[Emily Innes]: We have talked mostly about Boston Avenue, held the second of our community meetings, and obviously we are now here with you all in our meetings with city officials, which of course still include public input. These are the meetings that we've had to date with the planning and permitting committee meetings. the public meetings and the beginnings of the joint hearings. And then here we are today on the third. So I'm going to turn it over to Paola to talk about the current conditions. She'll tell me when to move the slide and just kick you all off with the existing zoning district. So Paola? Yes, probably would be very helpful.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Hello, everyone. So from this first slide, I just want to mention that we are working on the Boston Avenue corridor and the Tufts Institutional. Today we will be talking about the Boston Avenue. So what you will see is the first northern part of the hillside, Boston Avenue, and then Boston Avenue South towards Ball Square. In here, it's the existing current zoning. We have five districts, commercial one, apartment one, general residential, office two, and industrial. And I will go a little bit more in depth in the, when we go into each of the both areas. You can go to the next one. I was expecting to change mine, sorry. I just want to mention here, these are your existing current zoning and how it works in the table of dimensional standards. A lot of the zoning is dimensional standards applied to one district. In the case of Medford it doesn't work in that way. It works that from the district you have different uses and dimensional standards change according to the uses and sometimes also change according to the district. So it's a little bit more complex. So this is how it works right now. So you will see when I mention that I will say different standards for different building types even if we are in the same district. And that is not how we will be using it later. And this is the general residential, industrial and office. So all of the districts that we have in the area. If later anyone has any comment or question, we can go back to the existing. So in the next slide here, what we see is the land use, the existing in the whole Boston Avenue. So what we have is the red is the commercial. So we can see some of these more grouped areas with the commercial. And then we have residentials in very different intensities. So from condo, apartment, eight units, four to eight, three, two, and single family. And then we have with Tufts, obviously it's the institutional. In the south area, because we do have industrial districts, we do have some industrial uses. Next one. So now we are in we're going to zoom in in the two areas that we are studying in the Boston Avenue. The first one is the hillside. What do you see in this bigger in the dash black line? That was the previous study that we did for the corridors. And right now what we are focusing is on the green line areas. So we have two corridor boundaries and those come from, came from the city council meetings previous to this one from, not city council, planning and permitting development. So what we can see here are four different districts. We have commercial one. So as I said, there are different standards for different uses. In this case, we have residential building is six stories, commercial building, sorry, yeah, residential building is six stories, commercial is four stories, and hotel, it can go up to 15 stories by right. So we can see this C1 at the south area of the Hillside Boston Avenue and then on the north where we have the Whole Foods Market. Then we have apartment one that allows for residential building up to three stories by right. The commercial building, it's not permitted. And then we will see later on the, do, we do have in this area some of commercial, which are in this case not permitted by this district. I'm just going to follow with the next that we have within our boundary is the office two. And these are, allows for six stories by right at the moment. So we can go to the next one. So here we can see those land uses. So what we can see is that the commercial uses are mostly in the commercial district, but we do have some towards that apartment one district and of course on the northern part of the hillside. We do have also different residential intensities. So we can see that on the northern part of the south area, sorry, there are three family apartments, four to eight units, and even apartment more than eight units. Some also commercial lots as well. And so here what we have is the non-conformity by use. And this means that when you see these colors, where you see a lot that is colored, it means that those uses in there are not allowed by the current district. So we can have obviously those commercial that I mentioned that are in apartment one, those are not conforming at the moment. What I want to mention is that we had some, and this comes as a proposal from the city staff, and that is that magenta pink boundary that is proposed to extend that boundary for the Boston Avenue, the upper hillside corridor. And so the proposal, it's, we can see it in here. We have the, we propose two different districts. This is Boston Avenue 1 and Boston Avenue 3. The second will be in the, in the southern area. And we do 1, 2, 3, that it depends on the intensity of the uses. So the higher the number, the in, the most intense. What we can see is the different sizes of the lots, the different building types, we see different building footprints, and that is, it's giving us already a different use and a different intensity, and that is why this difference. So in the southern area we see this very smaller lots, smaller building footprints, already triple deckers that are three stories and a half, some buildings that are three stories. And so the, what we have right now is that the whole BA1 district, that is the blue one, is three stories maximum height, but then we have this incentive zoning, which allows for plus one. And this plus one, so the total will be four. What does it mean, this incentive zoning, for somebody that is new to this? We have done this for other areas, like the squares or Salem Street or Mystic. And this is that we have a list of community benefits that a developer can choose from. And if he does those to a certain standard, then they can have that incentive bonus, which is usually a number of stories extra. So in this case, that will be plus one. And then we have the BA3. As you can see, the lots are a lot bigger. So that usually means that there is some potential to do a little bit of more massing and better transitions. And so for that one, we have also the existing zoning is six. We have a couple of buildings that are five story already. So the base district for that one is six stories and then plus two with incentive zoning. So the total will be up to eight. More in the detail, Emily will explain more. I just want to give the high level for that. So we have some pictures of the area just to have a little bit of a feeling if somebody don't know the area or don't remember exactly. So we are looking a lot of that a little bit of medium density for residential from four to from three to eight And in between units so a lot of these triple deckers and usually they are a little bit raised because of topography or some kind of half basement and so we have that three stories and a half and You can see it in the first on the left upper left and upper lower area with that topography difference And then the commercial area we have here the hillside hardware store We see that mix Which is a commercial building and then in front so it's two stories and one usually for the commercial Just keep in mind that mixes are not allowed. So that is why usually we have this that if it's commercial is usually one story and So we did some sections to understand better the area and what is the height that we are proposing. So how does actually see the building in relation with the immediate surrounding. So we have this cut through the hardware store, the hillside hardware. And the upper section that you see is basically the existing. So we have the Boston Avenue on one side, on the middle, and then we have on the right towards the rail tracks. And then, so this is basically that picture that we were seeing, that two levels commercial in front of that on the right of Boston Avenue, we have one floor commercial, and then crossing that there is a small duplex. So how that would change with the new proposal, we have that two options. One would be just keeping the interfaith building from Medford as is in the first option. So how does it look with the three plus one incentive? The one that you see a little bit lighter and with the dash, that's always the incentive. So that plus one. which is not by right, they need to do the incentives. And then on the lower part, you see if that would become one lot. So they will merge these two areas. How does what look like towards Emory Street, towards the neighborhood residential. There's also the shadows, so this is usually to just understand a little bit how those, where usually, where is the most impacted areas. In this case it's towards the right of the section, so towards obviously the north. And we have usually two different angles, one is 30 and another 60, so we represent that summer, winter more or less. So then this northern area, we have these two pictures. This is a very different area from the other one. We see a lot of bigger footprint. We see a building on the back. For the one on the right, that is the five-story building. Lot is going down there. There is a topography towards the trail towards the train tracks and then on the upper side Towards the south we see that common building that lab building which is four stories It's quite high from floor to floor. So it's a little bit more than your regular four-story building Cummins Foundation, yeah And Elizabeth Grady, yeah I So if we do a section over there, we are proposing six plus two. So what you see in the upper part is the existing, there is a commercial building one story east of Boston Avenue, and then we have that Elizabeth Grady building, and then the rail tracks. So right now that is five stories. And what could happen if all of those two lots would merge? And so we see that towards the east of Boston Avenue. So always when we are proposing this, it's always an idea. It doesn't mean that this is a project or that this is coming from nowhere. This is just to understand what could happen and what is the relation with the other side. So if six stories plus two, there would be a setback from the sixth story. And so how that impacts the area. So the next one is on the south, so we are moving now from Boston Avenue south area towards Ball Square and Broadway Avenue. So this is the existing, where we have the St. Clement Parish that is general residential at the moment. What does it allow is a single family duplex 2.5 stories by right, two and a half, and then row house or another permitted structure is three stories by right. And then on the other side, south from Warner Street or Harvard Street, we have industrial mainly. And that's where we see the Titan gas and car wash or the sphere apartments. There are some, the land uses, as we can see, we have some industrial, but not all of them. There is only one industrial building. The other ones are residential mainly, and then the commercial where the Titan Gas is, and then obviously the St. Clemens area, which is religious use at the moment. So this means that because the existing is an industrial, the nonconformity will be all the residential uses that we have in that area. And the proposed is these middle intensity from the BA1, BA3. So this is an in-between. And this is proposed to be also mixed-use district, sorry, five stories by, four stories by ride plus three with incentive zoning. So totaling seven. So what we can see in the area, as I mentioned, these are the apartments. So we have in the first one on the superior part on the left, we see the area of the Titan gas station. A little bit then further south, we see on the right, Boston apartment, this is four and a half stories, and then the southern part is the Sphere apartment, this one towards the Sphere apartment. This one is a mixed-use building, so commercial on the ground floor, residential above, and this is a five-story building. So when we look into a section here, we did the existing on that apartment, sphere apartment area. So what would it mean to be with the proposed zoning, the four minimum, not minimum, sorry, the four maximum and then the plus three with incentives. And I'm now towards to you.
[Emily Innes]: Okay, so now we're going to move from the images to the text, and what my goal is to give you, anybody watching, basically an understanding of what pieces are where in the zoning. I'm certainly not going to read every word, but just to be able to translate what you've seen into what the document is. I do want to echo Pella that when we do these FIT studies, it's really just to give you a sense of an impact None of these are proposed projects, but just a sense of what you have now and what could be there under the zoning potentially. So just to reiterate, BA1 is the transition area to the neighborhoods. These are all mixed use districts. It's the lowest scale of the three. BA3 is that area of hillside near the river. These are both into the northern part of our neighborhood corridor. And then BA2, that South Boston Avenue area, is the one that's kind of in between in terms of intensity. So there's a couple of different pieces in the zoning that we are changing. The first thing is to add these districts to the table of uses. And then so all of the uses that you'll see on the left hand side of these slides are existing uses in the table of uses for the most part. We're just adding them. I'm not showing all, or we're not showing all of the uses here. What we're doing is just showing those where there's a differentiation among the districts. So you can see, for example, that BA1 has a lot more of the lower scale residential housing. And then BA2 and 3 is really the higher scale, the multiple dwellings above six units or the mixed use above that. I know that dormitory fraternity sorority house has been a topic of conversation right now. In the current proposed draft, BA1, BA2 does not allow them. BA3 has them as a Community Development Board special permit. So that also lets you know that if you see yes, it is allowed. If you see no, allowed as of right or with site plan review depending on the intensity. If it's no, it's not allowed or in. And if it's CDB, it's a special permit by the Community Development Board. Some other examples of the differentiation among uses for these three districts, banks and financial institutions, for example, our Community Development Board special permits. This is because we are trying to follow the comprehensive plan. and really promote that walkable mixed-use environment there. You'll see that medical office and clinics, also community development board in one and two. Drive-through retail sales and customer service, you'll see the footnote there. We are examining the idea of allowing a drive-through pharmacy with standards. I'm going to show you what those standards are later in the presentation. However, you can see eating places with drive-throughs are not allowed, and a retail that is not pharmacy is also not allowed. A couple of industrial uses allowing for printing and publishing. This is near a university after all and research testing laboratory, life science facilities in BA2 and BA3, but not in BA1 except for the research and testing laboratory. Oh, is it? Sorry, thank you. I'll try it on this side. Too many laptops on this table. How's that? Better? Okay, great. Excellent. And then in the accessory uses, you can see the differentiation here. Some of these are exempt uses and other things that we've seen in the other zonings that we've been doing. So that table of uses, this is a separate section of the zoning. I'm going to move to the Boston Avenue Neighborhood Corridor itself. So you'll see it starts off with a purpose. This is similar to the other districts that we've talked about. And all of the zoning that we've been working on, it's primarily mixed use. So you see the variety of uses and building types, supporting jobs, economic development, housing, living within walking distance of jobs, goods, and services. That's been consistent. Where this one differs a little bit is the idea of thinking about these transitions to and from the Tufts University campus and allowing working and learning along Boston Avenue. And then the rest are fairly similar in terms of mixed use, multifamily, and commercial uses as a density to reinforce that non-vehicular travel. and the development standards, and I'll talk a little bit about more of those to provide the landscape and height buffers that have been part of our conversations. So Paula started off with height, because it's the easiest thing to see. So this just shows the base height of three, four, and six. And then with incentives, the additional stories provided that a developer can prove that they have met one or more of the criteria. in the table of incentives. And they're very similar to the ones that we've talked about most recently for Medford Square in terms of additional affordability, number of units or depth of affordability, preservation of historic buildings or components of the historic buildings, preservation of either local businesses or existing businesses, some parking in the incentives. So that menu is the same as it was for Medford Square. Other key things that we're looking at, the other dimensional standards, the lot area you certainly saw in BA1 that there are quite small lots there so tying the frontages to that we have the facade build out which is how much of the frontage, the frontage is that Lot line along the street, the front lot line, it's the length of that is the frontage and the facade build out is how much of that frontage has a building, has some sort of principle facade which may be that mixed use commercial and residential or all residential or all commercial. We talk about and have defined active ground floor uses, allowing historical conversions again, and then the setbacks. And although they are zero, remembering that consistent with the other zoning districts, including most recently Medford Square, that from a residential district, there is a setback requirement of 10 feet, and then there are step back requirements at the upper levels as well. and those are covered in the text of the dimensional standards. We have building coverage maximums. We also have a green score minimum of 25 and an ideal of 30. That ideal is also one of the incentives. Pervious surface, which is the surfaces that allow for infiltration of water, stormwater primarily. A waiver that if you cannot develop because of these step back requirements that would have to be approved to the community development board to offer a waiver. A waiver for a drop off zone to allow for better management of the curbs. and a waiver for dimensional standards for eligible historic buildings. Again we introduced those in Medford Square. For use standards we have used standards for this conversion of historic buildings to additional residential units and those are consistent again with the ones that we most recently prepared for Medford Square. And then we have new use standards for the drive-through pharmacies. Primarily these, I'm not expecting everybody to read these on the slide. They will be available after the meeting, but they're mostly related to queuing. We understand, of course, that people are concerned about traffic along Boston Avenue. We don't want to drive through to make that work, make that worse by having stacking on the street, so they're required to have sufficient space to queue for a drive-through window on site. There are also requirements about the design of the lanes and the design of the signage. And then finally as Director Hunter mentioned we did have a public meeting on Monday. We had great attendance. Thrilled to see so many there. We had a lot of good questions about the zoning itself. Some of them we were able to answer there. And I apologize if our summary does not meet with somebody's individual comment. We did have general support for four stories. That doesn't mean that everybody agreed. We did hear some concerns about eight story buildings in BA3. We had a lot of concerns about the transition from residential districts to the corridor. That's consistent with what we've heard before. And so we pointed them to some of the things that we've already done in terms of the step backs and the setbacks. And then we had some more suggestions for incentive zoning that were really quite interesting in terms of a minimum percentage of owner occupancy, a requirement to hire local companies as part of the contracting for any new buildings. and remediation of soil in industrial areas. We did talk through with other colleagues in our firm. Generally zoning doesn't speak to owner occupancy. It's silent on that. We were trying to think of a way that you could create an incentive for owner occupancy, but it got very complicated very fast. So we're thinking that zoning is unfortunately for I think the people who brought it up, it's not the appropriate level. or the appropriate place for it. Hiring local companies, I have seen as part of, for example, if it's city owned property, it's part of the land disposition agreement. It's not usually something that, it's not something I've seen in zoning itself. So I believe I have also, although it's been a while, I've seen city ordinances to that effect that are non-zoning ordinances. So unfortunately we don't think zoning is the right place. And then the remediation of the soil and industrial areas came up when talking about residential. There is already a requirement that if a residential use is going on a former industrial site, it under a mass environmental law has to be remediated to a certain standard. So that's kind of baked into that use. We do recognize that that is an issue, but it may be that the existing Massachusetts laws for remediation are probably going to override anything in the zoning. So just, we're happy to look into any of these further if so directed, but our initial thought was that unfortunately zoning either doesn't address it or it's addressed elsewhere in the law. And with that, I am going to stop. I'll just note for anybody who might have come in, because I can't see who's behind us now. If you came in later, we do have copies of the maps up here at the front. And of course, we have the boards in the back. And I'm going to stop sharing and turn it back to Council President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Emily. You know, that's a lot of information. Yes. And I know that some of us have seen it a few times now. I was wondering if you could maybe for folks who are just tuning in for the first time or who may have seen something that didn't come from the city or from you guys, if you could give a short summary of each of the districts and how they differ from the current zoning and the current conditions. I know you just kind of did a more extensive version of that but maybe, you know, a minute or two on each of the proposed sub-districts.
[Emily Innes]: As succinct as possible, always difficult with zoning. I'll start and then Pella fill in as desired. I think there's, and we talked a little bit about this on Monday night, is that when we are looking at zoning, we're looking at a couple of different things. One is what's existing now, how many non-conformities, that's why we talk ad infinitum about non-conformities. Is there a way we can make it easier for existing property owners to invest in their properties without having to go through a variance? So step number one, what we're doing can address those non-conformities. And then the next thing that we're looking at is a couple of different documents primarily for this area, the Medford Comprehensive Plan. and the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan that start to inform this idea of the walkable districts, the mixed-use districts. I think the maps that Paola showed of the existing land uses show that these are already mixed-use districts and the existing zoning doesn't reflect that. So the next step is how to address that. And then the third step is going a little bit deeper on the ground and understanding, and there's a reason that there are three separate sub-districts to your question, President Bears, is we have one section with these smaller lots. The type of developments that's going to likely come over time on those smaller lots is very different. This is in the BA1 district. from the type of development that's likely to happen in the BA3 where you have these larger lots, existing larger buildings on them. So thinking about how zoning will support these ideas of walkable areas but lead to different results. That's why you would have two different sub-districts. And then Boston Avenue South, same thing, different underlying conditions where the upper part is the apartment one or commercial or residential areas because Boston Avenue South had the industrial area in it, it already had. underlying existing conditions that over time have been shifting more to residential, but wanting to add the heights and dimensional standards that reflect what's there now, but also give that room for the incentives that would provide the public benefits. Probably more than two sentences, but does that answer what you were looking for on that, or can we go into more detail to help?
