Don Chiofaro doesn’t just want to replace Boston’s Harbor Garage with two buildings – he believes he must build tall ones. Otherwise, he has said, the economics behind the $900 million twin Greenway towers he’s proposing, which top off at 780 feet, won’t make sense.
The Massachusetts Port Authority, on the other hand, is telling Chiofaro that it doesn’t want him to go tall. So he can’t go tall. End of story.
The conventional wisdom has it that Chiofaro can’t fight Massport on height and live to talk about it. After all, the Federal Aviation Administration and Massport, the owner of Logan Airport, lopped hundreds of feet off the top of Hines Interests’ proposed South Station tower, and the two agencies put the kibosh on Steve Belkin’s proposed 1,000-foot downtown tower.
If they say Chiofaro’s towers are too tall, they’re too tall. Right?
In reality, the relationship between the city’s development community and its airport is much more complicated. Massport has released a map that lays out maximum development heights for the neighborhoods surrounding Logan. Massport says the heights are recommendations, but it seeks absolute enforcement of those recommended heights.
Still, neither Massport nor the FAA can actually derail a development they oppose.
But For The BRA
The Boston Redevelopment Authority, which does regulate development in the city, is now on board with Massport’s height limits. Three years ago, though, the BRA didn’t just lead an effort to thrust a tall tower into Boston’s skyline; it also told prospective developers on that project that Massport and the FAA could squawk all they wanted, but couldn’t stop them from building whatever extravagantly tall tower they wanted to build.
Chiofaro’s experience with airport bureaucracy was much different two decades ago when he was building International Place. He was proposing the city’s fifth-tallest building, one block from the waterfront, and the feedback from Logan was simple: just make sure you put some flashing lights on top.
Massport only began thinking about the relationship between Logan and Boston development a decade ago. That’s when proposals for Fan Pier and Pier 4, along the South Boston waterfront, threatened to wall off one of Logan’s busiest runways. Massport officials got the city and the Seaport’s developers to agree to cap building heights at their current levels – below 300 feet. The flight path over the Seaport extends over the Southwest Corridor, so Massport showed an interest in the heights of Columbus Center and South Bay, the group of parcels off Kneeland Street where former Turnpike director Matt Amorello once envisioned plunking down one of the city’s tallest towers. Massport wound up chopping Amorello’s 800-foot fantasy towers down to 350 feet.
Then the agency took its efforts citywide.
Last fall, Massport released what it refers to as its composite map – a map of the cities surrounding Logan, overlaid with the maximum heights Massport says developers may build to without disrupting airport operations. Those heights range from 600 feet along Boston’s waterfront, to 800 feet along the edge of Boston Common, to 1,000 feet at the western edge of the Back Bay. Chiofaro’s Harbor Garage lies in the 600-625-foot range. The site of Belkin’s tower is under 750 feet.
Cutting Chiofaro
Massport cited its map in a July letter the agency wrote to state environmental secretary Ian Bowles. The agency said Chiofaro’s towers were as much as 170 feet too tall, writing, “Massport cannot condone and urges you to help prevent any degradation of the airspace surrounding Boston-Logan by tall structures proposed as part of this project.”
The BRA followed suit in a scoping letter two weeks later.
“We expect,” the agency wrote, “that the overall density will be effectively lowered by adherence to our requirement that the proposed project conform to the strict (absolute) height limits promulgated by the FAA/Massport….”
Chiofaro said he saw Massport’s height limits as flexible, even though the BRA and Massport letters don’t paint them that way.
But Massport does view the heights it lays out in its development map as strict rules. It just can’t say as much.
In an extensive interview with Banker & Tradesman, Flavio Leo, the Massport planner who oversaw the composite map’s creation, acknowledged that neither Massport nor the FAA possess any concrete legal tools to enforce height limits on Boston developments. At the same time, he said, “The map reflects hard surfaces that we need to protect.”
