Over-Building Brookline: One "Preservation" at a Time

or Extreme Building: The New Normal? In my previous post, I wrote about the threat to our historic homes from development interests looking to tear down homes in order to extract maximum value from the high cost housing market in Brookline. An older home is found and purchased often in a distressed or stressed sale condition, which can then be replaced by a multi-unit building. In a recent Boston Globe article entitled "Neighbors Decry Development of Historic Sites", Jeffrey Feuerman is quoted as saying, "You can get a bigger project with more units with a demolition".  He went on to say that, "...Keeping the historic elements of such properties is not prohibitively more expensive than tearing them down and starting fresh, it takes longer, often included expensive surprises, is harder to build and is less attractive to buyers". (This coming from the same individual who was listing his preservation award winning, three bedroom unit in a renovated 1855 carriage house on Harvard Avenue for more than 1.5 million.) I don't know about you, but I know plenty of buyers who place a premium on authentic historic architecture and character.

As a further point in favor of demolition, Feuerman went on to say that "single family homes on such sites means much lower tax collections than a new multi-unit building. A quality condominium complex will also translate into higher property values for nearby properties.  A single-family is not the highest and best functional use of the property." Spoken like a true developer. However, his claims about value are questionable. When the adjoining property's views, light, air and trees are removed to make way for these new condos, it clearly diminishes that property's value. When the street scape is harmed by the loss of front yards, historic homes and trees, some of the publics' collective ownership value is taken. There will come a point when Brookline will lose enough of these things that the "quality of life" premium that property owners in Brookline enjoy will be gone. "Highest and best use" means only that use that will make the most money for the individual property owner or developer. It fails to account for what is most valuable or best for the Community. Further, while tax collections may be a bit higher for condominiums rather than a single family house, there are increased costs to the town associated with additional residential development too, which may or may not be off set by the increased tax revenue, such as Schools, police, fire, open space and recreation, libraries, trash, roads, etc. It is not a clear "win" for the Town fiscally, and clearly not a win for abutters, whose property values are in fact more likely to decline.

My point here is not to say that all new development is bad. But it is to say that we need to think critically when we hear these "truisms", like "highest and best use" bandied about. But more importantly, we need to recognize, protect, and build upon the amazing assets we do have. The historic landscapes and neighborhoods, planned and designed by some of the most brilliant and talented designers to have walked on the planet. These are our assets, and if we lose these, or degrade them beyond recognition, we will have lost the beauty and soul of what makes this place so desirable to begin with.

In response to the community's distress about losing some truly priceless pieces of historic architecture, (many of which play a key role in defining our community character), a new "model" has been proposed. In the same Boston Globe article cited above, Scott Gladstone is quoted as saying, "the hope was to start a trend in Brookline where old houses are preserved, and Jeff Levine, Brookline's Planning Director proposed using 99 Winchester St. as a model". Let's look at 99 Winchester St. from above, to give us a sense of site design and scale.

99 Winchester is in the center of the image, the reddish building with the turret. As you can see, the renovated house has a large addition on the back, which seems to be built extremely close to the property line, completely filling up all available space on the lot. (Lot lines are in yellow). While this scenario may be lucrative for the developer, it clearly comes at a price to the community, in terms of declining values to surrounding properties,  due to the loss of open space, loss of light, air, sky views and trees.

The idea behind the Winchester model is that the preservation of the house is such a great benefit to the community that it justifies extreme violation of our zoning by-law, thereby allowing for the granting of special permits, etc. The proposal pictured above, 70 Sewall, requires 9 special permits/variances. It is not to object to special permits per se that I raise my concerns. It was expected that some "wiggle room" was needed to make an adaptive re-use project work. But it has gone far beyond "wiggle room". While no one wishes to see these historic structures destroyed, I believe the developers proposing these scenarios, are in fact going beyond any reasonable standard with their proposals, taking advantage of the Town's desire to preserve the house and using the threat of demolition to go to extremes. Convincing us that they are making a sacrifice by preserving the house. When in fact, the proposed development becomes extremely valuable. The historic structure is saved, adding beauty, character and quality that no new construction could ever achieve and a super-sized addition is allowed, even though it violates all minimum standards of sound building and planning practices. Because we are so afraid of demolition, we fail to realize the truth of the fact that even with demolition, a new full build FAR building would not fit on this lot either. In fact, in the case of the 70 Sewall proposal, (above) a building of only 1.14 FAR (not the full 1.5 allowed) would fit, and even then this assumes underground parking and a height variance.

A look at the site plan for the 70 Sewall project reveals the full extent of the site design violations.

