Planning Board - Planning Board Meeting

IF YOU JUST WANT TO QUICKLY TRY DOING A SCREEN SHARE AND THEN I CAN PULL UP THE AGENDA.

YES, I'LL DO THAT.

THANK YOU.

EVERYONE SEE THAT?

YES. GREAT. THANK YOU. EXCELLENT.

Swathi, I'm here. I'm just trying to figure out why my video isn't working.

Oh, okay.

Do you have something covering your camera?

No. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Usually if the camera's not working, your name will pop up in the box, but instead it's just totally blank, which made me wonder if you had a little switch that covered your camera or something. I've done that before.

Or like a hotkey on your laptop keyboard.

Do what on the laptop keyboard?

Sometimes the keyboards have something that meets the camera.

And also right next to the camera, sometimes some laptops have a sliding bar.

Yeah, right next to the camera. Oh yeah, no, it's not a mechanical thing. Okay.

Sorry.

Swathi, are we set?

Yes, we are otherwise all set. Okay. All right.

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the October 21st, 2025 meeting of the Cambridge Planning Board. My name is Mary Flynn and I am the chair. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2023, adopted by the Massachusetts General Court and approved by the governor, the city is authorized to use remote participation at meetings of the Cambridge Planning Board. All board members, applicants, and members of the public will state their name before speaking, and all votes will be taken by roll call. Members of the public will be kept on mute until it is time for public comment. I will give instructions for planning board comment at that, I'm sorry, public comments at that time. And you can also find instructions on the city's webpage for remote planning board meetings. This meeting is being video and audio recorded and is being streamed live on the city of Cambridge online meeting portal and on cable television channel 22 within Cambridge. There will also be a transcript of the proceedings. We'll start by asking staff to take board member attendance and verify that all members are audible.

Thank you, Mary. This is Jeff Roberts from CDD. H. Theodore Cohen, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Ted. Mary Lydecker, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Mary. Diego Macias, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you? Present, visible, and audible. Thank you, Diego. Tom Seneves, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

I am present. The meeting is visible and audible to me.

Thank you, Tom. Ashley Tan, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Ashley. Carolyn Zern, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Carolyn. Associate members, Dan Anderson, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Good evening, Jeff. Yes to the above.

Thank you, Dan. Joy Jackson, are you present and is the meeting visible and audible to you?

Present, visible, and audible.

Thank you, Joy. And Mary Flynn, can you confirm you're present and the meeting is visible and audible to you?

Yes, I can confirm that. It is visible and audible to me.

Thank you, Mary. So it's a full complement. We have seven planning board members present and two associate members.

Wonderful. Thank you very much. The first item this evening, as is generally the case, is an update from the Community Development Department. And for that, I'm going to go right back to Jeff. And Jeff, if you would also introduce any other staff who are with you at this evening's meeting.

Thank you, Mary. Once again, I'm Jeff Roberts. I'm the Director of Zoning and Development, and with the Zoning and Development team along with me is Swathi Joseph and Evan Spatrini. You'll be hearing more from Evan in the next section. Also, we have from the Community Planning and Design team, Daniel Mesplay, the Director of Community Planning and Design, Eric Thorkelson, Urban Designer within Community Planning and Design. We also have joining us, I believe for the first time, Colin Larson, who is our newest intern in the Zoning and Development Division. So he'll be watching the proceedings and helping us out. I am glad everybody's here for this. This is a pretty important session for us in CDD because we're coming forward with some important work that we've been doing. As to the agenda, we have two public hearings, and usually this is where I say the next one is coming up later, so sit tight through the first one and wait for the second one. This time is a little bit different. And you'll understand why as we go. We are going to be hearing two separate zoning petitions. They're petitions that affect two separate areas. They are under consideration as separate petitions. And substantively, the recommendations for each of them are different. in terms of the zoning that they recommend. But they are both based around a common theme and they share many similar issues. And so we kind of went back and forth on how we thought was the best way to proceed on this. um what we decided to recommend to the board just based on our our own sense of things and also based on the feedback that we've gotten a lot of which is is about both of these petitions that it would make sense to present these petitions in sort of a back-to-back way and then have the board uh discuss them together so um that's that's how we're planning to proceed with this and so instead of you know sticking around and waiting for the second one we encourage everyone to um to hear both uh petitions and then um and then we'll we'll get a better understanding of of them uh by discussing them together um so that's tonight uh we do have a third item on the agenda which if if you happen to be here for that which is a use determination a fairly straightforward request for 20 Child Street up in the North Point area of Cambridge. You can just sit tight and stick around till we get to that item, which may be somewhat late in the evening. so that's tonight's meeting uh we do have a meeting scheduled next week october 28th that will be a continued discussion of the infill development concept plan amendment that's proposed for the mxd zoning district in kendall square that's another joint meeting that will be with the cambridge redevelopment authority so um so that will also be an interesting discussion And we also have an additional general business item having to do with a design revision that will need to be looked at for one of the sites at 75 Broadway, which is the Volpe Parcel PUD. So, another full meeting next week, and that will be followed by two weeks where the meetings are canceled due to both the election day on November 4th and then the Veterans Day holiday on November 11th. So, the next meeting we would anticipate being November 18th, and we're still working out the agenda for that, so hopefully we'll have some more some more detail as we go on. I'll note just on calendar, the cases we'll be hearing tonight, the zoning petitions we'll be hearing tonight will be heard at the ordinance committee on October 30th. And also they scheduled a continued deliberation on November 13th. You'll be hearing more about that. Well, if you didn't write that down, we'll remind you of that, I think a couple of different times during the presentation. um that is uh i'll just uh end the update there because we have a lot to get through um unless the chair or any planning members have any questions any questions from the board at this point no okay then i think we're good to proceed um thank you jeff

The agenda, first item on the agenda this evening is a public hearing on a zoning petition by the city council to amend the Cambridge zoning map and ordinance in articles two, three, four, five, six, 11, 17, and 20, with the intent of establishing three new base zoning districts for the Massachusetts Avenue corridor. in order to one, encourage patterns of development consistent with the vision of the Mass Ave Planning Study, which was completed in 2025. Two, to allow up to 12 stories of residential uses along the length of the corridor. Three, to incentivize active non-residential uses on the ground floor. Four, to establish building and site design standards to achieve urban design goals. And finally, number five, to create a planned unit development overlay district in Porter Square, allowing up to 18 stories of residential uses in exchange for increased open space requirements and minimum retail density. So as Jeff mentioned, we're handling things a little bit differently tonight. So first, city staff are gonna begin by presenting the petition. After that, board members can ask CDD staff any clarifying questions that they may have. As was mentioned, since the Cambridge Street zoning petition, which follows this, covers similar content, and since most of the public comments we received were collectively for both petitions, we're gonna proceed after board questions to the second presentation. That then will be followed by questions on the Cambridge Street, petition, and then we will open it up to public comment on both petitions. And then finally, following that, we will go and proceed with the Planning Board deliberation to decide what recommendation to make on each of the two petitions. So with that, I will turn it over to Evan, who is going to summarize why this is before us and give us the presentation on the Mass Staff stuff. Evan?

Thank you, Mary. I'm going to just give me one second to get everything all set up. Okay. Is that visible to everyone?

Yes, I can see everybody's good.

Great. All right. Good evening, members of the Planning Board and the Cambridge community. My name is Evan Spatrini. I'm the Senior Manager for Zoning and Development. Tonight, we're going to talk about two zoning petitions, one for Mass Ave and one for Cambridge Street. These two petitions won't be unfamiliar to the board. We had a discussion about the general zoning concepts this past July, and staff had a discussion with the city council back in June. Both petitions are based on extensive planning work done over the last three years or so, and we're excited to move them forward through the hearing process tonight. So first we are going to look at Mass Ave. Starting with some big picture takeaways, this petition will most importantly implement the recommendations of the Mass Ave Planning Study. This proposal is based firmly in the extensive outreach and thoughtful research that went into that plan. Substantively, the petition will allow up to 12 stories of housing throughout the corridor, 18 stories in Porter if the project includes public open space and preserves the square as a retail destination. The 12 story height limit is tied to the provision of active ground floor uses like restaurants and retail. And the zoning includes building and site design standards to encourage good looking buildings in an active streetscape. But first I'll pass it over to the community planning and design team to talk about the planning work that led to the development of this petition.

Thank you, Evan. This is Daniel Maspalay, Director of Community Planning and Design with CDD. I want to start by just reiterating that our planning work is grounded in the city. cities planning north star which is envision cambridge and envision talked about our corridors as being areas where we should be concentrating growth and development and one of the the main recommendations from envision is to take a closer look at specific streets squares and areas of the city and do area specific planning and develop a more tailored zoning approach for those areas based on their unique characteristics and needs. So this MassAF planning study is a product of that guidance. It builds on other planning and zoning work that's been undertaken and adopted. I would be doing the planning effort a disservice if I didn't encourage you all to go and read it in detail if you haven't already. The zoning and urban form recommendations are but one part of a much larger planning puzzle that's been assembled in that report. So there are recommendations for housing as well as small business, key intersections in public spaces throughout the corridor, heat and climate resilience strategies, and recommendations for improving how people and things move along the corridor. And so it's important to remember that this planning exercise looks over a 15-year horizon. And in addition to zoning changes, it includes other recommended policy changes, coordination with ongoing infrastructure projects, and alignment with broader city initiatives around design, climate resilience, and transportation. It's important to remember that this didn't occur in a vacuum. This was an 18-month planning process that included the formation of a working group that met nine times over the course of the project. We had six public meetings, three community events, seven focus groups. We had stakeholder interviews, walking tours, open houses, and tons of online and print material to solicit feedback from key stakeholders. And from that robust community engagement, here are the four themes of what people wanted to see as the future of Mass Ave. So number one, to make Mass Ave feel more like a neighborhood. So that means more amenities, places to gather, encouraging active storefronts along the corridor. Number two, to make Mass Ave feel more inviting by improving the streetscape and the public realm by increasing tree planting and incorporating public art along the corridor. Number three, to make Mass Ave easier to get around by improving transportation options and accessibility, creating more space within the public right-of-way for people to walk and to stand and to shop and to sit. And number four, to provide more housing options along the corridor by changing the rules for what can be built and addressing the need for affordable housing, while also including design standards to better weave development into the neighborhood fabric. Envision Cambridge also set housing development targets, specifically that by 2030, the city would create 12,500 housing units. And it's crazy to think that we're not far away from 2030 at this point. We are falling short of that goal. And because that time horizon is now so close, we're looking beyond 2030 and now looking at what realistically could be built by 2040. And I don't want to dwell on this too long, but if you look at the top of these two bar charts, you can see that the petitions under consideration now could have a meaningful impact on the number of housing units built over the next 10 to 15 years. So under the existing zoning regime, which includes the recently adopted multifamily housing zoning, 1,230 units could be built on Mass Ave and 520 additional units on Cambridge Street. compared to 3,820 and 1,190 units respectively if the petitions were to be adopted. And this analysis is looking at developability of specific sites in a bit of a vacuum, which is why I don't think it's too predictive or helpful to dig into it too deeply. There are other real and impactful non-zoning factors that contribute to the likelihood of development occurring, like the cost of construction and the cost of capital. And so with that, I'm going to pass it back over to Evan to walk you through the specifics of the petition.