[Zac Bears]: And just, you know, if you could say for each of the sub-districts, you know, what are the main cross streets?
[Emily Innes]: Oh, you wanted like the actual, I'm so sorry.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and also like, what does the, what would the current proposed zoning allow in terms of height and build out?
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, okay. So, back to current proposed zoning. So, let me see if, yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: It would help if we partner on me saying what the known landmarks are.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, that would be great. Do you want to start with BA1, hang on let me go to a place where you can actually, yes I will do that.
[Alicia Hunt]: Mr. Chair, what I just suggested is that maybe we would partner and then I will name the known landmarks that people will say, oh, I know where that business is. And then Emily can speak to sort of what's currently allowed and what would be allowed. And there's actually one other thing that I highlighted on Monday that people hadn't really thought too much about. In our current zoning, we do not have any green requirements. We require open space, open space landscapes, but not permeable, not trees, nothing like that. So in all of this zoning, if the, and I wanna make sure I get it right, if the project is large enough to require site plan review, it would require a green score. And it did not require site plan review. This zoning requires a minimum permeable surface because right now people could in fact meet the open space requirement with paved yards and planters if they wanted. And so this would be actual permeable surface. So I did want to flag that for people because some people have said why change it all. And so there are some underlying things there that we think are good. So with that, we're going to share screen. We're not sharing.
[Emily Innes]: I wasn't going to share it because it makes it a little difficult to zoom in and out. Oh.
[Alicia Hunt]: Can you do that? Share and zoom in? So we were going to start first with the share just the window. So the first area we're going to talk about is the BA1, is the area around Boston is around near Tufts, just north of it. So it's the block across from starting kind of where the new dorm is being built and the residential house is next to it. That block between, there's a slice of businesses between Boston Ave and the railroad tracks. So that's one section there's a boss there's a Dunkin Donuts there there's actually a car repair shop or a gas station there and a couple of like a coffee shop and then the next block when you cross Winthrop Street you then have people know. Not modern pastry, Danish pastry. Sorry, never been able to keep those two straight. Danish pastry on the corner and across from that is the hillside hardware. I think you can kind of see it moving. That's actually where that red is right now. The red is around the Tufts Interfaith Center. So that's the area, that's the block that we're talking about. Right now the first portion of the block is a commercial and then there are some multifamily buildings just past that up the block. And on the other side there's a church. It's labeled Baptist Church. It has changed hands a few times and I think it's currently that. And then a parking lot, a small apartment building and then some small multifamilies next to it. That's the B.A. one. The current proposal there is to allow three stories with one of an incentive story. So that's one story taller than is basically allowed there for the for most of it because right now it's apartment one and commercial. The commercial areas have some loopholes that allow some much taller buildings, which we've flagged occasionally. And actually the commercial section would allow six story residential buildings right now. So the current plan recommendation there is four stories throughout. And it goes through the residential up to where on the one, the side across from the tracks is Lisa's Pizzeria and there is a dry cleaner there. So those are the, Not getting all the details, but and then there's a residential next to it. Then it's all residential. And so that where you see yellow is no changing at this time. This is a residential section. We're not touching it. And then the corner, I was just going to go to the blue corner. I can't actually remember what those businesses are, but there are a couple of businesses on the two corners. at North Street. And so the idea is that there those are embedded in the neighborhood. Those would stay in the mixed use one level. And then across the street is North Street. Actually there was a house that had an upholstery there that's been torn down. And those buildings that you see in the lower corner are all vacant, and then the two long buildings, one is the Cummings parking garage, and the other is the Cummings Foundation building. The parking garage actually has already gone through state plan approval to do more stories of lab or office on top of that, but they haven't had the market demand to build it yet. Behind it across the street is Walkling Court. And if I might take the liberty to say, since this was drawn up, we have the recommendation that maybe we want to take Walkling Court out of this because they actually have a planned development district for their property. They have pulled all their building permits. They have started construction. There is no reason to zone it. because they have special zoning for that property right now. And then the parcel next to it is Whole Foods Market, and we would recommend rezoning that in the BA3. There is the potential for some redevelopment at that location if it was rezoned. Not definite, but it's not off the table. And so that right now, the proposal is four stories.
[Zac Bears]: 6 plus 2.
[Alicia Hunt]: 6 plus 2, sorry. 6 stories by right and 2 incentive. Sorry, I lose track of some of the what's by right and what's incentive. That's the current recommendation on the table. Does that help place it all? And what's allowed there actually, so the Cummings building and the vacant buildings are currently zoned office two. And they're allowed to be 80 feet. Sorry, 80 stories. 80 feet, it was actually designed to do 80 feet. foot tall life science buildings but then the life science market crashed so nothing occurred there. I forget the number of stories it might be six stories but the intention was to be 80 feet because life science needs more floor to floor. So these recommendations have I think I don't remember the number of feet and stories. But it's a little taller than what's currently there is what's in the current recommendation. But we think it's important that there be stories as well as feet because if you build apartment buildings you're going to have 10 feet per story. And if you go for some kinds of life science or industrial or R&D You might have as many as 15 feet a story. We actually have some buildings in Medford that are 20 feet a story over by Wellington T Stop. The Cabot Road buildings are four stories and 80 feet tall.
[Emily Innes]: And actually, if I can, so the proposal for BA1, it's three as a base with a 38 foot height and then plus one to allow for a fourth story, a total height of 50 feet. That also, by the way, allows for a pitched roof as well as a flat roof. For BA2, it's four stories base at 50 feet. And then plus three to get to 86 feet in total height. And that is also either allowing for a pitched roof or mixed use buildings. The ground floor is typically higher than the residential floor to floor. So that allows for that. And then BA3, six stories base at 74 feet, plus two to get to eight at 98 feet is the current draft.
[Zac Bears]: And could you just show the map for the BA-2?
[Alicia Hunt]: So then we'll just go down to BA-2. So that area starts at the top, the north part. The north on the left is St. Clements. And we've had some back of house discussions talking about the fact that two more of the St. Clemens buildings have actually been left in the residential. You might want to consider whether you want to add those two St. Clemens buildings in as well. These two are St. Clemens and I believe this one's been vacant for a long time. And then across the street, we have Titan Car Wash, gas and car wash, and that has actually been in front of the CD board and the zoning board to get some, they've permitted 40 units with one commercial. I believe it's four stories if I remember correctly. It hasn't gone to construction yet, but they have been permitted for that residential. And then on the other sides of the track are a number of commercial and industrial buildings there. And then further down the block is the sphere building, which looks a lot like townhouses. It looks like townhouses. I don't know if it has a name off the top of my head. And then the sphere housing is the apartment building just past that. The parcels that are just past that, that are left industrial, I'll remind people the reason they were left that way is because we did an extensive study with Somerville about Broadway and about how to handle parcels that cut the city line so that they exist in both Medford and Somerville. And so this bottom section, it's our recommendation that when we come back and do Broadway, and really dig into that study that was done about how should we handle those and coordinate with Somerville and still see where they stand, that that last few parcels, which includes some MBTA land, should be handled with that as part of the results of that study. That's why you see that. The really weird triangle is because that is the shape of that parcel. And the recommendation here, or the current proposal, what's on the table is four stories with three incentive. Which I might say I do actually think that that's a little bit high for the two buildings I suggested adding because they're in the block with the residential buildings. They're like back to back with them. On the other hand right now there are three stories allowing four stories there would perhaps incentivize some redevelopment. They're all owned by the Catholic Church. We'd love to see them get redeveloped and stop being vacant.
[Zac Bears]: All right, thank you. I appreciate the summaries. We'll go to questions from, well, actually, one more thing. Were there any relevant updates other than the use conditions for the drive-through pharmacy from our last meeting? Anything else to share from the discussions that we had and what you've shared so far?
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm not thinking of any. So the one other little thing is that the Tufts Interfaith Center, I was actually confused myself by the map. Emily had to clarify it for me. The reason it's inside the dark dotted line but not blue is because the dark dotted line was showing us what was in the area we were talking about last year when we discussed this for our memory. The blue was showing just the hillside hardware building. One thought we had, and I will caveat this, without talking to Tufts about this. So I've talked to Tufts about trying to redevelop the hillside hardware, and there are a number of problems with and difficulties, constraints they're running into, including the fact that the building is in too much disrepair to just renovate. But when you back up to a residential district, it then has some requirements about how that works. And if the interfaith center was in this BA1 district, MA1, whatever we're calling it, Then they would not be literally backing up to a residential district and it would in fact not be a residential building. It is their own property. And so that might loosen up some of what they can and can't do with that hardware store building. I don't know for sure but it seemed to give them some more flexibility potentially even allowing them to use the driveway next to the Interfaith Center as some, you know, back entrance for their building to provide some additional help. So we thought including that one parcel in the zone may help that development project. I don't know, but it seemed to us that it might be. It certainly wasn't hurting anybody by including that from what we could see.
[Zac Bears]: All right. So just wanted to check in because it sounds like The main, you know, we had some comments early on in the previous meeting. You know, they weren't necessarily direction for you guys to take. So I think tonight is the, you know, we'll have some questions from councilors and community development board members. I'll try to keep a list if when you speak there's something that you would like to kind of, give direction to the zoning consultants and planning staff to make an amendment to the proposed zoning. I'll try to keep a list of that and then we can go back at the end, see what the two boards agree on for that and then we'll provide you direction. I just wanted to understand kind of what the comments at the previous meeting, how you had taken those.
[Alicia Hunt]: Just to be clear, we were very clear Monday night that we were not there to take public comment from the public. That if they had opinions, we, they should bring them here to this Emily's sort of summary of generally what we heard was not an attempt to convey all the public comment. We strongly discourage people from just voicing opinions but rather bring the opinions here tonight. It was interesting to get some new ideas and to understand what their clarifying questions were about.
[Zac Bears]: Great. All right. With that I'll go to questions from the council and I see Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Yes, thank you so much, everybody, both the members of the public for coming out to to offer. any feedback and questions on this, as well as members of the Council and Community Development Board, INUS, and the planning staff for all the hard work that you put into this. I would, this is more of a comment on some of the feedback that was received at the June 1st community meeting, because it said there that folks were asking about putting owner occupied requirements into the zoning as well as requirements to hire local companies would just like to say that there are ordinances which could incentivize owner occupancy for for certain things. Typically that's outside of any sort of zoning. So we'd just like to back that up if folks did want to bring up ideas for differentiating between owner occupied properties and rented out properties, that's definitely a conversation that could be had elsewhere. In terms of hiring local companies, interestingly, in a recent draft of the vacant building ordinance, I did bake something in there about a requirement to hire local companies for that. That did get flagged by legal in that draft as something that could potentially be like a contract issue. And they said that generally stuff like that wasn't really allowed. So a little bit more investigation there. But I think that based on that, it could be a no-go in terms of putting rules like that into any sort of local ordinances. But yeah, I just wanted to expound on two of those in case folks did want to bring them up in the comments tonight. Thank you. Thank you very much.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Leming. Thank you, Councilor Leming. Do we have any further questions or comments from members of the Council? Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: Thanks. I'm just going to adjust so I can read. I actually want to read a comment from someone and it's about a very it's one of the definitions. So I think it will apply citywide and a little bit of context just I don't know how much you guys know about the home sharing proposal which I'm sort of leading, it's a wonderful, it's a great solution for other cities that have many of the same demographic issues and housing issues that we have. We have a larger proportion of seniors than we've ever had before. It's about 24% of the population, I think, don't quote me, that's about right. And many of them live in homes that are, there's either one or two people living in a home that has four or five or six bedrooms. And home sharing is a wonderful way to help them stay in their homes longer, get a little bit of a discount on their mortgage, and get a little help around the house as they age by sort of handholding and matchmaking them with a younger person who is looking for a housing situation and can help them around the house. So the reason I give you some context is I'm looking at page 12 under accessory uses number 7 and it says renting of one or two rooms without separate cooking facilities to lodgers within a dwelling unit to one or two total lodgers. And so that is pretty much what the home sharing will be. It'll fall into that category. And so the person who wrote this email, I don't think she minds that I'm sharing that it's Roberta Cameron who is helping with the home sharing project. She says, in the table of uses, I believe strongly that we should not be mandating parking for renting bedrooms to one or two lodgers. Renting rooms to lodgers is an important component of our naturally affordable housing supply. Since these rooms are often rented well below market rates, it can help to offset housing costs for lower income homeowners. The boundary between lodgers and other household members can be porous, as they may be care providers, friends or family, exchange students or guests for any length of time. Most importantly, having at least a decade of experience with guest household members who are typically working adults myself, She says, the vast majority of people who occupy rooms do not have cars. The requirement to provide an off-street parking space to lodgers will eliminate the choice of many individual homeowners to share their extra rooms. Homeowners and prospective lodgers can assess whether the availability of pavement surrounding their property is appropriate to meet their needs, or if they would prefer to have a garden, a tree, or space for their vehicle. And they can decide accordingly whether the available arrangement will work for them. When we should be reducing barriers to housing diversity, this measure is needlessly creating a new barrier without solving a problem. She does also add, aside from this, I'm supportive of the proposed zoning for the Postman Ave corridor as is. I think it strikes the right balance, although I would like to ensure that we have strong and lasting public benefits as incentives for greater diversity. So I just wanted to bring that up and make a suggestion that as we consider parking requirements, that we do consider lodgers differently from how we consider other sort of by per unit parking requirements around the city. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor, oh, Councilor Malauulu.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you. And thank you again for all of the different diagrams and ways of breaking this down to kind of see some of the changes in here. One of the questions I had was, I know you showed it on the screen as well, but I think I was the one a couple of meetings back that brought back up the drive-through for the pharmacy. I think, you know, some of the comments about allowing for seniors to have access to it, that it's easier for them to not have to get out of the car, et cetera. to be able to have that drive-through. I could only, I was trying to see if I, I didn't think I saw it within the pack. I was trying to read it quickly, but in terms of the feasibility that you're seeing in that area, do you mind just kind of sharing again, like, your thoughts on it or what else needs to be done to see how much of a traffic, because I'm not trying, certainly not trying to create more traffic, but I do hear the need of people aren't not able to, you know, get out of their car and utilizing the drive-through. I just wanted to see if you could just share a little bit more feedback on that.
[Emily Innes]: So, thank you, Councilor. It was interesting, I was mentioning this to somebody else the other day who's a parent of a young child and she said, oh yes, drive-through pharmacies, please. Not a Bedford resident, we were talking about a different zoning proposal but, So it was interesting going back and looking at which standards would apply to a drive-through pharmacy because a lot of the standards were more focused on fast food retail. So I had talked with Director Hunt about the issue of queuing and how that is likely to have the largest traffic impact because of it spilling out. So I'll go through the recommendation. This is obviously a draft and so any pharmacy that's going to have a drive-through obviously has to meet the other parking requirements. Right now I have suggested that it just be no more than one combined teller and pickup window. is allowed unless they can show good cause for separating those windows into two windows and they would have to make that case to the community development board who would then allow for a single teller window with a single pickup window. Window locations would have to be or shall be located to minimize the impact of direct glare from headlights in the queue. on residential properties that are in line of sight from the queuing lane. A minimum of three queue spaces is required per window. I found that standard in a couple of places. Dimensions for queue spaces have to be at least 10 feet in width and 20 feet in length so that there's a defined standard for those three spaces. Each queue lane has to be clearly defined, designated so as not to conflict or interfere with other pedestrian or vehicular traffic. The stacking area shall not be located adjacent and parallel to a street or public right of way unless the review authority determines that there's no feasible alternative. That obviously would be the CD board for a site because this would come up for a site plan review. And then signs, the entrance and exits have to be clearly marked to show the direction of traffic flows by signs, pavement markings, and raised curbs. So as I was pulling a bunch of the different standards together, it's how do you keep the cars off the street? How do you minimize the impact of pedestrians and vehicular traffic? How do you separate those people who are parking from those people who are going through the drive-through? There was one section on accessibility standards for Windows, for ADA compliance for Windows. That seemed to be covered by other industry standards and other ADA requirements, so I didn't put it in here, but it's certainly something to think about. I don't know if any of you have ever driven up to, say, a drive-through bank and you're in completely the wrong car. for the facility that they put you either in the car that's too high or the car that's too low. So we might consider, given that one of the populations for a drive-through pharmacy window are people who do have limited mobility, we might consider adding that as a standard as well, just as kind of a belt and suspenders. But those are the issues that I was thinking about as I pulled those together.
[Liz Mullane]: OK. Thank you. I appreciate it. I just wanted to I appreciate you taking the time to look through those different aspects of it. And I guess in terms of how you decide or how you figure out what kind of impact that would be traffic wise is it just what you know or have seen in other areas or how exactly do you determine if having a drive through like that would impact that area as much.
[Emily Innes]: That's going to have to be on a development by development case and they're going to have to show that as part of their application. Just the reason being are we talking about a pharmacy that's on a corner with one busy street and one quiet street is a pharmacy located mid block on a busier street. What is the configuration of the entrances? So that I think is, that would have to be site by site. It would otherwise be too difficult to make assumptions about that. But I think the queuing factor in the discussions was the highest, but get, those cars should not be stacked up on the street. So that was the biggest piece.
[Liz Mullane]: Okay, thank you, I appreciate it.
