we could. immediately adjacent to Boston Ave and looking at the Tufts Institutional Zone, but then there are these gaps, especially that gap on the north side where it's a general residential zone and basically the agreement we got to so that we could keep doing zoning at all was if it's a residential zone, we're not talking about it right now. So I agree that that does limit some of the creative thinking and I appreciate the comment. And your other comments too, that was just the one that stuck with me. We have one more commenter with their hand raised. Janie Tallarita. Janie, if you could give your name and address, and we'll start the timer.
[Janie Tallarita]: Hi, thank you. Janie Tallarita, 68 Charnwood Road. Sorry, bad lighting tonight. I have Some comments and some questions, and I'll just jump in, I think, first with some questions. I really want some clarity on the timeline here. There was a mention of a June 3rd hearing. I have not, tonight is the first I've heard of any specifics about this. I did not have time to review any materials before jumping on to this call. And I'm going away for three weeks. I will not be here on June 3rd. I want to make sure I have time to comment. Can you clarify when you're taking, what date you're taking public comments until and Yeah, just more guidelines on timing for this. So that's my first question. There was some talk of incentives and I'd like to hear more about what constitutes incentives and a little clarity about daylight. These are just some comments that have come up tonight that are I think important and just have a little clarity around. And just a few comments. There was talk about changes not happening overnight when zoning changes go through. That's not true. That's already happened. If you look at Boston Ave, And I just want to clarify, those of us who are in Hillside, on Charnwood, on Burgett, on Brookings, we look at Boston Ave, it is part of our neighborhood. And so what happens there impacts us personally and directly. We have seen drastic change just in five years with The green line coming in, which has been a wonderful thing, of course. It also had an impact in removing all the trees in the train tracks, which has had a huge visual and sound impact on us. And it's also wonderful that we have the green line, so just to be clear. We now have a 10-story, block-long wall being built. So to say that change happens gradually, that's not true, sorry. It's here, it's happening now, and it's impacting us massively. I heard comments about the space or lack of space between buildings. We don't need yet another wall of buildings. And I haven't heard anything about affordability. I'm sure that's one of the incentives. But an incentive is kind of a bribe and not a requirement. I think that allowing developers to build whatever they want with the idea that we'll have more and more units And more and more units will eventually bring rents down and housing costs down. I don't think that's going to happen. I haven't seen it in other cities where tons and tons and tons and tons of housing has been added and the rents have just gone up and the rents have gone up because the developers charge higher rents and they wouldn't be building if they didn't think that they could continue to charge higher rents or build and sell units for top dollar. Anyway, just a few comments around that. It is really exciting to see some of the possible uses, the idea of a walkable, vibrant, Boston Ave is wonderful with small businesses and cafes and sidewalk seating. All of that would be fantastic. And we've gotten some of it, and it's been really great for the community. So it would be great to have more. Let's just keep it in human scale and not be dwarfed by outsized buildings that make us not want to be there because we're sitting in a big block of shade all day and because it just doesn't feel good. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Whoops. Thank you, Jamie. One, just to address the process side of this, you know, I think we all heard the rest of the comments. We will have the public hearing on June 3rd. I would expect that that would be continued at least one further meeting. We have a meeting scheduled also for June 11th. And given the short timeframe between those two meetings, it really wouldn't surprise me if that was continued further into June. But I would say the dates to have on your calendars are June 3rd and June 11th for the public hearing on this. And that's another opportunity for folks to come. And that would be the opportunity to speak in the public hearing, which is required by the zoning law, get your comments on the record. Do we have any further public comments. I'm not seeing any hands on zoom and not seeing any in the chamber. All right. We're going to close out that public comment portion on the Boston Avenue neighborhood corridor district. I think it is worth it. It's come up a couple of times. I talked about it at the beginning. to just do a quick overview, Director Hunt and Paula, about what our goals are for the Tufts Institutional Zone and the timing on that. I think we indicated at the beginning of the meeting that we do not believe we will have a final Tufts Institutional Zone by the end of June for approval, but the goal is to have kind of a framework or even potentially an early draft of that zoning. I don't know if there's a little more context that you guys would want to provide. And that's paper 24-033, Tufts Institutional Zone Discussion.
