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Six-story apartment building approved for where the CVS used to be on Comm. Ave. in Allston
By adamg on Tue, 12/12/2023 - 12:27pm
Rendering by CBT Architects.
The Zoning Board of Appeal today approved a six-story, 206-unit apartment building at 1270 Commonwealth Ave. in Allston, where the lights currently remain on at what is a long vacant former CVS.
The proposal by Hines and Benenson Capital Partners, approved by the BPDA in August, calls for 35 affordable units - 17% of the total units - and 68 parking spaces.
The Allston Civic Association "overwhelmingly opposed" the project because the building is simply too dense and has too little greenspace even for Commonwealth Avenue, association President Tony D'Isidoro said. "It's sort of out of character for that portion of Commonwealth Avenue," he said, adding that considering the variances the property needs, the developers should have at least done more than providing 17% affordable units.
Hines executive Matt McCollem acknowledged the relative lack of greenery, but said the developers would make up for that by donating $300,000 to the Boston Parks and Recreation Department to upgrade nearby Ringer Park.
And he said that, unlike many other projects, where affordable units are aimed at people making up to 80% or 100% of the Boston area, the affordable units in the building would be aimed at people making between 50% and 70% of the Boston area median income. Board member Gio Valencia asked if the developers could make the units affordable to people making even less than that. McCollem, however, said current financing restraints would make it impossible to provide additional such units - or greater rent discounts - in the building.
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Comments
Has the ACA ever actually
Has the ACA ever actually visited Comm Ave?! What an embarrassment that they are "speaking for the community." Meanwhile Boston has surpassed San Francisco for the #2 most expensive rents in the country due to our region's housing shortage.
ACA loves speaking for other communities too!
And yes, I know there is a bit of debate about the line between Allston/Brighton.
https://www.universalhub.com/2021/marijuana-shop-and-bakery-approved-con...
Come on, Tony
This is pretty nonsensical.
This is a six story building and is out of character with, what, exactly?
There are plenty of five and six story buildings all over the area. At the corner of Brainerd and Redford there's a 6-story building from the 80s (it looks like) across from a six-story building from more recent times. Most of Comm Ave has 4.5 and 5.5 story buildings.
What's out of character with the neighborhood is a strip mall CVS.
My only problem here is that this isn't a 12 story building. That might be out of character with the neighborhood, but it would mean more neighbors.
Tony lives over in a row house in Lower Allston, a mile away from here, anyway.
This is a start. 177 units per acre is not bad. At that rate, Herb Chambers could have 837 units instead of selling a few cars.
"My only problem here is that
"My only problem here is that this isn't a 12 story building. That might be out of character with the neighborhood, but it would mean more neighbors."
This, to me, is the ultimate catch-22 of land development in Boston. Part of the reason many of us love this city is because it has 4 & 5 story brick buildings. I get that when redeveloping a parcel, adding a few more stories can often make sense but once you go above that you start destroying the look & feel of our neighborhoods. Even if they ripped up entire neighborhoods and built 12-20 story buildings, the demand would still outstrip supply. Meanwhile, Boston hast has a subway system that barely works, roads that are already packed and power & water systems that are already near capacity.
We can't simply build our way out of the housing shortage. The best thing Boston can do is enact vacancy taxes to try and get the empty, high-end units to sell or pay their fair share (considering they don't pay state income tax, or much sales or meal tax like a full-time resident would), while also requiring more ownership (read: condos) than just apartment complexes, so residents can build equity rather than letting some corporation jack the rent 10% every year.
Shortage
Actually, we can build our way out of a housing shortage. That's what the "shortage" part of that phrase means.
"We can't simply build our way out of the housing shortage."
What are you even talking about? That is literally the #1 way to get out of a housing shortage.
Building more housing not only provides more housing, which we need, it also lowers rents, which we need. https://commonwealthbeacon.org/housing/study-says-boosting-housing-produ...
Building more units helps the
Building more units helps the shortage, but my point is that even if we could waive a magic want, rip up all of Boston and double the current number of units in the city, there would STILL be more demand than supply. People want to live in cities right now and Boston is seen as desirable. My point is that there is literally nothing this city can do today, in 2023, to stop the demand for housing in Boston. Building massively tall, steel & glass buildings next to brownstones only ruins neighborhoods and won't solve anything.
Good hand waving here
First, 12 story buildings don't ruin neighborhoods. (And if you want taller buildings, because some of those are only 10 or 11, here's a D'Angelo replaced with housing, and yeah, pour one out for the sandwich shop.) You may not like how this housing looks, but it's not ruining the neighborhood. Unless Back Bay is "ruined."
Anyway, to your other point, if we could wave a magic wand and double the number of housing units in Boston (from 240,000 to 480,000) and keep the sizes of the units the same, that actually would solve the housing crisis (or put a big dent in it).
This site is 177 units per acre, or 113,280 units per mile. If all of Boston was built to that density, it would be 5.5 million units of housing. Even at 1/4 that density, it would be more than four times as many units as exist today.
