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BRA approves new residential building for Forest Hills
By adamg on Sat, 11/15/2014 - 12:36pm
The BRA board of directors gave its OK for an $80-million, 132-unit residential complex to replace warehouses at 3521-3529 Washington St.
A five-story building will house 88 apartments; a four-story building 44 condos. The project will also include 25,000 square feet of retail space and a self-storage facility, as well as 166 parking spaces - 116 of them in underground garages.
As part of the approval, developers SSG Development II, LLC and New Boston Ventures, LLC will clean up a contaminated former industrial site on the property. By shrinking the number of buildings from the original five to three, the developers will also create a community garden.
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Comments
Nice project
A a glance it looks like some of the brownstone rowhouses in the South End on Mass Ave and around Blackstone Square.
BUILD MOAR MOAR MOAR!!! For the market to go NOM NOM NOM on NAO!
Shell Game
If you look closely it may just be yet another clone of the recent crap trend.
The shape is a dead ringer for many of those other recent [and much despised, at least here] projects. All they have done is replace the cladding [normally vinyl and/or fake brick] with fake stone. Underneath its the same old, same old, flimsy, wooden composite frame.
I don't understand what the hell they are thinking when designing these buildings. Not using concrete cores [at least for the floors and supports] for stability, durability, soundproofing, and insulation. I've even heard that a lot of the composite wood used in recent construction can be traced back to illegal logging operations in Asia.
Ummm
They can, but who's going to pay over a million a unit to live in edgy forest hills? Union bricklayers and masons ain't cheap, mmmkay? Neither is brick, for that matter.
Market rate or?
Are these market rate or "affordable?"
Mostly market rate
With 19 of the units (split between the apartments and condos) designated as "affordable."
Affordable units
Affordable units are initially distributed by lottery, so the first owners are a mix of people with income low enough to qualify for the lottery, but high enough to qualify for a mortgage. These are often young professionals just starting their career.
The system breaks when their units get resold. The initial owners get married, have kids, and outgrow their units within a few years so they are forced to sell. The resale price is "fixed" by the affordable covenant attached to the deed, and there's no lottery to pick the buyer. The current owner just accepts offers for the max resale amount from whoever meets the income limits. And the owner picks the lowest-risk offer they get.
So most likey next owner ends up being either 1) a young professional with a very promising future, like a neurosurgeon doing their residency who takes home $60k now even though they'll make $300k after a few years, or 2) a trust fund kid with meager income and no assets to their name, but millionaire parents happy to co-sign the mortgage. These people buy up the affordable units because they make the best buyers. These buyers are able to submit a very attractive offer with a letter from their bank preapproving them for any mortgage with no contingencies, guaranteeing the quickest sale.
And since the housing unit is bound by the affordable housing covenant for 50 or 75 years, this demographic persists for a long time, with affordable units getting turned over among people you wouldn't think need affordable housing. It's instant gentrification.
This is the insanity of affordable housing practices.
This is really the problem
This is really the problem with price fixing in general, and one of the reasons that I think requiring housing to be "affordable" is a pretty stupid way to actually achieve affordable housing.
Consider also that the developer has to cover the cost of these affordable units by making the other units in the building more expensive, thus further increasing the income stratification problem in the neighborhood.
If people really want affordable housing, they need to look at some of the zoning policies we've enacted that make it so difficult to build it in the first place, such as minimum parking requirements, height restrictions, and overly onerous ADA compliance requirements (I'm all for handicap accessibility, but the idea that every new building more than two stories tall needs to have an elevator is really kind of silly in my opinion).
i'm really looking forward to
i'm really looking forward to seeing what comes of this project. i live in the neighborhood and always noticed this stretch of washington between english and forest hills is pretty dull at the moment. besides the possibility of moving the MBTA bus lot this project seems like exactly what the area needs.
Heh
"Underneath its the same old, same old, flimsy, wooden composite frame."
Hey, don't go dissin' Eastie's new plywood palace like that. Oh, sorry, I mean "Portside at East Pier Luxury Boston Apartments," conveniently located behind the affordable housing block.
only if you squint...
and I mean REALLY squint
too much parking
and not enough spec commercial space.
Excess parking is indeed a
Excess parking is indeed a scourge.
But I am not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth, and the Boston area needs new housing like woah.
The problem is that the
The problem is that the market didn't dictate the parking, we (the citizens) did, and it uselessly drives up the cost for non-car-owners who need to live near the train.