“We don’t have zoning authority,” Leo said. “So what we’ve done is provide a map that’s guidance. But it is based on hard numbers that reflect safety surfaces, and we will work extremely hard, and the FAA has said they will work with us, to protect the map.
Leo added, “We need to view airspace the way we view runways and terminals and roadways. It’s an asset of the airport.”
He said it falls to the BRA to enforce Logan’s preferred development heights.
“The BRA is very supportive. They know that these are real surfaces, that it’s not just Massport making these things up.”
‘You’d Be Hard-Pressed To Vary’
“It’s a tough subject,” said BRA Director John Palmieri. “It’s not that these are zoning standards.” But, Palmieri added, “You’d be hard-pressed to vary from those guidelines. This is different than talking about shadow impacts. This is a much more serious proposition.”
Palmieri’s thinking on the subject is vastly different than the opinions his predecessors floated just three years ago.
Back then, Mark Maloney’s BRA was preparing to issue a request for proposals calling for the construction of a 1,000-foot signature skyscraper in Winthrop Square. The BRA asked aviation consultants Eclat Consulting whether such a tower would run afoul of the FAA’s obstruction standards.
In April 2006, the BRA got its answer: Eclat told the BRA the Winthrop Square tower would not present a hazard to air navigation, since the building wouldn’t affect a “substantial number of flights.” Moreover, Eclat said, even if the FAA did object, “the FAA does not have the legal ability to prevent construction.” If the tower were deemed to be a hazard, the report said, it would be up to the FAA to fly around it. The report added that any building deemed a hazard by the FAA would “very likely” have difficulties securing financing or insurance. (Eclat’s then-CEO, Randy Babbitt, has since landed a better gig: he now runs the FAA.)
The BRA included Eclat’s report in its May 2006 Winthrop Square RFP. Belkin was the sole bidder on the parcel. On Jan. 25, 2007, the BRA’s board voted to grant Belkin’s team tentative development designation. Massport fired off a letter to the BRA a few days later, saying, “This will set a new height limit that may be used to justify future projects of similar height thereby, cumulatively and over time, increasing the impact on Boston Logan flight operations.”
The BRA was told Belkin’s tower couldn’t top 740 feet. Massport also got busy with a project of its own – the development height composite map. The BRA’s eagerness to push downtown development to new heights hardened Massport’s resolve to stop it.
Palmieri told Banker & Tradesman that the Belkin RFP was “a particular, very special case.” He added, “We view it differently now that we have that [map]. If anything gets built, whoever builds has to consider these new guidelines.”
“Somebody might say, ‘Geez, there’s all these tall buildings downtown, why not just build another one?’” Leo said. The answer, he said, is that current airport procedures take existing building heights into account. Downtown, Massport’s height map essentially caps development at its highest current level.
“One of the discussions we had on the South Boston waterfront was the domino effect,” Leo said. “Once you go high, somebody else is going to want to go higher, and then somebody else wants to go higher, and you get a death from a thousand cuts.” He added, “Obviously, if you shut down a runway, you don’t have to worry about a building. But that’s not what we’re here to do.”
It’s noteworthy that Belkin’s tower proposal never got far enough to test that statement. He halted pre-development work on his 1.3 million-square-foot office building because it was economically infeasible, not because Massport or the FAA told him to. Through a spokeswoman, Belkin declined to comment for this story.
Chiofaro, whose International Place office overlooks Logan, is the first developer to run afoul of Massport’s height limits since the composite map was released publicly. He believes his Harbor Garage proposal isn’t too far off from Massport’s 625-foot limit; that “it’s within range of what could be approved.” He added, “We were conscious of what happened with Belkin’s tower, and we feel very comfortable that we’re going down the right road.”
The developer has been talking to the BRA about redeveloping the Harbor Garage site since 2005. Back then, he insists, a BRA official encouraged him to replace the garage with a “significant building.” More recently, when he began floating preliminary designs around the ninth floor of City Hall, he said, “They never said, ‘It’s too high for the airport.’ I don’t think it is too high for the airport.”
