BACC hosts second meeting, focusing on big projects (Jeff Sullivan, Boston Bulletin: January 31, 2019)

[Anthony D'Isidoro]

The Brighton Allston Community Coalition (BACC) held its second meeting last week on Jan. 24 in a room packed with about 100 residents.

The purpose of the meeting was to outline the main focus of the group, which is to advocate for the neighborhoods in terms of real estate development, home-ownership and transportation. Organizers said only residents who live in the neighborhood would be able to join as full-fledged members, and no businesses or none occupying landlords would be able to join.

“What makes us different than other groups is that we are not competing with any group already in Allston Brighton, we seek to collaborate with other groups when there is a common interest,” said co founder Joanne D’Alcomo. “The Brighton Allston Improvement Association (BAIA) and the Allston Civic Association (ACA) are very well established groups, and they have a very special role in the community that we don’t want to take on.”

D’Alcomo said those groups have to hear every housing project, whether it’s a 350unit building or a single-family homeowner, that requires a variance from the Boston Zoning Code at the Boston Zoning Board of Appeals. She said the BACC will be looking at issues in a less all-encompassing fashion. 

One of the big projects they will be looking at closely and advocating for are resident interests in the Stop and Shop redevelopment called Allston Yards. The project in its current form will have several buildings comprising 1,900,000 square feet of space. Impact Advisory Group (IAG) member and ACA President Anthony D’Isidoro said he’s been working with the development team on the project through the IAG process, and he said the two issues many in the neighborhood have with it are the size of it and  its lack of greenspace. He said they’re also concerned that the developers have not released information on whether any of the 1,000 proposed housing units would include home ownership. “They kept it very generic to start with but suffice to say, they have been dead quiet now for a certain period of time,” he said. “I suspect what happened was they did not do their due diligence when working with the community. I think they found out fairly quickly they have massive, massive problems.”

D’Isidoro added they are hoping that they can increase the greenspace on the project and that when the adjacent former Volvo Dealership is sold and developed, there can be a combined 1-acre park between the two parcels, as he said Allston and Brighton have the least amount of greenspace in the city.

D’Alcomo said one of the other issues they want to address in the future is the notification period for the IAG. Currently, she said Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and city officials appoint residents based on recommendations from elected officials and members of advocacy groups, but they do not announce when the nomination process begins.

“It’s the practice of the city to not notify anyone, they don’t tell us when the event has occurred that triggers the nomination period, which is the filing of a letter of intent from the developer to the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA),” she said. “That triggers the time period and it’s a very narrow window and they don’t tell us.”

She said she wrote to the Chief of the Office of Neighborhood Services Jerome Smith and the response has not been encouraging.

“Nothing, nada, zero, zip,” she said.

She pointed out the seven people appointed to the IAG for the Allston Square development for a seven-building, 334-unit complex at 334 Cambridge St. as an example.

“One person on it has an ownership interest in nearby Regina Pizza, and they don’t care if peiople are coming out like ants, it makes  the property more valuable,” she said. “There’s another person on there who works with one of the largest construction companies in the world, and you know where that built-in bias is.”

Co-founder Kevin Karagee said they are also looking to improve affordable housing in the neighborhood. He pointed out that the current inclusionary development policy (IDP) requires that for any project requiring a variance or containing more than 10 units have 13 percent of its units be designated as affordable, where their sale value or rent is kept at a rate so that a family making between 50 percent to 100 percent of the area median income can afford to live there. Karagee said they are working to get the city to increase that percentage to 20 percent

He also pointed out that the AMI for Boston is about $100,000, and that in Brighton the median income is below $56,000 and in Allston it’s about $42,000.

“Some of the rents here are at $3,600 a month for a very small unit, and over a year that’s well over $36,00,” he said. “There’s a total disconnect between the residents in this neighborhood and the housing being built. It’s been a middle class and a working class neighborhood historically, and those people who want to stay should be able to stay. We should be creative enough to enable that to happen.” 

Karagee also said they are working on transportation and are keeping a close eye on the Allston Brighton Mobility Study currently underway by the city, the BPDA and the MBTA.

 “This is an opportunity to share in the future improvements in public transportation,” he said. “In our neighborhood, it’s not just public transportation we need improvements in. We need increased pedestrian and bicycle safety improvements too... We think this is an essential project in the city, especially given the amount of development going on... I mean just go to the Seaport if you want an example of ass backwards urban planning. They said, ‘let’s develop a lot and then maybe we’ll worry about public transportation.”