[Emily Innes]: You're very welcome.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Any further questions or comments by members of the council at this time? Seeing none, I'll turn it over to you, Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: All right, before I start talking about with the various board members, I have a brief presentation I'd like to give. Just some of my thoughts so they have some graphic quality to them. I have some photos and some pieces of the zoning that I'd like to share with people to explain my perspective on this. Okay. So a couple of early comments. I really appreciate that this plan goes back a couple of years far before I was on the board. But I think I have some fundamental disagreements with a lot of pieces of this plan. And I'm going to go through a couple of sites and go through them. Because I feel like we just had a very successful effort with the Medford Square zoning. I think that the Salem Street zoning that preceded it, that caused an incredible backlash in the city, was far less successful. And I think the approach to the zoning feels to me closer to Salem Street than it does to what we had in Medford Square, even though a lot of things in Medford Square are here, but some things are not, and I think they need to be. One is the commercial boundaries of the proposal are far beyond what's there now. We appear to be trying to extend the commercial boundaries to make more of Boston Ave a commercial zone. Every time there's a store on a piece of a lot, we tend to grab some three or four houses around it and zone them up to what that store is so that we can have potentially a bigger building at some point or a more commercial zone with more shops, more height, et cetera. I just don't agree with that approach in a significant number of spaces along the corridor. The second is that I think the heights are simply too tall. When I look at BA2 and BA3, they really impact the character of Boston Avenue, the character of the neighborhoods around them. There's a lot of two-family houses that have been there for 100 years that will be really negatively impacted by this. And I'll show some examples when I get to it. B3 is one that is really troublesome for me because it's 98 feet at a maximum number with incentives. That is only nine feet less than the Tufts dorm that's being built right now, which is universally described by hundreds of people I've met, as the worst building they've seen in Medford, a complete disaster for Hillside. We couldn't stop Tufts from doing it, but we should not do it to ourselves. That's what we should not do. And 98 feet to me is a bridge too far. I want to talk a little bit about neighborhood quality and impact. There are a lot of places where we should just leave houses as they are. There's houses along Boston Ave, triple deckers, seven in a row that just, there's no reason to change them. And there's also houses that go back off Boston Ave that are on Hillsdale and Adams, but they're being rezoned and that would change the character of those neighborhoods. And I think people who buy houses in those neighborhoods don't want to live on Boston Ave. And I feel like they're almost being forced to do that with the new zoning. They're being kind of put in that Boston Ave bucket where I don't think they belong. I think this was true on Salem Street. And I think we have to go back to Salem Street and remove some of those properties because I think some of those neighborhoods should be left as they are. Let me jump ahead to a couple of examples. What I'm proposing is really a little bit different. BA1, I'm saying go four stories, 50 feet, with one to get to 60 feet, because I think in many of the cases where that occurs, it's actually a reasonable scale. because of what's around the neighborhood. But on BA2 and BA3, I'm saying limit it not to 86 feet, but to 70 feet, because 70 feet is just at the point where it becomes a high rise and where wood frame becomes very expensive to build. You're not going to have a lot of steel buildings on this site. You're going to have some podium buildings, one or two floors of parking with retail on the ground. and then four or five stories of wood frame above. That's what the sphere building is, which we looked at earlier. That's a great model for a lot of this corridor. So I'm proposing that BA2 get maxed out at 70 feet and BA3 85 feet max. And it's really critical that these are not on Boston Ave, that they step back from Boston Ave, that they're not 85 feet on Boston Ave, but they're 85 feet by the railroad tracks where I don't think the commuter rail trains care if it's an 85-foot building, but they do care on Boston Ave a lot. So let's talk about, I just mentioned that what I'm looking for change in BA3. I'm glad to hear what Alicia said, because I certainly agree with it, that we want to remove Walkling Court completely from this proposal. You can see the rendering on the left side. I view that as a really successful zoning. Six stories along the railroad tracks, four stories in the middle, three story townhouses, then you have residential buildings. It's a perfect step up. We shouldn't do anything to it because it's a good design. It hasn't even been built yet, so let's leave it as is. And I think there's a strong feeling with some people, obviously the planning board believes it as well. I think some of the people on the city board will also agree to that. These are the Boston Ave, Winthrop Street, Topeka Street. These are the seven triple-decker houses that are being proposed to be zoned so that they could be up to 50 feet tall, I think four stories in the base zoning. Again, I mean, these buildings are solid, really dense housing. I don't think you can have a continuous retail along Boston Ave. I don't think there's the foot traffic for it. I don't think there's the demand for it. I like to focus the retail where it is and build it higher and better than it is now. And that's really, you know, where the church is, where the apartment building is, the three-story apartment building, all the way to the Danish coffee house, all the way to Nick's Pizza. All those buildings could be four or five stories tall and I think it would be great. Improved retail, more shops, more restaurants, more people living above them. But I don't think taking the houses around these areas are the right approach. These are the seven, or I think it's seven or eight, three families that I think we should just leave alone. Let's see. Yeah, again, this is just more of the same with the houses that are really on the side streets from Hillsdale and Adams being part of it. Moving to the south now. Again, this is a great new building that was built. Four stories of wood frame over one story of a little bit retail and parking underneath. This is zoned for 85 feet. This building is only 55 feet. Imagine that building with three more stories. It's a really big impact on the houses across the street. Five is a lot. Eight is, in my opinion, a bridge too far. So I think 5 over 1, 4 over 1, those are good buildings. And the next two are the St. Clements sites that I'm proposing we add to the zoning. I'm not against zoning. I want to just put it in the right place. This is the St. Clements High School. This is in the zoning. But again, we're talking about a potential for an, I think it's an 85 foot, tall building on this site. That's a 35 to 40 story 40 foot tall building. You have to almost more than double it. And for the people who live on Saint Clemens Road, right along the edge here, like their world now is a sheer wall. And I just think There's a better way. We can add a few floors to this building. This building needs to be redeveloped into more housing, but I think it's too tall. So I'm proposing that it goes to BA1, which could be, again, four stories with a little incentive for historic to maybe go to five stories. You can build on top of that building, build two more floors, and I think nobody would blink an eye at it. Same thing. This is the building that was not in the zoning. The other one was, excuse me, the previous one, but this is the St. Clemens Elementary School. Again, three stories. Again, I think we can go at least another story, maybe two, up to 50 feet, maybe a little bit more. And the rectory next to it is the same thing. That's all one big campus. I think there's a development opportunity there, which makes sense, but it needs to be, sensitive to its neighbors, and its neighbors not just who abut it, but who are across the street from it as well. Those neighbors need to be thought of in the same way. So those are my big picture comments. I don't know how anyone on the council or even the city board feel about these because I just distributed them to Mark yesterday. So I think I'm not anti-development. I'm an architect. All my clients are developers. I've built buildings in Medford that are bigger than some of these buildings. We can do it right, but we have to do it very carefully and very sensitively. And I know that the folks in the city board are very sensitive about adjacencies because I've worked with them for the last six months and we've been very careful when we approve a building that it not negatively impact the buildings around it to the degree possible with still having the zoning. So with that, I will now ask the rest of the board to raise their hands and I will start.
[Zac Bears]: Chair, could you go back to the chart that you.
[Doug Carr]: Yes, sir.
[Zac Bears]: Great, thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Go ahead. Do you have a question?
[Zac Bears]: I've got to read it first.
[Doug Carr]: All right, let me give you a hard copy maybe. It's there, next page. I'll stop sharing. And who on the CD board would like to offer some thoughts? Anyone? Sorry, I'm having trouble seeing. Dina. What numbers do you have?
[Zac Bears]: If you press the request button, then it'll show up green. The one with the face. There you go. Oh, this one.
[Dina Caloggero]: I want to thank Ines for putting this together and I was at the June 1st too and I attended so I saw it again and I learned even more. One of the things that I did and I also did it with Medford Square is I walked around the neighborhood and I have to concur with some of the observations that Chairman Carr observed as well. I walked along. an area that I'm very familiar with. My children went to St. Clemens and I looked at the building and I saw that it's three and that's kind of crazy because some of the people that I know very well live behind that and a building at that height would would be terrible. It really would be. We really don't want to do that. Some of the other things that I noticed in addition to the height was when we're looking at the area around the old Elizabeth Grady site, the building does drop down like two stories near the bridge. But the buildings in the front are very close to Boston Avenue. They are level with the ground. a maximum 98-foot tall building would be terrible. I wouldn't want to live there. I really wouldn't want to live there. There is a pizza shop across the street. There's a nail place. And there's small businesses. And right next door are two and three family houses that are very well kept and maintained. You can tell that the families really care about their properties. So I concur with on the changes on the height which he has dictated, which he has really identified. So thank you. I didn't mean to use that word, but let's just say. So the other thing that I did notice is some changes that I would make. to the use tables, okay? So again, walking around, looking at what is there. And one of them, I noticed that there's a new definition of co-housing. Is that new or has co-housing always been in the zoning requirements?
[Emily Innes]: Sorry, just a little bit of occurring there. Co-living is the one that was taken out. Co-housing was added two years ago now? Yeah. Yeah. So that's already in your table of uses. That's not a new table. It was always there. Yeah.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay. Cool. And the only reason I ask that is that senior housing, it goes to the community development board, but co-housing is a yes all the way across. I was just wondering the reasoning behind that, why co-housing gets a yes and senior housing gets a, needs a nod by the community development board. That's my first question. I have a bunch of them.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you. Co-housing is a the ability of people to choose to live together. And it was not seen as a perhaps as much of a impact as those larger senior units might have been. I think that was the thinking behind it. But I'm pretty sure we just went with what had already been done. Right.
[Dina Caloggero]: It's like we're people that live together on the same house and
[Emily Innes]: Right. Yes, that's fine.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay, that's fine.
[Emily Innes]: I mean as a very high level. Yes, you are more of the expert. That's not going to happen. I'm sorry. Did I give the wrong definition? I apologize. I defer to you. I'm sorry. If I gave the wrong definition, I apologize. I defer to you. I wasn't.
[Anna Callahan]: Yeah just just to clarify so co-housing is like an apartment building right. It's and many senior living spaces are I mean really definitionally co-housing. So the difference in co-housing and a regular apartment building. is that in co-housing, there are some shared spaces. So you'll have individual apartments, and then you may have a shared kitchen and dining room. You may have some shared spaces that people use for different things. Could be a room where there's children's toys and the kids can play together. There are some shared amenities but there are always separate apartments and so and those apartments have kitchens and it's just a normal apartment building but with some shared amenities and a lot of senior living places are that. But but they simply don't limit the difference between co-housing and senior housing is it doesn't limit it to only seniors. Anyone can is allowed to live there.
[Dina Caloggero]: The things that I will strongly suggest is you have under the definition section under section 9412 a bunch of definitions that you're going to check. I would seriously put on that list neighborhood medical office because it's one of those things that If you look at the definition we want to make sure that we don't run into the same problem with Salem Street on that. Right. Because there's some loopholes in that definition. We want to make sure. So until the definition is clearly identified I suggest that the Community Development Board also take a look at neighborhood medical office as well. OK.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you and apologies after saying we took co-living out. I think I gave the co-living definition. So I have it in front of me. So the last meeting that we had just so everybody knows on May 13th. I'll move it forward. The last meeting that we had on May 13th, we had brought forward a number of definitions that were already in the zoning except for co-living which we brought back because there had been some questions about how things like dormitory, fraternity or sorority house and other kind of situations in which multiple people are living together. So we brought those back just so during that meeting there could be a conversation with the definitions in front of everybody. The neighborhood medical office, that was actually redefined, as I recall, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, during the Salem Street discussion. So we looked at it and created that new definition and you have it there. Do you want me to read it?
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, if you want to read it since you've got it. So I'm actually reading from our zoning that is already codified, or already adopted. And I can share a link in the Zoom to where this default, the current zoning ordinance is online. neighborhood medical office, office of a physician, dentist, or other medical practitioner not located in a clinic or hospital as defined in section 94-12 definitions. The office area shall not exceed 1,500 square feet of gross floor area shall have no more than five employees and shall operate only between the hours of 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. So this was designed to be a smaller neighborhood office that would not be a high traffic area, would not be disturbing the neighbors early in the morning. Right. That was in response to the Salem Street discussion.
[Dina Caloggero]: I would recommend that under the neighborhood medical center we put community development board on it just to make sure that that new definition works so we don't run into the same problem with Salem Street. Another page I'm looking at doggy daycare. I have a dog. I love dogs. I do. I love my dog. I had I have a friend who is a nurse and she works overnight and she lives. right next door to a doggie daycare center and it's in Stoneham. 20 dogs barking all day. So because of the high density of the Boston Avenue corridor, I highly recommend that that be Community Development Board approval as well because my poor friend has shifted to days, thank God. So let's consider that. Under Section 8, motor vehicle related use, I recommend that that also at least be Community Development Board. We need gas stations and every once in a while I need my battery checked. I need to have my fan belt adjusted as well. And I think putting a direct no there really prevents any type of development of needed service to your cars. And I would say the same for light repair establishments under Section 2. I mean, we did it from Method Square where we limited banks. I'm sick of banks in Method Square, too. So let's take a look at this and at least approve the places, but let's not give it a full-blown no. Under Section J, plumbing or carpentry shop, service similar or repair shops, we have no all the way across. Why is it no it should be you can have a light repair shop you could have a contractor set up a little business there a plumbing location. I don't know why it says no. I would also consider changing that. Go ahead. Sorry.
[Alicia Hunt]: So I actually just want to share with you right now one of there's a case that's been going through the ZBA. And what it is is that in a residential neighborhood in Medford people had started a gutter business. And now that gutter business is loading and unloading their trucks in the morning next to people's homes. And it's really disruptive to the neighbors. And so they've come out and said this isn't allowed. This is not a home business. This shouldn't be okay. And so trying to hit the balance where you might actually be back up against homes of something that has the potential to be noisy versus something that is not. And how do you control that? And I think that when we went through the list, like our gut instinct is that a plumbing place could be noisy, loading and unloading trucks and stuff. Now, in theory, anybody can be noisy because you can have your trash emptied and you have dumpsters and your trucks back up, so anything can be noisy, but versus the like, by definition is part of the work. Now, if somebody wants to teach us that plumbings are not, I don't actually know. Nobody's complained about one of them. I just wanted to share that there's actually a case like that going through the ZBA right now.
[Dina Caloggero]: That's fair. I agree with that. The other thing that I think we should consider is I think it was May 13th we saw a proposal to add another type of residential use to the table. And I think it's purpose built student housing which is a totally different concept. than the, what is it, 107-story, 107-feet building that's at the top of Tufts University. And believe me, I walk Boston Avenue almost every day. I go by Nick's Pizza and I go by Temper and all that, and I just look in amazement like a minion at the size of that mammoth building. But I do think that we could include some type of residential student housing that is privately owned, that is scaled appropriately to the zoning in the need in the area. and will also generate tax revenue for the city. I do feel that I agree that students do not require cars, as many as the residents, and I strongly feel that with some additional student housing for Tufts University, they will pull some of the students from the surrounding neighborhoods. Just alone in my street, I have seen two family houses that have been redeveloped beautifully the first time, wonderful houses redeveloped, pristine lawns, perfect trash cans. But what happens? You get an absentee landlord. The absentee landlord leaves. It is occupied by students. They're transient populations. They're not part of the community. They're really not. They're here for a couple of years. They leave. We have noise, rats. problems, and people that I have grown up with are gone. And it's really the coziness and the warmth of the area has been lost. And I do think that if there was a concept where we could have student housing, because there's always going to be student housing around the Hillside area, and I know in South Medford, you're not going to get away from it. But if it was done in a way where it was managed appropriately and it fit the need of what was needed in the neighborhood, it wasn't this behemoth 107 foot building. I think it would work, and I think we should give it a try with the right ordinances in place to do that. And regarding traffic, one of the things I have to say about traffic is that, yes, people have cars. People need to drive in and out of Medford. Not everybody can take the train to work. I'm a health surveyor, and I need to take my car. But one of the things with Medford is a problem, and we all know it. is that we're a cut-through city. When I want to go to Route 2, I go down Boston Avenue. I do it. I do it. I cut through. I do it all the time. People cut through Medford Square. So the issue with traffic is not only the number of cars that we have, it's the basic cut-through nature of the city that we live in. So I would make the recommendation to add that type of residential use with the correct ordinances in place with the correct registration for the students. I know that there are at least three students that I know. that use driveways in my street, and they go to Northeastern, Suffolk University, and they go to BU. They go up the street, they take the green line. and they go to school and they park their cars in the driveways in my neighborhood. So it isn't just Tufts University that would benefit from it. It would be other students as well. And the benefit that we would get as a city is increased tax revenue, which we desperately need. The 107 story building from Tufts University is not providing any tax revenue to the city at all. The other thing I did like was the incentive on waste management for hazardous materials, hazardous waste remediation. I think it's a really good idea. The other thing that the architect presented at that meeting, which I thought was great, was that it is very difficult to build underground parking garages around the area of the BA3 and any of the hillside area because of the water table. I thought that was a great point. I said I didn't even think of that. I didn't even think of that. Thank God he's here. So I think we should also consider that and some other types of incentives that would be beneficial not only to the developer but also to the the really quaint neighborhood of the hillside that I walk a lot and I've really enjoyed. I loved walking around this time because it wasn't snowing. Thank you for listening to me.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Dina.
[Zac Bears]: If I may, just really quickly, Dina. Doggy daycare by special permit, allow service station uses. And I'm not saying these are in, I'm just trying to keep a list of what the specific ones were. Add a purpose built student housing use, was there one or two other?
[Dina Caloggero]: I agree with the plumbing. Let me see what else they had. Medical, the neighborhood. The neighborhood medical office, I think it should be community development board until we try out the new definition.
[Zac Bears]: All right. So just to make sure it works. Neighborhood medical use office by special permit CDB.
[Dina Caloggero]: Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: Got it.
[Dina Caloggero]: Gas stations. Yeah. And then of course I agree with Chairman Carr's discussion on the height changes.
[Zac Bears]: And I think I had Doug, I can do yours now too. I had the BA1 remove certain residential properties and change to four base plus one incentive. BA2 add the elementary school and rectory properties, change to four base plus two incentive adjacent to the tracks, four base plus one incentive west of Boston Ave.
[Doug Carr]: I think both St. Clement's site and the rectory and the elementary school, I was switching from BA2 to BA1 because... I just wanted to... Sure.
[Zac Bears]: So I had that as the 4 plus 1. Gotcha. I think we should talk about that because I think we're using the geographical formatting and we kind of didn't want to... I think now we're saying that the district should be contiguous, so I want to make sure that we, I'm trying to capture the change without necessarily saying it should be a different zone.