Thanks, Daniel. Next, we're going to review the zoning map changes and then go through the zoning section by section to discuss key changes. So the first thing we do when going from planning to zoning is create a set of zoning principles to guide the development of the petition. Of course, all of this is really rooted in the Mass Ave Planning Study recommendations and Envision Cambridge goals. But simply put, our main principles are to allow for more housing, encourage active ground floors, and establish design standards to encourage good buildings and support an active streetscape. Looking at the existing zoning map, there are currently six base zoning districts that touch Mass Ave north of Cambridge Common and an overlay district that adds even more requirements on top of the base zoning districts. It's a complicated zoning concept that doesn't really fit how the corridor has evolved and how we want to change it in the future. The new zoning would replace all the business districts that touch the corridor and fold in parts of the residential districts right along the street. The zoning boundaries generally follow a 100-foot offset from the property lines abutting the Mass Ave right of way, which is a typical standard for our mixed-use corridor zoning. It creates a sort of sphere of influence that concentrates business activity in the highest densities right on the main street. And so this petition would also eliminate the Mass Ave overlay district to create a consistent and uncomplicated set of rules. So the petition proposes a brand new section in the zoning ordinance that would govern three base zoning districts in a planned unit development overlay district, collectively called the Massachusetts Avenue districts. The numbers in each of the district's names correspond to the tallest residential heights allowed in those districts, which we'll get into in more detail later. The Mass 12 district is the primary district along the corridor, stretching pretty consistently from Cambridge Common to Alewife Brook Parkway. In Porter Square, the zoning is a little more nuanced, but basically 18 stories of residential would be allowed closest to Mass Ave and the Porter Square T Station. And the height limits would decrease moving further away from Mass Ave towards the neighborhoods. 18 story residential buildings would only be allowed under a PUD special permit, which we'll talk about a little more later. Moving on to uses. In general, allowed uses on the corridor remain the same. Most residential, institutional, office, and retail uses remain allowed as of right. A few key additions include hotels, which weren't allowed in most of the corridor previously. As a quick reminder, hotels are considered non-residential uses and follow non-residential dimensional standards. The proposed zoning would allow other uses like craft retail establishments and theaters as of right where they are currently only allowed by special permit. And the intention behind all of these changes is to remove barriers to uses that fit well within the corridor and would contribute to a vibrant mixed use environment. The planning board also has the authority to allow other uses by special permit if the board determines the use would support the purpose of the Mass Ave districts. We've talked about active uses a couple times now, but what are they and why are we making this distinction? Active uses are simply those that encourage pedestrian activity. Uses that regularly have visitors coming and going throughout different times of the day. This is an important part of promoting the dynamic street life environment, we want on the quarter all institutional uses are considered active like daycares and libraries. Some office uses like dentist offices and all retail consumer service uses are considered active uses under this zoning petition. The planning board can also approve other uses if they promote pedestrian activity along Mass Ave. And these uses are a key part of the overall strategy here. We're proposing to incentivize active ground floor uses by allowing greater residential height for projects that incorporate them along their Mass Ave frontage. So basically there are two residential height regimes. Residential only projects can go up to eight stories, while mixed use projects with active ground floors and residential above can go up to 12. That amounts to a significant increase from existing zoning, which only allows for six stories on most of the corridor, with some areas allowing up to seven. Since the multifamily zoning changes, residential uses are no longer limited by floor area ratios, which is consistent here. Non-residential uses, however, are still limited by FAR. FAR and height limits for non-residential uses have not changed in the zoning petition. We think it's okay for our mixed-use corridors to have some commercial-only buildings, but we're not proposing to encourage that type of development in the future through the zoning. Other than heightened density, additional dimensional and design standards are included in the zoning to shape new buildings, which we'll get into next. So some dimensional and design standards like setbacks differ based on whether the lot line fronts a primary street or a secondary street. Primary streets just include Mass Ave and Somerville Ave, while all other streets are considered secondary. Where an active use is provided to achieve that greater residential height, those uses only need to front the primary street. As I just mentioned, these standards can be different on primary streets versus secondary streets. So what we're looking at here are the yard and upper story setbacks on the primary street. This is a typical portion of the Mass 12 district. The hatched purple areas in the back show the overall zoning limit and the darker purple areas in front are some more realistic building profiles. Starting with the yard setbacks here, you can see there's a three-foot front yard setback on Mazz Ave measured from the property line. The primary reason for this is to expand the public realm, allowing for more sidewalk area and other usable spaces. Three feet might not seem like a lot, but it can make a big difference when we're looking at providing new street trees and other sidewalk furnishings. We carefully calibrated the front yard setbacks based on our existing sidewalk widths and our citywide urban design guidelines. Opposite the corridor, we have five foot side and rear yard setbacks, which match those in the adjacent residential districts. Along the primary street, there are no side yard setbacks to encourage a continuous street wall. Moving on to upper story setbacks. So above eight stories on Mass Ave, the zoning establishes an upper story setback of 13 feet from the property line. From the residence district boundary, there's a 15-foot setback above six stories and a 25-foot setback above eight stories, creating a height transition towards the neighborhoods. This concept maintains a good street wall to roadway with ratio, while allowing for additional height set back from the street and creates comfortable transitions towards the lower height limits in the surrounding neighborhoods. On top of upper story setbacks, the zoning includes limits on floor plate area above a certain height. So again, above eight stories floor plates are capped at 15,000 square feet, which you can see here in the dark gray rectangle. But if you have a really big lot, you could potentially have two towers above Eight stories, but each would be limited to 15,000 contiguous square feet and the whole idea behind this is really to encourage good tower proportions again rooted in our citywide urban design guidelines multifamily design guidelines. Moving on to open space open space on mixed use quarters is an interesting thing our primary goal here is to encourage street activity and too much open space can actually take away from that active feeling. However, during the massive planning process we talked a lot about the need for gathering spaces spread throughout the quarter. So for buildings eight stories or less, no open space is required, which is consistent with other business districts in the city. But when it comes to taller buildings, we think there is an opportunity to add some additional open space. So here, 15% of the area, total area of the lot must be open space. 10% of the total lot area needs to be public or publicly beneficial, which means the remaining 5% can be any type of open space, including private open space. So this really is, you know, intended to produce scattered pocket parks and plazas, which is consistent with the planning goals from the Mass App Planning Study. Okay, moving on from our typical sort of dimensional standards, the zoning petition includes additional requirements to encourage good building and site design. And all of these design standards stem from the recommendations in our citywide urban design guidelines and multifamily housing design guidelines, specifically tailored to our major mixed use corridors to support walkable dynamic streetscapes. So this image shows a 12-story mixed-use building that could feasibly be built under this new zoning. 20% of the total facade area must be clear glass. That increases to 50% for ground story non-residential uses. Ground story heights must be at least 15 feet, and each ground story use must have an entrance directly from the primary street. Some more design standards here. Massing recesses are required for building footprints exceeding 200 feet to break up long facades. Projections like balconies and bay windows are allowed within yard and upper story setbacks. front yards must be designed to accommodate additional sidewalk area landscaping or other usable areas like benches and outdoor dining areas. And finally, new street trees may be required for buildings 25,000 square feet and up subject to the approval of the Department of Public Works. Development review largely stays the same here. Project review special permits are required for development greater than 75,000 square feet of residential or 20,000 square feet of non-residential area. Since this is an area of special planning concern, advisory consultations with staff, the public or planning board are required for virtually everything that doesn't trigger some kind of special permit. Another important note, other zoning requirements, including inclusionary housing, green building, green roof, and our climate resilience standards all apply as normal. So finally, we're going to talk a little bit more about the Porter Square PUD overlay district and the goals and requirements for obtaining a PUD special permit. This concept was developed during the massive planning study process with engagement from the large property owners in the area, but the goals and requirements really reflect the vision for porter square established through our Community engagement process. Just a quick reminder, PUD special permits are used to allow development beyond the base zoning limits, but within an additional set of PUD standards. The point of this strategy is to achieve public benefits and major redevelopment areas in exchange for zoning flexibility and a streamlined review process for multi-phase projects. The map on the right shows the boundaries of the PUD POR overlay district. and the base zoning districts underneath. A PUD special permit can include any number of contiguous or non-contiguous parcels within the overlay district that add up to at least 25,000 square feet. The purpose of this PUD overlay district is to concentrate housing near public transit and other neighborhood amenities, preserve Porter Square's function as a major retail center, provide a greater concentration of public open space than we're requiring on the rest of the corridor and to improve pedestrian and bike connections throughout the area, especially through the larger blocks. So the PUD standards are designed to meet that purpose, designed to meet that purpose by allowing up to 18 stories of residential in the Mass 18 base zoning districts. Portions of the PUD overlay within the Mass 12 and Mass 6 districts are still limited to 12 and 6 stories respectively. A PUD special permit requires a minimum retail FAR of 0.5, which is roughly what exists in the square today. A grocery store would also be required, recognizing how important the existing grocery stores are to the surrounding community. A PUD special permit would require a minimum of 20% of the lot area to be dedicated as public or publicly beneficial open space. And in the beauty special permit would also allow parking for multiple uses to be pulled into one or more shared parking facilities which could reduce the overall number of parking spaces created. Okay, we will end this presentation on a quick recap of the zoning petition review process. So this petition was filed and referred for public hearings on September 15th. This hearing tonight is the planning board's required. Public hearing, as Jeff mentioned earlier, the ordinance committee has split their public hearing into two sessions. The first will consist of a presentation and public comment, and the second will be committee deliberation. So the first will be on October 30th, next Thursday, and the second will be on November 13th, two weeks after that. After that, the ordinance committee will make a recommendation to the full council, which will then choose to adopt, amend, or vote down the petition. And with that, I'll turn it back over to the chair.

Thank you, Evan. Much appreciated. So as I mentioned before, we're going to just start with planning board questions on this petition and really What I'm looking for is if you have anything that needs to be clarified that you don't understand or you just want further information on, now would be the time to ask those. So does anybody have anything at this point? No. okay um i just have one in that so if regarding the height it's tied to the base retail being included if i understand that correct and then you can go anywhere from depending on where you are in the avenue from six to seven stories up to um 12 to 18 for the PUD, is that correct?

So the baseline residential height limit will be eight stories. It's currently six and seven in some areas, but under the new zoning The base residential height will be eight stories. If you provide that active ground floor use, then the residential height can go up to 12 stories. So you would, if you maxed it out, you'd have kind of one story of commercial use and 11 stories above it being residential. So that's that's in the mass 12 district that's pretty consistent through all of the the base zoning districts that the main difference in. The mass 18 which is porter square really close to mass ave and the T station is you can go up to 18 stories under a pod special permit without a pod special permit you're you're still limited to 12 stories. Okay, thank you for that clarification.

Diego.

Yeah, I was just curious if you could talk a little bit if the affordable housing overlay is related to this at all.

So a good question. The So the affordable housing overlay is not changed for the most part by this petition. What does change is, well, let me back up. So I'll just explain. The AHO currently allows up to 13 stories along pretty much the length of the corridor here, wherever the height limit is six stories along Mass Ave currently, an AHO project can go up to 13, except for in what has been designated an AHO square district AHO Square districts can go up to 15 stories. Right now, the Leslie Porter Overlay District is what's considered the AHO Square. It's a relatively small part of Porter Square. It really just covers the... like University Hall and the parking lots across the street and maybe a couple other parcels. So that's what's designated as the AHO square right now. What the zoning petition does is redefines the AHO square, not as the Leslie Porter overlay district, but as this new PUD overlay district. So it expands the area of that AHO square, which means there's an expanded area where an AHO project can go up to 15 stories. I hope that was clear. If I had a map ready, I would kind of explain it maybe a little bit better, but I hope that's helpful.

Thank you.

Yeah. We may discuss that further later on in the hearing. So for now, I think that's a great answer. Thank you, Evan, for the clarification. And let's go to Ted next, please.

Well, thank you, Madam Chair. I have a couple of very specific questions about language that doesn't go to, you know, the overall concept of the, I don't know if you want, I should ask them now or save them for some point later.

We can always have more questions later on, but you might ask them now, and if they're easy enough to answer, we can do that now. It looks like it's going to be more complicated. We can just hold off on the answer until we get to the end.

Okay. So, well, one of the questions is that the amendments in both the Mass Ave and the Cambridge amend section 3.11, 3.11, and the language doesn't work for both of them because if both of them are adopted, let's say, then the language in both of them is wrong. And I don't know what staff or city solicitor have figured out how they're going to handle all that. I mean, it talks about renumbering all the districts and how many districts there are, and the numbers simply don't work if both are adopted. Our gas question is, are gas stations allowed in the Mass Ave district? I couldn't see. They specifically allow some auto repair and some auto related things, but it didn't seem that it included gas stations. Question, what is the difference between when you measure from the lot line or from the street line? I mean, are they the same or are they different? The language in both of them about upper story floor plates, I really don't understand what the language says, and hopefully somebody could clarify that a little bit. and also both of them reference in the cognate section 178072 or 177072 a reference to another special permit which seems to imply that the language of the Cambridge district and the Mass Ave district might also apply to any other special permit anywhere else in the city and i just think that needs to be clarified um those are my specific questions right now very good thank you ted as usual you have with the the legal eye that we so need um evan do you want to address any of those right now or do you want to hold off till later um

We can, maybe we can, there was a lot there and I don't know if I caught all of it. And I appreciate all of your questions, of course. The first question, maybe Jeff has some more insight on this, but I think we sort of were expecting, you know, if it became clear that both petitions would be moving forward that we would make those changes so that they are consistent. But I don't know how we've... We had a similar sort of challenge with the multifamily zoning petitions where there were changes to the same sections in the two different petitions. But I'm not sure if Jeff has something to add to that.

