Image courtesy of EMBARC
A big hole in the ground on one of South Boston’s busiest thoroughfares could become the apartment building it was originally dug to enable after several false starts.
The property’s new owner, Huabin Fan of Wellesley, has filed an application with the Boston Planning & Development Agency to restart construction at 270 Dorchester Ave., but dramatically slash the building’s parking count and trim its footprint to make room for a public pocket park facing a side street.
Fan proposes to keep the previous developer’s plans for 114 apartments – 17 percent of them affordable – in a 6-story building with 20 below-grade parking spaces, substantial bicycle storage, a 2,250-square-foot below-market ground-floor retail space for local martial arts studio Ultimate Self Defense and a separate, market-rate 2,090-square-foot unit for a retailer or a restaurant.
Amenities called out in the project filing include a coworking space, bicycle repair station and a fitness studio.
According to a notice of project change filed by Marc LaCasse, lawyer for Fan and development manager Dinosaur Capital Partners, the parking is in line with the BPDA’s new parking maximum calculations and partly driven by the elimination of space, included in prior developers’ plans, for a rental car operation.
Fan’s proposed project represents the fourth development plan for the site in five years.
According to a deed filed with the Suffolk County Registry, an LLC controlled by Fan bought the parcel at the intersection of Dorchester Avenue and B Street for $10.84 million in June from an affiliate of Back Bay real estate development company Navem Partners. Navem had bought the lot for $14 million in 2019 from the Milton developer, Mark Edwards, who originally permitted the site as an apartment project in 2019, one of the first projects to be conceived under the BPDA’s PLAN: South Boston framework that sought to channel growth along Dorchester and Old Colony Avenues.
Navem had begun construction shortly after buying Edwards’ project, demolishing the commercial buildings on the site and beginning to dig a foundation, but the project stalled due to the multi-month construction moratorium former Mayor Marty Walsh instituted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, LaCasse wrote in the project filing, and subsequently gave up on construction some time in 2021 while looking for alternatives. BPDA filings show a fourth developer, Boston-based Foxfield, had filed a proposal for the site in May 2022 but later abandoned that project without city approval or purchasing the site.
Fan’s version of the project will need BPDA board and Boston Zoning Board of Appeal, LaCasse’s letter says. However, since the first project was proposed on the site, Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration is seeking to increase the minimum affordable housing percentage in new developments to 17 percent deed-restricted units and 3 percent set aside for Section 8 and other voucher holders.