[Doug Carr]: Yeah, we should, yeah, let's just get the boundaries, I think that's the first step.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. And then BA3, remove walk-in court and change to five base two incentive. Right.
[Doug Carr]: Correct.
[Zac Bears]: All right, great.
[Doug Carr]: Okay, I'm going to go to Ali next online because she tends to be last and we, that's just not fair, so I'm going to unmute you. Ari, can you go ahead?
[Ari Fishman]: Thank you for recognizing me, and thank you to Innocenco and everyone who's been working on this. I overall like where we are with this plan. A few specific comments. I agree with the removal of Walkland Court, as well as Roberta's comment about lodging parking. I think that that should not have a parking minimum. I'm also interested in allowing more growth at that whole foods parcel, and commend the needed changes about green space. I also agree with the permission and encouragement of well-designed student spaces, including private ones, to move the student population out of the existing housing stock, freeing it up for permanent residents. Moving into some stuff where I'm disagreeing with the previous speakers, I am overall a fan of higher heights, more density, and not as tied to preservation of all old buildings as a chair car. This is a difference between us and I think is an area where there are different opinions around the city and where reasonable people can disagree. I also want to remind everyone that zoning does not mandate changes using the example of those seven triple-deckers. If they're working well for their owners, great, they won't change. We don't even know if they're owned by the same owner, and I assume they're not based on how they look. However, if there is interest in a multi-use taller building, as the city changes, as that area changes with the development of the T Station, With other changes in major parcels. That is something that I think should be an option and that option would go through site plan review. And I think that is a particularly dense area with room for growth of that density. And we're not mandating anything. We are allowing developers and owners this option. And kind of thinking about my personal experience with that exact corridor and even those triple-deckers, I haven't checked the exact numbers, but I did have a friend who lived in a triple-decker on Boston Ave for many years as a renter. In kind of 20s and 30s young professional, and it was not great rental and. There was not the opportunity pricing wise or housing stock wise for young professionals to live on their own or with 1 other person. I think allowing redevelopment where it's called for. Allows for increased density of smaller units as well as an increased commercial space and freeze up larger houses and larger units for folks who want them. I think that this increased density is. appropriate for this area. I'm happy to, for us to kind of be looking at some of these specific boundaries. But overall, I think we do have the capacity and desire for that growth. Thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Ari, I appreciate it. I just want to make one comment about historical because you mentioned it and I forgot to mention in my comments and I appreciate that not everyone, even on this board, agrees on every subject all the time. There are actually no buildings north of Winthrop Street in the north zoning area that I think the Historical Commission which I still sit on, would put as preserved. There's so many in Medford Square that we're definitely going to do that. But I don't think there's a single one in the north. And I think St. Clement's School, both the high school and the other one, I think they would be in that historical bucket. But by and large, most of this district, 90 plus percent of it, in my opinion, does not have a lot of historical character that we would care about. That's my reading of the Historical Commission. So I appreciate that. I don't think it's going to be a barrier here, but one of the things we did in Medford Square is we incentivized by historical buildings by giving them more height to save the building. But if you look at what we're doing now, we're giving a lot of height before. In other words, if we give three or four floors and there is other ways to get there, historical won't be important. because they can do the green score, there's other ways to get to that, then the historical will be meaningless in those two historical buildings that I talked about, the two St. Commons ones, because we've already given them so much height to begin with and then added a few floors on top of it that I feel like we might lose the carrot and stick approach that I think we successfully did in Medford Square to, I think, have a solid preservation approach to those buildings? If not, there's no guarantees as everyone has discussed many times about saving really any historic building without some incredible efforts. Anyway, do you have any other final comments? I appreciate those excellent comments. Sounds like you're good.
[Ari Fishman]: That's it for now. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Just to confirm again, I had removed walking court from BA3, no parking mandate for the lodgers, allow purpose-built student housing use, and generally supportive of the currently proposed heights.
[Doug Carr]: That's correct. That's right. Great. Okay. Great.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you both.
[Doug Carr]: Paige, you want to go next? You were number four. Nope. Sorry. Are you on three?
[Zac Bears]: Three. On three. Kristen, yeah. There we go.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you. Oh, it's loud. Thank you, everyone, for being here, and good to see everybody again, a few nights in a row. So I'm excited to hear about Wackling Court. I think that's really important that we distinguish that. My question is, and I don't know if Chairman Carr, if you're able to pull up your pictures of Wackling Court. Can we just see the difference of what that zoning does look like compared to what we're proposing for the Elizabeth Grady section? Because I think that's important to see what's already gone through the boards and the community and what we're proposing now, please. Yes. Thank you. So I think this is exciting because the tallest buildings are up against the tracks. Obviously, we can see North Street. We can see how the units and the townhouses and is this considered a subdivision or just a neighborhood? What would we consider this development called with the different sizing of buildings?
[Alicia Hunt]: Doug's new to the equipment. So they did not apply as a subdivision. A subdivision is like when you're creating a new road. And that was mostly there. This is actually one parcel. It's staying as one parcel. They're not subdividing it into separate lots. So it's just multiple primary buildings on one lot. It's sort of different when you have one owner. Like it's kind of a mini campus in a way. Is that sort of what you're getting at?
[Page Buldini]: Yes, because I think this is a wonderful way to show how to use a big parcel. And with Elizabeth Grady abutting this on the other side of the tracks, this is a really good example of how it's granted that one building on the top is very close to North Street and not set back. which is, there's no step back or set back, I think, from this image. So I think that's a really good example of what we could be looking at on Boston Ave. So I'm hopeful that we can get creative when we're incentivizing who we want to see in these other parcels. But I do appreciate, Chairman Carr, what you suggested. I am in agreement. And even on the BA2 with the four-level, four-story condos and then the sphere, I think if there's another max height that's over there, those neighbors are going to be in shadows, potentially. So I do agree with that as well. It was interesting to hear about, and I know my colleague mentioned, the incentivizing of both underground parking. So I know that in other areas of the city, we want covered parking. So how do we work around that? And I don't know, obviously, you kind of spoke to that. But as an incentive, if we want covered parking, yet if it isn't feasible, and I know it's per site and per development, I just want to make sure that we have good, we have feasible incentives.
[Emily Innes]: Yes I'll answer that if I may. So the discussion at the meeting on Monday of the gentleman who spoke mentioned that underground parking in this area would be in particularly in the South Boston area I think would be South Boston area would be infeasible because of the high water table. It would be very expensive. Underground parking in general is very expensive. So the number that we had been using was $80,000 a space. He updated that to $90,000 to $100,000 a space. But you don't have to have underground parking in order to have covered parking. And so, for example, some of the site sections that Paola showed, there was one that showed parking at a lower level. with buildings in front. And so what you have there is you've created a parking podium. So that's actually above ground. You can have and actually the existing buildings in that area show that. You can have a liner building like a commercial along the street parking behind it and then residential above without having to actually go below ground and that's helped by the topography on some of the sites or it can just be how you've constructed the building. The existing housing in the Boston Avenue area the South Boston Avenue area. does have that parking on the first level with the building above. So that's a way that you can have that covered parking without being the additional expense of it being actually underground parking.
[Alicia Hunt]: I just want to add that we expect, so I mentioned that there was the Titan Gas property has had gotten approval for a project. So if you look really closely, actually, they are on a property that slants down. So at Boston Ave, their first floor would be up like, I think they had designed it to be up about three or four steps. And then their driveway goes next to their building and down underneath the building. And so if you're standing in the back, it looks like podium parking. If you're standing on Boston Ave, it looks like underground parking. And it is our expectation that the site that's right behind this one, we'll just keep calling it the Elizabeth Grady site. And just to be clear, I don't mean just that building, but all those parcels right there together, is also slanted like that. And we've looked at a couple of very tentative ideas over the last six years, and every one of them had something very similar. where at ground level, you would have your first floor of your building, but your cars would drive in and drive down. And you could do at least one level of parking that would be on Boston Ave underground, but at the back by the railroad tracks would be open and podium. So that has some digging into the ground, but it's not expensive the way you completely excavate a basement would be. So, we do think we would have some of that in some areas, particularly at those two sites.
[Page Buldini]: I appreciate that, because I want to make sure, and I know you all have done so much work and everybody here, that the incentives, we want people to come, we want to develop, so I just want to make sure that they're feasible, and they are. A quick question about, just because I have personal experience where I own my skincare salon, which is on this strip. So, I'm part of the section of BA1, and Although I do appreciate the zero setbacks, front, back. And I do understand my strip is nine units. There's ledge behind us. It's a huge retaining wall with ledge. So how would we work around that? And granted, I mean, if it's developed, it's developed as it should with housing above. But I just want to make sure that we are really staying true to the comprehensive plan with green score. And I appreciate the permeable surfaces. But that is, it's a tiny lot, but it's a long lot. So how do we work with that?
[Emily Innes]: Just to clarify, the issue is that the rear of the lot has ledge on it. So right now, the front setback is proposed to be a zero front setback, which would actually accommodate you because it's not pushing you backwards. The 20-foot setback comes in if you're wanting to put a plaza or something in front of it, but it's not required. So you would be what you, I believe you are now, is along the lot line. That would be no change, so. You do bring up an interesting point, and I know we probably say it once at every meeting, but I do want to confirm, I think we touched Collectively, we touched on it earlier, but when zoning changes, that doesn't mean that existing properties have to change to match the new zoning. So those properties would stay as is until somebody came along to develop, but in that case, the front setback is actually your friend because it's not pushing you into that ledge. There are usually, I mean, there are the opportunity if somebody came in and wanted to do something different and they couldn't meet Some of the other things there is of course the ZBA process if they're going to be requesting waivers on that. There are also some other waivers that are built into the proposed zoning to allow the CD board flexibility to address some of these existing conditions that might be tricky. In general, a combination of a waiver that's allowed by the CD board, and we've talked about some of them already, or an actual requirement from, or an actual application to the ZBA should cover many situations. Now the palette is reminding me that it's not just the zero setback, but it's a sidewalk setback as well. And you do actually have a waiver as a CD board for new construction. So if your building were to be torn down and somebody was proposing new construction, then we have the requirement that it has to be set back from the lot line at a distance sufficient to create the 12 foot setback. So if the existing sidewalk is five feet, it would have to be set back seven feet. You have the issue with the ledge, as you pointed out. So there's a waiver in here because we did recognize that there was some topographical challenges. If that's not, if that can't happen, then the setback requirement, the CD board has the ability to bring that down to an eight foot setback. So therefore, if the public sidewalk is already five feet, you would only have to add three feet in order to meet that requirement. So we could consider whether or not we need to add additional flexibility given the presence of ledge. And that's certainly something that we can talk about as part of the policy decisions that you all are making today.
[Page Buldini]: Perfect. Thank you so much. And I think using my the building where I'm at is a great example because it's such a tiny lot. But I think it just shows also there are other areas on this corridor that could use a setback and would be appropriate. So I do want to be really mindful of that. Yes, that little strip, totally, that makes sense, but I think we do really need to look at the other ones, because I think a setback is appropriate, and stepbacks too, because that was something that I learned in the square of how wonderful that is to still grab the units that we really want for housing, but not make people in shadows.
[Emily Innes]: Absolutely, and we do have a step back, so just for terminology for people at home, step back is the upper level floors stepping back from the facade, from the front facade. We also have those requirements, same as we talked about in Medford Square, about if you're next, if the building is next to a residential district, it does have to meet certain requirements for step backs on those upper stories, that's that 45 degree plane that we talked about. So, those have all been retained in this. I think we learned those lessons during the Medford Square. So, thank you for that.
[Page Buldini]: So, thank you. And I have just one more, and I would love to pass the mic. We did get a lot of public comment, and I know a lot of us didn't get it this afternoon, which it's to no fault of anyone's. So, we all are looking at public comment and listening to public comment. But one that I did see that was actually fascinating was about data centers. And that's not something that we had talked about. And it's an interesting thing that is going on. So I didn't know if you had any experience with data centers or zoning around data centers. But I do think it was brought publicly. So I would just like to hear what you all have experienced with that.
[Emily Innes]: So we have not yet done zoning for data centers. It's actually zoning for data centers is relatively new. One of our former clients actually is one of the first towns to bring one forward. So is that fast. I can't wait to get a chance to read it and look at it. So, data centers are currently not allowed at the level that we all think of as data centers. Obviously, an individual building can have its wiring closet and all that, but those single-use data centers are not currently in your table of uses. They're also very large. And so I'd have to look and see what the average size is, but just my memory of some of the size of buildings I've seen and the parcels you have available to you here, I'm not sure one would fit. But we can take another look and actually it gives me an excuse to delve into the newest.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you for looking at that, but I think it would be important that saying how large and huge and potentially you know energy water whatever is used that we don't.
[Emily Innes]: So we can at the moment. So you have zoning that if it's not in your table of uses it can't be done. It's not currently in your table of uses so it is therefore not currently allowed. Excellent. Thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Paige. Just a couple of comments. Excellent comments. Thank you. The one thing I'm pretty sure of, as much as I agree with you about the Walkling Court as a great zoning and massing and step up away from the neighborhood, it's a much bigger parcel. And I am quite confident, knowing my developer clients, because I think like them for the last 20 years, They're going to put one building on the Elizabeth Grady site that will cover the almost as big a building as they can fit on that site. And they'll put parking and retail below and as many floors as we allow them to put above. I can almost guarantee any developer would take that approach because that's what developers do. You know, they don't, if you allow them seven, they're going to take seven. They're not going to take five. And that's okay. That's why we're doing this. We, you know, and it, you know, it's, the use is something we're debating. I think it's a healthy debate. But it will be, I think that what that requires us to do is assume that that building is tallest along the railroad track and finds a way to gently step down and then maybe with the 45 degrees on both streets to allow that morning sun, because it's not south, but it's east. and a little bit southeast. We don't want to cut off that light to the neighbors on Boston Ave. I think there's a way we can do that intelligently with any use, whether it's multifamily, even labs, which has been proposed, as Alicia said. So I think there's a way forward here. That's a lot of development, but still being sensitive. OK, Sean Began, you're next.
[Zac Bears]: Four.
[Sean Beagan]: Go ahead, John. Thank you, Chairman Carr. Again, very, very thoughtful comments from all the board members tonight, and I think that really is the key. That was the key on Medford Square, and I think it's the key here to take our time and be thoughtful about this approach. I'm going to reiterate a couple points where I agree with what speakers have already said. One is the concept of adding a use for the privately owned student housing And when I say privately owned, I mean owned by other than an educational institution. I think that can work. I think that can be a nice benefit to the city. I think we have to be careful about the definition in terms of the size. I don't want to pass a privately owned student housing use that then allows a row of private fraternities. I wanted something that is going to be maybe a 200 person minimum. Something large enough that only developers that can really professionally manage a building are going to be involved. I think it's something that probably we would want to put some sort of annual licensing or permitting factor in as well such that there's review. But I think that can be done. I think it is a good idea and I would encourage adding that as a use. Chairman Carr on his proposal to eliminate the residential houses that he identified on Boston Ave, on both sides of Boston Ave in that location. And then in doing so, I would also propose that we eliminate from the use table the single family, two family, and three family dwellings from the BA1. I think what we're trying to do is build a commercial corridor here. when we start to put in residential uses or start to rezone residences, and I know these houses are in an apartment one zone, they're not necessarily in a residential zone, but they are residences. I think we're getting ahead of ourselves because I think one of the mandates of the agreement with the city council and the mayor is that residential would be done at the end. And I think if we have residential, small residential uses allowed here, We run the risk of first getting development that we don't really want here and isn't really the point. But secondly, in a way we're setting some precedent in terms of dimensional lot sizes for residential uses that might come back to bite us when we actually do residential zoning next year sometime. So that's what I have to say about the residential portion of Boston Ave. In terms of the heights, I'm comfortable with the BA1 as it is now. I wouldn't want to go higher. I think Chairman Carr is right on the money with the BA2 in terms of where that height should probably be. And then with the BA3, where those lots are so large and there's so much room off the street, perhaps we could have a height that varied as you got further back off the street so that when you're back at the tracks, as Chairman Carr said, perhaps you're higher than what's allowed right out on Boston Ave. So I think that would be worth talking about. And let's see, one other, oh, just one other ticky-tack thing that I always harp on is that right now we have a use, marijuana use as allowed by the ZBA and It's not allowed in the marijuana ordinance that we have in the city. So before we start putting it into our zoning, I think the correct thing to do is change the marijuana ordinance, say where you want to have marijuana retail and I have no opinion as to whether it should be on Boston Ave or not. I don't really care. For me, it's more a procedural thing of we can't say the ZBA can approve it here when the marijuana ordinance specifically says it can't be approved here. So I would say let's take that off or just maybe put a note or an asterisk that says refers them to the marijuana ordinance and then put in that ordinance all the areas where you want to allow marijuana retail. So that's all I have for right now.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Sean. John Anderson, let me unmute you.
[John Anderson]: Thank you. I don't know where to start. A lot of people have covered a lot of points already, and I really appreciate that. I'm just going to go in random order. One of the things that I don't really understand is the role of the Community Development Board versus zoning. This has come up in a couple of site plan reviews where the applicant has taken the position that, well, the zoning says that what I want to do is okay, so you can't tell me to do something different. Now, it never really came to blows or court cases because they were looking for a quick approval, so they relented. and would go along with our requests. But my question is, if push came to shove, can the Community Development Board, given the design standards that we have, say, okay, the zoning says you can put up a six-story building, but in this particular situation, that would be unfair to the neighbors, so you can't? I just don't know the answer to that question. I know the attorneys for some of our applicants have have a particular viewpoint on that.
[Doug Carr]: I obviously think that's a question for Alicia and the staff. I don't think we should tackle that here. You're raising it as an issue. I think it's a good issue. I don't think we want to.