Side yards are reduced to 4', at the smallest point the rear setback is 36". These miniscule setbacks are insufficient to allow adequate light, sky views, and freedom from shadows for the abutters. They will not function in terms of safely accommodating circulation of persons or machinery. There is not sufficient space to support plant life to aid in buffering the building from neighbors.

The historic house is moved forward on the lot 15 ft. Fundamentally changing the setting of the house, alters one's view and experience of the house from the sidewalk and street. It is no longer the same house. The 36” oak tree at the front of the property is unlikely to survive the movement of the house. In addition, four other 10”- 12” trees are slated for removal from the property. New trees that are proposed would in fact grow onto adjoining property, would be difficult if not impossible to maintain and would also so severely limit circulation on the site due to the close proximity to the building that they seem impractical. Given the extremely dense development in the area, the value of these trees as softening, humanizing elements cannot be overstated. Key historic elements are being altered or eliminated from the house. Only 245 sq. ft. of usable open space remain on the property. The scale and mass of the addition overwhelmes and dwarfs the original structure, the beautiful 1889 Schweinfurth designed Queen Anne house.

Our Town boards and staff have forgotten that the maximum size (or Floor Area Ratio) allowed in a given zone is just that, a maximum, not a de facto right, and that at least basic standards of safety, functionality and protection of abutters must be maintained. These are the core functions and purpose of zoning.

The question then becomes, does the partial "preservation" of this house justify the extreme violation of our Zoning By-law and by extension the rights and privileges of the citizen's of Brookline? Has Extreme Building become the New Normal?

It seems to be catching on. Jeffrey Feuerman has submitted his plans for a project at 59 Green St. Here we see a two family home being turned into one giant condominium and another giant condominium being added onto the back, resulting in a long narrow housing development stuck into the back yard, next to homes with open back yards.  This too was a case where demolition was threatened before the Preservation Commission stepped in.

Both of these proposals will be discussed at the upcoming Planning Board meeting next Thursday,  July 15 in room 111 at Brookline Town Hall, starting at approximately 8:00 pm.

Anatomy of a Parking Space

The standard dimensions for a perpendicular parking space are 9 ft. x 19 ft., with an additional 24 ft. of pavement required behind the rows for access and egress. Parallel parking spaces must be 9 ft. wide and 24 ft. long. So, each car requires 216 to 279 sq. ft. of pavement to park. That is a lot of space for one vehicle that often carries only one person. That is also a lot of land to cover with an impervious surface. At the dawn of the auto age America seemed a vast and limitless reservoir of both space and land and we quickly set about dispersing ourselves.

We even felt compelled to accommodate the auto within our cities, riping through neighborhoods and destroying the fabric of our human scaled street networks to build parking lots and roadways, in an attempt to merge the vital hearts of commerce with the freedom and easy access of the automobile. The strategy was of course doomed to fail. The landscape became one of ramps, roads and parking lots. Once out of our vehicle the human body is met with the cold gray concrete of parking decks, or we must walk along side the empty threatening space of vast expanses of parking lots. A visit to Detroit, center of the automotive universe, holds many lessons on how not to build a city. They are struggling to overcome the past and have made some significant steps in the right direction, especially with their new waterfront park, but have a long way to go.

We are now beginning to have an intelligent discussion about parking in Brookline. There have been some surprising revelations. (Surprising to me anyway!) and I feel there are also some serious misconceptions. A major concern many people have centers around cars parked on residential streets. Everyone has a different theory about who these cars belong to and why they are there, but there is an intense dislike of them. I have heard the sentiment "I don't want Brookline to look like Cambridge or Somerville or Allston" from many people. Apparently these individuals perceive the big difference between these communities to be the presence of cars on the street. No one sees the irony in the fact that they all want to own cars and drive them where they want, but don't want to see them in parking lots or on the street. Personally, I think one of the biggest differences in the look of these various communities is the number of street trees. The other is the quality of the housing stock. But back to this fixation on the number of cars parked on the street. At first I thought this had to do with residents not being able to park (or their visitors) in front of their home because of these interlopers. But I don't think that quite gets at the heart of it. It is more about an idealized image of what a Brookline neighborhood is supposed to look like. And it doesn't have cars on the street. Hence the overnight parking ban. We have achieved what we wanted there, but the result has been another problem.

