Latest news with #BPDA
Boston Globe
04-03-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
High rises on Morrissey Boulevard? Developer pitches 18-story towers near JFK T stop.
Advertisement A rendering of two 18-story residential towers proposed at 75 Morrissey Blvd. in Dorchester. CBT Designed by Boston-based CBT Architects, the towers — one at 204 feet facing Morrissey Boulevard, another at 206 feet facing Interstate 93 — would each have three levels of underground parking. Between them, the developers have planned a roughly half-acre community park. The Morrissey Boulevard project stretches nearly 9 acres from 35-75 Morrissey Blvd., including the Star Market grocery store and former TV studio along with the former Beasley Media radio studios. A seven-building master plan, approved by the Boston Planning and Development Agency board in 2023 — albeit under a different developer — calls for three apartment buildings and four office/lab buildings. The BPDA board-approved master plan calls for a grocery store to be included within the third planned residential tower. The radio site at 55 Morrissey Blvd. how houses The Record Co., which offers affordable recording studio and rehearsal spaces. Beasley The development would include a community park located between the two new residential towers. CBT Of the 754 apartments planned at 75 Morrissey Blvd., about 150 — or 20 percent — would be set aside as affordable. Copper Mill said it intends to start construction in the first half of next year, wrapping up by early 2029. The site is located across Morrissey Boulevard from the mammoth 21-building Dorchester Bay City mixed-use project. The BPDA board Advertisement Copper Mill is also proposing a 25-story apartment tower on Elm Street in Somerville, a project that earlier this year Catherine Carlock can be reached at
Boston Globe
29-01-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Wu trying to make the world a better place for people who love glass towers
The new plan is now on a fast track to approval — all in the name of creating more housing. Advertisement 'Nobody knew this was coming. Nobody had seen it before January and now they're saying you've got a month to approve it,' said Anthony Pangaro, one of the developers of Millennium Tower and now a resident of the area. 'This isn't planning. This is the very opposite of planning.' Get The Gavel [Coming soon] A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up He isn't alone in opposing the 'up-zoning' plan that was the topic of the BPDA's only public meeting earlier this month — a Pangaro, who knows a little something about building high rises and housing, said units in a new high rise in the Ladder District would cost at least $1,000 a square foot to build and would need to sell for at least $2,000 a square foot. 'They are very expensive to build, so you get luxury housing,' he said. 'There are more cost effective ways to build [housing].' One example is Advertisement Boston is no stranger to skyscrapers, even in the Downtown Crossing area, where the 60-story Millennium Tower — built in what But since 2018, city planners and community leaders had been working on a plan for the other side of Washington Street that extended through those 'ladder' streets to Boston Common — a preservation district where buildings would be capped at 155 feet. Then came COVID-19 and the Wu administration — first with Arthur Jemison heading the BPDA. Jemison left in mid-September. Kairos Shen returned to the BPDA in October to become the city's chief of planning after a stint at MIT. And, voila , a new more encompassing plan — running from the western side of Washington Street to the Common and Public Garden, from School Street and running along Stuart Street to Arlington Street. The new plan would allow buildings of up to 500 feet in much of that corridor, but only if they are 60 percent or more residential. Those who were part of the planning process over the past several years are feeling blindsided. 'What this amendment tells me is that you have not taken anything that we have said over these last years into account,' Martha McNamara, board chair of Revolutionary Spaces, which oversees the operations of the Old State House and Old South Meeting House, said during the Zoom meeting. 'The plan that Shen unveiled was completely different,' Pangaro said, 'and now it affects thousands of people. It's a very one-dimensional plan — essentially it says you build towers and you solve the housing problem. … The old plan was about preservation, renovation, and protection of the parks.' Advertisement As of last April that much smaller zone would have established a 155-foot height limit in the Ladder District and Washington Street, with an exception for a 23-story building proposed for the old and long vacant City Sports site on Bromfield Street. Shen told the virtual meeting that the proposal was actually a 'kind of compromise.' Well, kind of is right. That former low-rise zone is now bifurcated — lower buildings closer to the Common but the potential for 50-story ones on or nearer to Washington Street. It would also allow those hideous pencil buildings that now dot the Manhattan skyline. There is another way to create housing, and New York City seems to have found it with its What is astonishing is that Wu, who fought to bring the BPDA under her control and who as a city councilor fought for greater transparency in its workings, would then use it to produce a plan that makes the world a better place for people who love to live in glass towers. Rachelle G. Cohen is a Globe opinion writer. She can be reached at
