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Apartments would replace auto-repair shops, billboards on Hancock Street in Dorchester
By adamg on Tue, 12/12/2017 - 11:27am
Rendering by Rode Architects.
The Board of Appeal today approved developers' plans to replace two auto-body shops at 233 Hancock St., near Pleasant, with a five-story, 36-unit apartment building that would also feature space for an art gallery.
Benjie and Dan Moll would also tear down two billboards now up the hill from the shops, their attorney, John Pulgini, told the board today.
The proposed building would have 20 parking spaces on the first floor.
The Molls are planning twelve studio apartments, twelve units with one bedroom, eight with two bedrooms and four with three bedrooms, none more than 950 square feet. Board chairwoman Christine Araujo said the sizes seemed kind of small to her. Pulgini said that is to try to bring the rents for each unit down. He added that five units would be rented as affordable.
The BPDA has already approved the proposal.
233 Hancock St. small-project review application (3.8M PDF).
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Comments
But What About My Car's Allignment?
Good riddance. This stretch of Hancock always looked like the Detroit atmosphere scenes from True Romance right down to a fire in the barrel that used to be kept going during the winter in the drug sales facility, excuse me, $2.00 car wash that was on this site in the 80's.
Glover's Corner has been a pit since the 1800's. There are reports from Dorchester history books talking about unruly sailors mucking about here back when ships could tie up along Freeport Street towards the gas tanks.
In the end I'm sure that this will look like every other apartment building, but it will be a step up nevertheless. Let's hope this and Dot Block comes to fruition.
Textbook Classism
Did you ever think that the fire in the trash barrels was because the guys who were washing your car for you in February had cold wet hands, and were trying to stay warm while they worked outside? (Y'now like in Detroit, where it's also cold in the winter - or is that not what the Detroit reference was meant to imply.)
And what's the difference between unruly sailors 'mucking up about here' when they got off work at the nearby docks a hundred years ago and the unruly tech bros that were mucking up Broadway in Southie after work last night?
Textbook Classism?
HELL YES!
When you have heard the slights of being from Dirty Dot and know suburban parents counted the silver after you leave their house when visiting friends you have made from the leafys, you get to invoke a bit of happiness watching that "grit" of urban life pass on.
It is always the ones who grew up in nice little suburban and rural towns who move to Boston and "lament" the changing of ways of those urban neighborhoods, though they would not be caught living there when its rough and only move in after the first wave of gentifiers, typically a few gay guys have softened the landing for them.
Try walking down Dot Ave as a teenager at night or up to the Post Office and hope you don't get jumped or worse, shot. You will change your mind about the crappiness of being raised in an urban environment post haste. I guess you missed the part about the car wash in the 80's also being an open air drug sales facility. Did you know up until about a year ago the used car place to the west of this site was a wholesale cocaine operation? I guess being critical of that is part of my classism as well.
Disagree
Symphony autobody has two great, affordable and honest mechanics who have been a part of Dorchester for quite some time. And yes, people do own cars in cities. And yes, sometimes they need to be fixed.
More importantly, if Boston keeps turning our PDR parcels into residential we will become another San Fran. Altering zoning of PDR areas is what they did there, it didn't help, people continue to argue about no housing in San Fran, and other costs of services has risen because there are a many fewer options for businesses like car/truck repair, bus depots, construction offices, etc. But now the problem has been amplified on media because there is no housing for upper-middle class tech folks who for the first time don't understand why they aren't getting their way instead of immigrants, artists, young HS/college grads as it had been in the past.
These PDR parts of town help keeps rent down as they are traditionally in sub-neighborhoods that a certain segment of the population, i.e. middle to upper class, do not want live in or near due to noise and/or odd operating hours. So, the rents in the buildings nearby are still affordable for people willing to deal with those disturbances. But if we get rid of all these spaces not only does the city lose affordable housing but also a balance of property taxes between commercial and residential.
Fake
Nobody in the upper middle class is moving to a studio. The argument that keep ignoring is ls that their is going to be much more square footage to tax. Dot has plenty of auto shops leaching petrochemicals.
Fake?
Was that a response to my post? If so, have you been to the South End, South Boston or Beacon Hill before? Plenty of studio apartments there and all with crazy high monthly rents being paid for by the upper middle class.
And I think you meant to say that the argument I am ignoring (the post is a little jumbled) is around square footage as taxable. I am not ignoring that. What I am saying is that there needs to be a balance of commercial and residential properties within a city to balance one another in case one tax base goes belly up. If housing crashes and a majority of tax revenue coming into a city is from residential housing, then that city will have major financial issues. While there are some hypothetical, I am not making this up. These same events happened in San Francisco.
Yes fake
Taking your posts as a whole, you twist everything towards your convenience. Which is fine but you are not honest about it. There are few studios in Dorchester.we need more housing in Boston. Stop trolling every article about building in Savin Hill. Or anything that undermines your weak justification for driving everywhere.
