Development mitigation measures/proffers proposed by Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston
-- "MGH pushes ahead with nearly $2 billion expansion," Boston Globe
One interesting point made in the article is that the Massachusetts General Hospital campus has 27,000 employees, 78% who get to and from the campus by sustainable modes--walking, biking, and transit. The Hospital is served by the very busy Charles Street/MGH Station on the Blue Line.
Bicycle parking. While the project will add car parking spaces for a total of 971, moving them from the surface to underground, it will have more total spaces for bike parking, 1,043 than cars, with the addition of more than 500 spaces. It also proposes bike lane improvements on Charles Street and elsewhere on the campus.
Public realm improvements. It proposes a variety of improvements, including two outdoor plazas and a street arcade, wider sidewalks, benches, among others.
Photo credit.Connecting the Blue and Red Line subways. Perhaps the biggest mobility contribution is underground tunnel easement and other elements within the complex, to accommodate the extension of the Blue Line from the Charles Street/Massachusetts General Hospital Station, under Charles Street to the Bowdoin Red Line Station, thereby connecting the two lines.
This should spur the MBTA to move the project forward ("Red Line-Blue Line connection could be much cheaper than thought, study says"). They hadn't really prioritized it until three years ago, even though previous administrations had agreed to it as part of environmental and other mitigation measures although they have a target date of 2040. From the article:
Supporters of the connector say it would make it easier to travel from Logan Airport, East Boston, and Revere — all on the Blue Line — to Red Line stops such as Massachusetts General Hospital and Kendall and Harvard squares in Cambridge. Switching between the two lines now requires a short ride on the Green or Orange lines.
The new estimate includes building a 1,500-foot rail tunnel under Cambridge Street from the Bowdoin stop on the Blue Line and new platforms at Charles/MGH station, where the lines would connect. It also includes the cost of moving utilities.
It doesn’t include aspects of the project that could increase costs to about $500 million, such as designs, testing, any necessary modifications to vehicles, and finishing touches on the station, like adding elevators.
Since the new hospital construction project will be completed in 2030, MBTA should fast track this connection project so that it can open simultaneously with the newly constructed hospital buildings.
Community center space. The project also calls for the demolition of a community center, and the proposal calls for providing space for a new community center in the development, along with a food bank.
Affordable housing. And a different building on the campus would be shifted to the provision of affordable housing.
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It's rare for nonprofit projects, even by large institutions like colleges and hospitals, to include mitigation measures in response to new building projects, which often come at the expense of existing operations.
To me one of the biggest is the cessation of the Seattle waterfront heritage streetcar service. The Seattle Art Museum extended its campus, creating a sculpture park, and in the process eradicating the yard and maintenance buildings for the streetcar, without having to replace them.
This is rare.
This rowhouse at 837 22nd St. NW, in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, was built in 1886. It's the last rowhouse on the block and it does not qualify for historical preservation protection. (Frank Leone)Separately, George Washington University intends to demolish a historic, undesignated building on its campus, as part of a development project ("A District couple hope that GWU won’t tear down an old Foggy Bottom rowhouse," Washington Post).
DC's oversight of the GWU campus plan never imposed serious mitigation measures, especially around historic preservation.
GWU's expansion in Foggy Bottom has pretty much eliminated the residential and mixed use neighborhood that had previously existed, comparable to the impact of schools like New York University on its neighborhood.
Memorable transit proffers. Boston has some examples of developer contributions to transit station creation such as Federal Realty Investment Trust's Assembly Row and New Balance's new headquarters ("New Balance Bought Its Own Commuter Rail Station," Atlantic Magazine) providing funding for the addition of transit and other mobility improvements.
A casino, the Pittsburgh Stadium Authority and other interests paid towards the extension of the T subway to the North Shore, serving a casino and stadiums for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers.
In Portland, Portland State University paid for station creation and other improvements for the streetcar, including providing access to the streetcar route within the campus, while Oregon Health Sciences University operates the aerial tram.In New York City, SL Green constructed underground connections between subway stations, its building, and Grand Central Station ("Behind the rise of the 77-story One Vanderbilt," New York Post).