Right. This is Jeff. I was just going to say on that point... that it does happen sometimes that we have petitions under consideration at the same time that affect the same section. And so we would need to resolve that through some kind of clarifying edits. I feel, and we're certainly working closely with the law department on all of this, but I feel like it would be a simple set of clarifying edits that could be made if one were adopted and then the other you know, afterwards or as noted, if it seems like they're on track to potentially be adopted at the same time, we can resolve those fairly easily, I think.

All right. And then there was the question about gas station, whether stations, whether that's an allowed use.

Yeah, I'll have to look back on that unless someone else knows off the top of their head.

All right. Well, on that one, and then the remaining questions, which had to do with calculating where the lot line is, whether it's from the, was it the property line or the, I forget.

They talk about lot lines and street lines.

Okay.

And it was unclear to me what they're measuring from.

From? Okay, so you wanna hold that for later?

All my questions can be.

Okay, all right. So it looks like a little further inquiries needed by our staff. So let's move on then and we'll get back to those Ted. Let's move on to other questions from the board right now. Tom, let's hear from you next, please.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So thank you for the thorough presentation that gave some of the history in the background. Obviously, the planning board had the advantage of a presentation where we were introduced to the good work that was done on the Mass Ave study. But looking at the census in our clicker here, where there are a lot of members of the public at the hearing tonight that may not have had the advantage of hearing the the process that you went through there and similarly we have a significant amount of correspondence and a lot of community interest about this particular petition i wonder if it wouldn't help for the record and for those of people who are dialed in to just briefly explain give a little more color to the planning, detailed planning process that went into the Mass Ave study, how many meetings, was it generally members that lived close to Mass Ave that attended those meetings, those sorts of things. Some bullet points I think, Evan, would be very helpful to set the stage for further discussions this evening. Thank you. Thank you, Tom.

Daniel, did you want to take that?

Sure, absolutely. And actually, Evan, who was also part of the planning process, might have a bit more color to add to this, too. I just so happened to be returning from parental leave sort of in the final stretch of the planning effort, and there was a lot of great work that was done during my time away. But just to reiterate, this was – an 18-month process, a working group, which was confirmed by the city council, convened and met over nine times over the course of that effort. There was several public meetings, both virtual and in-person. There were kind of formal and informal community events, open houses, focus groups with small businesses, with the development community, with affordable housing providers. We had specific stakeholder interviews. We did a walking tour of the corridor. We had mailers that went out to residents and business owners and property owners, not just immediately along the corridor, but also on properties that were in close proximity to the corridor. The process was extremely iterative in that the initial recommendations that were formed from the study were carefully crafted, shared, discussed exhaustively, refined, and finalized before the final report was ultimately published. And I would encourage folks to take a look at the project website. There is an entire... community engagement appendix that was put together as part of the process to explain and go into greater detail all the feedback that was heard, the data that was collected and synthesized and discussed exhaustively during the process.

Thank you, Daniel. Very helpful.

Thank you, Daniel. Let's go to the other Daniel on the screen at the moment. Dan Anderson, the question.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So a couple of questions, and I guess maybe with a preface. I gathered from the presentation that kind of our three priorities here are housing production, support of small business, which kind of comes along with that, A critical mass to help help that and then open space right, so I saw those those three things being identified and and thank you. I appreciated in particular seeing some some diagrams sometimes reading into zoning and understanding what that might look like take some interpretation. I guess my question goes a little bit back to housing production. I know that you probably don't want to dwell on that too much, but kind of thinking about what the objectives are was Were those projected numbers of housing units towards 2030 or 2040 generated from those projects that took advantage of the bonus or were they set based on the eight-story number? And I kind of have a little follow-on question, but if you can clarify that those are the three primary and where the predictions were coming from, that would be super helpful.

And maybe Daniel has something more to add on the projections, but I believe they were based on, you know, it's a complicated model and, you know, we can't, predict everything, of course, but I believe they were all based on a 12-story development plan where there was growth. So there wasn't that kind of nuance between the 8 and 12. It was... And I should say, it was 12-story, but it was accounting for the commercial space. So it was more like 11 stories of housing.

Okay. No, thank you. That's super helpful. And then I guess the only other question that I have at the moment had to do with some of the breakout of the areas, in particular the PUD. And in the Porter Square area, just from an urban design standpoint, was there any consideration of carrying the higher PUD across Mass Ave rather than having a mismatch in heights as you came through that major square? Yeah.

That's something that we wrestled with a lot, I think. And there were some sensibilities that thought we should have 18 on both sides kind of framing the street nicely. I think what we landed on is more reflective of the feedback we heard from the community where they really thought that these, you know, large parcels, larger kind of redevelopment opportunities kind of right around the T Station and, you know, along the tracks there were really the the more appropriate areas for height. But it was, you know, we talked about it a lot, but that's sort of why we ended up just with those select areas for 18 stories.

Thank you.

Ashley.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a very high-level question and a really specific one. But high-level one, I know we recently reviewed and approved of the citywide design guidelines and also the multifamily design guidelines. Given there's, in some areas, I guess, in the Mass Ave corridor, there would be more height. Is the staff expecting any changes to those guidelines or do we think we've you know cover all the bases and the and those um and my specific question i was always looking at the permitted uses the other day and i noticed there's a carve out of permitted uses so so that animal service facilities are not allowed whereas every single other retail use is allowed including you know nightlife nightclubs which I thought was a little interesting because I work downtown in Boston and there's so many animal facility or service facilities like, you know, dog daycare, there's spas that are popping up. So I was just curious, pure curiosity why that's carved out. Thank you.

All right. Thanks. Chair Flynn, I'll maybe tackle the first question. And Evan, you get the fun one with animal services. It's a great question, Ashley. And it's something that when we were initially developing the multifamily design guidelines, anticipated this sort of higher density context. And so in that, one of the chapters of that guidelines document, you know, principles and practice, we have examples of different types of multifamily development and different what you would sort of see in different areas of the city. And one of those examples included sort of taller, mixed use type of development on a major corridor. And so I think a lot of the development that we would anticipate along Mass Ave and Cambridge Street, for that matter, under these petitions, would be captured in that sort of diagram. And I think a lot of the design recommendations from those guidelines made their way into the zoning as design standards in this case. With that said, we've always got those documents open. We're looking at them in more detail. We're following along based on sort of what is proposed and developed to see if there are tweaks or refinements that need to be made. We're absolutely open to that as well. So it's something that we're going to continue to take a look at. And if the document needs to be responsive to the types of projects that we're seeing, we'll obviously go through that effort to update it. But we do feel like we are prepared with good guidance for those types of proposals should the petition be adopted.

Thank you, Daniel.

I guess I'll try to jump in on the animal services, but maybe Jeff has a better recollection than me. I believe a lot of the uses we... as far as whether they were permitted or not permitted or permitted by special permit. We kept most of them the same as they are now, so I believe that is one that has remained the same. Why we didn't make that allowed by right, I feel like there was a conversation about this, but I can't quite remember what that was.

This is Jeff. I'll just note, some of this, as Evan noted, changing the use allowances in sort of any kind of major way wasn't necessarily a part of this planning process as much as it was done in the 2021 revamp we did of the retail use section of the zoning ordinance. So a lot of that's pretty consistent. Animal services is one of those uses that continues to require a special permit nearly everywhere it's allowed in the city. And I think it's because that was seen as a use that could have, depending on the actual type and kind of extent of the use, could have potentially some some significant impacts to mitigate so that that remains there while I think most of the other uses within the retail and I guess you could argue is that you know does it really belong within the retail category of use maybe maybe not but that's sort of where it is in our current zoning and the other uses are our uses that are more kind of traditional you know retail and retail entertainment service kinds of uses which are generally more allowed in our major business area. So I don't think it was really an attempt to make that stand out. I just think it happens to be a little bit of an anomaly within the retail use category.

Thanks, Jeff and Evan both. Carolyn. Thank you, Madam Chair. A couple of questions on the other sides of Dan's questions about kind of the three goals and the open space and the small businesses. For the added density that doesn't have an open space requirement, which I think is a lot of it, can you, and I think you talked about this maybe in the last presentation, but can you remind me, clarify what the requirements are? Or like, can you talk maybe a little bit about street trees and street furniture and making that space feel more like a neighborhood, even if there's not open space? On the other side of that, for where there is publicly beneficial open space requirements. Is there a citywide program to put signage up, making it clear that that's publicly beneficial? I've seen some of that signage around. I think it's maybe unintentionally easy for some publicly beneficial open space to feel private. So I'd love to hear kind of whether that signage is a citywide initiative and how we make that feel more publicly beneficial.

Thanks. Evan, I don't know if you want to start and get some more, maybe. I'm not sure. Evan, Eric, who would like to address?

Yeah, well, I can just say, you know, and just to be clear, I don't know if I was clear before. existing you know zoning on most of the corridor the the business districts have no open space requirements so um so yes you know the the kind of the lower uh residential height limit of eight stories still has no open space requirement um and then you know it's it's added as you go up the pud district has even more open space requirements and that's sort of specifically to create some kind of gathering spaces in Porter Square itself. The street trees are kind of part of this zoning petition where they will be required for projects 25,000 square feet or greater as sort of directed by the Department of Public Works where those trees would be appropriate. But other than that, zoning doesn't really talk about uh street trees or or the street furniture as um explicitly uh certainly something that we talked about in the planning process um and and hopefully is you know tackled in other ways um but i'll let maybe daniel jump in on on that and and then your your question about the um the the signage

This is Jeff. I'll say one thing that I'll jump in here now because I was going to do this later, but I think I forgot or maybe they joined us in progress. Brian Gregory from the Urban Design team is also here and Melissa Peters, Assistant City Manager for Community Development is here. And I think one that I think Melissa, it was going to talk a little bit about the question about signage.

Yeah, thanks, Jeff. Hi, good evening, everyone. So a few years ago, it was probably 2021 or 2022, we developed universal signage standards for privately owned public space with the intent that we wanted people to know that it was open to the public and that everyone should feel welcome. And so you might see in the signage around, it says open to all. And we've been encouraging POPs privately owned public spaces who have already been built to include that going forward. And then for folks, for new POPs, we've been requiring it as a special permit criteria. that we're hoping that that'll become more of the practice and people will start to see that more around and get to your point to recognize that that space is for the public to use and enjoy.

And then did you want to add? Oh, I guess we already did discuss the Okay, so it was that and signage. All right, so I think, Carolyn, we covered your questions. All right, for now, anyway. Okay, so seeing no other hands up at the moment, let's move on to agenda item number two, which is the second public hearing, which is on a zoning petition by the city council to amend the Cambridge zoning map and ordinance in Articles 3, 17, and 19, with the intent of establishing four new base zoning districts for the Cambridge Street corridor in order to, one, encourage patterns of development consistent with the vision of the Our Cambridge Street Planning Study, which is completed in 2023. Two, to allow up to eight stories of residential uses along the length of the corridor. Three, incentivize active non-residential uses on the ground floor. Four, establish building and site design standards to achieve urban design goals. And finally, five, allow additional residential height of up to 10 stories in parts of Inman Square, up to 12 stories in the Webster Avenue, Windsor Street area, and up to 15 stories in the Lechmere area. So as we did with the Mass Ave petition, we're going to begin with the presentation from city staff, after which the board will ask clarifying questions. Then we will follow with taking public comment on both of the zoning petitions. And following public comment, the board will then have time to ask additional questions

Thank you, Mary. Yeah, give me one second. I will share my screen, of course. Okay, everyone can see that. Yes. Great. Okay, thanks. Thank you again. Cambridge Street and Mass Ave are different places in a lot of ways, but as our major mixed-use corridors, we think the zoning structure should be relatively similar. These two petitions share the same basic organization and a lot of the standards, the design standards in particular, are the same. So we'll move relatively quickly through those sections that are the same and focus more on the differences here. And of course, the most important thing this petition will do is implement the recommendations of the Our Cambridge Street study, which was completed in 2023, just as the Mass Ab petition is seeking to implement the recommendations of the Mass Ab planning study. Here, however, there is one exception, the proposed residential heights are different. So initially the study recommended residential heights up to six stories along the corridor with the ability to go taller in specific areas. The idea at the time, which we think still holds true, is that greater height and density should be concentrated along the corridor relative to the neighborhoods that surround it. With the adoption of the multifamily zoning, residential heights in the neighborhoods can go up to six stories. So when this was presented to the city council in the spring, they asked us to take a look at incrementally increasing the height along the corridor so that planning premise of it, you know, being incrementally higher than the neighborhoods. So that idea still works. So that's how we landed where we are. This is a proposal for eight stories along the corridor, allowing some taller heights in specific areas. We'll look at Inman Square, the Webster-Windsor area, and in Lechmere. And similar to Mass Ave, that increased height is contingent upon providing active ground floor uses. But again, I'll pass it back to Daniel Mesplay to talk a little bit about the planning work that led to the development of the petition.