[John Anderson]: I know. I don't want to debate it. I'm just saying, though, it gives us an out. If we trust the Community Development Board, which I certainly do, Then if something slips through the zoning and it's subject to site point review, there's a backstop there. That's the only point I'm making. I'm concerned that we've never tackled the definition of high frequent transit.
[Alicia Hunt]: Before you go on, could I just sort of address something? If something is allowed under the zoning, it's a yes, and the height is allowed, then the CD board cannot just say, no, we don't want to do it. We don't want to allow it under site plan review. Like it's allowed. They have a right to do it. If it's a special permit that's where you have right. So if the use is CDB then it's allowed. But if we say that a seven story building is allowed there and then they but it has to go through site plan review because it's a large building. The CD board can't just say no we don't want it. You want to. Danielle's gonna be more nuanced I think.
[Danielle Evans]: So I don't exactly agree with that. Site plan review, you can condition things and say that it can be lower, but if that equates to making it like uneconomic or not developable, then they can say that these conditions basically equate to a no and a denial and you can't deny the buy right use. But I think it's totally within the purview of a site plan review authority to say, you know, to mitigate the various criteria and standards that say this, You know, eight stories on the east side of the building would have a detrimental effect and would shadow and all of this, and should be stepped back, or the footprint should be changed. It's not just a yes, you have this envelope you can build to, and if you say no to that, someone's dragging you to court. I don't agree with that. But they have to be defensible reasons. If they appeal it to land court, which they're entitled to do, it depends what a judge would say. I also saw that, I'm not sure where it's going, but the state legislature was looking at adding site plan review. to Chapter 48, which is the Zoning Enabling Act that governs what we can put in our zoning. Cuz right now, 48 doesn't have site plan review. It's really a creature of local government. So this could all change. Yeah.
[John Anderson]: Well, that certainly backs up your position, Doug, that this needs further discussion. The issue of noise with certain uses came up, and perhaps this is something we could toss to the city council to review their noise ordinance if there is one. Is there one? Oh good.
[Zac Bears]: The city has a noise ordinance. It's one of the oldest ordinances the city has.
[John Anderson]: That's great. But these sorts of issues should you know the noise or should be able to deal with situations like that. I'm concerned that the definition of high frequency transit is still floating around out there and it came up in the context of site plan review of a building on Salem Street and there was some real ambiguity there. And I don't think it's just the ambiguity. I think the concept needs to be looked at more carefully. I can say just from personal experience, my house has pretty good transit if you want to commute to Boston every morning or maybe even Cambridge. And I unfortunately was not able to use it except for a couple of years when I had a job in Kendall Square. But even when I was working in Kendall Square and had a T-pass, I think I used it once other than to go to work. Just because the service didn't accommodate, you know, going to the museum, coming home within an hour or two of when I wanted to. It just didn't work. So there's kind of two kinds of, you know, there's high frequency to get to work and there's high frequency for pleasure outings and one means you don't need a car and the other means you do need a car or you need to have a big Uber bill. I think the, getting back to parking again, there's some material in here that talks about shared parking and how that can reduce the parking requirements. I found that extremely confusing and if some more examples worked out, would be very helpful. Another issue that came up discussing green features. A developer gets points, for example, not cutting down a nice big tree. What happens if a year or two later, the developer sells the building to someone else who gets tired of paying to have the leaves raked and cuts it down. They got an extra story for leaving the tree and now what? I'm at a loss as to how one might deal with that with zoning. Even if you attach stuff like that to the deed, who would enforce it? Am I correct in assuming that almost all development is going to take advantage of one or more of the incentive bonuses to get to the height they want?
[Doug Carr]: I don't think there's a guarantee, but the way it's structured by Emily and what we've seen, I think it's likely they'll go for it because the values are so big, getting an extra floor or two. They'd be crazy not to, in my opinion, as developers. That's my personal opinion. I don't know, Emily, if you have any... Additional thoughts on that?
[Emily Innes]: I'm sorry, official thoughts on whether or not a developer would take the incentive?
[Doug Carr]: On the incentive, the likelihood that it will be engaged by developers, that they'll get those extra stories by going for the extra, you know, the things that, in some cases, the historic and the green.
[Emily Innes]: So the question, as I understand it, is whether or not a developer would be more likely to take advantage of the incentives. We structured it as a menu, and actually this goes back quite a ways in Medford zoning because we first talked about it with the MBTA Communities Act in terms of structuring incentives. The problem with development is it's very dependent on market cycles. And the point of having a menu structure is to allow a developer to make choices based on which market cycle they're in as to which types of incentives they could go after. And although they are stackable to a certain extent, they are limited by the height. One of the reasons for having the, the base heights in this district be lower and the incentive heights be higher is to encourage them to take the incentives because those incentives provide public benefit. That's why you're doing it, right, is you're, you're, you're giving the additional density. in order to have that public benefit. It would be interesting because the incentive is, of course, dependent on the size of the floor. So in a smaller building, say a building that has a 2,000, 3,000 square foot footprint, adding a single floor of height for some of those incentives, say for the affordable housing ones, They might not actually get that much out of it. You're more likely to get a developer taking advantage of it if they are dealing with a larger site and the market works well with what they're doing. So that's why the structure is set up the way it is. Certainly we just brought forward, as we did with the development standards, as we did with the shared parking, we just brought forward what was in Medford Square as that opening point for your discussion. You're already familiar with it. It made sense, I think Chairman Carr made the point that there aren't as many historic buildings in the area that might take advantage of the historic incentives. It becomes up to you whether or not you want to leave those in or take those out. But I don't know that it's an automatic that a developer would go to the maximum height based on the incentives because it's not just the incentives that There are other components of the dimensional standards and requirements that might reduce the height such that they could not take advantage of the incentives.
[John Anderson]: Go ahead, John. Well, that raises the question of instead of rewarding developers for taking one of the incentives, require them to pick from this list of things they can do that add value to the neighborhood. In other words, require them to pick some options.
[Emily Innes]: So we do have to be careful there, because we may get into a situation that's called a regulatory taking, where we are creating such a disparity in the value by requiring them to do something that they're losing economic value, and therefore, A, they could just simply walk away from it, and then the community gets nothing. I tend to prefer the carrots to the sticks when writing zoning, so I'm more likely to recommend that my clients consider incentives. I have heard arguments to the contrary, that incentives should not be considered. And to your point, maybe it's just a requirement, but I would be very careful that you would have to structure those requirements so as not to cause either the economic value to be substantially diminished or to run the risk that the development doesn't happen at all. So not saying no, just saying that there's these additional considerations.
[John Anderson]: Because I do know that many cities have tree ordinances, which require you when you build something or tear something down, you have to put in a certain number of trees, which also could affect the economic value of the development.
[Doug Carr]: Well, we've seen that, John, ourselves, right, in our own projects on Salem Street and Main Street just in the last three months, right? Yeah. We've seen that in action, actually. Great.
[Ari Fishman]: Those are legislative not zoning, though, typically, is my understanding.
[John Anderson]: Who said that?
[Doug Carr]: That's Ari. That's the ghost of Ari online.
[John Anderson]: Sorry. Hi. That's OK. The disembodied voice.
[Doug Carr]: She's obviously unmuted.
[Emily Innes]: If I may, just to add to that, the green score, which you all have, you, the city, not necessarily you all personally, but the green score, which has already been adopted by the city, does have those requirements. The developer must meet the green score requirements if they hit the thresholds. And we actually went through those in fair depth on Monday. I have to give all credit to the patience of the people there. of exactly what would be required for the green score. That is existing and that is required.
[John Anderson]: My next comment or question has to do with the use table and allowed usages, which we got into a little bit. I wonder if there was some sort of rubric used in deciding what uses are yes, what uses are no, what uses are ZBA. Because for example, I noticed that Makerspace and Work Only Artist Studio is yes, yes, yes. But if I want to run a carpentry shop, it's no. And, you know, so if I'm producing wooden sculptures, I'm okay. If I'm making designer furniture, maybe I'm running a carpentry shop. I mean, is there a rubric? I'm not trying to dwell on that specific point. I'm just trying to say that a lot of these uses are similar. And so how did you decide what's yes and what's no and what's maybe?
[Emily Innes]: Thank you. Excellent question. In many cases we started with so all of these are coming from your existing table of uses. We are using your existing table of uses and we are trying to be consistent with what has been allowed in similar districts. What may be allowed in the current existing districts that are being replaced. I believe the carpentry shop may be classified as an industrial use and the maker spaces and artisanal spaces are up in the commercial uses so that would. That would be one reason why they would be different is the levels of intensity and how they're classified. Certainly we're happy to take a look at that. I would also say that one thing to think about if you were wanting to open up some of these other uses, certainly we've been talking about a few in this conversation, is to make sure that the definitions are separate from the standards. So, for example, we were talking earlier the conversation about whether or not to allow for privately run student dorms. You would have a definition of what that is. And then if you wanted to put standards on it, like the number of rooms or the annual licensing, I think that was mentioned, that should go into the youth standards section, which you already have for the historical conversion. and we're proposing for the drive-through pharmacy. So just a couple of other things. So for example, if you wanted to allow carpentry shops as a right, but you wanted to have some sort or even by site plan review or special permit, and you wanted to have some sort of limitation on that, you would want to consider adding use standards in. But I believe it's because a carpentry shop is classified as industrial in the existing table of uses.
[John Anderson]: Are all these uses actually defined somewhere?
[Emily Innes]: Not all, many are. Certainly the new uses that we have added in over the past couple of zoning rounds, those are defined. That was part of what we did. But I don't know that every single use in the table of uses has been defined. Some of that would have been through the recodification.
[John Anderson]: Because you know, there are these sort of anomalies. We want to give pharmacies drive-thru access but not eating places.
[Doug Carr]: I'm actually not a fan of the pharmacy drive-thru. I think it's suburban and this is an urban corridor. I just think it's a bad use of that. My preference is to make it go away.
[John Anderson]: Let's see what else I got. Oh, I just want to join with Doug in his concern about preserving historic neighborhoods. And I'm not approaching it from the point of view of all these buildings have historic significance. I'm just approaching it from the point of view of being a fan of older housing. And why is that? It's not out of sentimental reasons. In fact, a huge portion of the housing in Medford has been here a long time. Most of it was built before 1950. These are buildings that are much less expensive to buy than new construction. When I bought my house, it's like five bedrooms. It wasn't in great shape, but it was perfectly livable. But for only maybe another 25% more, I could have bought a tiny condo. But I chose to buy the old house because that was my preference. And at the time, I thought I needed the space. I don't know what I was planning to do with it, but I thought it was a great idea. I'm just saying that when those three deckers we were talking about, When they get torn down, and they will because we know about Adam Smith's invisible hand, the idea is that in a capitalist, profit-driven country, society, the most economic use of an asset will be discovered and taken advantage of. If you can make more money building houses than growing wheat, you're going to build houses. If you can make more money tearing down the triple-decker and putting up condos, you'll do that. And all over Medford, I've seen examples of where modest houses have been torn down and replaced by million dollar plus condos. So you're not just adding density, you're gentrifying when you do that. And I think that's something we need to keep in mind. That's all I have at the moment, except I wanna ask a question. Is this our last chance, really? To influence? No, we're continuing.
[Zac Bears]: We're continuing to next Thursday, June 11th.
[John Anderson]: No, I'm just talking about to make more suggestions for changes.
[Zac Bears]: I mean, no.
[Doug Carr]: Okay. I mean, we have a menu that Zach is developing of, I hope, that is consensus on this list of potential changes. But we have to see that, and I think if Medford Square was the precedent, it was more than one bite at the apple to make sure we got it right.
[John Anderson]: I remember.
[Doug Carr]: I'm sure you do. OK.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I think the idea is to try to give some direction tonight, see the response to that direction, and then consider that if it's great, then Maybe it's one more meeting if we need to go back one more time and there's a further.
[Doug Carr]: And keep in mind that not a single person in the public has had a chance to speak yet, right? So we really, I want to start the next meeting. I feel like we have to start with more public comment as soon as possible in the next meeting because we're on two and a half plus hours and we haven't heard from anyone yet. So I don't want to cut off that avenue either because I feel like great ideas can come from anywhere. So I'll sign off for now. You got the hint, huh? Oh, hold on.
[Dina Caloggero]: Quickly, very quickly, the Community Development Board received many, many public comments by email. They came in today. I had to work today. I have a job. I just can't go through all of those in a very meaningful way and consider the comments that came in. happy that the public comment, you know, we will hopefully need to extend that so we can make a very thoughtful, give the thoughtful approach of the comments that we received and how we develop the zoning.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Dina. Speaking of public comments, I think it's time to open it up. So I think we're going to start with the people in the room since they've been here for two and a half hours, at least one or two people, and then we'll have some people online. Please give your name and address for the record. I think we want to be generous with the three minutes because I think people waited a long time. So try to keep it reasonable, but please go ahead and name and address for the record.
[Zac Bears]: I am gonna start the timer and we tend to alternate between in person. Okay. We'll do that. Give us one second.
[Doug Carr]: What's the number?
[Zac Bears]: Nine. They have to get a microphone.
[Doug Carr]: Mike would be good.
[Patricia Doherty]: Thank you. Patricia Dougherty, 190 High Street. I'll try to go through these points very quickly. Two people who were sitting with me asked me to add their comments, so I'll do that first. One woman lives on Burgadave and she was wondering if you could have a site visit, both the city council and the board, because it is a very good example of they back up to the Cummings building and what it did to their neighborhood. Also, they are now looking at the new Tough Storm going up, and it's another monstrosity. The Green Line took away all their greenery already, so that's her main request, and I think it's a really good idea. The other person mentioned traffic, density and everything else that some of you were taking consideration of and I want to thank you very much because it sounds like there's been some common sense and it was greatly needed. People are really, really nervous about the density and about the height. You know that from last summer from the uproar that took place. This is why you're sitting here again a year later because last year the residents did not want that to go through. Okay, now these are my points. Sort of going backwards, I heard some people interpreting what I would consider to be the law or statues, and I think they shouldn't be doing that, but I think you're stuck. You don't have a city solicitor. I implore you to ask the mayor to appoint a city solicitor. I frankly don't know how you're passing ordinances because the charter is very clear. So arguably, you need a city solicitor to sign off on any ordinance you pass. And outside law firm doesn't have the authority to do that. KP law firm had made it very clear a number of times that they represent the mayor only. Okay, back to the zoning. It was mentioned by a board member that it would be, she wanted density to allow I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's a good thing. buildings and all the things that you mentioned. The other thing is that one of the team members over here mentioned that if you own property, you don't have to build up. You can just stay as it is. That's true. But if you're all of a sudden surrounded by five, six, and seven, eight stories, you're more likely to sell your property. These aren't blighted neighborhoods. These are well-maintained homes and these people care about their properties and we have a responsibility to make sure that we don't allow that to happen to them. With regards to the student dorms, I sat on this council for many years. a long time ago, and Tufts would come in front of us often and ask for help in building a dorm. Because of the Dover Amendment, of course, they get to build their dorms, but they often worked with us because they didn't want to offend us. We had a vice president of Tufts who was the community development liaison. I don't see anyone here doing that on a regular basis. But I can tell you that at least three, if not four, new dorms have been built. It didn't alleviate the problem in the Hillside neighborhood at all. All it did, and that was what they promised, no more parties, no more cars, no more beer cans on lawns. It didn't help because all Tufts did was increase their enrollment, and if you look at the numbers, you'll see that that happened because they had the dorms. Having been an upperclassman at one point, not at Tufts, and my kids doing the same thing, and many nieces and nephews doing it now, As you know, upperclassmen don't like to stay in a dorm. They move out to apartments, and they always will. So that's so much for adding 400 to 500 rooms for a private dorm.
[Zac Bears]: We're at about four minutes, just FYI.
[Patricia Doherty]: Well, I did take up that first minute with the other two people. It was also said in my last point is this one. It was mentioned over here that in one of the zoning changes, it would allow property owners to invest in their property without a variance. Well, zoning is to protect the property owner. And if you remove that, then the neighborhood doesn't have that protection of zoning. And you certainly can invest in your property without going outside the zoning code. So I ask you to please consider that. Thank you so much. And I don't know if this is possible, but maybe. Since we, and I can't speak to everyone else here, had already read the materials, gone through stuff online, watched the meeting the other night, we already heard all this. And maybe it's possible to let the people come up, since they kind of already know what they want to say, and do it and leave, and then you two boards can talk all night long if you want. Thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you very much. Appreciate it. I'm going to go next online to Dean if you could. I've asked you to unmute.
[Dean Tognarelli]: Do I have the wrong one? Hello. My name is Dean Tognarelli. I live on North Street in Medford, a lifelong Medford resident. I've been looking at some of the images and the max height and how big things can be. I just want to say I think it's too much, too big, and way too many all at once. I know this has opened up to public comment and people get to weigh in. on what their thoughts are and what the benefits could be for the community or not. I think everybody probably has some good intentions. I would say that I believe people that live closer, maybe their opinion should be weighed slightly more than someone that might be two miles away, not impacted by increased traffic and problems. I heard comments, people saying that we have the appetite For more development with density, I would say not if you live right next door, not if you're hidden in the shadow of a giant building, not if you have traffic for days or weeks or months upon end. If you do live in the area and you do like it, it could be, maybe not always, but it could be, maybe you can now sell your property, benefit, make a lot of money and leave. So maybe you would be a fan of that. If this zoning is passed and I heard other people say, you know, there's certain zoning now, but it's not enticing people to really develop the property. If passed, it sounds like a lot hope that this will kickstart some development, some projects, and some increased tax revenue. Is there any limit to how many could happen at once? Could something happen over in the area behind the Whole Foods or where the Life Science was at the same time that the Hillside hardware is being worked on? Could it maybe take an hour or two to get from where I am on North Street to Medford Square? Is it possible that it could be more than anyone can handle? And once they approve a project, it is now too late to stop? I think this is maybe gonna be my attempt at humor, but I really don't find it that funny. When we did the Green Line extension, There were rats running up the street. I mean, like an ungodly wave, I could not believe. Has anyone spent all the time in zoning, planning and everything else to think about all of the disruption to the ground in the area and how, as a community, we should handle what I would say would be a large pile of rats, might be a huge pile of rats, could be just a few rats. Whatever they are, I'd like to know how we think we can address that. Is someone standing up at the end of my street with a giant net, scooping them up before they run up the street? We had composting added not too long ago. Is there some special bucket that someone thinks they can drop off at my house? I can catch them in a barrel of water and dump them in that, or I'd be happy to bring them down and drop them off somewhere towards City Hall or wherever the other decisions are being made that aren't working out to my advantage. That's all I have to say.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Is there anyone else in the room who would like to speak? Please come on up and your name and address for the record, please.