[Alicia Hunt]: So the current intention, Mr. President, is to have a draft for the 1st of June for people to start looking at. That is the plan from Innis. land use strategies. So we'll see. We'll look at it. I think it's a great question for the boards and the council. What do they want to do? How do they want to handle this? What's the next steps in a very high level way. We also have to put out an RFP for zoning consultant for like the next phase. And I will tell you that we have not had the bandwidth to really review that document and make any headway on getting that RFP out. It's frankly just a matter of. Man hours in the office to get that done on our side. It is there is a draft that's available to The Councilors on that subcommittee and the Members of the CD board that are on that basically the the working group as well as well as the mayor it's available to them all to look at and I am not aware of anybody having had the bandwidth to do more than acknowledge we have the last draft. The last time we put this out to bid and that we have kind of said we really should redo that now that we know with all of our lessons learned. So. I have no timeline on putting that out, although I will say it's my personal goal that we could have it out for consultants to look at during the summer. And then we could actually make decisions on hiring in September just because of the length of time things take.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Appreciate that. And I'll recognize Chair Carr and Councilor Leming in a second. I just want to. kind of echo the capacity question that Director Hunt just raised. I think even having it out in the summer with a decision in September is an ambitious timeline, certainly the council. We have to do this, we have to do the budget, and we have to do the five or six other things we're working on. So I think us being able to get together even in a planning and permitting committee meeting to even review a final product, never mind give comments on the stages before that is, would be ambitious to try to do by the end of June if it's running in parallel to this project. So this part of the project, so I just wanted to put that out there. I'll go to Chair Carr and then Councilor Lemke.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, President Bears. I would like to make a pitch here that we not rush the Tufts zoning. I feel like we've just had one brief conversation with Tufts so far, and I feel like we need to bring to come together and find out what we want. I don't know how we can create something without input from the city council and the city board to start from, because there's such a wide variety of different ways it can go and so many intersected things. I just don't think there's the time to do it properly. We're going to get Boston Ave done, I think, by June 30th. I can see that based on what I see in front of me tonight in the comments. There's a path forward there. I just don't see that on Tufts. By even getting a draft by June 30, I think it will dilute the time we have. I would really prefer that we gather more information and feedback, give it to NS, let them work on it in July, come back with knowing what our thoughts are to develop that draft. but not put something down that none of us have really seen before. I don't think that's the right way to approach something as sensitive as Tufts. And Tufts is gonna obviously have several, there's gonna be a dialogue back and forth for a month with Tufts, I think. And I just think it's, it just doesn't feel like it should be part of this process, just my own personal opinion, obviously.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chair Carr. And we'll go to Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, um, I can take a shot at, uh, uh, looking over the, uh, looking over the RFP. Um, just want to put that out there to, you know, commit myself to doing it because it's just 1 of those things that everybody can sort of put on the back burner. Um, but I. Saying that during a public meeting, you know, I'm kind of. Putting the expectation on myself. Um, yeah, with I mean, I don't think anybody thinks at this stage with regards to the test institutional zoning that will have any thing close to a finished product by. Any expect, like, we don't have in his past past June 30th. And that that's that cut off is something to keep in mind there when talking about the timelines. I think that having an initial draft out there is very useful for the public conversation because 1. We are going to have a good amount of public feedback between the memo that Tufts gave us and the feedback that we get from the June 1st session. And it will be very useful to the public conversation. To have something out there. So I feel like when people are kind of talking about the toughest institutional zoning and there's no drafts, like, there's no even there's no, like, it all just becomes very amorphous. And, you know, if there's something out there, then people can have, like, something to oppose or get behind. And that kind of starts that. Like, feedback process, so I feel like it's, it's useful for the public to just have something to. To look at some initial ideas on paper so that over the summer, they can sort of think about it. And then, of course, we'll, we'll get something back. Um, you know, the agreement said, we're not going to talk about anything. we're not going to have any meetings on this over the summer. And then you get back in the fall and then, you know, we'll, people have had those conversations around the community, people and individuals on the council and the CD board will have heard from folks. And I feel like we'll have a better idea of where it stands, but I just want to keep the conversation from being kind of vague for too long.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And I do wonder, thank you, Councilor Leming, I do wonder if, the word draft versus the word framework, I think it would be helpful to try to have, I think we need a milestone if we know that where this contract is ending, we need a milestone that has some sort of work product that sets the foundation for us to build on it either with a new team or whoever wins the next RFP or even internally with the planning development and sustainability staff. In September right we need some sort of milestone that develop some sort of product that we can take all the work that we've already done. And work from and I think the question that the thing that keeps coming with the tough institutional zone to me is what are the questions were trying to answer and it seems like we don't have. that all of the different models of institutional zoning are deficient in some way. And so the question is, what are we trying to do? And maybe if we could come up with three, four, five, six things that we're trying to control for to develop a framework, that might be a valuable work product and even something that could be brought to the June 1st info session with some options, just kind of my two cents. And I do see a member, Sean Began, so I'll recognize member Began.