Free parking for commuters. Without good enforcement of our two-hour parking limit, it seems many have found it convenient to park all day and take the T or walk to their work destinations. I don't see this where I live, but it is apparently a big problem around Brookline Village. Where the breakdown in logic occurs is when people think this problem is related to the amount of legal parking provided in the Village. No amount of paid parking in the Village will make a dent in this problem. For one thing, the free parkers have no interest in paying for their parking. For another thing, the demand is infinite. If we attempted to accommodate the demand for commuter parking we would only be inviting more and more vehicles into our already overburdened, congested roadways and neighborhoods, further degrading an already dangerous and conflict ridden environment. The only answer is good enforcement of the two-hour parking limit.

Flowing from this "get them off the street" desire, there is a powerful seduction to the "out of sight out of mind" solution of "stuffing the cars in a big hole in the ground", aka the underground parking garage. If we just build enough spaces in the underground garage, we will be able to put all the cars in it and our streets will remain "unsullied" by the nasty cars cluttering them up. There are a few serious flaws in the logic here. First off, cars do not levitate to the garage. They must make there way there, twisting and turning, pushing and squeezing through our over-crowded intersections and roadways, playing chicken with each other because of the double parkers too lazy to park properly and worse, playing chicken with pedestrians and bicyclists who are just in the way. Crowd enough of these vehicles and people into the same confined system and conflicts escalate, its a matter of physics. Your big garage is a magnet, pulling more and more vehicles into the spot you had hoped to remove them from.

Highway engineers had to face this conundrum long ago. There truly is such a thing as induced demand. They learned that you cannot build your way out of congestion. Once you make it flow better, everyone wants to use it and you are back where you started. It is a treadmill that never stops. The best you can hope for is to strike a balance. That's why the Big Dig wasn't bigger. It is hopefully big enough. It was meant to be done in conjunction with improvements to transit, so that we could move as many people as possible with our excellent mass transit. There is real efficiency there on every level.

The strongly held view in Brookline is that we must accommodate all the "demand" for parking on site for each new development or else there will be overflow into the neighborhoods or worse the dreaded circling and searching for parking. We have never had a handle on just how to predict what that "demand" is, hence our current debate that will surely continue about just how many parking spaces are needed at 2 Brookline Place. It is a much bigger question. The parking rates in our zoning code are flawed to say the least, being based on suburban locations and related only to the square footage and use of a building, variables which are often poor predictors of a businesses activity level. Rates are just not the way to go. A more nuanced approach is necessary, one based on the realities of each situation. But I won't go into all the details here, only to say that demand for parking, like any other commodity in the market place, is in fact dynamic. Just as drivers respond to the free flowing new roadway in the induced demand example above, parkers respond to the availability of easy/cheap parking when deciding whether or not to drive, take the T, walk or bike.

The other day, I was walking home from my appointment in the Longwood medical area and a fellow next to me on the sidewalk, with his Beth Israel Deaconess ID tag dangling from his belt on his cellphone said, "I can't believe I was so stupid to drive in today". Exactly. Tomorrow he won't be so stupid. I'm not making this up, this really happened.

There are some who believe that our traffic problems are actually caused by people driving around looking for parking. Traffic volumes are up because people are out driving their cars to and from their various destinations. There are a few stubborn individuals who refuse to park more than a few feet from their destination and they will either circle, idle or double park. For the more flexible individual, accommodation is almost always available, as our recent parking utilization study of Coolidge Corner revealed.

For those who hold this view, if everyone could just drive up and park right where they wanted, we would have free flowing roadways. Those roadways however would have to be so big we would have to obliterate the very destination buildings they seek to serve. I suggest they spend one day with a traffic planner running intersection analyses to see that the actual number of cars on a roadway is the determining factor for how much delay will be experienced and that there is a point at which the capacity is exceeded and delay becomes infinite. In other words, it doesn't matter how big those parking lots are, the cars won't be able to get there!

Another serious problem with the on-site disappearing cars scenario is that it precludes the provision of shared public parking. There are many benefits to shared parking, which I have written about previously. It is vastly more efficient, allowing us to dedicate much less land/space/resources to parking and it engenders social interaction and good urban design, all positive goals for Brookline.

If you are at all interested in any of these issues, please come to the upcoming parking forum:

Better Parking = Better Brookline
Monday, June 9, 2008
7- 9 pm
Old Lincoln School Auditorium

Speakers are Jason Schrieber, of Nelson/Nygaard, a national leader in Transit Orient Development, Travel Demand Management, and parking management.

Al Raine, former Chief of Planning and Development for the Dukakis Administration and now National Practice Leader for Transit Oriented Development with DMJM + Harris. Al Raine is a Brookline resident and member of the Economic Development Advisory Board.

There will be a question and answer period after the speakers.