[tTQZY1IK4s4_SPEAKER_01]: Hi, my name is Laura Longsworth. I also live on North Street, right on the edge of BA3. I'm here mostly to just advocate for removing fraternities and sororities as a potential use in BA3. I lived in Medford for 15 years, but I'm a native of Amherst. Child of a college president, and I went through many years of discussions about the abolition of fraternities at Amherst College, and I had way too much privy to the variabilities of fraternity life on campus, and I really appreciate living near a college. I always have, my entire life. I sort of enjoy my neighbors in training, as I call them, otherwise known as students, and yet I spend a lot of time walking around on Tufts and I see what's going on with the fraternities and the partying and so forth, and it's sort of young people behavior, but I think it's along the lines of why would we invite this? into our neighborhood, especially in a moment when I know Tufts has been wrestling with dealing with the fraternities and the sororities and kind of trying to tamp down on some of the behavior. And then there's also just the element of it being essentially a private club. Like we're trying to build housing and yet it's a possibility of a private club that would be, I think the language right now says it would have to be recognized by Tufts, so it's a private club recognized by a private entity, and we don't have participation in what recognition means, and we don't, we know Tufts has unrecognized some fraternities, and we don't know what that means then, that there's a private club not recognized by the private entity. Anyway, I think you get my point. It's potentially a lot of, disruption and I actually did a little research and I can read you the long list of communities that have had either lawsuits or just major conflict with off-campus Greek life. Do you want me to read the list? It's like 18 communities.
[Doug Carr]: I would like you to submit it actually as a written comment so it's in the record.
[tTQZY1IK4s4_SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[Doug Carr]: I think that would be important. I appreciate that information.
[tTQZY1IK4s4_SPEAKER_01]: Okay. I will submit that. Yeah, I think those are my main points about And I think on the, you know, just on the issue of the purpose built student housing, I know we have a student housing issue in Medford. I, you know, you can see in our neighborhood there's a mix. I find it an interesting mix. And I know that there are problem houses and problem areas. that people who have lived there longer than I have probably feel that more. I really question the premise that purpose-built student housing in BA3 is a solution to this issue. It's far from campus. Students seem to be more concentrated in off-campus housing right around campus. I don't really know, I would love to see the evidence that if we built purpose built student housing, that they will actually live there instead of living in Hillside. I just don't buy it, basically, and I don't think we should assume that's what would happen. I think we need to have it proven, and I actually did also do some other research. which shows that owner occupancy actually declines often with purpose-built student housing because people just basically don't really want to live near it. So I think we have kind of an amazing opportunity with BA3. The potential to do something really cool as a city is there. And I just really hope what happened in the seaport doesn't happen in Medford. And my view of the seaport is it was a parking lot, and then the city just let developers build what they wanted instead of having a really nice, solid, coherent plan. And I don't know who among us goes to the seaport. You can look at glass or buy Lululemon, I guess. But it's just like not a very, if you think about the potential, it's not a very interesting place. And I really hope that BA3 becomes an interesting place and that it's made for people who actually would like to live there. And I appreciate the comments about shrinking the height. I think that's right on. And I would actually like to see more green space. I think 90% density is way, way, way too high. And we need some grass.
[Doug Carr]: All right. Thank you. Great comments. Thank you. Anybody else in the room? Otherwise, I'm going to go back to online. Yes.
[Anita Nagem]: My name is Anita Nagum. I live at 9 Norton Avenue. And I agree with most of Chairman Carr's comments, but I do take issue with one in particular, the height along, that you think the height along the tracks can be big. I live on the other side of the tracks, along North Street, just off of North Street. It seems to me that you have not really considered the consequences of building there on our side. When 200 Boston Avenue, 10, 15 years ago, wanted to build an extra two stories, they were four stories originally, they wanted to add two. The neighborhood objected. They were built. Now there are labs on that floor with lights on all night. They shine into my house. There is a huge privacy issue, and I'm not even as close as many people are. I also take issue with your characterization of Walkland Court being a good example of the step down. If you look at it from Auburn Street, it is. If you look at it from the side, it is anything but. The neighbors, again, I'm almost in line with where the new six-story buildings are going to be between that and this 200 Boston Avenue. We did not want another building of that height on our side of the tracks. It makes a very big difference and that six story building is going to be right up against North Street. There are two story houses across the street on North Street. There are not only single family but single story buildings on the same block. Not acceptable. I also those are all the issues that I take all the things I took issue with you with your comments. There was another comment by another person that just because it's zoned for something doesn't mean it's going to be built. Don't zone it unless you expect it to be built. Once the zoning is in the cat is out of the bag. That's it. I really object to that characterization. Oh, we can have it built for this, but it probably won't be built. It's too late then. I also strenuously object to purpose-built student housing being put on the Elizabeth Grady site. student housing does not belong in the middle of a residential and small commercial business district. Tufts has a lot of room on its campus. If they want to build dorms, they have a lot more open space than we do in Hillside. That is not the place to put it. And just one other comment about the shadows that will be or the regulations about shadows that will be included in the zoning. My understanding is that there is a requirement for two hours of daylight. That is pretty minimal. And quite frankly, I think that should be increased. But it should be stipulated that that will be measured on the shortest day of the year. Do not do that on June 21st and say, oh, well, in June you get two hours. The sunlight in the winter is what matters more. Thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you. Appreciate that very much. I will say that I, I, I think we should, when I mentioned North, North Street and Boston have having those, your house should fall in that same category because it's, it's a, it's an abutting property, even though it's across the track. So I appreciate that. We'll take a look at that. Thank you. We are going to switch to the, to Laurel Ruma who was next.
[Zac Bears]: We'll go to Laurel Ruma on Zoom. Laurel, name and address for the record, please. You'll have three minutes.
[Laurel Ruma]: Hi, everyone. I'm Laurel Ruma, 149 Burgett Avenue. And as you can see behind me, this is the Tufts dorm up on Boston Avenue. So I just really want to hit a number of points, and then I will write my comments in for sure. One is, I appreciate a good story. Hyperbole is real. There were not rats running up and down the streets. Not only did Tufts build their high rise here, the green lines in my backyard, this other dorm building's being built, the rat problem come on let's be realistic people when we talk about our city and what we see when construction happens because it's not not helpful to to say there's rats running up and down the streets. I really want to stress now listen I spent 12 years as the representative for the city of Medford on the Green Line extension and what rapid transit is is a definition that has been defined, and the Green Line station is rapid transit I'm sorry you don't take it all the time. There's a lot of us that do, clearly, because the sites have been done and the trains are full in the mornings the trains are full at night, and the buses also, you know, provide a lot of rapid transit options. This is not stuff we need to be legislating or litigating right here. This is stuff that is beyond the scope of what needs to be talked about in these discussions. And I really encourage both boards to really focus on what has to be done tonight. And it is ridiculous that we're only on our X number of meetings here. We only have so many meetings left and we're not getting to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is no fraternities and sororities should be zoned. Absolutely no private dorms. As said previously, those of us that live in the neighborhood don't want to live in a neighborhood that's not diverse, that's only full of dorms to serve either Tufts kids or any other kids in Boston. They can go live somewhere else. Listen. Tufts has publicly stated that their plan, their business plan is to put 75% of the students back on campus in housing. So, who's living in these private dorms, who's living in these fraternities and sororities, who's living in our neighborhoods anymore, if that actually does happen. We have to look at this ecosystem as something that encompasses a lot of other things and a lot of other factors. I know we're not talking about Tufts tonight, but let's be realistic. Tufts also owns a majority of the properties up and down Boston Avenue. And so when we talk about, oh, it wouldn't be great if this is what happens when developers come in. there's already a developer, they're already here. And guess what? There's such thing as Dover, and they do not have to necessarily abide by these zoning changes and rules. So let's think about that. The shadow study is a really important thing. I think we all object to six to eight stories being on the railroad side of the tracks, because you think the other side of Boston Ave is quaint. No offense chair car, but I mean, come on, like it either everybody, gets 10-story buildings, or no one should be getting 10-story buildings. But guess what? The cat's already out of the bag. We already have this in our neighborhood. We've now made the standard that this is what's acceptable. And I'm actually okay with that. Everyone should be exposed to the wonder of mixed-use will have lots of retail on the bottom, lots of people living up top, all sorts of different people of all sorts of different incomes. And whether you're a student or not and you're just a regular person, that's great. What we want is diverse options in housing here. And then lastly, You know, honestly, we can't have gas stations, because we have a high water table. These two things don't don't mix. So, I don't think we should actually zone for more gas stations. There's quite a few around here, they require such heavy regulation and specific needs. The water tables a real problem Burgett Avenue, talk to tough so tell you how much money they've already spent and trying to regulate their water table underneath all those fields. You know, listen, we all love our neighborhood, we understand it's changing. It's taken a lot of us a long time to get here. We have the green line now. We have this opportunity to expand in a really smart and excellent way. And I guess I'm more with Ari on this side, which is more building is better and we have a way to do it in a good way. So thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Laura. Appreciate it. Next.
[Maryanne Adduci]: Mary Anna Ducey at 2 North Street in Medford. I have some comments, but the first thing I would like to say is that all of you should walk this neighborhood to put in perspective what I'm saying and why I'm saying it. All right. The first thing is the traffic on Boston Ave. From 4 to 6 most days, it's backed up. You have to wait for probably four or five changes of lights to get through Winter Street. On the other end, it's backed all the way up the hill, Winthrop Street. So there's a traffic problem here. There's already three storey houses on Boston Ave, in between North Street and Winthrop Street. And many of the houses don't have dryways, so the people have to park on the street. Most of the Boston Nav Houses are privately owned, but they're occupied by tough students. And I know that because I've gone around with petitions for the buses and so forth. And when I knock on doors, I find out there's tough students living there, which is OK. But they're not owner-occupied. They're mostly rentals. The Walkling Court redevelopment is going to house 300 to 350 people when it's completed. There are two six-story buildings along the track, as your illustration showed there, one four-story apartment building in the center, and several townhouses around the circumference that back up to the residential houses. The six-story buildings have the ground level is parking under the building. It's not below ground. It's on street level. Over the bridge between Marshall Street and Boston Ave, North Street is very narrow. There's only two lanes of traffic coming and going. You cannot park on either side of the street. The houses on Piggott Road, which is opposite the property, the Elizabeth Grady property, there are one story single family homes. Trucks are not allowed on North Street because trucks are not allowed on Route 16. So North Street is a truck route. What that means is that trucks have to come up West Street, up North Street, and on their way because they cannot go on Route 16. So when the trucks get to the Boston Ave and North Street intersection, it's pretty tight there if there's an 18-wheeler truck there. Plus, Whole Foods delivery trucks come frequently during the day to resupply the store. There are school buses that come up North Street. The current Boston Ave bus routes, my neighbor and I have been challenging the T for the last four years because they want to eliminate buses. So there's bus service today, but we've been fighting. Originally, they wanted to eliminate the 94 bus, which still might happen. The 80 bus was going to go on a one-hour schedule for part of the day. The 96 bus, the route is potentially going to change if it even stays here. Okay. I can't even read my notes here. All right. So, the lack of bus service will encourage more people, residents to have cars. So, it's being proposed, somebody wants to build, the Elizabeth Grady people want to propose we build a six, I don't know, six or eight story student housing on that corner. Even though they say students won't have cars, there'll be Ubers, there'll be Lyft, there'll be Amazon, there'll be FedEx, there'll be food deliveries all out there. On the other side of the track for Walkley Court, there'll be home health aides, visiting nurses, physical therapists, the ride coming and all this. So we're going to have all this additional traffic in our street, in addition to the people. So between Walkling Court and a proposed 600-bed student housing, there would be over 900 people in one corner in a residential neighborhood. That's too much. It's too much.
[Doug Carr]: I think you've had about five minutes. Do you have any more comments, any closing comments?
[Maryanne Adduci]: Oh, at the meeting on Monday, the consultant said that there was some kind of a rule that said if there was a single story house, you couldn't put a six story building beside it. The proposed 600-bed student housing is across the street from single-story houses. So does that count for disqualification? If you can't do it for a house, does it count it's across the street? But basically, I'm opposed to any kind of zoning that would allow a 600-bed student housing on that corner.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Next, go to online to.
[Matt Leming]: Sorry to interrupt. Could we enforce the three minute rule? There's there's eight hands on zoom and it's pretty late.
[Doug Carr]: I think we will from now on, because we have seven or eight more people online and a couple here, so we can do that for three minutes. And we'll do that with Laurie Krieger. Let me just unmute you if I can. Hold on. I lost you going on the other one.
[Zac Bears]: Yep, I gotcha. Hi, Lori. Name and address the record you're going to have.
[Laurie Krieger]: Don't limit me to three minutes now. I've been waiting for many hours. So hi, I'm Lori Krieger, 124 Brookings Street, Medford, Mass. And I'm in Florida on vacation. And I got to attend Monday's meeting. And I'm here now because I care that much. And I'm going to reiterate a little bit from Monday. but I have a couple more comments. So I want your attention, please. I love you much. So I just want to be for everyone involved, changing the zoning and hoping for the best is not a strategy. Okay. One of the things I've heard about doing those zoning changes is that we need it for housing, right? And do we really have a housing issue? One of the questions we had answered on Monday was does zoning for height change the housing situation? And the answer is potentially no. I've looked around the city and around the state and we talked about the seaport. 33% of the luxury housing in Boston remains vacant because the owners don't need that money and it came from developers. Offices around the state remain unoccupied, so there's plenty of vacant potential dwelling space that's not being utilized. I live on the hillside and one of the things that is really important to me is the owner occupancy. And I think that in terms of That could be part of a successful strategy, owner occupancy. In my neighborhood in the last five years, within a two block radius, there's been one house that has been, they've been working on it for five years. They added an extra floor, but it remains empty. No one's moving in there. They have the building permits, but no one's moved in there in five years. Behind me, folks have purchased from the West Coast, have purchased the house. And they have family come and visit back and forth, and they let their co-workers come and visit now and again. But no one lives there 24-7 regularly. It's not a home to anyone anymore. Three houses down the street from me on the other side, that's turned into an Airbnb. And I know that's not by law, but nobody's enforcing that law. And the person that owns it is lovely, but still it's not a home for anyone anymore. On the other side of the street, further down, there's a couple who own their primary residence is here in Florida. They have a secondary one on the Cape. And the home that they own on Turnwood Street is empty most of the time, but sometimes serves as an Airbnb. So my question is not my question. My point is that we can write all the rules that we want, but in our little area, they're no longer being owner-occupied dwellings, but rather investors are coming in and using the houses however they want. So the income doesn't really support Medford, and it doesn't support the community, and the properties aren't really well-maintained, some of them like they used to be. I also think that there is, like Tufts is a tremendous example. We had all these people that weren't interested in that being developed to the heights that it is, but because of a legal loophole, they got to have the building and it's affected and impacted all of us. So what I'm wondering about is if we have all these incentives toward affordable housing and we have plenty of, it seems like lack of Regulation for investors that come here and do whatever they want. What about average people? Like my story is that I used to live in Cambridge in the in the in the affordable house rent control. And I was moving every year until I got rent control. And finally I got that and my life stabilized and I could focus on work. Then they got rid of rent control.
[Doug Carr]: And then again, sorry to interrupt. It's been three minutes. I can only be a short while.
[Laurie Krieger]: I'll only be a short while more, I promise. And then I'll put it in writing. Then I moved finally through supportive family and friends. I moved into the first home I ever lived in that was owned by someone in my family. And having that. allowed me to become middle class. Having that allowed me to stabilize my career and start pursuing more and more advanced careers. And that's the delta. We're not protecting for the middle class. We're creating and supporting the K economy. So I just ask us to be really data driven and really mindful of what actions we will take that would truly support an integrated, diverse, housing situation where people can own their apartments or own their homes and develop their own personal wealth in this community, in this community.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Next up here at the at the at the in-person mic. Name and address of record please.
[Erin DiBenedetto]: Hi, Erin DeBenedetto at 21 Dearborn Street. Hi, I've lived in this area almost 40 years now. I've raised my children and some of them went to Tufts University. So I have respect for them in some ways and just feel not so happy with them and many others. I felt like when they took over the Coho housing, which was Capon Street and all those streets, and changed all those two families into dormitories and put 14 students in each of those two family houses, and they kept it in that area, they kind of pushed out the other people that owned those two families. I think there's only one left in that area, maybe more, but I know of one. And I called it the Capon Creep, the university creeping down the hill, and taking over our neighborhood. And at that board meeting with zoning, the Tufts lawyers drew a red line about where they would come and how far they would come based on the fact that we could bring so many people to oppose them coming down to that area. Well, I just found out that Hillside Hardware, which was owned by Walnut Property, which paid taxes to the city, has now just transferred that property over to Tufts. So that means that we have lost that commercial revenue, the sales revenue, the tax income for that. And then will they give us a pilot? When they did the Cummings building, I insisted on a pilot and they paid $250,000 a year, every year for that building. On the, my point is, this is our chance to zone the corridor and to hold it, back from losing more revenue for the city. Also, you know, 700 story, 10 story dorm, what is that doing to our infrastructure? How is our fire department addressing all, you know, when the elevators don't work, when there's a problem up there when there's a medical issue. We have to respond to that as a city. They only gave one payment of $250,000 one time for that building. So we are losing money by helping Tufts every single day, and they act like they give so many community upgrades to us. Now, I served on the pilot committee with President Bears at one point, and we haven't done that in a long time. We need to hold them more accountable. And I would like to see in this zoning that no more housing for students be allowed on the Boston Ave corridor. I want that part of your zoning. I loved all of you this evening in your restricted heights because I don't think we need those heights. It doesn't warrant it. We're on a hill. You build four stories on the hill, you look like six. You're not, I live down the hill. My daughter went to Tufts, she could see her bedroom from her dorm room. That's how close, we walked up first day of school. She was an RA up there for many years, up in Miller. And I have respect for the campus in so many ways, but don't feel like they're good neighbors. I think this is our chance to maximize our hold back, them taking over hillside and taking over revenue from our city and requiring our infrastructure to support their buildings when they don't even want to build them on campus. So I'm probably at my three minutes. I also want to say I don't want to see that religious building across from the church added to the corridor zoning. I think it's part of the neighborhood because that street has houses on it and I think it would be a disservice to add that just so Tufts could develop a bigger building at Hillside Broadway.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you. Appreciate the comments. Thank you. Next on line, Judith Weinstock. Hello, Judy.