Daniel Mesplay Sure. Thank you, Evan. We can go to the next slide. Apologies for the deja vu, but again, Envision is what sets up the planning framework for doing this more granular area-specific planning like we've done on Cambridge Street, as well as looking at the corridors and squares as places to concentrate future growth. Taking from Envision specifically, Envision says that the squares and major mixed-use corridors should, quote, accommodate greater densities than surrounding neighborhoods to strengthen the mix of uses and incentivize sustainable transportation choices, that, quote, thriving commercial districts will draw in more customers for existing businesses, and that, quote, redevelopment in the squares and along the corridors offers opportunities for the addition of housing above ground floor retail. The plan has a whole chapter on zoning recommendations, but I do want to reiterate that planning isn't simply in the service of zoning. Zoning is one important component of our planning work, but I encourage folks to read through the study in detail. It includes recommendations related to supporting the business community, creating district identity, wayfinding and signage, improving streetscapes in the public realm, and creating inclusionary commercial spaces, among other recommendations. And again, meaningful community input was key to the formation of this plan, and that was gathered through a robust engagement process that occurred throughout the course of 16 months. And as with Mass Ave, there were a multitude of different engagement types and options from tabling events to focus groups to community surveys, outdoor events, virtual workshops, open houses, and public meetings. Here are the four themes that shook out from that engagement. Number one, make Cambridge Street a destination for the celebration of history and cultural diversity. Number two, support and expand the small business network that serves surrounding neighborhoods and makes Cambridge Street such a desirable place to visit and shop. Number three, help Cambridge Street's affordability, both in terms of commercial and residential spaces. And number four, make improvements to the streetscape. So make it walkable, shaded, enjoyable to traverse and spend time, regardless of age, ability, user, or mode. As we touched on in the previous presentation, adopting the zoning here can result in new housing units, including affordable units that helps the city reach the targets that it established during the Envision process. So for Cambridge Street, existing zoning would be predicted to generate approximately 520 units of housing by 2040 and 1,190 units under the proposed zoning. And now back to Evan to walk through the details of the petitions.

Thanks, Daniel. Again, you know, next we're going to look at the zoning map changes and go through the zoning. We're going to kind of breeze over the pieces that are kind of the same as Mass Ave and really focus on what's different here. So rooted in, as we've been talking about, you know, rooted in our Cambridge Street study, we established zoning principles that largely mirror those of Mass Ave. Again, our main principles are to allow more housing, encourage active ground floors, and establish design standards to encourage good buildings and support an active streetscape. The map changes here are relatively simple compared to Mass Ave. The Cambridge Street petition would replace the existing business A zoning from Inman Square to Lechmere and also incorporate the C2B district and that little C1 pocket in Lechmere as well. Like the Mass Ave petition, this one creates a new section in the zoning ordinance governing four base zoning districts collectively called the Cambridge Street districts. CAM 8 is the primary district that stretches throughout the length of the corridor. Then we have CAM 10 in Inman Square, CAM 12 in the Webster-Windsor area, and CAM 15 in Lechmere. The allowed uses here are the same as what we looked at on Mass Ave, which are both pretty consistent with what exists now under the current zoning. Both of these streets are major mixed use corridors with the same general land use makeup of active ground floor uses with housing above. And the occasional commercial only building. The main difference between the two quarters from the zoning perspective is in the height and density restrictions, which we'll get into in a little bit. So we're using the same strategy here to incentivize active ground story uses on Cambridge street as we did on Mass Ave. So we're allowing for greater residential heights for projects that incorporate active uses on the ground floor and what we've defined as active uses are the same here as it is on Mass Ave. On Cambridge Street, our baseline residential height is six stories under this zoning and under current zoning. Projects with active uses under the zoning petition, the proposed zoning, can go up to eight stories in the CAM 8 district, 10 stories in CAM 10, and so on. So the fundamental change here from existing zoning to the zoning petition is this idea of allowing additional residential height with the provision of active ground floor uses. So on Cambridge Street, we have primary and secondary streets as well. We have more dedicated primary streets here than on Mass Ave. The corridor is really bookended by two squares. So we have more major streets within this new zoning district as you can see those major streets kind of crisscrossing and making up those squares in Inman and to a lesser degree in Lechmere. So in Inman, we have Hampshire in Prospect Street in addition to Cambridge Street. And in Lechmere, we've included North First Street and Monsignor O'Brien Highway. So again, these are the streets where we think active ground story uses are important and where we want the shape of buildings to look a little differently, which we'll look at in the next couple slides. Since we looked at a similar diagram on yard and upper story setbacks, a similar diagram on Mass Ave, I won't go into all the details here, but I do wanna point out a couple things. First of all, this diagram is showing a typical building profile in the CAM 8 district centered on Cambridge Street, the primary district on the corridor. Here the front yard setback is four feet as opposed to three feet on Mass Ave. Like Mass Ave, we're using these setbacks to try to achieve the desired sidewalk widths in our urban design guidelines. So here on Cambridge Street, the existing sidewalks are narrower. So the setback is greater than Mass Ave to try to make up the difference there. Upper story setbacks are established above six stories on Cambridge Street, rather than eight on Mass Ave. The width of Cambridge Street, the right of way is narrower than Mass Ave. So this shorter street wall creates the same one to one roadway to street wall ratio as Mass Ave. So next, this is the Cam 10 district in Inman Square. The diagram is showing a section straddling the district with Hampshire Street on the left and Cambridge Street on the right, both of which are primary streets. You can see the Cam 10 district in the middle and the Cam 8 districts on the far left and right side. um both sides of each street both within the cam 8 and in the cam 10 district uh follow the same rules uh initially as the cam 8 district so you have six stories set back four feet from the property line and then the seventh and eighth stories are set back 14 feet The Cam District, of course, allows up to 10 stories, but the 9th and 10th floors are set back even further from the primary streets, maintaining a consistent street wall height on the primary streets, Cambridge Street and Hampshire Prospect as well, not shown here, while allowing for additional housing to be set back further from the streets. Moving on to the cam 12 district, this is in the the Webster Windsor area, you can see the same six to eight stories on Cambridge street but further back towards the Somerville line buildings can go up to 12 stories creating. A height gradient from Cambridge Street up to Boynton yards over the city line in Somerville, which has an upper height limit just a little bit greater than what we're proposing here. And finally, looking at the CAM 15 district, we see the same six to eight stories right on Cambridge Street with taller heights in the middle of the block and towards Monsignor O'Brien Highway. You can see on O'Brien Highway that the street wall height is eight stories, not six. More like on Mass Ave. O'Brien Highway is a much wider roadway than Cambridge Street, closer to the width of Mass Ave. So a taller street wall feels more comfortable. And it's also consistent with other existing buildings on that end of the street. So overall, we have a consistent six-story street wall along Cambridge Street. Up to eight stories set back a little bit further. And in certain parts of the corridor, additional height set back even further from Cambridge Street. And all of this is to allow for additional housing potential without being too overbearing on the main corridor. Cambridge Street zoning petition includes the same upper story floor plate limits above eight stories. The difference here really is where this applies. Since the CAM 8 is limited to eight stories, this really only applies in those special districts in Inman and Webster-Windsor and Lechmere where you can go taller. But it's the same sort of principle of limiting those floor plates to 15,000 square feet to really encourage, you know, good tower proportions. Open space requirements again work works similarly here, the key being you know taller buildings have more required open space, some of which may need to be public or publicly beneficial. Moving on to design standards, since these two corridors do share a lot of the same DNA as our major mixed-use corridors, the design standards in the Cambridge Street petition are the same as those in the Mass Ave petition. You can see in this image, this is a potential mixed-use building that could be developed under the new zoning eight-story mixed-use building. So you can see how, you know, maybe some of those design standards could play out in a potential development here. And again, all of these standards are really derived from our citywide urban design guidelines and multifamily housing design guidelines to support walkable dynamic streetscapes. And finally, as is the case with massive with the massive petition the review process on Cambridge street would remain the same as it is now other zoning requirements, including inclusionary housing and our state sustainable development standards also apply as normal. And just a quick reminder, I know this was a short presentation, so this might still be fresh in your mind. After this planning board hearing, there will be two ordinance committee hearings on October 30th and November 13th, the first of which will be a presentation followed by public comment, and the second will be committee discussion. And with that, I will turn it back over to the chair.

Thank you very much, Evan.

So as we did with the first hearing, board members, are there questions at this point on the petition for any of the staff?

Mary?

I think maybe following on the schedule, kind of a procedural, could you expand out a little past the ordinance committee? Can you walk us through what then are the next steps before

it becomes accepted yeah so it's it sort of depends on on what the the ordinance committee wants to do but um they will have their their public hearing which will be that kind of split session the second session will be their their discussion and during that discussion they may um ultimately they'll they'll come to a recommendation that they want to make to the full city council on whether you know they should adopt the petition amend the petition and things like that so that that'll all kind of shake out in that discussion um whether they will come to a a recommendation at that november 13th meeting um that that may happen um there may be another Ordinance Committee meeting that they they want to set up to to continue the discussion, but you know, ultimately they'll they'll meet to to make a recommendation and that recommendation will include any, you know, specific edits to the petition and those sorts of things.

jeff i don't know if there's anything maybe just track it past the ordinance committee when it goes to counts say they they get to a point where they're recommending it with any modifications then what happens so this is before so this is jeff's side sorry i'll fill in a little bit more detail just on the pro this is kind of the broad um uh

Chapter 48 sort of state mandated hearing process that's accompanied by zoning petitions. So both of these zoning petitions are before the city council at this point. They're sort of on the, they went to the city council and the city council referred them as city council petitions. under state law before the city council can consider adopting a change to the zoning ordinance there needs to be these two kind of parallel public hearing processes one at the planning board and another within within the city council which is referred to their ordinance committee um both of those processes are meant to they're basically at hearings but they're advisory processes so the they both both are intended to send recommendations back to the city council Once the city council gets these, there's kind of a window of time in which to take action. It has to be at least 21 days after the planning board hearing, unless the planning board sends an earlier report. And it has to be within 90 days of the ordinance committee's public hearing. So there's this kind of time window for the city council to consider it. They can consider amendments to the petition. We've talked about this before with the planning board. There's certain types of amendments that can be made as kind of clarifying amendments just within the scope of the petition. There are some amendments that might be considered to be beyond what was originally advertised as part of the purpose of this hearing process is to make sure there's notification and input from interested and affected parties by the proposed zoning change. So the city council can then, it's all in the city council's hands. So if they're gonna make amendments, they have to vote to make any amendments to the petition at this point. And then they can ultimately within that timeframe vote to adopt the petition. They could vote on the petition and it might fail on a vote, which means it wouldn't be adopted. they could take no action. So there's no real obligation to the city council to take any action. But if those 90 days expires, then if they wanted to consider it again, they would need to have an additional set of hearings. So they'd go back through this hearing process again. There was one more thing I was gonna mention. related to oh so the other thing procedurally the city council before they and this is not necessarily within state law but within the city council's procedures when they pass an ordinance they usually pass it to a second reading first so that kind of is sort of a re-advertisement it's kind of a notice an additional notice to the public that says you know the council is going to you know at a future meeting consider adoption so that's that's another kind of period of time when another procedural step between the city council getting the reports back and then considering a vote on adoption.