It's not going to make it
It's not going to make it affordable, and that's like you're making everything about the concerns of people who think everything should be built so much just because places are more affordable than others areas.
So debating = trolling now?
Cool, call me Branch then.
1. I live in Dorchester, so I'm not trolling articles about the neighborhood. I am expressing my opinion about where I live. I think that is one of purposes behind the ability to comment on UHub.
2. You brought up studios, not me. I was just debating/trolling that people from the middle class DO rent/buy studios and gave an example of it. Unlike you who made a blanket comment about how they don't. BTW, I still don't understand what kind of point you were trying to prove in your post.
3. In case folks missed it the first two times, there needs to be a balance between residential and commercial properties within in a city in order to protect the people and the city's budget i.e. the ability to pay for your trash to get picked up every week. Getting rid of commercial space for all residential housing can have negative consequences.
4. In case you forgot from our previous debate, I ride the MBTA every day. Red line to Orange line for work and then other directions when we get out of the house. We moved to the city for public transit and advocate for it with our local officials consistently. So don't try to throw shade on my character when it isn't true.
Have fun in Bergen-town. I'll be chilling with Poppy, Guy Diamond and the rest of the crew.
Persistent Dishonesty= Trolling
Debate is fine. There are a hundred car repair shops in Dorchester. Whatever commercial integration you think is vital, we are not running out of them. There are very few studios in Dorchester, we need more diverse kinds of housing. This area is depressed, it is the perfect place to build. My life in Dorchester will change as it grows more dense, but is wrong to prevent housing for others because of that.
PDR?
Am I supposed to know what that means?
My apologies
Production, Distribution and Repair.
It's an outrage!
What is that guy DOING to that poor dog? Hitting him with a light-saber?
Wow that will be an improvement!
Current streetview
https://goo.gl/maps/6PkWV8qSSc62
(Check out the kid on the cool bike!)
Hold on a second there Gaffin
Didn't you already post about this project.
Oh wait, never mind - I forgot there's only one design and exterior material now permitted for every project in the city.
A modern building being built with widely available and modern
building materials. Shocking. They should really demolish the south end since so many of those buildings are so similar to each other. Do you think they may have been constructed around the same time?
Obviously, you've never
Obviously, you've never actually seen one of these buildings up close. The fit of the synthetic panels is terrible, so they have to be sealed with caulking. The material throughout is the cheapest available, and that particle board will suck up moisture and rot under the siding in a few years. The design looks like it was done by a first year student, totally without any effort to produce an overall balance.
And the workmanship? One of these went up near me in the last couple of years. When they put in the concrete sidewalk, grit from the pouring splashed up to the street-facing wall. So they painted over it.
Your average Boston three decker - once derided as 'tenement' - was built to a vastly greater quality. You'll find bad ones, but I've been in quite a few in Boston in working class neighborhoods that are filled with very nice woodwork. The guys who build that dump above wouldn't know where to start on such builds.
How long a due diligence
How long a due diligence period does the developer have to get a complete environmental testing done and remove all toxins from the parcel's soil ?
Only 5 units out of 36 are
Only 5 units out of 36 are "affordable"?? Small units but space for art gallery? Pure greed. Chairwoman states too small but still approves? The next NY city I tell ya! It's a shame when developers are put before the community.
You do realize
That one of the reasons real estate around here is so expensive is due to "affordable" housing requirements? The developers have to make up for the cost of this housing (at zero profit so they need to make more on everything else). In turn that restricts how many units can get built and people who might otherwise be able to live downtown have to move to other, cheaper neighborhoods and so on and so on.
You want cheaper housing - eliminate "affordable" requirements and the cost will go down very quickly.
Citations?
Is it also because we can't hire drunks with a GED to "teach" kindergarten like Oklahoma does?
No citations
Just the bare minimum of common sense and math skills.
Show your work then.
Show your work then.
You failed?
your minimum competency tests?
Mathematics is a series of operations
Show your work and cite your sources.
Like logic, mathematics is a series of operations. Being able to do manipulations with numbers isn't the same as being able to use good data and solid sources to begin with.
You must have failed critical thinking basic competency - or you were never taught critical thinking and simply got bananas for being a good math monkey moving numbers around.
TL/DR: GARBAGE IN = GARBAGE OUT
And we all thought you were the math whiz
This is a simple algebra word problem.
Express the required cost of additional affordable units such that the original construction cost per unit, plus the cost of affordable units plus a bank financing mandated gross margin can be equal to or less than the sales price without the affordable units.
Get back to us when you can prove that, for example (X + .15X)×1.1=<1.1X where X is a constant greater than 0 and represents the construction cost per unit.
After you graduate 9th grade, then we can move on to economics and the laws of supply and demand.
