Up-zoning Newton’s village centers will dramatically impact the future of our Garden City. Residents need visualizations of the up-zoning ZAP plans to ask the City Council to approve in May.
The Planning & Development Department has not provided this basic information to the community, instead spending time and resources on non-scientific “surveys” and presenting one idealized sketch that, as Councilor Wright pointed out, is misleading.
Three volunteer residents’ groups tried to fill this void with grassroots imaging by Marc Hershman (video), Waban Area Council, and Newtonville’s Area Council. Public response has been overwhelmingly favorable. Some offered constructive criticism for improving our images — we welcome their feedback. Some were unnecessarily unkind — we ignore that degradation of public discourse.
The NAC’s images are not perfect. We repeatedly “owned” that we encountered modeling software limitations that, especially with VC1, resulted in imprecise images. With unlimited funds, we could have done even better. Since Marc and WAC created excellent depictions of up-zoning to VC1 and VC2, we concentrated on illustrating VC3 on Walnut Street.
Some commented that the building on the Star parking lot (#7 below) looks too large. It is. If we had money to have it professionally redrawn, any of three simple “fixes” would make it compliant: (1) increase the rear courtyard slightly, (2) use two buildings with a 25 ft separation, or (3) make two 15,000-foot lots with two buildings attached by a party wall. None of these materially impact what we drew. Indeed, we now realize we could insert four (or more!) 5-story buildings on the up-zoned Star parking lot.
We stand by our imaging of a VC3 build out on Walnut Street. All buildings we inserted there are fair representations of the 5-story (“4.5”) buildings that could be built By Right (without mitigation payments).
Carolyn Jacoby Gabbay
member of the Newtonville Area Council