The forum is sponsored by: Brookline Planning Board, Brookline Transportation Board, Climate Change Action Brookline, Brookline Conservation Commission, Economic Development Advisory Board and Brookline GreenSpace Alliance

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Coolidge Corner's Future

What do we love about Coolidge Corner? I love the fact that I can walk there to take care of my daily errands, with the occasional special treat of taking in a movie or browsing at Booksmith. If I'm feeling cooped up or lonely, I can just walk down and have a cup of tea at Peet's. Everyone has their favorite spots. It's not like everyplace else. It's not the mall. We can talk to the people who own their own businesses.

Coolidge Corner is the social hub of Brookline. It's where we are most likely to run into our neighbors. CC defines our town in the minds of many. But now we have just learned the distressing news that instead of McDonald's and Zeeba's flower shop we are to have yet another bank. How utterly boring. Now, I'm no fan of McDonald's (I have read Fast Food Nation and seen Supersize Me), but at least people of all walks of life could get a snack or meal there. Zeeba's Exotic Flowers had some of the best floral arrangements in town. They will be sorely missed.

A bank does not generate much foot traffic. Their store window does not offer visual stimulation or an inviting setting. They are closed at night, taking away from the life of the street for evening saunterers. It's as bad as another cell phone store. Must we allow any business that wants to set up shop? Can we only have those businesses backed by large corporations with big bucks to spend? We are losing the soul of our town. Why not offer a tax break to independents? When it comes time to permit development in CC why not offer incentives to those developers who will put locally owned retail businesses on the first floor? This is a trend we can no longer ignore. It is not going to fix itself and we can't count on being lucky. The economic forces bringing the chains to our door will not change. We need to address them in a meaningful way.

There has been an ongoing planning effort underway in CC. The goals are two-fold. One to determine what we would like to see built in a few spots that are ripe for redevelopment and two to help protect the surrounding neighborhoods from tear downs that result in overly dense rebuilding and loss of character. Mention has been made of implementing "form-based zoning", which focuses more on regulating the streetscape and building design and scale of new building. It's a way to enforce more appropriate contextualizing of new building. All good. The neighborhoods would gain a great deal by establishment of Neighborhood Conservation Districts.

But what would make CC a great place, a special place that reflects our values and is welcoming and fun to visit? Retaining independent businesses is a good start. Better streetscape design would really help. Keeping in mind that CC is the social hub of Brookline, it becomes apparent that what we are lacking is a public gathering place. Anyone who has experienced the festive atmosphere at the farmer's market understands that it is popular for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is its social function. Why not extend that idea to a year round market? Like the Pike's Place market in Seattle. Part of the market would have to be indoors, and it should include fresh food, prepared food and places to eat in a public setting. It would have to be town owned and administered to help the fresh food providers survive economically, but what an asset for the town!

Some have expressed a desire for "green space" in CC. While I am as much of a tree-hugger as anyone, I think this is misguided. We need a people place. That's what CC is all about. If we think of our public place as a "Plaza" we get the right idea. Of course it could have small ornamental trees, a fountain, even tall grasses in planters, a spot of grass maybe even, but a "nature" area it is not. Not a patch of grass to look at, no, it needs to be a place with tons of seating for people watching. Maybe it could even be a site for outdoors concerts, poetry readings, drama, etc. It could never be big enough to be a true natural area, and we don't go to CC for solitude. Fortunately we have Hall's Pond near to us for that.

CC is at a crossroads. It is up to us to envision the CC of the future. Now is the time to use our imaginations and let the ideas fly. Remember the Brookline 300 celebration? All of those people surging down Harvard Street? There was a palpable sense of shared pride and happiness in our town's success. All of those people would love to come back to experience that type of "street life" again. As we withdrawal more and more into our private domains and the Internet, etc. we need that experience of community and human contact even more.

Why not think about sharing the road with people a bit more? There are plenty of ways to accomplish this, through wider sidewalks, traffic calming, even selective street closings. We need to make CC more friendly to the pedestrian, not the car. It's the walkablity and pedestrian environment in consort with its unique shops, that makes CC special and the better we make that, the more people will come. People are yearning to experience environments that are not the ubiquitous suburban sprawl swallowing much of the rest of our country.

Our history has blessed us with a built environment made before the automobile took over our public realm. Its dense enough to support mass transit, rich in beautiful architecture, and softened with lots of trees, but we can not coast on our laurels and hope for the best. The same threats and economic forces that have created anywhere USA are present and active here too. Only vigilance, regulatory change and a clearly articulated vision of something other will protect us.

What would you like to see in Coolidge Corner's future?