Great, thank you. Let's see, Carolyn, let's go to you next.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The question that I forgot to ask last time for both of these petitions is about the small business side of it. And if there's anything in the zoning, I know there's kind of the economic development side of the world, but is there anything in the zoning text that encourages, I know in the Port Square, we're trying to encourage a Grocery store, big box grocery store. But is there anything to encourage kind of a mix of sizes of retail? Anything to encourage more neighborhood scale retail?

Yeah, it's a good question. So the zoning, the Mass Ave overlay district currently has limits on retail square footage of, you know, specific retail spaces. And what we have found with that is that it's often too limiting and, you know, restrictive. Sorry, that was intended to sort of encourage small businesses if you kind of limit the size of retail spaces, small businesses can go in. I think what we've found is that it didn't really play out that way and just created more challenges. So this zoning petition doesn't include any space, like maximum size of spaces. There really isn't anything that is, you know... explicitly kind of encouraging small businesses or local businesses or things like that. It's pretty flexible, which we thought was important just given what we've seen with the existing zoning regulations and the issues with that. But we know that that is something that is really important to both of these corridors is is small local businesses but it's it's kind of challenging to to put something in zoning that really um uh encourages those those things that makes sense market forces are complicated and weird right now anyway okay thank you uh joy what questions do you have

Yeah, and I don't want to get too stuck on the sort of projected number slide, but I guess my understanding is that those figures represent kind of like a theoretical upper limit of like the potential increased housing capacity under the proposed zoning. And so my question is, I'm wondering if the city's done any sort of like economic feasibility analysis to understand what could actually be supported or what might pencil out under the proposed zoning? Or is that the sort of thing that informed the proposed height limits like through that stakeholder engagement process that was referenced earlier? So I know there's like the maybe a tension between what could be built in a particular area versus what like economic realities could dictate. And I'm just curious to understand how that may have informed how those height limits were set or just kind of understand that relationship a little bit better.

Thanks. I might take a first crack, Evan and Jeff, and you might want to fill in too, because I think some of that economic analysis was also done maybe during the multifamily zoning process to kind of understand what that nexus is in terms of how much additional density would really be sort of the trigger point for someone to then pursue a redevelopment of a site, for instance. I think for us, The heights are more about sort of the planning vision and less about the economic reality of the moment, because I think a lot of that sort of shifts with cycles, as we've seen recently with sort of a slowdown and some development activity because of these other market forces that are at play. With that said, I... you know, we did a lot of stakeholder engagement, including with multifamily developers, with affordable housing developers, and talked about sort of where we were starting to land in terms of some of the height and density recommendations of the plan. And just did a little bit of a gut check with them on, you know, this is kind of where we are. what does this sound like? Is this something that could realistically be pursued and built? And zoning is one piece of that puzzle. Building code is something that gets kind of tricky here as you go from sort of the low rise construction method into something like steel or poured in place concrete. But we did hear generally that the taller heights were something that developers would be interested in availing themselves of should the petitions be adopted. So we heard general feedback that the heights could work. Hope that's helpful.

Thank you. Oh, okay. Dan Anderson.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So I think Joy asked one of my questions, which is really the basis behind the eight story. There is definitely a shift in building cost just because of the construction type. Once you move above 80 feet and the My concern is that unless there are more specific incentives built into zoning, that you will have a hard time getting people to move off of a standard DEC plus four, DEC plus five project. The economics, even the best of times are challenging. I'm also a little skeptical about sort of one to one ratio that's been put out. I think we've got a lot of really good urban design bases that are two to one or even three to one. So I don't want to get too hung up on that. I see Eric smiling, but I think it's particular to the case. In any case, a couple other questions would really be I guess, dependent on the dimensionality of these projects. So we've historically and currently have a lot of smaller lots. So all the diagrams that I'm seeing are for larger projects. This touches a little bit on what's the character of the street front in the retail. Larger projects tend to feel more institutional or less pedestrian friendly in a lot of ways. And I think some of those setbacks at the heights at 12 or 13 or 14 feet could really compromise the development of smaller sites that might take advantage of that. So I don't know whether, I mean, 65 feet is a fairly typical residential width. And, you know, if you're looking at, you know, at least a five-foot setback on sides because you're not going to get any window openings if you're less than that. There's some real kind of pieces here that I think maybe could shape and nuance this a little bit more. So I'm kind of curious how some of those things were thought about. And then finally, and I think this is an important one, I went back to the definition in our current Article 5 for publicly beneficial open space. and I don't know whether there was a thought about changing this though it can be physically inaccessible as I read publicly beneficial open space and I would really like to say if we're going to be providing public open space particularly as Melissa put out it ought to be occupiable actually rather than just visually accessible so I think that's my comment at the moment slash question.

If it's okay, Chair Flynn, because I know our – thank you, Dan, for the questions because they're fantastic. I would love to give just a quick opportunity for our urban designers, Brian Gregory and Eric Thorkelson, who are on the call, to maybe just share in some of the thinking that sort of went into some of these recommendations. And dan i i don't know if we have a silver bullet response necessarily i think these are a lot of the same things that we've been sort of wrestling with as as staff as well and the balance of where do you put in a design requirement into zoning that applies sort of uniformly across the district and where do you leave open some opportunity for for flexibility or first sort of site by site case by case review i think that's something that you know, we continue to kind of think more deeply about. But Brian, do you want to talk a little bit about street width to building height thinking or step back thinking? And Eric, I know you've done a lot of thinking on this as well.

Yeah, sure. Happy to jump in. So Dan, to your point, there is no magical ratio, I think. I think there's a lot of different conditions, but I do think there are some general thinking around specifically mixed-use corridors in similar conditions and what sort of feels like a comfortable sense of enclosure. We're looking for something that can define the public realm, create a coherent street wall, and sort of allow for the density to support the ground floor uses while still being true to sort of what we heard in the planning process and the feedback of what the community is looking for in terms of those heights. So sort of trying to the thread the needle between the planning goals and maybe some urban design precepts. And I think that's how we started and how we sort of arrived at the one-to-one as being sort of a classic ratio, you know, everything from like Park Avenue in New York to like Hanover Street in the North End, a lot of these fantastic sort of urban streets, regardless of their scale, do share some of these. So we felt like that was a good place to start. And then we sort of introduced a step back at the upper level to go up for the additional stories. The idea being to try to create a distinct top for the building. We sort of have the philosophy of the base metal top that allows us that. And it allows for additional height and development opportunities while minimizing some of the impacts on the public realm in terms of access maybe to lighter or the apparent height by about a story there so so that's sort of how that that came to be and then um just to sort of close the loop on the heights above that we were really looking at uh sort of unique conditions with the urban fabric of where those might be appropriate so that maybe two conditions that show themselves most in these planning studies would be either um sort of major intersections that define our squares, be they Porter or Inman or Lechmere, where you may merit additional height because of sort of the civic nature of that moment in the urban fabric, as well as typically a larger public realm that results from those intersections. And the other condition being in areas where you're adjacent to more intensely developed or developing areas. And so the Webster, Windsor, Columbia areas adjacent to Boynton Yards. So instead of sort of stepping down as you might into a neighborhood off of Cambridge Street, we actually sort of step up anticipating, you know, the higher scales in those areas. And so that's sort of how we came to those. The last point I'll make is the sort of larger step backs there. I admit they would be. challenging on the smaller development parcels. I think those moments that we're thinking of specifically at least the Porter Square PUD, Webster Windsor and Lechmere actually do already have sort of singular large parcels. And the hope would be that allows more flexibility to introduce tall heights without majorly impacting the public realm of those streets. And Inman is a shorter height at the 10. It's a more marginal bump. And that's to sort of respect the historic conditions as well as the sort of the urban condition, the unique urban condition of that area.

Brian, thanks. And Eric, did you want to add anything to Brian's thoughts there?

Yeah, no, I think Brian covered it pretty well. The sort of height to width ratio, it's a really interesting question. And we thought about it a lot and had to basically come up with a simple strategy for saying something that is least internally consistent. And that seemed, you're totally right. I can think of streets anywhere between a half to one to really one ratio that are all wonderful. And it's a little bit picking something that seems, you know, different than the existing kind of fabric of Cambridge, but not like wildly different. incompatible with it either. And so that it kind of retains something of the kind of somewhat more open character of Cambridge State compared to downtown Boston. So that was kind of the thinking. It is subjective and a little bit arbitrary, I think, but it seems a reasonable compromise between those kind of two agendas.

Thank you. And just as a quick follow up, Madam Chair, if I could, you know, I think one was, did you think at all about incentives based on development size footprint rather than height, which could be another way of incentivizing or strategizing about that? And the other is really acknowledgement of all of the, I mean, there's a level of discomfort for me to read from our comments coming here. And whether it's eight stories, six stories, eight stories, or 12 stories, it's a fairly significant change, right? So people are obviously in the public looking at this carefully and we're weighing this out carefully. And it needs to be balanced out against a goal of housing production. And I think my concern is that looking at it, it's hard to predict the future, but just from land values and construction costs and all of these economic pieces the concern is that if the zoning doesn't incentivize or allow the increased height none of those housing projections are going to get hit and we're going to end up just with six-story buildings which is the current zoning so i i'm struggling with this because uh on one hand we don't have a very um you know 75 000 square feet We'd hit pretty quickly with a large footprint, but for smaller development, which is most of our most of our parcels. It's just not going to prove out to be to be that height. I don't know whether there's any consideration short of a special permit of advisory review, whether that's binding or not, but it's just another query about the tools that might make things still case by case and sort of maybe address some of the comments coming from public, I guess, I put this out to our other board members as well for for conversation I want to sidetrack it too much.

Well, I think it's a very good point. It is a topic that needs discussion, but I'd actually like to hold that because the public has been very patient and has been waiting, and I'm sure that there are many members who would like to comment. So I'd like to just go to public comment now, and then we'll go back to discussion.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Understood. 5.22.3, I'd like to not lose track of. 5.22.3, okay, yes.

That was the open space. accessibility issue, right? Okay, thank you. All right, with that, to the members of the public, thank you very much for your patience. As everyone knows, this is a public hearing and we are now gonna move to public comment. So any members of the public who wish to speak should now click the button that says raise hand. If you're calling in by phone, you can raise your hand by pressing star nine. As of 5 p.m. yesterday, the board had received 93 comments on the Mass Ave petition and 89 comments on Cambridge Street. Written communications received after 5 p.m. yesterday will be entered into the record. So I'm going to ask staff to unmute speakers one at a time. Please begin by stating your name and address and staff will confirm that we can hear you. I just want to encourage anyone who wishes to speak this evening to please raise your hand now so that we have a good sense of how many speakers we're going to have, just so we can kind of try to monitor the time a bit. Okay, so right now it looks like 14 speakers. All right, I think usually what happens is, you know, you get the initial count and then as we go on, more people will raise hands and because either, you know, something has... incentivize them to come forward. So given that we already have 16, I expect there'll be more. I think it makes sense to reduce the public comment time from three minutes. I would suggest two minutes. Are board members okay with that? Or let me put it this way. Does anyone object? Okay. All right. So let's do two minutes. So after that, I'll ask you to wrap up after the two minutes and we will move on from there. So let me turn over to Jeff who's gonna manage public comment for me.

Thanks, Mary. This is Jeff. And just to keep people prepared to begin, I'll read the next speaker's name and then the following speaker so that you're ready when it's your turn. And I will apologize in advance for any mispronunciation. I'm just reading the names on the Zoom. So please restate your name and your address when you start. So the first speaker is Gordon Moore, who will be followed by Joshua Gerber. I believe you're still muted. if you're trying to speak, so you may need to unmute yourself.

Thank you. Before I start, I believe that the protocol is that there should be three minutes, and I want to object at the outset to being held to two minutes, which is already too little to cover the stuff that I'd like to say. My name is Gordon Moore. I live at 9 Rutland Street. I had a number of things that I wanted to talk about, but I'm going to focus on just one. Is the clock starting? Yeah. And that is, I attended almost all of the meetings, the public meetings, and I applaud the degree that they were really laid out as mentioned. However, I would say the final report that was done in April and it was the final report and the final meeting is radically changed in this proposal. At that time, we were told there were eight stories with three additional ones probably going to be related to affordable housing. Setbacks have changed. The size is now 12 instead of a maximum of 11. And to be honest, I feel misled. And I think I'm in touch with a lot of people in Neighborhood 9, and they feel misled. What we were presented and what was the first last opportunity for us to dive in deep really is very different than what's being presented now. And it's almost impossible to have a community discussion of this kind of proposal when you've got two minutes to be able to talk about the points and no opportunity to interact. My strong recommendation is that there be another public meeting around this proposal, which is now the final proposal. I want to say, secondly, that there's almost nothing in this proposal that allows me to understand why there were the changes. Why are there differences between Cambridge and Mass Ave? There are several significant questions about the level of step backs abutting the neighbors. And then finally, I want to say that in the zoning ordinance that was passed last year, multifamily, there is an allowance of a 25-foot penetration into a property that the owner can buy at which the existing 12 stories could continue. And you've just said there are no side setbacks. So this would be a plane of 12 stories facing my house.

