A mall by any other name?
You know you’ve made it, even in a black way, when your name is invoked to frighten the children. Such is the fate achieved by our friend the term ‘sprawl’ which, judging from a recent Boston Globe headline, is now summoned simply to make a high-density commercial development look greener:
Mini-city would be an antidote to sprawl
… runs the headline. And what sylvan glade will be sprawl’s antidote?
WESTWOOD — Two familiar names in Massachusetts commercial real estate are joining up to replace a worn-out industrial park with a $1.5 billion city in the suburbs, where people would live, eat, shop, work, work out, and hang out, right at one of region’s busiest transportation hubs.
Cabot, Cabot & Forbes of New England Inc. and New England Development of Newton are busy drawing up plans for Westwood Station, a 4.5-million-square-foot development that would transform 130 underused acres into homes for 1,000 families, and offices or shopping destinations for thousands more.
Four and a half million square feet of high-density, high-traffic business enterprise …
… not like Norwood’s Automile, we hope!
Thirty or more new buildings would occupy a wide strip along almost a mile of
”The main attraction here is the transit station,” said John J. ”Jay” Doherty, president of Cabot, Cabot & Forbes. Residents could walk to the train to take a 20-minute trip into
”Any time you see large-scale, mixed-use development happening near or on top of a train station, it’s a good thing,” said Douglas I. Foy, secretary of commonwealth development for the state. ”People of all ages are increasingly fed up with the amount of time they’re sort of imprisoned in their cars, and are increasingly interested in going to community neighborhoods.”
Foy has championed so-called smart growth, a concept promoted by planners and politicians as an antidote to the sprawl of the last half-century.
Argh! As Bob Bruegmann has exhaustively documented, the myth swallows the reality.
Westwood town officials and the developers caution that it is early. The general plan for the area changes daily, and final town approval of a specific proposal — including the names of retailers and a precise number of housing units — won’t come until spring.
Thus the invocation of debbil sprawl has already had a salutary effect: the town is flexible.
Oh, the devil went down to Westwood …
But the ambitious effort to create a new community from the ground up cleared its first hurdle last year, when the town approved a zoning change that would permit residential and large-scale retail uses.
Zoning is destiny, and higher density adds value.
Cabot, backed by the money of Commonfund Realty Investors LLC of Wilton, Conn., went to work early last year, and Doherty quickly bought 125 acres on
Starting with a building and 25 acres that Cabot had purchased from General Motors Corp. in 1997, Cabot and Commonfund acquired about 20 properties from a dozen owners.
With the zoning changes, the developers have already secured and consolidated on important gains.
Elkus/Manfredi Architects of
University Avenue, now as straight as the railroad tracks that it parallels, would be massaged …
“Now sir, let’s just work out those nasty warehouses, shall we?”
… into a pedestrian-friendly town-center street. In its first phase, the developers would build about 2 million square feet, including up to 400 apartments or condominiums in modest-size towers near the 128 Station, and in four- or five-story buildings along the main street, with shops and restaurants at ground level.
How many stories keep a tower ‘modest’?
Stephen R. Karp, chief executive of New England Development, is negotiating with local, regional, and large national retail firms that would lease 1.2 million square feet of shopping space.
The plan is for smaller stores to dominate the complex, but department and home furnishings stores, or a trendy discounter like Target, will fit in too. Karp calls it a ”lifestyle town center.”
”People like mixed use, having retail where they live, accessible to public transportation,” said Karp. ”We think it’s going to be wildly successful.”
Spoken like an entrepreneur negotiating for zoning, securing permits, mollifying suspicious residents, and seeking to raising capital.
Unable to make
Always watch the economics, folks …
Watch the economics!
… for they always reveal true motivations. If residential property is a rising share of the total base, it means commercial/ retail is shrinking. Westwood was economically atrophying, its retail/ commercial infrastructure economically obsolescent, not to say defunct. So the desperate town awoke to the fact that its developmental restrictions were auto-asphyxiating its local economy.
If the patient has gone comatose for lack of oxygen, how to revive it?
In a short time, the town dramatically changed its sticky permitting process to encourage development. Previously a dry town, Westwood went to the Legislature and won the right to issue liquor licenses for restaurants, which would help bring nightlife to the town.
Good thing Carrie Nation’s no longer still around
Of course, all that value will be for naught if the neighbors (or the fairies!) get up in arms, so the developers are in full-blown sales mode:
Doherty’s calendar shows there were about 40 public and government meetings related to Westwood Station just in the first two weeks of 2006.
How fortuitous to have a serendipitous ‘antidote-to-sprawl’ article in the Globe!
”We’ve got sufficient critical mass and interest from certain retailers that it will all come together as we move into the second quarter,” he said.
As Doherty and Karp move buildings around on a model, measure interest from national retailers, and debate where their parking should go, Westwood officials are participating in the process, removing obstacles quickly when they can.
”To our great surprise and pleasure, a rare thing occurred,” Begelfer said. ”They really took a look at what needed to be done and listened — how rare.”
Regarding this development as sprawl’s antidote, I leave you with this riddle:
How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?
Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