The New York Islanders are paying almost the entire cost for an LIRR station to serve their new arena ("Islanders arena project at Belmont Park now includes new LIRR station," Newsday). The Golden State Warriors, Phoenix Suns, and forthcoming Seattle Kraken hockey team pay/will pay local transit systems for transit access for ticket holders.
In Seattle, Paul Allen's Vulcan Investments, developer of the SoDo district, paid towards ("Paul Allen's major makeover offers high risks, huge payoffs," Seattle Times) the creation of the Seattle streetcar, to help facilitate his real estate developments (which was a particularly common method by developers during the streetcar development era).Subsequently, Amazon paid for additional streetcars and payment for operations to expand service.
Historically, the Van Sweringen brothers of Cleveland are perhaps the most remarkable. They wanted to build a streetcar service to serve their developments in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights but couldn't get right of way. So they bought the Nickel Plate Railroad to get access to the railroad's existing right of way to include the rapid transit service.
Labels: development oriented transit, proffers-community benefits
3 Comments:
Re: GW, is that rowhouse really 'historic' if it's not designated, or is it just old?
As far as DC's planning priorities for the area, reserving that space for a future second entrance to the Foggy Bottom station is far more important than the nebulous public benefit of preserving a house just because it's somewhat old and otherwise unremarkable.
Historic = old. By definition any decent rowhouse in DC before 1920 has a case for being designated.
But there is a big difference between being a contributing building as part of a historic district versus being able to justify an individual landmark designation. For the latter, a building needs to meet a higher standard of criteria, and it's pretty hard for the "average" rowhouse to meet that standard.
One of the criteria is "integrity" of the building, e.g., if it had been butchered, no longer meeting the expectations evinced in the architectural style of the building.
And while it isn't a justification for demolition, you can make the argument that there is no longer any historical integrity to the block.
Historic doesn't always = saving/preserving.
One of the points I make as that historic preservation became a "legal construct" people in the development community only saw "historicity" as a regulatory issue.
WRT your comments, the planner part of me has no problem in saying that reserving space for a second entrance for the transit station is more important.
That being said:
1. IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ADDRESSED IN THE HISTORIC PRESERVATION SECTION OF THE CAMPUS PLAN, stating that the building is old, eligible for designation, but not especially remarkable. My problem is that it wasn't addressed in the campus plan.
2. Could it be incorporated into an entrance? While WMATA/Metrorail has never been designed to incorporate extant buildings into station entrances, it's frequent in cities like New York and Manhattan.
(Relatedly, WMATA doesn't do a good job of monetizing the air rights above stations. Maybe that's something GWU would want to do and could incorporate the building. Or not. In either case, it justifies mitigation.)
(Having seen photos of some of the buildings that were extant on top of what became the Georgia Avenue Metrorail station, I regret that WMATA had no interest in going that route.)
3. And wrt "mitigation" that they could offer to move the building and pay towards the cost. (For years I've said the city should systematically identify empty lots suitable for such buildings, and create a system to "preserve" buildings like this by moving them.
A preservation plan doesn't necessarily save everything, but it does explain the framework for decision making and offer opportunities for mitigation.
(WRT how advocates, like in Takoma say that a Section 106 review should have been done before WMATA moved forward on transferring station land to EYA, my response back then was a Section 106 review doesn't forbid development, just that it be evaluated in terms of its effect on historic resources, with a plan to address it. Lots of time it means saving buildings, other times it doesn't.)
Well, it's clear that this particular house isn't worthy of preservation. It's not (and should not) be part of a historic district. The house itself is unremarkable.
It's also not as if this house wasn't considered for preservation. It was, and it didn't meet the criteria. If you disagree with the outcome, that's fine. But there was a process here.
If the only criteria for preservation is age, that's an argument for encasing the city in amber.
So, simply being old is not itself a compelling reason to preserve it, particularly given the opportunity to use this site for something else that has more public benefit.
I don't think your characterization of WMATA is correct, either. The system has several entrances incorporated into older buildings (Farragut West, Farragut North, the VA entrance of McPherson Sq, the Woodies building) and they also do a pretty good job of monetizing their land - their joint development program is far more aggressive than any others. I also think lots of the New York examples are a bit more complex, where the subway pre-dates the building and not the other way around.
Either way, the WMATA concept for a second Foggy Bottom entrance assumed air rights development above the new entrance.
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