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Old Colony Avenue could get another new residential building

Architect's rendering of proposed 218 Old Colony building

Architect's rendering.

A developer is proposing to replace a nondescript one-story commercial building at 218-220 Old Colony Ave., between Dorchester and E streets, with a five-story, 32-unit residential building.

The proposal is the latest that would for that stretch of Old Colony Avenue - it sits between one new building and a site where another new building is proposed.

Developer Sing Ming Chan hopes to take advantage of a new zoning rule for Dorchester Avenue and surrounding areas that would let him put up a bigger building than he could otherwise in exchange for including "community benefits" greater than what the city would normally require. To start, that would mean selling or renting five units as affordable, rather than the four that would normally be required and by providing additional public amenities to be negotiated with the BPDA.

Chan has proposed 33 parking spaces in a two-level garage and ground-floor commercial space for his $14.4-million building. Chan hopes to begin roughly 15 months of construction in mid-2020.

In addition to the BPDA, Chan will also have to win approval from the Zoning Board of Appeal.

218-220 Old Colony Ave. small-project review application (46M PDF).

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Comments

Short walk to the Green Freedman bakery, ........

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Just a short trip across Gustin Street to Kelly's. Stop by for a beer and a beatin`!

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Is it really still open, or is this just a snarky joke?

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Just over 1:1 parking ratio for something that close to a major Red Line station and bus hub? Will we never learn?

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He could be thinking of leasing the remaining spaces out to abutters (or giving them away to certain people who may have 'helped' the process along.

Or it's just the first plan that the neighborhood will freak out over. Then it will be amended to seem as if the developer is being gracious by reducing spaces, adding affordable units, etc.

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You probably expect a parking space to be thrown in if the building is new construction. At $14 million for 32 units, 5 set aside for affordable housing, that's probably the average sales price you need to hit on the market-rate units.

Not everyone with a car uses it to commute. Some like to have a car for the flexibility of getting away on evenings or weekends or for going out to the suburbs to shop. Plenty of two-earner households have one earner commuting via public transit and the other commuting somewhere poorly-served by public transit.

And they likely need the spaces to satisfy neighbors who view their resident parking spaces as a God-given right not to be shared with newcomers.

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Most people who move to Southie don’t have cars.

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I wish that was true. But it's not. That is something developers and real estate people keep repeating.
There are more automobiles in this neighborhood than there has ever been.

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You are right that there are more cars in the neighborhood, but the ratio of people with cars moving into the NEW buildings is definitely less than 1:1. Developers know this because the garages they're forced to build rarely fill up. They build them anyway because they know that if they don't, residents, including Mike Flaherty, will storm their ZBA hearing and cry bloody murder about it, causing their building permit to be denied. It's not based on logic or a careful reading of the demands of the market. It's based on politics.

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My comment is total sarcasm.

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with no parking? 99% of the parking whiners will not even think about living here so please stop telling the developers you want less parking.

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Then don't buy or live here.

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... is that this building is not proposed to be much taller.

This is one of the few areas of the city where tall development and, gasp, shadows effect practically no one.

This stretch of Old Colony, Dot Ave, Widett Circle and Haymarket should be built up like Hong Kong.

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