Thank you. The next speaker is Joshua Gerber, who's followed by Young Kim.

Good evening. My name is Joshua Gerber. I'm here. Can you hear me? Everybody hear me?

Yes.

Okay, great. I'm here to comment on both petitions. I was a member of the Envision Cambridge Working Group and I own the 1369 Coffee House, which has locations in both Central and Inman Square. I'm also a resident living at 4 Union Street. I want to start by saying that I support the goals of this proposal. Adding housing is important work. that aligns with our community planning efforts. However, I have two specific concerns about the ground floor provisions. First, regarding active use and the height bonus. Section 17703.3 in the Cambridge Repetition and 17803.3 in the Mass App proposal define active ground floor uses for the height bonus. Under the current draft, office space qualifies as an active use. This means a developer could build to the maximum height simply by putting offices on the ground floor. This does not match with the vision that we developed through Envision Cambridge. Office space, particularly at street level, doesn't create the pedestrian activity that we're aiming for. It doesn't draw people to the sidewalk the way restaurants, shops, and community spaces do. The petition's own purpose statement says that we want to promote a dynamic urban streetscape and allow production of a diverse mix of economically viable ground floor retail uses. Second i'm concerned about the relaxation of limitations on retail space size limits. That was mentioned earlier during envision Cambridge limiting retail unit sizes, one of the was one of the very few concrete tools that was identified to actively encourage small locally owned businesses, rather than just chain stores. I understand the challenges this creates for developers, but it was a deliberate recommendation. Without size limits, we're likely to see ground floors dominated by large format retail or consolidated spaces that national chains or only large restaurants can afford, which is the opposite of a diverse mix that the petition calls for. So my recommendations are, please remove offices from active use definitions in both petitions, And please consider adding maximum size limits for ground floor retail spaces to genuinely support small businesses. Thank you.

Thank you. The next speaker is Young Kim, who's followed by Judith Aronson.

Young Kim, 17 Norris Street. Why weren't the full package made available online in advance of the public review and all the informed comments as we saw about the family housing petition last year? Why repeat the same mistake? I'm focused on the Mass Avenue petition, but my point also applied to Cambridge Street. AHU was created to give 100% affordable developers an edge through a high incentive. Now, with similar high-density allow for market rate projects, that advantage is gone. What incentive will the AHU developers have? CDD continues to rely on outdated data. The 2025 annual affordable housing startup day should be available yet presentations for use in 2020's new figure. Working groups have done extra incremental to integrate them into a coherent city-wide framework. These petitions can be re-evaluated in isolation. They are on top of AHU parking elimination and MFH of zoning and their parallel structure as complexity. The two petitions should have been merged to avoid conflicting provisions and to give clearer picture of the community impact on corridor form and enable character. Also addresses what project system will be used for tall plus story buildings. The only realistic answer is mass timber. Before moving forward, the city should adopt clear mass timber construction guidelines based on the experience of nearby municipalities. We can't just rely on industry hype generic standards. We've learned lessons from lead paint and asbestos in the past. Finally, approving this petition without updated data, an integrated framework, and clear technical guidelines would repeat past mistakes. On the accessibility, because the... Mr. Kim, could you please wrap up? You're past your time. Yeah, because there's no parking requirement, there is no accessible parking requirement.

Mr. Kim, we're going to move on. You passed your time, and we do have your written comments, so those are very much appreciated. Thank you. Thanks.

The next, sorry, the next speaker is Judith Aronson, who's followed by Helen Walker.

Can you hear me? Yes. I have a very simple question. Nobody has mentioned anything about parking. I find the fact that this planning doesn't require any parking with the building structure extraordinary because people will have cars and they will park on the streets and the residents that already live there will find it almost impossible to park. And the local little small businesses, I've heard over and over again how they depend on people being able to park nearby to go in the shops. not just people walking up and down the streets or going to the T. So I want to know why there is no mention of parking.

Thank you. The next speaker is Helen Walker, who's followed by Pamela Winters.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Thank you. Helen Walker, 43 Linnian Street. You have my comments on open space. Today I want to speak to the question of engagement. I attended 13 community meetings and two events at Lesley University. As you saw, there are at least four topics being covered by the study. Zoning is only one of those. There was a great deal of discussion and feedback about do we like benches, trees, more interesting shops, and artist events. As you know, none of those is on offer today. When it came to the question of zoning, public participation was actively shut down. In the May 2024 event at Lesley, attendees plastered the boards with stickers saying stop at six stories on Mass Ave. That was the community consensus. When it came to unveiling 18 stories at Porter, there was shock and we were told, well, you want the benches and the trees and the good shops, you have to have the 18 stories. At which point the community said, well, I think we want to think again about what we were asking for because we didn't agree to that trade off. Just to let you know the background. I would like to talk about 18 stories with no open space. Eight stories with no open space. We're told that that's what's there. I gotta say what's there is mostly one story high. There's quite a difference. When I look at the multifamily housing design guidelines, which are fabulous, Much of what they propose has to do with the open space and where you put it and the trees in it and the entry courtyard. So if there's no open space, there are none of those things, and we're leaving a great deal of the potential benefit on the table. I really want you to think about that because I think no open space to eight stories or to six stories on Cambridge Street is totally inappropriate. Thank you.

Thank you. The next speaker is Pamela Winters, who's followed by Jason Alves.

There. Can you hear me now? Yes?

Yes.

Okay. Yes. First of all, I want to say thank you very much for the work that you do on the planning board. And I want to say hello to Ted and to Tom that I new from my years on the planning board. So I have a couple questions that involves mostly cars. Why does this, I have some questions and I'd like them to be answered actually. Why does this proposal invent, incentivize incentivize pedestrian use and not cars. I know two businesses that are closed now due to lack of parking. And how does one like one that's proposed at 2028 Mass Ave, how is there no parking allowed, including handicap parking, which is mandated by the state? um also my third question empty storefronts along mass ave where are the businesses going to go and why are they not um why are those storefronts still empty and lastly friends are not visiting me because of the traffic in cambridge it's really really bad um during rush hour and during certain hours of commuter traffic and um anyway that's all i have to say and um thank you again for your work and um being 15 years on the planning board i can certainly appreciate what you're doing thank you thank you and the next speaker is jason alves who's followed by suzanne blier

hi as Jason now i'm the executive director of the East Cambridge business association, I just wanted to thank you all for taking this up tonight, hopefully you. have received my email which I won't go over all the things in there, but we kind of highlighted. Some things that have risen the top as we've been talking to Members. One of the main things here, and it feels like my fear is a little bit coming to fruition here tonight. I've been doing this for, it turns out, 19 years. I've been paying attention to Cambridge Street, Cambridge Street businesses. We haven't had... a moment where we're talking about like this impactful of a change to Cambridge Street and all that time. And I feel like we kind of deserve our own space and moment here. I have some concerns about being combined with the Mass Ave. Yes, there's a lot of likenesses, but there's some very distinct And I think the combining here and the cross questions and even the public comment I think takes away from maybe what we deserve here a little bit. So I just ask you to keep that in mind. Number two, the commercial requirements here need to be much more, we need commercial on Cambridge Street. There are some instances here where it's not required. It absolutely needs to be required. We fought for it in the AHO, we got it. The same thing has to happen here. Three, what issues can we fix in the zoning that maybe needs more discussion? In my letter, I gave an example of how we lost retail space because of bike parking. It just needs some tweaks. Maybe that can be in the basement. Maybe we can fix those things here if we have more time to discuss it. Finally, Porter Square has a PUD. I'm wondering if maybe Inman deserves that type of PUD. So maybe we can guide some changes. Like what happens when all of a sudden we have lots of commercial on Hampshire Street? Inman has some challenges that are only working because of good neighbors that are sharing parking sharing loading when all this gets it's not gonna happen tomorrow, but when all gets developed, how can we use this zoning petition to fix some of the things that we know aren't working? I made it within my two minutes. I just want to thank you all very much.

Thank you. The next speaker is Suzanne Blea who's followed by George Harris.

Thank you. And thank you so much for what you're doing. And I want to commend a number of the questions by members of this group. And Dan Anderson pointed out housing production, local business, and open space. And I would agree. And the open space problem we have or you have addressed and hopefully will. Of course, it's not green space, meaning no trees, no ground, etc., So the impacts on heat island effects are there. On local business, we in Harvard Square put in place something that greatly limits the size of the ground floor space so that it actually brings in much smaller stores, which makes it really vital. and hopefully you can also define what is active space because it's not just offices but in Harvard Square you can include labs and banks are a problem because you can't see into them and most people actually bank online so hopefully you can add that as well. Yes, we need an economic feasibility study on housing. I teach at Harvard and we've lost 50% of our incoming graduate students. Staff are going, the need for housing really needs to be looked at at present and whether the needs that we have foreseen a while back are exactly what they are. And if you take a look at the National Bureau of Economic Research, they point out in a March 2025 article that supply constraints is not what explains price. So what I worry about here is a lot of these units will be purchased by investment groups and it'll add to the price and add to the cost. And what was not addressed is the kind of pyramid scheme idea that you go from six stories to eight because you need to have the AHO work. Now we're saying this would be 18, but would it go to 21 because of the AHO? There's an awful lot that is missing here. 40% of Frost Terrace renters have cars. That's an affordable unit. And I think we can see that here as well. And just design features like each square and corridor should be developed with its own character We're not seeing here. It's not really a plan and should be sensitive to the existing neighborhood character. Again, we're just not seeing that happening here. So we're not finding what we might see in Brooklyn or Paris or DC where I'm calling from now in just a vitality and engagement that's going to offer sunlight and walkability and community connection. Thank you so much.

Thank you. The next speaker is George Harris, who's followed by Mariette Murphy.

Hi, good evening and thank you for listening to me. I participated last year when the City Council passed the zoning changes near us, which is at 16 Leonard Avenue, which we abut, where we abut Cambridge Street. There's a number of things here and I applaud at least two people. Parking, parking, parking, parking, parking. How many times are we going to see that being an issue? I don't see anything there being offered in what you've presented. Secondly, I'm a little worried. I've been a consultant for 30 years. I'm worried about the process used by the Massachusetts planning group. Great, I'm sure they put a lot of time and effort in. Nine meetings in 18 months, that doesn't seem right. And as one individual noted in one of the meetings about the zoning, I would like what, I know you've got lots of minutes. I would like to see a table that said, here are all the meetings, here are all the points that were brought out and here is how they were addressed. That's how you do public comment. So I don't think that that was a very elaborate process. The other thing that the, and I forget the individual who just spoke from Harvard, One of the things that I think is also missing is you're going to change the nature of the neighborhood. If you put an eight-story building on Cambridge Street or in Inman Square, you're going to really change the nature, the whole composition of buildings that were built in, you know, 1880. So I think you should kind of give that consideration. And then the last one I think someone also said is affordable housing. How are you going to ensure that? You know, you have 12 buildings, 70 units. How do you make sure, 12 story buildings, how do you make sure that you're giving affordable, you know, rents to people? That's all I had to say. Thank you for hearing me.

Thank you. The next speaker is Mariette Murphy, who's followed by Marilee Meyer.

Yes, hi. Can you hear me?

Yes.

OK. I am a physician who has worked in health centers and opened the teen health center in Cambridge in 1989. I am very supportive of affordable housing. I have heard now that the affordable housing lead has been dropped, which I have I am very concerned as the previous speaker two speakers have said that the neighborhood is going to be changed we want people in the neighborhood we want to develop that site we have wanted that for many many years but This is so inconsistent with the neighborhood, and it makes me question who is on Envision. And it's okay to have a Cambridge City Council Envision for Cambridge. However, each individual neighborhood needs to have its character respected. The parking, as other people have mentioned, is an extraordinary issue. I heard previously that people won't have cars, but that is a very narcissistic view. because people do have cars they have disabilities they need cars um there are so many needs that have not been addressed uh and to lump cambridge street with porter square is uh you know disrespectful frankly so um i i would hope we'd have we'd actually have a robust community, representation, and communication. Because we all want Cambridge to be affordable, accessible, and develop. But we have lived with, I know my time is up. We have lived with so many empty retail spaces that when I hear this optimism about the retail space.

