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Tomorrow, Sunday 9/27, I will be holding office hours from 3 PM to 4:30 PM at the front porch of my house (send me a message if you don’t already know where that is). Please feel free to drop by with questions or just to chat. (Bring a mask! Thanks.)
This past week, Newton Ward 5 constituent Jason Korb (who builds high-quality low-income housing in other communities) and Cambridge Vice Mayor Alanna Mallon invited me, Councilor Holly Ryan (Ward 8), and Councilor Alicia Bowman (Ward 6) to tour low-income affordable housing developments in Cambridge at Port Landing (recently built and occupied) and Frost Terrace (still under construction). These types of projects involve significant subsidies and credits from the state or federal governments, so that rents can be deeply affordable and well below market rates, but they also feature some matching investments by municipal governments in partnership with the builders.
This tour in Cambridge was a valuable opportunity for us as Newton City Councilors to get some ideas on what other nearby communities are doing on the issue of low-income housing and what we might want to consider in Newton, perhaps as part of our comprehensive zoning redesign effort over the next year. Certainly many residents have expressed concerns about development in Newton leaving out families who are significantly below the area median income. This type of project would be quite different from the mixed-income, mostly market-rate projects we have seen in the past few years, where the affordable units are rented for rates geared toward those somewhat closer to the area median income.
At the moment there is no proposal on the table yet to pursue this, but the three of us wanted to give it some more detailed thought and this tour was helpful for that ongoing discussion. More to come in future updates, I hope.
New Senior Center update:
This past week, the Programs & Services Committee and the Public Facilities Committee met jointly to hear a presentation (starts on page 7 of this PDF) about the senior center.
You might have heard earlier this summer from Mayor Fuller that a decision was made that the new Senior Center (sometimes known as NewCAL) will be built on the site of the existing Senior Center on Walnut St in Newtonville. This was partially due to a campaign by people in Newtonville and the surrounding area to keep it there and partly a reflection of certain fiscal realities and construction challenges that would have been posed by the other finalist site, the Newton Centre triangle parking lot.
In order to get the project done quite a few years earlier and with fewer budgetary hurdles, the current site in Newtonville ended up being the preferred site for the Mayor’s Administration.
Earlier in the process, it was thought that the existing site in Newtonville would be too small to support the level of programming we were aspiring to provide, but given the current economic and fiscal crisis and given some expression from a number of seniors that not all of the “ideal” programming was strictly necessary for a great senior center, it made sense to go back to the drawing board and come up with a somewhat scaled-back plan – and to get creative about figuring out how to do more with less. (Think of it like Spielberg making a more interesting Jaws movie because the original design for the mechanical shark wasn’t really working and was too expensive to fix, and they were forced to be more creative with fewer resources.)
But sticking with the current Newtonville site does mean there will be less green space around the new senior center and less on-site parking, and it does mean a smaller gym facility in all likelihood.
It is still not decided whether or not there will be a new building as opposed to a renovation and expansion, given the historic nature of the current building. However, the existing building is not in great condition. It has fallen very far behind on (expensive) renovations (partly on the assumption that it was going to be supplanted by a new building elsewhere). And it is a very cramped building with limited first-floor access, which even a big addition could only partially address. (The first floor is in fact actually 6 feet above exterior ground level and the basement is partially below ground level, which creates storage and equipment problems if the first floor were to be lowered to ground.) It’s also not very vibrant or inviting from the outside.
Preserving the existing building would require some fairly significant tradeoffs in the project, including less first-floor accessibility to programming, which might be important to many seniors. A new building could make full use of the limited area of the site and maximize programming. It would also likely be much less costly.
Let me know what you think. In the PDF linked above, on the presentation page marked 31, you can see some ideas for an all-new facility, and before that you can see what it would be like to integrate the current building into the design.
There is currently no exact design proposal yet for either the current building or a new building – just some concept “test fits,” to see what kind of facilities and programming could be fit onto the site in various configurations. Some versions have different heights and numbers of stories. On page 44 you can read side-by-side statistical comparisons of 3 different options for Newtonville and also what was rejected for Newton Centre.
At 6:30 PM on Thursday Oct 1, there will be a community meeting to go over all of this as well and solicit feedback from the public. (Learn more.)
Other recent meeting updates:
Traffic Council on 9/17 approved the proposed bike lanes & street parking reductions for Beacon St across Ward 5 and part of Ward 6. Public comment submitted had been nearly universally in support and in fact many people wrote in to ask for even more details to be adjusted to strengthen the bike route in future.
City Council on 9/21 sent back the Indigenous Peoples' Day / Columbus Day item to committee for a public hearing on October 8 – although all Councilors seemed to agree that it would not change their votes on the final item. (If you missed my detailed analysis of this docket item, see my previous newsletter.)
Oak St & Chestnut St redesign community meeting: The Planning Department and design consultants held a virtual public meeting on 9/23 with Upper Falls residents to review an early-stage concept for what to tackle with redesigning the Oak St & Chestnut St intersection (using a state grant) to make it safer, more pedestrian-friendly, more attractive, and better suited to walkable village center businesses. The most noticeable change being proposed would be a raised-table intersection. You can review the slideshow here: http://www.newtonma.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?t=58935.63&BlobID=106355 The next step would be a 50% design with more details. Email Newton’s Economic Development Director Devra Bailin with feedback and suggestions for things to change.
One other note: MassDOT will be holding a Zoom meeting at 6:30 PM on Wednesday 9/30 to provide an update on the Needham Street overhaul project.