Look, the answer is most certainly to build more housing. And opposing housing because you don't like how it looks, or feels, or whatever, is opposing housing. So congrats!
(If we could waive a magic wand, of course, we wouldn't have a magic wand anymore.)
"Destroying" may be putting
"Destroying" may be putting it strongly; neighborhood look and feel is certainly changed by increased height, but it's not always for the worse, and neighborhood participation in the process (as opposed to heels-dug-in opposition) can dramatically improve the end result.
Regardless, I think the best thing Boston can do to preserve our 4/5/6-story buildings is to encourage more of the surrounding cities and towns to build more of them. These are the buildings you say are your favorite thing about Boston, but putting them outside city limits can be impossible and changing that, for the most part, is like pulling teeth. I never in my life thought I'd say this, but kudos to Brookline. Growth can't be confined to just a handful of arbitrarily-delineated jurisdictions, and until the 'burbs really get in on things, people will continue pushing to double the height of every project in Boston because this is apparently one of the few places willing to even minimally accommodate the growth we're seeing.
Of course we could also try to choke off growth for real, but I'm not sure any serious people think that's a good idea.
Brookline had to comply...
They had to at least have a plan to build more affordable multi-unit housing to comply with the new state MBTA/rules/guidelines. I believe the only holdout was Newton or they didn't at least have a plan in yet.
The actual catch-22
No, that's the actual catch-22: if you can't redevelop a site unless you stay "within the character of the neighborhood" then nothing ever gets built bigger, just newer. The land is the land...there's not more of that coming any time soon...but we can go up. But the first building to suggest it, in a residential neighborhood full of triple-deckers or even on Comm Ave where brownstones and the like only go to like 5 stories at best, is always going to get stifled with negative responses about "changing the character of the neighborhood". We're never going to have high-rise apartments and house enough people as long as the "character of the neighborhood" is more important than a growing population. It's insane that this is something that can be used as a weapon to inflate the housing prices of people who already own property (and sit as speaking members of these sorts of community groups).
Building more and taller buildings isn't "destroying the character of the community". It's changing it to fit the current times.
Complaining about "too many units" as a property owner aligns with your financial interests. The association should either vote without property owners involved or have its opinion discounted as such.
Funny how they
can change the number of the building.
CVS was 1266 Comm
They did the same with TD Bank.
When it was Uno's Pizza, it was always 1230. The bank is 1228.
Five Guys Burgers is wholly on Harvard Ave, none of the entrance is on Comm. Ave, but they're listed as 1223 Comm, which is the same address as McDonalds.
I was formerly the mail carrier to those locations. The changing of the addressing always made for some mail misaddressing.
Hmm...
I live right near there. They've been talking about building something there (and on other already-permitted neighborhood sites) for years. I'll believe it when I see it. And if they do build, it will take years to complete, based on the other big projects I've seen in recent years.
With the narrow sidewalk, they'll either block it completely and rope off part of the street for pedestrians (rare), or block totally and put up signs telling you "sidewalk closed, cross the street" (which they had on a few Harvard Street blocks, i.e. Harvard Ave. when it crosses into Brookline nearby, for years), or, most commonly, build some kind of tunnel-ish thing under the scaffolding for pedestrians (not sure what you call that). I'm a big guy and I can't usually pass by another walker going in the opposite direction in one of those. Pain in the butt for a few years. Oh well.
As for green space… it's true that almost every building along Comm Ave around here is way way smaller than this new plan, and has a green strip of grass/bushes/small trees/whatever in front. This rendering looks like there's none for this project; no green for you, got to squeeze every penny out of the tenants in rentable space! Ringer Park is irrelevant, it's maybe a quarter mile from there around a few turns, i.e. not even visible from there, and relatively few people in the neighborhood ever go there (my neighbor got robbed there), and is already green (a few more cops or just security cameras would be a lot more useful than a few more shrubs). That talk about greenifying Ringer Park is just marketing piffle to cover for not having any greenery in front of this building like the other buildings around there do.
Speaking of greenery out front -- the building right next door to this site (just inbound of it) has a fairly substantial planted green strip in front. Wildlife too: the rats that live in it are fearless, and will run across the sidewalk right in front of you, even colliding with you if they're not paying attention. We have the bravest rats in Boston around here!
This will also make everything even more crowded around here, I guess, but that's what urban life is. Allston ain't no suburb. Overall I'd think it was a good thing if it actually eased up the rents around here somewhat, but it won't. The landlords are too cagey for that, nothing will slow their skyrocketing rents (which fly up better than Elon Musk's rockets do).
Are you really an Allston resident?
Have they?? I am very familiar with the area, and have not found any evidence to the contrary. As far as I know, this has been the only proposal for this site for years.
Yep, that's uh kinda to be expected. I mean, did you expect a building that size to be built in months?
The sidewalk in front of the former CVS isn't narrow at all, if anything, its wider than the other adjacent sidewalks.
I feel like if you lived in Allston, you'd know that Ringer park is well patronized.
