Image courtesy of Prellwitz Chilinski Assoc.
A residential project has been proposed on the Brookline-Brighton line that pushes its multifamily component entirely to the Boston side of the property, drawing attention from housing advocates on social media.
Developer Jeffrey Feuerman is seeking the OK from Boston officials to replace a vacant, 8,800-square-foot, 2-story nursing home at 249 Corey Road on a 16,600-square-foot lot with a 4-story, 38,591-square-foot, 35-unit apartment building with a below-grade parking and bicycle garage.
The larger portion of the site holding the former nursing home’s parking lot, about 17,800 square feet in total, sits across the Boston-Brookline line, although roughly half of the site is dominated by a steep, wooded slope. Fuerman’s small project review application submitted to the Boston Planning & Development Agency states that the property will be host to two new, single-family homes in line with Brookline’s zoning for the parcel, which limits buildings to single-family homes or single-family homes converted to two-family homes “designed to further buffer the proposed project from Brookline’s residential neighborhood up and along Jordan Road.”
Located about a half-mile walk from the MBTA B and C branches of the Green Line and 0.2 miles from the T’s No. 65 bus, the project’s announcement drew criticism on social media from housing and transit advocates, who said it showed the difficulty of building housing in Boston’s suburbs. Massachusetts is 38,000 homes short of demand, according to the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, and Eastern Massachusetts will need 435,000 new apartments, homes and condominiums by 2040 to keep up with demand, according to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
The project will need to seek a variance from the Boston Zoning Board of appeals as the parcel is zoned only for two-family homes. The parcel was originally larger, according to its BPDA filing, but following feedback given at community meetings this spring and summer Feuerman shrank the building’s height and unit count in order to receive support from the Brighton neighborhood association.