[Judith Weinstock]: Can you hear me? Hi, everybody. Hi, it's Judith Weinstock at 144 Burgett. I actually thought Jeremy was next, but I'm going to try to keep my comments pretty brief because it's really been a long night. I'm sure everybody's really exhausted. I would like to say first that I do support Doug Carr's comments. I think one of the big struggles with zoning in general, is, particularly in a city that probably fell behind in zoning, is this incredible energy to want to push, push, push, push, push, so we have to make up all this lost ground now. I would urge the city to think twice about that strategy, and I think you do need to moderate the building heights I think you're going to have a lot of pretty unhappy residents, at least in the hillside, if you don't. And I also think the city ought to be committing to reviewing zoning changes every three to five years for impact. Nothing prevents the city from coming back four or five years from now And changing the zoning again so that you can allow for more gradual change across the neighborhoods. And I really do think that gradual change is not a curse word. And I think that when you have really polarized views, that moderation can really be what is needed. I do think that the city clearly needs more tax revenue. I'm not jonesing to approve another tax override in November to fund a high school as somebody who's sort of on a fixed income. But so I completely appreciate the need for additional tax revenues in the city. I think that has to be one of the main drivers for zoning changes in this town. I will say I have an issue with the word density and I kind of wish people would define it because it's actually not a defined word. Everyone talks about increasing density, but to what? And since that's a completely unanswered question in my view, at least I haven't heard a reasonable definition of it, I just assume that it is undefined because it's a really difficult thing to define. And that's another reason to look at moderation in zoning changes across a number of years rather than in one big bang. The last thing that I'll say is very specific to the dorm proposal for the corner of North For other reasons than many people, first of all, I don't think it's needed. And if somebody from Northeastern is living in Medford, I do pity them because, you know, the Green Line could help, but it's going to be a long commute because I went to Northeastern. I don't think we need it. And I don't think my concern is that I don't know that there's any difference in the context that we're talking about it than an apartment building. It's not under the auspices of an educational institution. There are not resident assistants living in the building to help regulate that building. There's no independent police department who citizens can call to complain about issues related to that private dorm. And so I would caution us that this is actually not something that the city of Medford needs at this time and would completely support tabling that completely in this zoning pass. That's it for me, folks. Thank you so much for all the work. I know you're all exhausted and I can understand it.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Judy. Appreciate it. Is there anyone else in the room who would like to speak? Go ahead. Your name and address for record and Jeremy, you will be next.
[SPEAKER_02]: My name's Narelle Marr, 39 Emory Street. So I'm an abutter to Hillside Hardware. I used to go there often. I guess I'm just going to reiterate what other people have said. The Interfaith Center, I would really not like to see that change. It's on the corner of our street having a five or I don't know how many, if it's four or five story building there. would not be welcomed by, I don't think, most of the neighbors. To your point, Chairman Carr, you mentioned the three family homes. I overlook those. I agree with you. I think they should be removed from that zoning. I think that it's a residential neighborhood. It has character. And to the points of the others that mentioned, you know, if you allow them to do it, it will happen. People will look at it and say, oh, I can just sell it and someone else can do it. So they're going to pay me extra money for my house to do it. And it's just going to tear apart the character of the hillside. So, and those are my basic points. I'm against the dorm as well on North Ave, on North Street.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you very much. All right, we're going to go next to Jeremy online. Let me just make sure I can get you to unmute. Go ahead, Jeremy.
[Jeremy Martin]: Hey, everyone. Jeremy Martin, 65 Burgett Avenue, right in the heart of the neighborhood and community impacted by these proposals. Thanks for all the work that's been done in the presentations. I want to state emphatically my support for mixed use rezoning, this effort. It's the outcome of a comprehensive master plan for our city. It was developed by a great team of experts, and it was informed by extensive community input. So this is the future of our city. I plan to live here a long time, and I look forward to raising my family in a community that has more neighbors, more places to shop and socialize, and better streets and sidewalks that come with new development. These are how cities grow. This is a healthy way for our city to grow. While there is some work to be done to get this proposal, I think just right, I think it's the right thing for our city. On that point, I think we are still missing an opportunity and the necessity to look at this comprehensively as a corridor. by excluding some blocks of residential even though some residential buildings are being included in this. I think that's out of alignment there and again I think it's influenced by a political negotiation that we've all heard about not by what's best for zoning and not by what's best for Medford and we need to revisit that. I kind of hope the mayor is listening because this needs to be a comprehensive look at this corridor that is most evident on this north street corner that we intersection that we keep hearing about where one part of that corner is not included and the other is as the potential for 100 foot tall building on it with all of the incentives It's creating tension in this conversation. And I do think that would be alleviated quite a bit by adopting some of Chairman Carr's recommendations for reducing the heights in BA3 zone specifically. There are some nitty gritty details in the proposal that I want to comment on. One of them is sidewalk widths. And I know the team will get tired of hearing me talk about this. The minimum should be 12 feet if we're talking about walkability and street life. And right now, the language in the zoning that's proposed provides too easy of an out. It sets too low of a bar for a developer to say, oh, I don't have the capacity to do what I want to do. I'm just going to make it eight feet. We need to set a higher bar than that. I think it should be a CDB waiver only that would allow someone to reduce sidewalks less than 12 feet in this area. Similarly, BA3 needs to be a 20% open space minimum, and right now it's at 10. 90% lot coverage on those large parcels looks like a lot of building, a huge amount of building, and not the right proportion of open space to building. So that needs to be reconsidered. And lastly, and related to one of my first comments, we're looking at this right now without any context of the institutional zone at Tufts. And this is another point of tension that you're hearing in these discussions and in these comments. the things that have gone wrong with our zoning in the past related to developments by the university. So I heard in the meeting on Monday that we're not even gonna look at that again now until September. And that's different than what I heard in the last planning and permitting committee meeting, which was that it would be developed in parallel. And I really think we need to be doing that, even if it's not finalized. We need to know what's happening between these chunks of zoning that we are looking at in this process so that we have the full context of the corridor. But I think this is going in the right direction. It needs some more work. There were a lot of great comments by the board tonight and thoughtful comments. And I appreciate all that you're doing and look forward to the next hearing.
[Doug Carr]: Thanks. Thank you, Jim. I appreciate it. It's always a pleasure to have you on many, many meetings. Thank you. Anyone else in the room? I think we've gone through everyone. So we'll go back to online to, I guess, Elizabeth Bale.
[Elizabeth Bayle]: Hi there, everyone.
[Doug Carr]: Yes, for the record, please.
[Elizabeth Bayle]: Elizabeth Dale 34 Emory Street, Medford. Um, I was in the hospital this morning. So not to be one upping anybody, but I hope that shows how much I care about this issue. I'm not going to take time to make the substantive comments for the most part, because I have some logistical questions that I think everybody should hear the answers to, which is, I'm getting confused with all the different meetings and how to submit comments properly to them. Planning and permitting, the CDB, the city council, public information meetings, et cetera. And so if someone there could just list or post or something, how to properly respond in comments. I think that would help a lot of people and you would get more broad feedback, hopefully. Along those lines, the June 11th, I'm noticing that's a Thursday. I'm wondering what kind of meeting that's going to be and where. So along with the other comment, I would love that. I want to thank you. I guess this was from Zack bears to request the verbal summary after we went through the map portion as somebody who's map challenged and also is doing this over Zoom on a laptop. I couldn't really follow the maps and having that summary was super helpful. So if that could become a sort of normal part of these presentations, I would really, really appreciate it. It helped me a lot. And my last comment, which is the only part of my substantive comments that I want to get into is, Much as I appreciate Laurel, and we were on that Green Line fight together for 12 years, and it's because of people like Laurel that we have the Green Line, this great community resource, even though there were some problems with lots of problems with getting it done, including the loss of the trees. I have to just vehemently, loudly, and just emphatically disagree that we're gonna let those Tufts abominable dorms of 10 stories set a precedent. No, they did it, they got it done, they squeezed it in, they disregarded, everything that the community wanted. And it's not, don't let it set a precedent, please. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Just really quickly on the question about submitting your comments. This meeting is a good meeting to submit comments. Next Thursday, June 11th is a continued public hearing. And you can also submit public comments directly to both the city council, the community development board and the planning staff team at medfordma.org slash zoning or by emailing ccmembers at medford-ma.gov or ocd at medford-ma.gov. Both of those email addresses and I believe the public comment form that you guys created are available on the zoning page on the website as well.
[Elizabeth Bayle]: Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: And the planning office is saying that they do prefer the form to be used, if at all possible. And if we could see the responses, it sounded like CD board maybe saw form responses, but I don't know if the council saw them.
[Danielle Evans]: Sorry to be shouting. I emailed you a SharePoint folder this afternoon that has all of the comments and I'm trying to think of the best way to, so that's a live comment folder that will continuously update, and I don't know if the, I emailed it to you and to Matt, and then it was probably too late in the day. But I wasn't sure what was the best way to share that out to the rest of the council.
[Zac Bears]: If you email it to ccmembers at Medford-MA.gov, that'll go to every councilor and or cc, the acting clerk. Because I don't think I can directly forward it to everybody.
[Danielle Evans]: Alicia says she's going to forward it. Great. Because you were on that email, right?
[Doug Carr]: Yeah. Robert Carney, could you unmute yourself and name and address for the record, please?
[Robert Carney]: Sure. Robert Carney, 50 Hicks Ave, Unit 6. I do live slightly outside of the corridor, but I do frequent the corridor a couple times per week. And just want to talk on a few points related to zoning proposals here. The first point relates to gas stations and service stations. Just want to, on context here, you know, the first thing that I'm concerned about in this aspect is knowing that there's a development possibility at the Titan Gas, you know, in Car Wash. I think it's very advantageous for quality of life for residents to have a gas station slash service station right down the road from them. I know personally, my wife and I have benefited from that. We don't drive a lot, but we're a one car family. So it's very beneficial on a work from home day or on a weekend to just be able to drop your car off for an inspection, oil change, or in our case right now, our car just got hit and run. We're about to drop it off at, You know an auto body shop on mystic app tomorrow and to be able to walk home right after that it's just very beneficial. The other thing that I want to point out as well as for people who, you know, own cars and again I commend the efforts to get people outside of their outside of cars but. I want to echo earlier comments just about the reality is that people do need to drive places, you can't always avoid it. Having a car wash for people to go to, I also think is important for people to be able to maintain their cars. For many people who live in, you know, apartments or multifamily houses, it's very hard for them to be able to wash their car at home. The second thing I want to speak about is regarding some of the comments about, you know, industrial slash kind of like more manual labor shops slash plumbing, electrical. And this is regarding, you know, our city's current noise ordinances. So experientially, we, I live on Hicks Ave, which is adjacent, we're adjacent to the industrial section of Hicks Ave. And I feel the noise ordinance slash enforcement around it slash norms in general is not sufficient in this city for those who live near industrial areas where noise is being made. I've heard complaints from my neighbors about getting woken up from trash trucks at four in the morning, trucks that are just doing business in general. So I think Looking at this, when deciding what type of businesses you wanna bring in is gonna be an important thing to consider. I don't have an opinion one way or the other about whether these type of shops should be allowed, but I just wanna really caveat that. I think to Alicia's point, it is important to be thinking about for residents to be able to have kind of like a peaceful living existence in residential neighborhoods. Third, I want to just say that I agree with Doug Carr's initial presentation earlier today, just about height in general. I thought that was really well done. And then the fourth thing is there was an earlier comment about rats in general. While I can't speak to the rat situation in that neighborhood, I can speak to the rat situation in my neighborhood. And I do feel that currently the city has not been doing a good enough job with enforcing sanitation. There are many houses in my neighborhood that have overflowing trash cans at trash time, as well as lids that are cracked in half. And we know that that is a breeding ground for rats. So I think this is also an invitation as we're thinking about zoning, if there's anything that could you know, where residents are presenting concerns, you know, in those areas, I think it's an opportunity for our city council to also be looking at how are we enforcing sanitation in various neighborhoods of the city. So those are my comments and thank you for your consideration.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Mr. Carney, appreciate it. Next up is Miranda. Please your name and address for the record. If you could go ahead, Miranda.
[Miranda Briseno]: Hi, I'm Miranda Briseno. I live on 2 Taylor Street. I'm right off of Winthrop in the Hillside neighborhood. I'm a renter. I've been a renter the entire time I've lived in Medford. I'm actually in a not that unique of a situation that my house is like a one floor house surrounded by two and three families. And I have to deal with the shadows of those all the time. And it just really is the cards were dealt. So I really don't see an issue with the heights proposed. currently. I think it's fine. I think it's part of changing neighborhoods. I don't really know what people mean by the character of a neighborhood because neighborhoods are constantly changing. Demographics are constantly changing. I love the diversity of this neighborhood and I hope to see it continue to grow to be diverse. I want to echo Jeremy's comments on the sidewalk with I know that there's a lot of potential for developers to try and get out of that. So I really appreciate the comment on making sure that there's enough width on the sidewalks to accommodate everyone and to really encourage more walking, biking and rolling. I also want to say someone who lives in the neighborhood uses the Green Line every day. I don't have an issue with the dorm on Boston Ave. I think it's just the same height as the parking garage is right next to it. And I would have rather had that parking garage be a dorm as well. As a renter, this whole time I've lived here, I look forward to the opportunity to potentially getting access to more of a housing stock in this neighborhood, a neighborhood that I love and wanna be in because now tough students will be hopefully in those dorms and not competing for rental property in and all around the neighborhood. And that's all for now, thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you very much, Miranda, appreciate it. We're going to go next to Zachary. Zachary, could you unmute yourself and name and address for the record, please?
[Zachary Chertok]: Zachary Church, I'm on the street and while I'm not the resident of the neighborhood here, Boston Abbey is my primary commute route to and from my office that is in the suburbs out beyond I-95. Um, there are a couple of things that I wanted to bring to attention that there were comments about grass and tree cover that some of the other residents in the neighborhood brought up. And the comprehensive plan, um, does actually call for, um, you know, an increase in the canopy. We've had these studied for the city when you're erecting tall structures that are casting shadows over a particularly narrow roadway where boss, including Boston out that has also been found through the. The comprehensive Boston Avenue planning study, we'll look at the preliminary data that that's being done in partnership with Tufts, and we'll continue to run through this year. Feedback that's already come back has already highlighted the lack of tree canopy, the narrowing, the deteriorating sidewalks. And per AASHTO and MBTC regulations for road design width and standards, the way the buildings and lots are currently designated along that road, there's not a lot of room to play with the width there to be able to overcome that. And if you're going to build buildings that are six and eight stories, casting shadows over the roadway, you're not going to be really doing much to support a vibrant and replaced tree canopy along that road. This actually came up in the discussion regarding the top storm back during the last session of the CD board. At the same time, when you're discussing taller buildings on the railroad track side, leaning into the conversation that the comments from one of the members of the CD board about reconciling um, allowed businesses with the, um, with city's regulations, I believe it was in relation to the marijuana, um, you know, shop use case. We also should be making sure that we're passing zoning for buildings that are actually feasible on these sites. Since the, um, the trench for the MBTA was widened to accommodate the green line coming into one of the Southern nodes in one, uh, one and two of the Boston abs split zones. Um, we also should be making sure that we're examining the required setbacks from that, um, train trench for allowable construction. And that is not a site plan issue. That is actually a zoning issue for height maximums, because you don't want to be advertising buildings as allowed on those sites that actually feasibly can't be built. There will be blasting and digging restrictions to put foundations deep enough in there to support those buildings. The last consideration also is in relation to fire and public safety. that when you're turning a narrow street into a construction zone, which this will do because developers will move in particularly on the commercial properties, you have to make sure that for any road closures that the surrounding infrastructure can handle it. We've heard from many neighbors tonight about road overflow on existing traffic flows, the backups on Boston Ave at key nodal points that happen to be particularly narrow. And if we're over-densifying and supporting the construction of taller buildings that will require more advanced construction techniques, we've got to be really sensitive to what actually can be accommodated there. In addition, on the dorm side, you've also have to consider the feasibility of the fire safety requirements within the building code for that area. I agree. I understand that private dorms can serve as a tax revenue generation opportunity for Tufts overflow. where they wouldn't pay that to us if it was a public building. But there's also restrictions around if Tufts is gonna be the primary beneficiary of a publicly legislated opportunity of a private dormitory, that their institutional zoning plan has to be complete before we consider that. So just there are a couple of things in here, some of which I've already written in memo to the CD board that are happening on a board of here that have to be accounted for. Thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Mr. Sertak, appreciate it. I think we have one last person online.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, iPhone 39, if you could change your name or start your video so that we know that you are a real person. We have been burned in the past. iPhone 39. Oh, their hand went down, okay.
[Doug Carr]: All right, I think with that.
[Zac Bears]: Oh, we've got one person. Nope, we've got one person. Oh, iPhone 39 now has started their video. So I'm going to, I see that they are a human being. I will unmute them. You have three minutes.