[Sean Beagan]: Yeah, I was just thinking, Why don't we have Tufts give us their proposed zoning ordinance, what they want? Draft it fully, have them do it, and then us work backwards from there. What do we like? What don't we like about what they want? Takes the burden off our contractor who's only got another month and a half. Takes the burden off our planning department who's already overworked. They can do it. They know what they want. Let them draft it, and then we'll mark it up.
[Zac Bears]: I think there's value in a few directions there. One of them being that it seems like we might not like what they want. And I can see value on both sides of that question, right? One is let them put the things that we know we don't want on paper and then they've said it out loud. The flip side being, does that mean we're letting Tufts write our zoning or does it even appear to be that we're letting Tufts write our zoning? And I think we need to be very clear. And I think you were implying it, that we're writing, we're asking that question kind of in a negative. I don't want to put that in your mouth from ever being in, but.
[Sean Beagan]: I'm suggesting it in terms of from a practical standpoint. If we draft something and give it to them and they hate it, it's just going to be five more meetings of them browbeating us for what they want. let them draft it, and the changes we make may be less than you think, or we think. And plus, it saves the city money. We don't have to have our staff or our contractors doing the work. I'll go to Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: I think it's an interesting idea, Sean. Remember, Tufts did give us a memo. They've kind of told us not in a zoning map, but they have actually outlined what their preferences are for the zoning. They were quite specific about height and about a bunch of things, parking, and Rocco and the company, they've had a first pass at that. What I'm concerned about is when I see these maps, and we just went through with some Method Square, It took so many meetings to get boundaries to shift to just a little bit. It took us forever to get historic resources into the plan. These maps sometimes have an inertia and a will of their own. And I'm worried if the map is developed with Tufts without any input from the city board, with very little input, I think, so far from the city council, That that becomes the de facto plan and I just don't, I don't think it's a good idea to create a plan without an idea behind it that comes out of the city. The city, I think, owes in its clear direction of what they want, what we want for tough zoning to protect Medford to allow Tufts to grow. I'm not looking to make Tufts life hard, but we have a situation on Boston Avenue that is an absolute disaster. And one of the concepts behind whatever zoning we put together for Tufts has to be never again for what Boston Ave has become, because that is terrible. And a lot of people earlier spoke about that, and we need to assure Medford residents that they're not going to be in the shadow of Tufts for the next 50 years if they want a 10-story building, or they can use the Dover Amendment to get whatever they want if we give them opportunity. We have to start with something that we feel is right for Medford and fair to Tufts, and there is a reasonable compromise in that, in my opinion.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chair Carr. Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, I mean, giving The ability to draft the initial zoning, basically, let's, let's, um, you know, set the playing field for everything. I don't I don't think that's a great approach. And, uh, but besides besides that, like, if the. I feel it's not really money. In most cases, that's the issue. It's time that's spent in meetings, time that's spent scheduling things, time for both bodies to discuss, effort to do the outreach. I think the intention behind, a good way to summarize the intention behind the Tufts Institutional Zoning from what I've been hearing is, a way to allow Tufts to grow without the city totally giving up any leverage it has in that relationship. And that's the best way that I can think to summarize the direction that we'd like to go. And, you know, it, I think, I think it should be the city's consultants, uh, or planning staff with the capacity that they have to come up with an initial draft. And the initial draft could be something that, that nobody agrees with, but even having that will kind of like let people figure out what they want. It'll help get people's opinions out there. So that's why I think just like having something there, uh, would be, would be extremely useful for the conversation over the summer.
