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Apartment developer wins bid for closed Roxbury hospital

The Bay State Banner reports Kensington Investment Co. plans to use the 5-acre Radius Hospital site on Townsend Street for affordable and workfoce housing.

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From the street, the hospital seems absolutely jammed into a dense neighborhood, but on google maps you can see that there's a decent amount of land around it, but not visible to the street really.

The great hospital mystery to me is the VA on S. Huntington. That's a big building but isn't it largely mothballed as the West Roxbury facility was chosen as the primary site?

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As someone working at the VA in JP, I can verify that it's quite busy :) West Roxbury is the primary INPATIENT site, yes, and has all the emergency services, so the JP campus is totally dead nights and weekends, but a huge number of our outpatient clinics are here and bustling, including day surgery, radiation/chemotherapy, primary care.... It's also the site of most the research offices and clinics, and patient-facing admin work like eligibility, compensation/pension, patient services, travel....

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West Roxbury VA is now huge, but the JP VA is still a major hospital. There's a lot of medical researchers based in there too, to be close to their Harvard Med colleagues in Longwood.

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Kensington is most likely doing this to offset their affordable housing requirements for building in town and other developments. They own the 2009 built building at the corner of LaGrange and Washington in the former Combat Zone, the building which houses Stephanie's On Newbury, and where Urban Outfitters is on Newbury. Not so bad.

That being said the poor get placed (warehoused) into a section of Roxbury which has lots of public or tax credit housing while the people Kensington caters to in market rate housing and their travel business; Grand Circle Travel, don't have to mix with the Poors.

It would be nice for a wee more market rate housing in Roxbury and put more affordable housing in the Gold Towns. This is a massive site and market housing would have helped stabilze the area a bit more.

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... I don't think Wellesley or Weston or Cohasset would be willing to approve the housing needed to make a dent in the displaced-- and that is assuming that most of the displaced would even want to live in the Wellesley or Weston or Cohasset. Those burbs have little in the way of public transportation infrastructure, and not much blue-collar employment. The middle class/professionals of Roxbury could relocate if they wanted to, but not the working class who need city-type infrastructure, not suburban. So this would further segregate the working class and poor into Mattapan and other city-fringe neighborhoods, the middle class into the burbs, the upper middle into the central city.

While I applaud the idea of those towns providing more affordable housing, and share your distaste for warehousing people, I don't think that developing affordable housing in the burbs should be tied to displacing Bostonians from the few affordable neighborhoods left.

And there is always another aspect to these designs-- not everyone wants to be on the front edge of forcing rich white suburbs to integrate. Roxbury is majority-minority. Cohasset is 98.2% white. Cohasset had a white population bump during the white-flight days. I want everyone who wants to move to Cohasset to do so regardless of race or class, but I don't want anyone to feel forced into a town where the current residents may be-- and act-- hostile towards them.

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