Anti-housing community groups opposed to large projects like Robert Korff’s Riverside development are forcing large projects to cut hundreds of units from their buildings. Image courtesy of David M Schwarz Architects

Hopes of building our way out of the housing crisis are dying a death of a thousand cuts. 

At a time when hundreds of thousands of new homes, condos and apartments are needed to across the Boston area, pushback from housing–hating NIMBY neighbors is forcing developers to slash the height of projects and cut the number of oh-so-badly needed new apartments and condos. 

Probably the most egregious example comes fresh off South Boston’s waterfront, where developers had hoped to build 1,300 new condos and apartments in a neighborhood where prices have gone through the roof. 

Faced with a backlash from neighborhood blowhards, developers have cut those housing plans in half, and that’s not all. 

Along with one plan calling now for 750 units, the developer, Redgate, has also prepared an alternative plan for the Boston Planning and Development Agency that includes no housing, just commercial space. 

Opposition to As-of-Right Projects 

Unfortunately, when it comes to developers caving into the housing haters and downsizing their projects, there is a lot more where that came from. 

Just take the debate over plans to convert long-shuttered Quincy Hospital into hundreds of new apartments. 

The developer, FoxRock Properties, is battling ornery neighbors over plans to convert old redbrick building atop Hospital Hill – and its 15-acre campus – into 465 townhouses and apartments. 

That these sites can’t be built out to their full housing potential is a travesty, and one we will all be paying for in the decades to come in higher prices and rents.

That’s the second drop by the developer, which had previously scale back its plans from an initial 598 units down to 490. 

Roughly the size of Fenway Park, the old Quincy Hospital site could actually accommodate two or three times the number of units being proposed, the developer has said, a figure based not on whimsical fancy, but current zoning. 

Even so, the neighbors still aren’t happy. Rather, they contend the project is still too large, and are particularly irate the developer has backtracked on plans to slap an over-55 age restriction on several dozen units. 

It would be nice to think there is genuine concern over senior housing, but alas, that is not the case here. The Hospital Hill Neighborhood Association gives away the real game when it notes, in an op-ed in the Quincy Sun, that the change will increase “the number of commuters and school age children.” 

Worse still, the developer has managed to increase the total number of bedrooms in the project, the group complains, even as it decreases the number of apartments and townhomes. 

“These latest changes amount to nothing more than a shell game,” the group fumes. 

 No Room for New Arrivals  

Also taking a haircut are plans to build hundreds of apartments at the Riverside MBTA station in Newton. 

Neighbors living in the stately and brightly colored Victorians in the Riverside neighborhood surrounding the station have spent a decade battling plans for new residential and commercial construction at the site. 

Developer Robert Korff’s latest plan calls for 600 units – a reduction of 75 apartments from his previous proposal and far short of the 750 units a proposed zoning change would have allowed. 

Facing pushback from some neighbors Redgate Capital and Hilco Development Partners have offered to scrap all housing from their plan to redevelop the neighborhood’s former Edison power plant. Courtesy Spagnolo Gisness & Assoc.

Still, the spin about the deal is the neighbors actually wanted more housing and less commercial space. In fact, the neighbors, who have spent more than a decade battling various housing and development plans for the MBTA station and its sprawling parking lots, were in fact happy the developer scaled back the entire project while also keeping a high percentage of housing, or so the story goes. 

If true, that would certainly would be a refreshing change, though it still means anywhere from 75 to 150 fewer – and badly needed – apartments. 

Yet it doesn’t take any brilliant sleuthing to follow the links from the website of “Rightsize Riverside” and its supposedly apartment– and new housing–hugging members and Rightsize Newton, which makes very clear it it is so angry about: all the new housing being proposed in the Garden City. 

There is just too much being proposed too fast, the group contends, an argument somewhat undermined by the years of debate over development plans at Riverside. 

“A total of at least 1,900 units and potentially over 2,600 new unit means more residents, more traffic, more pressure on our schools, services and infrastructure,” the group contends on its website. 

Scott Van Voorhis

Greater Boston is booming, people are moving here and they need a place to live. 

And sites like the Riverside T station, the now–shuttered Quincy Hospital and the defunct Edison plant in South Boston are perfect for housing, and for lots of it, at that. 

That these sites can’t be built out to their full housing potential is a travesty, and one we will all be paying for in the decades to come in higher prices and rents. 

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.