[Meryl Perlson]: Hi, thanks, sorry about that. I'm having some tech difficulties. So I'm actually gonna reclose my video.
[Anita Nagem]: I'll just go ahead.
[Meryl Perlson]: My name is Meryl Pearlson. I live at 97B Boston Avenue. I've been here 25 years. First of all, thanks for the time tonight. I want to address a couple of the specific changes regarding BA3 and then just overall concern about the level of information we're working with around these decisions. As I said, I live on Boston Ave. It's north of Route 16, but I I'm probably a daily traveler by car, by bike, sometimes by foot along the Boston Avenue corridor. I am thrilled to see more housing coming to the corridor and to welcome more people in our community, as long as we do it smart. For BA3, I think some of the proposed building heights are too high. Doug Carr said a lot of things really well that I don't wanna have to repeat. So I'm just gonna add a couple, things onto it. I think six stories should be the max. It would be consistent with what's already going to be happening at Walkling Court. It would align with the other BA zones which are actually closer to real high frequency transit like the Green Line as opposed to intermittent unreliable bus service and the commuter rail. I am concerned the neighborhood is already gonna be absorbing an influx of at least 100 new residents from Walkling Court, plus the people who provide them with support services. Other people have commented about the traffic backups on Boston Ave, between Route 16, the one-way streets in that entire neighborhood that direct all traffic towards Winthrop Street onto Boston Ave. It gets backed up for blocks and blocks. I also want to agree with the folks who talked about having 90% lot coverage. being too much that we need way more green space and the mandatory 12 feet sidewalks. More broadly, and I've said this at a meeting last year, I just feel like we don't have enough information to be making these really critical zoning decisions. We keep talking about geometry, the height of buildings, but not about human impact. We're not talking very much about traffic. We're not talking about sewer usage. We're not talking about capacity of emergency services to reach a hundred foot building. We're not talking about how much more the area can absorb. I've been told at another meeting that it's just too difficult to estimate these things, but I know that peer communities like Cambridge and Newton didn't guess when they did zoning, they had the data. Somerville-Worcester, they used build-out analyses, infrastructure capacity studies, traffic impact assessments during major rezoning. If they can do mathematically sound, assessments of impacts about their schools, their intersections or sores. I don't understand why we aren't on the planning department website. It says that citywide traffic studies are just quote snapshots unquote and that we can rely on assessing individual site plans later. To me, I find this like kind of legally contradictory. If we are expanding our by right zoning now, and I think somebody had commented on this earlier, the council, the community board effectively legally forfeit their power to really stop or mitigate projects when our infrastructure hits a breaking point. So by deflecting this infrastructure accountability to future isolated project reviews, you know, by passing these changes now, it just seems like a failure of thoughtful planning. Like the state forced Medford to use data-driven compliance models for Wellington Station. Why isn't this council demanding the same mathematical rigor for these zoning changes. I also wanna question the math about the tax revenue is needed to make the infrastructure improvements that we need to have in the city. I was reading a study from Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis and Mass Municipal Association. I think the report came out in October. They documented that in Massachusetts, municipal costs inflated about three to 4% a year. but we know that prop two and a half caps revenue increases, tax revenue increases to two and a half. So the cost of serving new residents is gonna outpace any municipal tax growth annually. And you can just look at Natick to see that fiscal reality. They had lots of dense development and it's still resulted in a structural crisis forcing a big, I think it was like $7 million tax override. And you're also talking about things, yeah.
[Doug Carr]: Sorry, I appreciate the comments. I know it's late. We're coming up on a four hour meeting, but thank you for the comments. Appreciate it. We have one more person, Sophie R. online. Could you please unmute yourself and your name and address for the record, please?
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Your neighborhood as well.
[Sophie Ricks]: Thank you. It's Sophie Ricks. I live on Cotting Street and I'm in the Hillside neighborhood. I wasn't planning to say anything, but I do just want to also agree with Jeremy's point about the 12-foot wide sidewalk. I appreciated that. And about more green space generally. I don't have a concern around six to eight stories personally. That corner, North Street in Boston right now, it is a meadow of invasive plants that like literally anything feels better than that right now. It's black swallow wood. It's, I think I saw some knotweed in there. There's a lot of other stuff. I am looking forward to any kind of commercial development that doesn't end up being a vape shop. Yeah, I don't need to say more. I know you guys have been here for a long time, but I appreciated those additional comments from Jeremy too. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: I got to recognize him. And first we need to close public comment. So public comment for tonight is closed. We'll be continuing this public hearing to June 11th. If you'd like to comment on June 11th, you can do so. And you may also submit public comment through the, portal that the Planning Development Sustainability Department has created or by emailing it both to the city council and the community development board. And before I recognize Councilor Leming, Chair Carr and I did discuss going through the, as quickly as possible and not necessarily to debate them further, but the suggested list of potential changes to provide direction to the planning staff and zoning consultant. My plan was to go through my list and essentially say that the person who offered it was offering a motion and see if there was a second on that motion or in this case, I guess, Chair Carr, you would do it for the community development board items, I would do it for the items for the city councilors. And then if there was a second, we could take a vote on whether or not we wanted to include in the direction to the planning staff and zoning consultant. Let's do that. But I will now recognize Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you. I have an alternative proposal to that because it is slightly late. It is a bit late and I think that with the recommendations from the Community Development Board, this is many city councilors' first time hearing them. So I would like to suggest the alternative of first uh, continuing the public hearing to June 11th, then having the Council President email the list of recommendations and, um, you know, which members of the CDB recommended them and, Then follow that up by having Councilors individually submit their feedback both to PDS, NS, and the members of the CDB by next Monday. And I think this would give, this would, and then at the June 11th public meeting, at the June 11th public hearing, then share that, have Councilors summarize their own feedback on those individually. I think doing this would allow Councilors a little bit more time to think about and digest some of the, some of the comments and also give NS enough time to incorporate those into, into the draft, but, you know, I would be interested to hear folks thoughts on that path forward.
[Zac Bears]: I'll go to members of the council first. It sounds like we kind of have two thoughts on how to proceed. Do we want to go through the list tonight or do we want to give folks time, councilors time for written feedback and then send something back in writing by Monday? Councilor Tseng?
[Justin Tseng]: My preference would be to sit with the recommendations and have until Monday to write back. But I'd also be happy if we went through verbally the recommendations list to orient everyone to make sure that we got everything.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. Yeah, I will go to Councilor Malauulu and then Councilor Callahan.
[Liz Mullane]: Yeah, I do think there was a lot of great comments and a lot of great feedback that came through tonight. And it's kind of hard to be able to, off the cuff, be able to know what's the best next step. So it would be nice to be able to digest it. But I do also agree, I almost feel like all of us need kind of a repeat of what it was that all the different pieces that were brought up tonight, just to kind of reframe and understand moving forward. But it would be helpful to be able to take a little bit more time to look through. That was the first time I'd seen, you know, Chair Carr's presentation, so it's like, it's hard to, you know, off the top be able to know exactly what to say or feedback on, until I can actually really look at it in comparison.
[Doug Carr]: Yeah, I mean, I created it this afternoon, so you didn't really have time.
[Liz Mullane]: No, yeah, no, and truly, not a judgment at all, at all. I just, I want to be thoughtful in it, and I just feel like I'd be a little bit, a little bit rushed, that's all.
[Doug Carr]: Just, I think it would be good for us to go through the list to get a sense, is there consensus? We don't, I actually don't think we need to vote on it. I'm just looking, is there a consensus that this is a generally good idea? Because I think we need to give, and it's time to start working on it, even though there might be still some comments coming in by Monday, if that's what the will of the council is. I don't disagree with that at all. We're going to have our own meeting soon and we want to start to see changes because it's, it will take time to make these changes and then there's only a certain number of meetings. You know, I don't want to rush it either. I'm the proponent as I know I speak for most of the people in the city. Boy, we don't want this rush. We want it right. So maybe we can kind of do a little bit of both. We can get a consensus but then we still have the time to get the comments. You guys can think about it. A lot of us walked the corridor in the last week. I mean, I would certainly recommend that for everyone just to take a fresh look now that you have the maps and you can see what we're talking about. You can see where this is heading. I think it's a great idea. Someone suggested. Yes. And so anyway, that's my thoughts. Good.
[Zac Bears]: Anything else? Councilor Mullane? No. Councilor Callahan?
[Anna Callahan]: I was just going to agree with both of the, my fellow city councilors, but also add in the fact that it is a little bit late at night, and I'm personally like, I find it unlikely that we will be able to get a good answer to the question of consensus, because I, like, at a meeting this long with a number of, you know, fairly deep requested changes that came from, you know, primarily from the city board, but also from residents, I'm not sure that I personally can like process all of those tonight and I just would given that many changes I'm I'm just guessing it would take us a very long time to get to some consensus on that list and I would I would just love to have a little bit of time given also the lateness of the hour the difficulty that you know I would have to like feel like mentally up to the challenge of like making these kinds of multiple decisions in a row without having more time. Thanks.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Then I can go through the list and we can just confirm that this list is comprehensive and then I can try to share it out. I don't really have the time to compile responses so I won't be doing that. Councilor Callahan requested that we remove the parking mandate for the home sharing definition for lodgers and consider parking mandates differently for lodgers than the per unit requirements for construction. All right. In general, are there any objections on the council to that change? Do you want to see if there's any? On your side, Doug.
[Doug Carr]: Yeah, does anyone have any? Sorry.
[Page Buldini]: Not to be disrespectful of the process at all, may we just ask the planning office? I know that we have some dates, and I just want to be mindful of that, not to be disrespectful of the process. And honestly if, Emily, if you guys are able to compile the information that we asked.
[Alicia Hunt]: So we were just consulting among ourselves about this suggested idea. And what we came to is that we have a set, most of the changes are literally They're small from the perspective of changing a Y to an SBC or, right, or a number from a three to a two, right? It's not, nobody's saying can you rewrite a section. Rewriting a section, researching a topic, those types of things, if there's something you want the NIST to research before the next meeting, that we would need to kind of know tonight because that takes time and effort. But if in the end we wanted to switch, you know, a Y to a CDB and a 4 to a 3 or whatever it is, that's not a big deal. The only other thing is map changes. The ones that have come up are pretty small. No members of these bodies should email each other about their opinions. That would be like deliberating outside the public view. That would be an open meeting law violation. If you all want to each individually email myself and Danielle by Monday, we would then just compile that answers and we could reflect back the compiled list. It's not a deliberation. It's just for the record for the meeting. You can attach it to the meeting minutes if you want to or you're not, I don't care. And we could send it to Innes Associates on Monday. The goal would be to just, you know, if you know how you feel, send it to us sooner. But then we'll just compile it on Monday.
[Zac Bears]: I just wonder if we're over complicating at this point. If I'm hearing from you that most of the changes that we've presented don't require significant like research, it's more just copy edits if we essentially, you know, obviously there's substantive changes, but they would require you to change a sentence or a word or a letter. How about I read through this?
[Alicia Hunt]: And as you're doing that, there was one that I felt maybe making sure people were clarified on. The stuff around the auto uses, gas stations, light repair services, the words in the table are not as clear as the definitions. And so I just want to make sure that as you go through it, let me just tell you which one at that point is the gas station versus auto repair so everybody's on the same page.
[Zac Bears]: I guess more what I'm saying is what if we just decide at the next meeting, I read the list, that list goes into the agenda and then we go through it point by point at the next meeting and we can decide whether we want that to change or not.
[Alicia Hunt]: Vote on each one then.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah and not have some sort of complicated or convoluted compilation.
[Doug Carr]: I agree with that but I think getting that list out ASAP obviously is critical.
[Zac Bears]: So I want to read it and then I'll email it and then if you guys have context like additional things like this is what this definition means.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'll attach the definitions to the list.
[Zac Bears]: And then we could put that as an attachment to the agenda for next Thursday. Great. Remove required parking mandate for home sharing definition slash lodgers. Consider this differently for lodgers than per unit requirements for discussion. I had four for Doug's presentation and this one might be one where I send this list and then you guys can, there's some boundary suggestions that we need to look at. So that's probably the one that requires the most. But for the BA-1, removing certain residential properties and changing the height to a base of four stories plus one incentive story. For the BA-2, adding the St. Clements Elementary School and Rectory properties, reducing the height on the east side of Boston Ave to four base plus two incentive and then for the two St. Clements properties which will be the only ones west of Boston Ave. That would be four base plus one incentive. So I think we need to figure out exactly what we want to do there. Doug was proposing that we make that a BA1 but I think that messes with our kind of geographical approach to the zone naming and determination.
[Doug Carr]: I guess I really disagree with this idea that this zoning purity should decide the boundaries because, We're only putting the entire corridor into three buckets, and I just think the corridor is more complex than that. We found that out with Walkling Court. We decided to extract it, because if we hadn't, I would be proposing something very different for Walkling Court, match the zoning we're going to build. It violates the boundary, you know, this kind of like.
[Zac Bears]: I'm not necessarily saying the boundaries. I'm just saying that in the Medford square zoning, we used a principle where there was a general height but there were height limits on the north side of High Street between X Street and Y Street. So maybe we could do something like that. here.
[Doug Carr]: Whatever the best way to get to the result.
[Emily Innes]: Gentlemen, can I just make a quick suggestion if you don't mind? I think we were just going to read down the list so we knew what the list was and we were not going to debate it just now.
[Zac Bears]: Doug's proposal is that the height for the St. Clements property should be four base plus one incentive.
[Emily Innes]: Fair enough.
[Zac Bears]: BA3, remove the walk-in court and change the height to five base plus two incentive. And then we had a number, Dina was suggesting doggie daycare should be special permit CDB only, that we should in some way allow more of the car-oriented or service station uses. Adding the purpose-built student housing use, making neighborhood medical offices by special permit CDB only, Ari agreed with to remove Walkland Court, you know, I'm just going to go through the new ones. Ari was in some way supportive of some of those previous amendments and in opposition to others. Sean recommended also the purpose built student housing use but specifically with a minimum number of beds and annual licensing. Sean also recommended not allowing the single family, two family and three family dwelling uses in BA1 if the residential Properties were removed from BA1. There was something about the marijuana uses by special permit ZBA that I had a question about. Maybe we could follow up on that, Sean. Just where is it conflicting with the Chapter 14, Article 9 or somewhere in current Chapter 94 special regulations?
[Sean Beagan]: In the marijuana ordinance itself. It's limited to C2 in industrial.
[Zac Bears]: The non-zoning ordinance? Exactly. All right. So we need to look at Chapter 14, Article 9. Okay. And then I think John had something about the high frequency transit definition wanting that updated.
[Unidentified]: Yes.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. It seems like I just read a long list but someone over there have a... No, John's all set.
[Doug Carr]: All right.
[Sean Beagan]: concern is, again, I want to make sure Emily has enough time to do this because the student-built housing is going to be its own definition. It's going to be more than just changing a letter. That's its own definition. It's maybe a page of regulations. So that's going to be something that, and it won't be, might not be done by next meeting. But I just want to give her as much time to get going on stuff like that.
[Emily Innes]: I think we were just talking about the fact that we would attempt to have a definition available for discussion in case you wanted to. We know you're going to want to debate it because some people were in favor, some people may in this part be against, certainly some members of the public were on either side. So we'll just see if we can prepare a definition to at least have something to discuss.
[Zac Bears]: Would it be to Sean's point of any of the things that I listed including that, You know especially is there one that would be helpful for us to provide more clear direction on tonight. Would that one be helpful if we said please we would like to move forward with this. Please prepare it.
[Emily Innes]: Given, I think, from my perspective, what I heard people comment on on the private dorm, I don't think you want to make a decision on that tonight. I think with respect, I think it deserves some thinking time of all of us as to how best to address and take into account all of those comments. So I think we'd like to. That or any other. Yeah, exactly. And so where I was going with that, I think with that one, we need to have some information available for you for when you have those discussions. I think to Director Hunt's point, many of these other things are policy decisions by you all. Yes, special permit by CD board, no. But for us, those are simple changes once you've made them. So I think we have sufficient direction. at this point to prepare information to provide to you during your discussion.
[Zac Bears]: Great. So if I send that list over to you guys, you guys can distribute that out to the members of, you know, take, take some time on it. Give us some context on each of the items and we can come back next Thursday and we can go through them with a little more context and make some policy decisions. Great. All right. In that case, I think we only need one motion at this moment, which is to continue the public hearing to Thursday, June 11th and adjourn. Motion of Councilor Callahan seconded by Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Sorry, you're still sending that list out, right?
[Zac Bears]: Yes, that list will go out, yeah. I'll send it to Alicia and Emily and Danielle and Paula right now. On that motion, we do ours, all right. Danielle, could you please call the roll?
[Danielle Evans]: Councilor Callahan? Yes. Councilor Leming?
[Matt Leming]: Yes.
[Danielle Evans]: Councilor Millane? Yes. Councilor Scarpelli? Yes. Councilor Tseng? Yes. Vice President Lazzaro? Yes. President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, 5 in the affirmative, 2 absent. Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: Yes, same motion to continue the public hearing to June 11th. I will entertain a motion. So moved. Second.
[Sean Beagan]: Second.
[Doug Carr]: All right, roll call. John Anderson.
[Sean Beagan]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: Sean Began.
[Sean Beagan]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: Page Buldini. Yes. Tina Calgaro. Yes. Ari Gothman-Fishman.
[Sean Beagan]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Ari. And Doug Carr, yes. Motion passes 6 to 0. Motion to adjourn on this side.
[Sean Beagan]: Yup, so moved. Second.
[Doug Carr]: Mr. Anderson? Yes. John Began? Yes. This is going to be a tough call, huh? Page Buldini? Dina Calgaro? Yes. Ari Goffman-Fishman?
[Ari Fishman]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: And myself, Doug Carr, yes. Motion passes.
[Zac Bears]: Great. The motion of both bodies passes and the meeting is adjourned. Thank you. th th
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