Or you can tell us that one time at band camp your son worked for $2.54 an hour with a kid that went to MIT who proved that 1+X can be <= 1 if X is greater than 0 and you live in a black hole while traveling at the speed of light
do you understand the cost of affordable housing?
What does the builder actually pay? You keep dodging the question so your answers appear dishonest.
builder pays...
Either into a fund to build affordable housing offsite (and historically this money often doesn't go into affordable housing because nobody kept tabs on it - hopefully that's more closely monitored) or they have to build the units onsite - which cost as much or almost as much as the market rate units. If s/he is LUCKY, they recover their cost for onsite units.
Visited with a friend who does small project financing and he told me his client just wrapped up a 9 unit building. He says lots of smaller projects that could be say 10/11/12 units get cut to 9 units because if you put in one extra unit you have to build an affordable unit and the numbers don't work.
It's a lovely goal. It just doesn't work.
(by the way - there is an error more of an assumption than math that I deliberately left into the formula above - bonus points if you figure it out - let me know. Hint - it's related to this post. It doesn't change the conclusion that affordable housing drives up the cost of the market rate units artificially which according to the rules of supply and demand reduces supply - see my note in par 2 for a real world example).
How much do they pay?
You imply that you understand the question, just answer it.
The answer...
It depends. On site, offsite, cost of units in the project and other variables.
There is no single answer.
And here is your dishonesty.
First you say that affordable housing is driving up the cost of housing, then after several (pretentious) cryptic answers admit that it changes the housing that the developers can build. Well duh.
You assert that the builders are lucky if they recover their costs, but you don't cite any proof of this. Are there a bunch of builders in boston going bankrupt? Do set asides cut into their profit? of course it does. Developers only want to build luxury condos and McMansions with master suites that have private full bathrooms and double walk in closets.
Affordable housing isn't just reducing the cost to rent or buy. It is also about creating well made homes for a variety of city residents. Studios for entry level workers that are safe and reasonably priced. Small houses and town homes for new families and single parents.
tangent I know, but we to address the issues of integrated housing with less pressure on individuals in private sector. Like creating an insurance for Section 8, so people don't get turned down for bad credit and homeowners don't lose money. Like a rent to own program that isn't a scam.
I'll quote Barney Frank
Arguing with you is like arguing with my dining room table.
more pretentious coverup.
Clearly you don't know anything about this subject. Just another troll entertaining themselves with snark to disguise their lack of substance.
Huh
so the person who answers - "Well, duh, you were obviously right all along. But, but .... other Stuff" says I have lack of substance and know nothing about the subject - after telling me I'm right.
Hey dining room table - who gave you those other 3 thumbs ups - the dining room chairs?
Still no facts.
Still no facts.
Irrelevant
Irrelevant statement. Burden of math and evidence is on you, not her.
I made a huge assumption
That she understood that 1< any number greater than one.
My bad.
The building will result in a "decrease in traffic volume"
LOL. That is an impressive piece of spin. That area is cut through/go around for Dot Ave. Traffic isn't high because of repair shops, traffic is high because there is so much traffic. But removing 2 auto body shops will DEFINITELY change the whole dynamic of the neighborhood though.
(Removing drug dealers does help though. Thank you for the reminder John.)
Interesting how there is no zoning letter needed to submit to the BPDA. You would think that would be a key piece of information for the Board of Appeal...
All that said, it will be an impressive feat of construction in such a small parcel though. Give them credit for that.
Thank goodness
they did not forget the proverbial art gallery space which seems to be a prerequisite for almost all of these new developments.
(Art Will Save the World)
And, oh, boy five units as "affordable". Gee, how wonderful.
How many affordable units were on the lot before this?
.
I am a fan of affordable
I am a fan of affordable housing and believe every project should have some affordable units. I also tend to fall right outside the reaches of being able to take advantage of said affordable units so find myself with the choice of either trying to figure out how to slash my pay by 5k a year or make enough money to buy a non affordable unit. I want there to be lots of affordable units but when you keep adding higher and higher numbers onto these projects the overall cost of non affordable units goes up. When I see people demanding 50 percent affordable in some spots my head almost explodes because that means I will never be able to buy a condo or home because what is left will all be too expensive for me to buy. I get faced with the option of leaving the Boston zone or possibly going DOWN a peg on the career ladder in order to be able to afford a spot to live.
There are plenty of places
There are plenty of places that cost less, and having some affordability is the best solution.
Do you even know where this is?
Oh, I'm sure you DROVE by it sometime in your specialmobile.
I sincerely doubt that it will be a luxury building by any stretch of that adjective.
I bought up the street 4 years ago
This, with dot block, and the fact the lot next to this is being turned into something similar has me in hog heaven!! What a luck time to buy! Oh also hookers used to bang there. As fun gays coming from dbar, we would cheer and wave.... those were the times I tell ya.
Did the owners of these
Did the owners of these businesses get any compensation? Will they be able to relocate? They’ve been there some 30 years.