Your time is up.

It's ridiculous. Okay, I'm done. Thanks.

The next speaker is Marilee Meyer, who's followed by Benjamin Johnson Staub.

I'm Marilee Meyer, 10 Dana Street, and I want to applaud Dan Anderson for focusing on concrete detail. We've seen developers buy three lots in a row and put up one big monolithic building, and we're losing our smaller lots. And hopefully developers don't have to max out something. They can be a little bit more realistic about it. Envision also says take into account neighborhood context and pattern of development and history. And was there a civilian at the table instead of developers dictating the height? the heights seem arbitrary. Less regulation makes for easier development but won't produce housing we need. It will also encourage widespread demolition and eviction and speculative investment LOSS OF SMALL BUSINESSES AND EXISTING AFFORDABLE HOUSING. EVEN THE RECENT CITY URBAN DESIGN GUIDELINES SAYS EACH SQUARE AND CORRIDOR SEGMENT IS RECOGNIZED AS HAVING DEVELOPED ITS OWN UNIQUE CHARACTER. WE'RE LOSING THAT. NEW ZONING CAN'T CONTROL THE FINANCIAL CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL WORKER ISSUES DEVELOPERS ARE FACING THE MARKET HEIGHT AND DENSITY ALONE CANNOT SOLVE AFFORDABLE HOUSING SUPPLY AND DEMAND IS IN A DEMAND CITY LIKE CAMBRIDGE DOESN'T WORK no setbacks or open space is required. Yet on the older 10-story towers currently in neighborhoods, they do work because of open space setbacks, landscaping, dormers, design guidelines, parking, and drop-off space all now eliminated currently. The city has shirked responsibility for first identifying needs, then supporting development of housing to meet those needs. What are the types and size, location, and price levels current residents need? Failing to incorporate adopted guidelines and impose a reasonable and efficient- Ms.

Meyer, your time is expired. This is a siloed- Please submit any comments you have in writing.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Benjamin Johnson Staub, followed by Tom Rawson.

Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Johnson Staub, a resident of Inman Square, and I'd like to counterbalance some of the comments that I've heard tonight. Sorry, can you hear me? Yes. There is a deep need for more housing in Cambridge, especially in a moment when cheaper states and regions are increasingly unsafe ones for many communities. Even with the changes and some very favorable assumptions, we're still admitting that we're not going to meet our housing supply targets, even with these petitions. Let me start with parking. I just want to say that I also find it extraordinary that these petitions say nothing about parking. I found it to be an extraordinary breath of fresh air. Many people that live in Cambridge, especially in the denser and more walkable areas targeted by these petitions, do not own cars. Every parking space is a subsidy for the generally wealthier people that do own cars that live in those areas. I've heard a number of comments about businesses closing because of lack of parking, but I haven't seen any evidence that actually supports that attribution. On Inman Square specifically, I just want to say that you're not going to change the nature of Inman Square by building an eight story building. I live there. There's a 13 story building right across the street from me and it's totally fine. The only criticisms I'd actually like to echo are some of those that I heard from Daniel Anderson. Um, the only answers that I heard in response to what seemed like some very real concerns about step backs and small lot sizes were kind of vague and aesthetic in nature. But that being said, I think both of these petitions still represent a really considerable improvement over the status quo. Not everyone has time to sit through these meetings. Not everyone has time to put stickers on telephone poles that are claimed to represent a community consensus. But many of them would benefit from these petitions.

Thank you. I assume that's all. Yes, sorry, that's all. Thanks. The next speaker is Tom Rawson, who's followed by Heather Hoffman.

Okay, I presume you can hear me. Yes, we can hear you. Thank you, Tom Rawson. I live in North Cambridge. Several of my points have been made, but a few things. This is a really carefully, professionally done design, but the underlying proposal to me is very flawed. And I'll just raise a couple of points. One that I think is not a planning board issue, but we should note is that I have not yet seen Any analysis that suggests that the number of units that's proposed, even at the maximum here would have any significant effect on housing costs. It has to do with how that matches up with the demand you can't just say, well, we built some more units so they're going to get cheaper housing market doesn't work that way and a couple of others have. alluded to that. Without that analysis, the idea that we're lowering housing costs by doing this is kind of just wishful thinking. In terms of engagement, I was really interested to hear the comments of the other speakers because in the presentation, when people talked about hearing from the community, the most often mentioned members of the community where the City Council and the various kinds of developers. I saw things in my community that were about a planning study. If you had put something out that said we're talking about putting 12 stories of buildings on Mass Ave and 18 stories in Porter Square, you would have heard a very different response from the community. I don't think you have the community engagement that you think that you have and more community engagement is needed. And I would recommend really talking to communities with the full picture of what you presented tonight, because I don't know anyone in my community who likes it. Some of the lower heights, yes, but the 12 stories, 18 stories, no. And I will just say, in addition to the parking concerns, this is transit oriented development. It's not transit only development. And in addition to the parking issue, there's a huge traffic issue now on Mass Ave. and what will happen to that. Thank you.

Thank you. The next speaker is Heather Hoffman, who's followed by Justin Safe.

Hello, Heather Hoffman, 213 Hurley Street. I would like to talk about something that Tom Rossen brought up, and that is why we keep selling these things as producing affordable housing At the same time, as we have people giving us numbers, that each of these apartments will cost a million dollars. A million dollar apartment isn't affordable. It isn't today. It won't be tomorrow. So what are we doing to make stuff actually affordable and to say, oh, we're putting in inclusionary housing. A developer is going to sue you and win because I am firmly convinced that the existing inclusionary housing zoning is unconstitutional. And I think, especially in today's atmosphere, you'll lose. So what are you doing that will make stuff actually affordable? Because that, I am firmly convinced, is what everybody actually wants. The people who have been selling this stuff for years threw it up a few years back and admitted what they were really looking for, which was housing for rich people like them. And by golly, that is what we keep writing more zoning to produce. And in fact, just doing it more and more and more won't give you a different result. So let's talk about what our actual goals are and how we can get there. Because I'd be up for that discussion. But I've never heard a single word about that. All we talk about is making deeper and darker canyons of expensive buildings. Thank you.

Thank you. The next speaker is Justin Safe, who's followed by James Williamson.

Hi, Justin Safe, 259 Herland Street. I strongly support these plans for rezoning Cambridge Street and North Mass Ave. Cambridge has a housing shortage and needs more homes. Cambridge's annual scientific survey finds that housing affordability is by far the number one issue facing Cambridge residents. Given that fact, the planning board should center and prioritize it in reviewing these proposals and ignore the neighborhood defender dynamic that is always present for those of you on the planning board who are unaware but you professor catherine levine einstein specifically included the cambridge planning board in her research that found that public comment is not representative of the community and participants are more likely to be homeowners are much older whiter and wealthier than average residents when the median cambridge resident is a renter in their early 30s I do have some concerns that have been expressed that we are not likely to reach the housing projections here. I find it disappointing that the taller heights in Porter Square are so few parcels, some of which are already built out and highly unlikely to develop, redevelop, which the housing projections do not appear to take into account. We already have a permitted multifamily proposal on North Mass Ave supported by the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority that has provided extensive information as to the lack of financial viability. I also agree with the planning board members that the housing projections insufficiently grapple with further possibilities of underproduction due to high costs for materials, labor, and financing. The Cambridge Street corridor provides insufficient new housing capacity, given the fact that a new union T stop exists a short walk away, and there are likely thousands of jobs being added in Boynton Yards. If we fail to allow sufficient housing to be built in this area, we could face displacement from these new workers. Corridor thickening would help increase the capacity. Finally, it would be helpful for CDDD to provide some further details on how extremely challenging retail is these days. and the need for it to be subsidized. So if we want retail, which the public feedback and the working group, which, by the way, was consisted of very strong citizens of Cambridge who are not all developers, these heights are necessary to subsidize retail. Thank you very much.

Thank you. The next speaker is James Williamson, who's followed by James Zoll.

You can hear me?

Yes.

Okay, James Williamson Churchill have along what this so called Carter. up toward the arlington line and I first of all i'd like to, I think we should have the transcripts of the meetings that staff have with. People on the staff have with the developers, that would be a simple thing to do, and I think it would be very informative and I think the public deserve to know. what transpires in those meetings. I like what Jason Alves said about separating these two topics. I was shocked when public comment didn't come after the first bit. I also like what the other speaker said about three minutes. This is going to affect the lives of people for the next 30 years, but we get two minutes to talk about it? Are you kidding? I guess we have to save our democracy There's nothing democratic about this process unless you go through some convoluted thinking. An appointed body, who applies to be on it, who bothers to show up at the meetings, and then the cherry picking of the comments that misrepresent what happened. I went to many of those meetings. both the public ones and the working group. I use a pseudonym so I don't get targeted for the discrimination that can often happen. And there was a lot of concern about 18 stories and they're not being honest about it. And I don't think they ever are. um so you know did you ever hear anybody who works for the city of cambridge ever say we didn't have a robust community process of course not um my concern is actually well there is the t runs right under the parking lot does it not i saw them 18 people from the t working on a great in the middle of that parking lot i wonder what what's what's How is the engineering going to go for an 18-story building in that location where the CVS is? I'm less concerned about the excessive height that others, and I agree, you know, are concerned about than I am about the 12 stories along the corridors. Why can't we do six stories? No lack of imagination? Thank you.

Thank you. The next speaker is James Zoll. James Zoll is the last hand that's raised. So if anybody else thought they had their hands raised or was intending to speak and hasn't spoken yet, please raise your hand now. Thanks. You can go ahead.

Thank you. This is James Zoll, Pemberton Street in North Cambridge. I think the city staff did a tremendous job in reaching out to people and listening to people and putting together a very difficult plan. I'm kind of appalled to hear people respond to that with a long list of things that does not seem to take into account that there's like 118,000 people here in Cambridge and that the belief that there is just their own little neighborhood and in some cases their own individual desires. Everybody wants to, not everybody, but some people want to specify how planning should be done, what it should include, it should come out the way they want it. And it's especially bizarre when people demand contradictory things. They want more parking and less traffic. Those just don't go together. They want things developed, they want this and they want that, but they don't want the city to change, or at least their neighborhood. That's a telltale thing. You can do something anywhere else in the city, but we want special rules for us. I really don't know how to express my disgust at that in just two minutes. I won't even get to the plan, but please don't let a small number of noisy people derail a very difficult and potentially promising project or change, a series of changes. because just as we've clamped down on housing for many decades, if we allow people to clamp down on any kind of economic development, that is going to be very bad for the people in Cambridge. Thank you.

Thank you. So that appears to exhaust the list of speakers, so I will turn it back over to the chair at this time.

Thank you.

So we will now move from public comment to board discussion. Additional written comments may be submitted for the record. So I will open it up to the board. If you have further questions, we can answer those. But we can do, I think in the interest of time, we can do a combination of questions and comments. You know, Jeff is a great note taker, but if you have specific comments on each petition, you know, on one petition versus the other that does not apply to both, just make sure that that is specified. If you're talking about both petitions in general, I'd appreciate it if you just kind of reference that. So who would like Mary? First hand up.

I had a follow up question on it. It looks like there are a couple of changes from the planning documents to the zoning. One that's been mentioned is 11 stories on Mass Ave is 12 stories in the petition. And it looks like the primary street setback is three feet instead of five feet. I was wondering if you could just speak to any of the changes between, say, the planning process and the actual petition.

