One Benton Road's Last Stand

[lslapiko.livejournal.com]

Tonight the Somerville Planning Board meets to discuss whether to approve the additional buildout on the One Benton Road lot. The question of whether to finalize the permit now comes down to traffic safety. Because of the increased traffic to be generated by the additional residence, should it be built, combined with the limited lane space on Benton Road, and the foot traffic in the neighborhood during morning hours, the Planning Board has required the property developer to present a traffic mitigation plan that would resolve these issues before allowing construction to go forward.

Supporters of the effort to prevent further construction on the One Benton Road lot will be attending tonight's meeting, and Alderman Tom Taylor has stated that the more people who show up, the more weight their opposition will carry. The petitions submitted by neighbors at the May 6 meeting have been instrumental in delaying construction this long, and forcing the developer to search for solutions to the negative impact that additional building on the lot will have.

Tonight's meeting takes place at 6:00 PM in the 2nd floor Meeting Room of Somerville City Hall at 93 Highland Avenue. Please come out and support the effort to stop MLM Realty from continuing its poorly conceived and executed assault on the city's precious remainder of open space.

For more info on One Benton Road, see http://lslapiko.blogspot.com

Comments

Meeting won't take place tonight!

[lslapiko.livejournal.com]

Due to Bunker Hill, City Hall is closed tonight. The next planning board meeting is 6/24/10 and it is not definite that One Benton Road will be on the agenda. More to follow...sorry for any confusion.

Re: Meeting won't take place tonight!

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

I feel that the appropriate way to signify that no action needs to immediately be taken is to edit this post, instead of just putting a comment in. Please edit the post to note that the date of the meeting has altered and that it's unclear when this discussion will occur.

[m00n.livejournal.com]

Not to make this post a board for discussion on the topic or anything but...It seems like the most meaningful complaint about this development is the fact that a large amount of grass was removed and a tree was cut down in order to make room for uncovered off-street parking.

Isn't this really more the fault of unnecessarily generous off-street parking requirements on the part of the city than it is the developer's fault for wanting to subdivide a house without, I might add, actually expanding the footprint of the house in any significant way?

I mean I think it's incredibly sad that he seems to have completely removed all of the historical character of the house itself on the inside (if I am understanding correctly) but it seems like we're kind of past that at this point.

At any rate, it seems to me that if what we really want is less pavement in our city, then the first order of business needs to be to reduce the off street parking requirements and to NOT encourage landlords to do things like mitigating traffic by widening roads or developing only in places that already have very wide roads to begin with. I realize people dislike this particular developer because he's a bad neighbor and I sympathize with that, but it seems like most of the efforts being made to fight him are also the *exact* same things that cause urban sprawl in the first place.

[ron_newman]

So maybe a reasonable compromise here would be: let him build his additional building, but only if he removes the parking lot and restores it to grass?

[m00n.livejournal.com]

I think that might be a fine compromise, although if other development projects I've seen around here are any indication, it's usually the city that pressures the landlords into providing more parking space, not the other way around. In this case it's probably that the original design did not call for them, and he was made to add them, so they turned out particularly ugly and haphazard looking.

In general I think Somerville would be much better served if it took the attitude that development could be an opportunity to improve the overall health and feel of the city if done intelligently rather than viewing all new development or increases in density with extreme skepticism. With the obvious exception of neighborhoods that everyone already seems to agree are "blighted." Those follow a separate set of rules, generally.

Of course, as a non-car-owner, projects that encourage higher density tends to make my life easier, provided they are well planned, so obviously I am going to be a bit biased. That said, I would remind anyone who seeks to keep Somerville's population flat that, provided there is an increase in demand, we can either build up, smaller, build out, or build nothing. People definitely don't like "up" because they feel it ruins the historical character of the town (and people don't like living next to tall buildings). Building out increases sprawl, which has many of its own consequences, and building nothing causes property values to go up, which people also hate. Thus, smaller seems to be the way to go. Avoiding it because of traffic or parking concerns seems like very antiquated thinking t me.