That's simply not true at all, a simple google maps query will show otherwise.
Actual Allstonian
Yes, I'm really an Allston resident, long-term in fact, and I live just a couple of blocks from there. I used to shop in that CVS, in fact. Do you assume that everyone you disagree with, or who interprets things differently from you, must be a liar?
I don't even understand where you think the contradiction is between that and what I said. They've been talking for years about building an apartment building, or something, on that site. I thought that's what I said, more or less. I even discussed the situation with the (annoyed) CVS store manager at the time.
I think you're including the sheltered part under the overhang of the current building. I guess I assumed that the part under the building overhang was technically part of the property, not of the public sidewalk, and would be built on; perhaps I was wrong (I hope I was) and it will remain part of the sidewalk for pedestrians.
As for your other comments… Ringer Park isn't "well patronized" when I walk past it or, occasionally, through it. When I'm by there (as I was a half hour ago, in the evening) it's usually fairly deserted. In fact it was totally deserted. Perhaps our experience is different because we have different schedules. Anyway my neighbor got robbed in there in the middle of the daytime, and it really shook her up.
And I don't have to "look at Google Maps" to see that this project looks way more massive than most of the other buildings around here -- I use my eyes, because I'm around here all the time, walk all over the neighborhood. Typically on Comm Ave there are five story, hundred-year-old buildings that might have 40 or 50 apartments per building. And they have individually distinctive architectural styles, unlike these souless blockish things they build nowadays. Of course, since these distinctive old buildings are mostly adjacent/connected to each other (only a few alleys separating them on this part of Comm Ave), there might be some disagreement as to what "one building" means. But even the few newer, blockish buildings around here are smaller than this planned project… and I don't think that's central to this discussion anyway.
Overall, I think this project might be a good thing, or a bad thing, or not even be built soon at all, just like it wasn't built when they talked about it years ago... I don't know. But I agree with the other person in this discussion who predicted that building it won't reduce housing demand or prices... for approximately the same reason that the Big Dig didn't significantly reduce traffic congestion like they'd claimed it would (and I predicted back then, when the Big Dig was being proposed, that the neighborhood would get nicer as a result but the traffic and parking would not get better, and I got attacked for saying that, but I was right). All you people who think adding capacity always helps problems through "market forces" (which is true only sometimes, sometimes it can actually make things worse)… you should all look up the economic concept of "induced demand".
Oops…
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I just realized I had the sidewalk in front of the former CVS conflated in my mind with the sidewalk + overhang in front of the TJ Maxx on Harvard Ave. not far from there. Not sure how I did that, sorry. That whole sidewalk thing is very tangential to this anyway, I shouldn't have even raised it. The real issue is whether we can simply "build our way out" of the housing crunch, and there I agree with _Sean. We can't.
Here a few things that might actually help:
- Make it much less attractive for owners to let apartments sit mostly or completely empty. That includes foreign investors who hold them as "investments", rich travelers who hold them as "pieds a terre", etc. Probably marginal though, those are mostly high-end luxury apartments; I don't know how much the "trickle down" theory would really work here.
- Improve the transit systems going to outlying areas, around the city, so people can live more spread out and still conveniently get into the city to work/shop/etc. without using a car. I have Tokyo in mind here -- yes I've been there. The majority of people there live in surrounding town areas (still urban, but much less dense & cheaper) and commute into Tokyo every workday on their fantastically good subway systems. They have more than one competing subway system, and the competition (plus their overall culture) seems to really help.
- Pressure the colleges here to house more students, even upper-term students, on campus.
- Some people want rent control and/or rent stabilization, like they have in New York; others says that's just a disaster and won't work at all. I don't know.
Overall: the problem with "Stop the NIMBYs! Build build build!" is that simple solutions to complex problems generally don't work, and gentrification can smack the poor especially hard, and induced demand is a real thing. Making something less painful may encourage more people to come here/stay here and do that thing, whether it's renting, driving, whatever… none of us are smart enough or knowledgeable enough to come up with one simple thing that will solve the housing nightmare here. That kind of reductionism is ideology, not reality.
Former CVS site
Tome, this is the former Finast (First National) Supermarket site.
Yeah
Just took a look at streetview.. yeah that def is giving off some Finast vibes.
Same here
Yup. When I was a kid there were three grocery stores in the neighborhood: the First National there, an A&P around where Bunratty's etc were later, and the New England Food Fair (later Purity Supreme, AKA Poverty Supreme) in the TJ Maxx space.
Many CVS stores are not
Many CVS stores are not shoppable anymore. They follow the wrong people around thinking your an addict boosting makeup or sleep aids or trial sizes. Many have stopped stocking many items, the self check out machines are always broken or break down in the middle of scanning (HELP IS ON THE WAY), and prices have inflated ridiculously to an unrealistic level, and it always smells like old cinnamon Big Red gum found under a car seat when u walk in. And I'm sad in a way because I remember the days it was a joy to shop at CVS back in the day.