There couldn’t be a starker difference in the two bids to remake Somerville’s land at 90 Washington St.: In one, the buildings surround an oval field of grass where children play, ringed by patios for retail, arts spaces and restaurants; in the other, the buildings surround an eight-story parking garage.
The plans, examined at meetings of the 90 Washington Street Civic Advisory Committee on April 22 and Tuesday, resulted from the city’s need to pivot: The 4-acre site it seized for $8.7 million in 2019 for a public safety building led to a lawsuit and judgment finding the city owed much more. Now the city is trying to recoup its total $35.3 million by letting a company develop the Inner Belt land with dense, mixed-income housing and ground-floor businesses.
Wood Partners proposed on April 22 one large building with six stories of 324 apartments – 65 of them kept affordable – over a ground floor with around 15,000 square feet of retail and 6,000 square feet of community uses, mainly along Washington Street. In the middle of the building is 398 parking spaces. The project also proposes a pool and creating a roughly 7,000-square-foot civic area where Washington and New Washington streets meet.
North River Leerink proposed 600 homes, of which 120 would be kept affordable, divided among three to four buildings of between six to 14 stories in height – highest at Washington and New Washington streets and tapering down toward the east as they get closer to the Cobble Hill Apartments. There would be 200 belowground parking spaces and the central green space, retail and an art space meant to extend the Brickbottom neighborhood and its arts building on the other side of McGrath Highway. “They proposed kind of tying into that arts ecosystem,” economic development planner Ben Demers said.
The North River Leerink proposal drew questions from members of the advisory committee that seemed to advance the project, such as about the mix of retail envisioned for the site and whether the proportion of affordable homes could be bigger.
The Wood Partners concept drew universal disdain.
“This really missed the mark in almost every way … I unfortunately don’t have too much positive to say,” Zach Wilson said. A request for proposals for the site made the community’s priorities clear to Wood Partners, he said, but with “this proposal, it feels like they kind of just glanced at them briefly and then did their own thing.”
“Just under half of the total square footage is dedicated to car storage, and we’re right next to the T,” Alex Taylor said, referring to the structure as “this enormous monolith.”
Public comment to the Wood Partners proposal was nearly as negative, and Taylor passed along reaction from an online group of East Somerville residents: “People have been talking all day about how awful this looks, and how it’s just like a big structure for cars.”
The proposals’ path
The negative reactions came despite a note from Demers that “these are concepts, they are not site plans,” and that “any project is going to be refined as we go down this process over the next several years.”
The request for proposals for the site went out in January, calling not just for housing and commercial uses but for publicly accessible green and community space – all meant to fit into a neighborhood around five minutes’ walk from the East Somerville green line T stop. Responses were due April 10, got the public unveiling April 22 and are set for another public meeting Tuesday before the advisory committee makes a recommendation to the City Council and Somerville Redevelopment Authority, Demers said.
The council holds a closed-door session May 11 to talk about the proposals, and in a “best and final offer period” starting around May 20, the developers get a chance to update their plans based on all the gathered feedback. The dollar amounts offered by the developers are withheld from the public until one is chosen, Demers said.
A surprise score
In the city’s 100-point scoring rubric, the 55 making up the financial side of things are unknown to the public; in the remaining 45 points for understanding the city’s goals (20 points), zoning strategy (10 points) and organizational expertise and experience (15 points) Wood Partners scored higher at 35 and North River Leerink got 27, leaving several advisory committee members baffled as to how the parking-garage proposal scored so well against the one they felt responded better to neighborhood priorities.
Wood Partners has put up housing in Somerville – the Alta Revolution building in Assembly Square – while North River Leerink’s experience in the city has been commercial.
And even though its 600 homes was significantly more than Wood Partners proposed, committee member Bill Valletta wasn’t sold, calling it “almost minimal as to what we should be looking at for the redevelopment of 4 acres in a transit-oriented zone. Our planning here in Somerville has rested on the idea that the transit-oriented areas of the city have to be where we’re going to put the bulk of the new population and the bulk of the residential building units for all the new jobs that we expect,” he said. Putting up only 600 units would “undermine everything we’ve been doing here in the last 10 years.”
In a Tuesday presentation that responded to some comments from April 22, Wood Partners’ Dave Snell said the proposed building would be stepped back to “read as multiple buildings and not a continuous street wall.” Vice president of development Quinlan Locke stressed the transit-oriented neighborhood, with green and orange line stops within walking distance, and said they’d “heard a lot of comments about the project.”
“Admittedly, it’s probably too much parking,” Locke said, but it’s easy to eliminate levels of the garage.
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