[Zac Bears]: Do we have any further discussion on this question at this time? It seems like we kind of have a general, general thought of how we're going to go forward, but maybe some of the specifics we'll need to discuss further. All right. Then we need to take a vote as a city council only to refer, oh, sorry, John, go ahead.
[John Anderson]: I think we should consider Mr. Bagan's proposal. By even though Tufts, we may disagree with everything they want, but it sets a limit on what they're going to ask for. Sort of like when you're selling your house, somebody puts a bid in. Well, you know you can get at least that. It seems to me the person who makes the first move actually loses something.
[Zac Bears]: We could certainly take a vote on such a motion. It seems to me that there's a potential for a motion, potential for a second. Outside of that, I, you know, consideration, no, not right now, okay. You know, consideration, it's in the air, it's been floated, it'll, I'm sure it'll be part of further discussion, so it certainly could be considered going forward. It sounds like we don't want to, have the motion on it right now, so that's heard. Let's dispose of our, we need to take some disposition votes tonight to move the process forward. So we do have the paper 26093, which is the Proposed amendments to the Medford Zoning Ordinance, Boston Avenue, Neighborhood Corridor District. That's for referral to the Community Development Board. So this is a vote of the City Council only. Is there a motion from a City Councilor to refer this to the Community Development Board formally? On the motion is Councilor Callahan, seconded by Councilor Leming. Any further discussion by members of the Council? Seeing none, Mr. Clerk, could you please call the roll?
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan. Councilor Leming. Yes. Councilor Milley. Yes. Councilor Scarpelli.
[Zac Bears]: Nope, we didn't hear you, George.
[Matt Leming]: Sorry about that, yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Tseng. Councilor Tseng is absent. He's absent. Vice President Lazzaro is absent. And President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, finally affirmative to absent. The motion passes and we've referred this to the Community Development Board. We will be scheduling the public hearing. The next time we will be having the discussion of the public hearing will be June 3rd. There may be a noticed meeting to continue the public hearing to June 3rd. Just FYI, but that would be on May 27th, but that will not be the discussion. It's the legal process, so I'm working that through with Danielle. June 3rd is the date to keep on your calendars. I don't think we need to do anything with the next paper. It's really just an updates paper. It's been on like four committees, so I think we can just leave that. We do have general public participation on the agenda, if there's any further public participation. All right, seeing none, in person or on Zoom, is there a motion? We'll go through the council and then the Community Development Board. Motion to adjourn by Councilor Malauulu, seconded by Councilor Callahan. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan? Councilor Leming? Yes. Councilor Malauulu? Yes. Councilor Schapelle? Yes. Councilor Tseng? Absent. Vice President Lazzaro is absent. President Bears?
[Zac Bears]: Yes, I'm affirmative to absent. The motion passes. Is there a motion on the Community Development Board to adjourn? I have a motion of Member Calagaro, seconded by Member Anderson to adjourn. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll for the Community Development Board.
[Rich Eliseo]: John Anderson?
[Sean Beagan]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Sean Began?
[Sean Beagan]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Page Buldini? Yes. Dina Coladuro? Ari Goffman-Fishman?
[Ari Fishman]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: And Chair Carr?
[Doug Carr]: Yes, sir. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: All right. That's six on the affirmative, none on the negative. Motion passes for both bodies and the meeting is adjourned. Thank you.
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