The rules of a process to develop Somerville’s land at 90 Washington St. say two plans must go forward – and since there are only two plans to choose from, both were advanced Monday by the City Council to next steps.
One is widely disliked, though, and the other that everyone likes may be impossible, which leaves city officials and staff hoping the developer process works as intended: “Play them off” against each other to “see what comes of it,” said Rachel Nadkarni, the city’s director of economic development, “push them to the best place that they can.”
The favored design by North River Leerink has 200 belowground parking spaces and would build its hundreds of homes and portion of affordable homes based on federal tax credits. Those have different requirements than the city’s own, and would put all the affordable units in a single building among the three that are proposed.
“To segregate the lower-income units is very much a nefarious policy suggestion that I will denounce,” councilor Kristen Strezo said. “For me, that’s a nonstarter.”
While a move to a mixed-income model would add costs, belowground parking is already expensive, and councilor Matt McLaughlin further dampened anticipation with a prediction for the land, which is in the largely industrial Inner Belt neighborhood.
“I’m going to use my crystal ball and guess that the land is contaminated,” McLaughlin said. “Underground parking is always expensive. If there’s land contamination, it’s expensive-slash-impossible.”
The Wood Partners proposal
The city seized the 4-acre former shopping center site for $8.7 million in 2019 for a public safety building, but that led to a lawsuit and judgment that the city must pay much more. Now the city is trying to recoup a total $35.3 million by letting a company develop the land with dense, mixed-income housing and ground floor businesses.
Wood Partners proposes to build five to six stories of 324 homes – 65 of them affordable – over a ground floor with 15,000 square feet of retail space. What’s been called a “monolith” of a building would be wrapped around a central parking structure with 398 spaces. There would also be 15,000 square feet of amenities, including a raised plaza with a pool and a deck, 6,000 square feet of community space that is so far undefined, and 7,000 square feet of civic space. A portion of the land along New Washington Street is “a fairly thin, somewhat difficult to develop parcel, so they essentially proposed giving it back to the city at the end of the development period,” economic development planner Ben Demers said.
The company said it expected to refine the parking, ground floor activation, housing density and public realm strategy.
The North River Leerink proposal
North River Leerink proposes three buildings of six to 16 stories with ground floor retail of 17,000 square feet and art spaces around a central green space, which would go atop the parking. It offers 8,000 square feet of community space and a total housing count of 426, with 85 of those homes being deemed affordable. Its original proposal proposed up to 600 units, but that was lowered by the time representatives did a public interview with the site’s civic advisory committee.
“CAC members were disappointed that the number of units dropped, and so they would hope to see how they can still allow for greater density on the site,” Demers said. There was also concern that the central green space wouldn’t feel like public space, and they want the company to find a way to invite in pedestrians, as well as to explain better its ground floor activation strategy and interest in hosting a large grocery store. That should include local grocer options, members said.
“The proposal is ambitious and several elements still require significant due diligence that raised some feasibility concerns,” Demers said, summing up committee member reactions.
The chief concern among CAC members was the underground parking, which has little precedent at this size in Somerville. “They are concerned that this may not be achievable,” and discovering it later in the process “is going to change the site plan fairly significantly.” Additionally, the strategy around affordable units brings a city-versus-federal conflict not just in placement, but in how income limits are set; levels are different locally than federally, and there are questions “how this would be done from the zoning perspective,” Demers said.
Feedback on both projects have urged developers to build higher to include more homes.
Improving the plan
Councillors heard the proposal summaries and went into a closed-door section of the meeting to talk about finances. The dollar amounts offered by the developers are withheld from the public until one is chosen.
With the two developers progressing by default, each has time to update and improve plans before new presentations in early July. The Somerville Redevelopment Authority, which owns the land, decides afterward whether either company becomes developer of 90 Washington. After a selection comes a four- to five-month period in which the developer and city negotiates and the company gets a due diligence period for things such as environmental testing. The goal is for that period to end with a land development agreement, Demers said.
It’s in this phase that North River Leerink would have to figure out its parking. “Getting them to things like soil samples, et cetera, that will have financial implications for whether they could do underground parking,” Demers said.
Transit-oriented development
The complications around parking – Wood Partners’ much-disliked structure and North River Leerink’s potentially impossible garage – had councilors wondering why so much parking was needed.
“If there’s ever anywhere where, feasibly speaking, it makes sense to have people come and want to live who are going to move in and not need cars and not be expecting to have a car, it’s here. It’s right next to the green line. It’s a 10-minute walk to the orange line. It’s on bus routes,” said Ben Wheeler, the councilor with a seat on the Redevelopment Authority and advisory committee. “We need to push as much as we can here for as little parking as possible.”
Among residents of a US2 tower in Union Square, only nine people from 90 eligible units sought street parking permits, councilor JT Scott said. “The aboveground parking is, to me, a total full stop, and I understand the concern about underground parking,” Scott said. “Actual utilization of parking at this kind of transit-oriented development is extremely low.”
A more collaborative approach
Summing up the message of the meeting, “we have one proposal that I haven’t really heard any positive vibes toward, and one that has general positive vibes with some serious concerns,” McLaughlin said. “What is the advantage of moving both of these to the Redevelopment Authority when there are still so many questions remaining?”
Since the advancement was required by law, Scott had his own proposal for later in the process.
The companies are “coming at it from a perspective of what they can deliver independently, and quite frankly I feel like we have the opportunity as a city to deliver stronger projects and stronger benefits from a more collaborative approach,” Scott said, urging the process be allowed to accommodate a “creative partnership” with the city.
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