Just outside the square: Union Square presentation

[secretlyironic]

 Monday at  6 PM at the Argenziano school on Washington Street-- meet with developers and city officials to see what the current plans look like. 

The plan has several updates in response to neighborhood feedback, including relocating a park further from the busiest roads, and adjusting the massing of some buildings to make them fit into the surrounding buildings. 

This is bound to be controversial so this is a really good opportunity to have input on the ways in which the community is going to be redeveloped.

Comments

[secretlyironic]

Here's the giant PDF of the plan:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ifa.somervillema.gov/documents/US2-UnionSquare_CDSP_-Application.pdf

[elusiveat]

Our family is about to move back to Somerville. Is there a good online resource to bring us up to speed on redevelopment plans?

(We've been living in Allston for the past few years, which has its own special redevelopment situation...)

[secretlyironic]

https://www.somervillema.gov/departments/union-square-planning has all the documents, including the recently-updated massive full proposal document.

If you don't have time to read 250odd pages of development planning, just look at pages 12-13, 22, and 25. That's the list of which sites are in the proposal and some maps of what they're planning on doing.

The plan is expected to take at least 10 years, and will go in phases, so it's not like they're going to raze the whole thing at once.

[fredrikegerman]

Thanks for the pointers to the most relevant summary pages, that was helpful in quickly digesting the proposed plan.

Update...

[auntycourtney]

The vote for approving this plan was postponed until November 30th.

Re: Update...

[secretlyironic]

I think that makes sense. I went in really supporting it, but Union United brought up a couple of issues that 1) are important and 2) Shouldn't be terribly difficult to resolve.

Basically there were a few major questions. Some could be decided later (like "which of these two lots should be a park?) and some were pretty uncontroversial (clustering creative economy uses in one building so there's a more flexible space and creative economy people can collaborate from within the same building).

And there were a couple that were real issues.

* How will they make sure the traffic mitigation plan works?
* How do they justify the request to pay a fee to reduce the total square footage of creative economy spaces?
* The city and US2 don't own all the land in this plan: How will they get it? What if someone else wants to develop it?

I think the plan is *really close* to ready to approve. So, I hope US2 can get back to the board quickly with answers to those questions.