Sorry. I haven't talked in a while. I can start and then maybe Daniel wants to jump in or someone else wants to jump in. But we didn't talk about this as much, I think, maybe because it was a lesser change than what was on Cambridge Street. But the So yes, the plan recommended this eight to 11 story model on Mass Ave. When we had presented that initially to the city council back in June, they had kind of challenged us to think about pushing that upper limit up to 12. um we thought that that you know that we went back and kind of thought about it um and you know with i think we we talked um with our urban design team they they mentioned earlier kind of these these the one-to-one principle and and those kinds of things and the the closer we looked at it i think the more comfortable that we felt that That additional story kind of set back the way that that we had it still kind of fits with that overall you know idea and and ultimately gets you know some more housing. Through that additional height. The setback, similarly, I think we, you know, during the planning process, we were using more kind of broad strokes ideas and going from the planning to the petition, we started to take a much closer look at that. at what we could do there. And we felt like there was less of a need to go to the full five feet that exists now, given the existing sidewalk widths and what our sort of aim is. And again, that's more potential building space for more housing. So it's always this, you know, those kinds of trade-offs. I don't know if anyone else has, from my team, has anything to add to that.

Questions from other board members at this point?

Diego. I can just do my comment part, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Um, just because it's fresh. I feel like we've had a lot of information. I feel like I've had a lot of information. Um, generally, I, I'm like. For both of these petitions, um, I, I think. I'm okay with the heights. I'm okay with, um. The process, the community engagement sounds good. The, um. The guidelines that we've seen, we've seen a lot of guidelines I feel are thorough. I think they help with these zoning changes. I have to remind myself that these zoning changes are sort of not necessarily part of the guidelines, but they're connected to each other. And I think for me, that's what makes me sort of feel positive about these changes. There were a lot of great public comments that brought up questions for me, and I'll just go through those briefly. one of the concerns that i had and i had a question i wasn't sure if it's a question or not um what was was the joining of these two two petitions which was the mass ave and and cambridge streets i wasn't sure if you know the intention is saying like these are are the same streets essentially right and but from my perspective i think that what's happening is that they're zoning language it's easier to present for these streets this way um so i think that they're different and I'm just a little confused about that. And I actually was kind of inspired by one of the comments about how Cambridge Street should have been different than Mass Ave. Because I do feel like it's a little different. And another comment also made a great point about being close to that Somerville higher density region, which I'm not too familiar with. I just thought that was a great comment and I wish we could talk more about that. But I feel like there's a lot of other stuff going on. And I also liked the idea or I think that office personally office spaces as an active use space, I would agree with that it shouldn't be included. I've just personally been a part of a few office spaces that are part of really high dense active areas and they always seemed dead. I don't think that's good for a neighborhood. But you know, I didn't ask a question about that. So maybe if anyone wants to speak about that, go ahead. It's just my own personal opinion. My other concern was if, and this was one of my questions, what is the AHO and how it was impacted and whether or not you know affordable housing developers lose the incentives to develop in these in these uh regions so um i hope not right i hope we get more affordable housing i think that's a valid concern i don't know if zoning is gonna is gonna fix that um but it's something that i've that i'm thinking about and i think should be should be considered as disco this is continues um Yeah, I guess I'll just stop there. Those are my comments. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Who would like to go next? Dan, maybe we should just return to your discussion that you brought up in terms of urban design and height and your concern about open space. So if you could just briefly restate some of that, that might launch us into the discussion.

Sure, Madam Chair. Thank you. I didn't want to just throw my hand up since I always have something to say. Yeah. So one concern that i have and it's been stated before um that if we have a six-story building or an eight-story building with no requirement for open space my concern is that we won't get any open space so i'm I'd like to see some requirement in here, but I know that that's a little bit at odds and look to planning staff to help out with this one. If we're looking at small lot sizes, I don't know what the incentive is, but I'm concerned that we don't have enough open space and that that really goes towards our livability, towards some of our sustainability, heat island goals. So I guess one recommendation, I don't know what, what that percentage should be, but I think it should be more than none. And I also think that it should be publicly available open space and strike the beneficial because beneficial specifically in our definition says it just has to be visually accessible, not physically accessible. So I guess that's at least one point that maybe you should have some conversation before I dive in other directions.

Okay. All right. Board members, do you have any comment, follow-up on those issues or additional issues that you'd like to raise? Ted.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I was hoping to hear some of my colleagues speak first, but I was just doing a very quick internet search. Someone mentioned 1880 buildings. So the population of Cambridge in 1880 was about 53,000. When I moved to Cambridge in the early 70s, it was about 100,000. In 1980, it went down to 95,000. In 2010, 2011, it was about, well, the last 2,000 census was 101. In 2020, it's somewhere between 118, 119, and 125,000. And some commentators are saying that it's really closer to 150,000. So, you know, we've grown a lot. This population has grown a lot, especially in the past 20 to 40 years and we haven't built enough housing to deal with all this population increase. I mean I've said it repeatedly that they're not making any new land in Cambridge, and so the only alternative is to go up higher to house all the people who are living here now. I mean, maybe these are not the most perfect solutions, but they're an attempted solution. You know, people are talking about open space. Well, the open space in Porter Square right now is a giant parking lot and, you know, a large... retail-built businesses there. So I'm not really concerned all that much about the open space along the corridor of Mass Ave and along the corridor of Cambridge Street, which are now pretty built up, but are, you know, not built up high enough. There are one, two, three, maybe some places, five and six stories, and a couple of places where you might jump up to nine or ten. And I just think the city has got to address the problem of not enough housing. And everybody talks about the rapacious developers, that this is all for the developers. Well, who else is going to build the housing? I mean, there are a couple of developers in the city and in the Boston area that might build housing here. And we've got a couple of developers that might do all affordable housing. But there are no other people who are going to build the housing in this city. And I think we've just got to move forward. I do agree that the issue of retail is very problematic. Requiring retail in the first floor everywhere, I think is a great idea. But since the past 20 years and the development of everybody going online and ordering from Amazon or from other sources, yes, we have a lot of open stores. And I don't know that that's going to change. I don't know what the solution to the retail is. But I do agree that it is probably not correct to include commercial or office space as part of the ground floor occupants that we're looking for. Although certainly, traditionally, we've always had the small insurance company, the dentist's office, the doctor's office, things of that nature, which are really, I think, appropriate for ground floor. Maybe this is not a perfect solution, but I think it is an attempt to do something uh the parking you know city council has decided that we don't need to have parking for residential units that decision they made before and we're living with that and we will continue to live with that and requiring more parking on other residential when they've said we don't need it is something i think you know if they want to change that that's that's up to the city council to change but i think we as the planning board have to live with what they've said is going to be the situation now You know, I have some small comments about some of the language. I can deal with staff on that. They're not big issues. I think this is an attempt to resolve certainly a big problem we have. And if it doesn't work, well, then, you know, the city can amend it again. So that's where I am, and I think that this is a valid attempt to deal with our dramatic housing problem right now. And personally, I would recommend it to the City Council.

All right. Thank you, Ted. Tom, you're next.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I concur with the sentiments that Ted has so beautifully outlined here, but I wanted to just make a couple of comments. I'm in support of both petitions. I wanted to say, yes, it wasn't a perfect public and planning process, but it's a series, extensive series of meetings where the community looked at itself starting all the way back envision, which was the basis for identifying the two corridors as the likely places to increase density to try to address what is a critical housing need, not only in our community, but across this whole country. And I'm proud that our community has chosen to address it, unlike some of the other cities and towns that we've heard about in the news recently. So once again, Cambridge is at the forefront of trying to deal with a very, very complex issue. The other thing I would say relative to the conversation is the tenor of it was largely critical, both in the correspondence and in the majority of the comments tonight. And the conversation was framed about what we're losing. I don't choose to look at that way. I think that these petitions will allow for growth and they're going to allow for the evolution of this community. They're going to allow for maybe sufficient population so we can support more retail locally. They're going to allow for an extension of the diversity that we enjoy here where they're going to allow The other gain of course, as some petitioner, some comment made tonight was this is an inclusive community and this is going to be space for us to welcome people that feel threatened in other parts of our nation at this point. I'm proud of that as well, that we're going to accommodate and continue to be an inclusive community. So I think there's a lot to be gained here. I can imagine maybe my children will get to move here because there'll be space for them and I could grow old and eventually see the grandchildren in my neighborhood that perhaps is not possible now. So I think there's a lot. that in the petitions that this is going to allow, that it could be extraordinary and very, very positive for this community. So I'm in support.

Thank you, Tom. Ashley.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, I just wanted to start off by acknowledging thank you for everyone who attended tonight. And there's a lot of members of the public who also attended and did not speak up. I see, I recognize a lot of names. There's a lot of business owners on the call, a lot of residents, clearly. A lot of architects, planners, people from neighboring towns on the call. um who you know we're all stakeholders and these two thoroughfares are very different as people have mentioned on calls but i think as a planning board we've had the advantage of seeing both of these as studies and also as petitions come separately and you know i think it was like a month or two ago that we've looked at these separately to an end detail and It's not a plug, but kind of a plug. We're not having a meeting on election day and everyone who didn't speak up or had a chance to speak up, go vote, as someone noted earlier, as Ted noted earlier. Issues of parking, these are all things our counselors have decided on already. PLEASE GO VOTE. OUR BOARD IS ABOUT PLANNING. I THINK AS TOM MENTIONED, THERE there are a lot of great things that are coming out of these plans that became petitions, you know, for Cambridge Street. I remember when we first started looking at the studies, we had our very own Lou Bacci, who grew up on, you know, the street, lived here his whole life, and just hearing about all the legacy businesses and What makes Cambridge Street so unique? You know, those are things we want to keep. And I think things that whether it was, I think Carolyn mentioned earlier or Dan too, about how can we make the retail spaces more active or more welcoming to small businesses is, you know, something to think about. But there's so much good coming out of it, you know, like finding ways to increase width of the sidewalk for Cambridge Street because it's currently very deficient in many areas. And how can we have more open space? I bike on Cambridge Street a lot and I noticed in the last year on one of the city lots, which I think is by the railroad tracks, I think it's by Fulkerson or 7th or 8th Street, there is now a small space but has a lot of colorful paving, it has a lovely shaded area and there's always people sitting there grabbing a sandwich or coffee from nearby And that's something that, you know, makes Cambridge Street so unique and so just beautiful. And I hope there will be more of that. And so ways we can do that would be great. Mass Ave is so different, as we mentioned in previous calls, it's a lot wider. There's areas that are underutilized, frankly, and I wanted to emphasize, I think it was something Mary brought up last time, but, you know, about trees, like how can we Or how can we encourage developers to actually add more trees on Mass Ave where we can? And I think that's something I'd like to see. But otherwise, in support, I think we've had the advantage of seeing how these plans and petitions have evolved to really also try and incorporate comments from neighbors and mutters and so you know the plans have incorporated that I'm sure developers or neighbors who are trying to build will also do the same and look at the guidelines and do the same.

Thank you.

Thank you Ashley. Carolyn, let's go to you next. Thank you, Madam Chair. I certainly can't be as eloquent as the speakers before me, so I'm not going to even try. I am broadly in support of both of the petitions. I do, to Dan Anderson's point, I do worry that frankly the, and this may not be Dan's point, I'm not sure the eight stories on Inman or on Cambridge Street, I think is enough to incentivize eight stories because of the six story, the stick built construction types. I think a lot of buildings might stop at six stories. If you want to add, if we really want to increase housing, I think you might need to go up to nine stories for something above six to be built if you're going to require ground floor retail. But I know that's not the conversation at hand. So I'm going to just... Say that I agree with the speakers before me were supportive of these petitions and supportive of shopping at local retail and encouraging people to to shop in our neighborhoods.

Thank you.

Mary. So I'll reiterate that our board members are very eloquent. My comments will be, I think, just some thoughts that I've been having and maybe some responses and kind of proto-discussion board members um so one thing i've been thinking about and this is what i felt when i when we looked at these planning studies in a few months ago is particularly for the mass app study um you know dan when i think about the open space requirement i'm more concerned that there is a compelling and powerful vision for the street that the public realm is mass av it is the sidewalks and one of the things that concerns me about the planning study is that There's the zoning of the buildings. There's the curb-to-curb improvements. And it feels like the sidewalks are discretionary and going to be piece-by-piece. I think we just saw this when we did our AHO review the previous week is, you know, well, here's the building. We can't exactly share the public realm vision because that's going to be by... Maybe it's the city. So I think that as a board, I think that we're going to be at a deficit to judge and evaluate proposals as they come up if the city doesn't have a cohesive and powerful vision to get everyone excited, right? That the public realm is the street. Mass Ave is one of our greatest public realms. And certainly from Cambridge Common to Alewife, It isn't what it could be, and it can be something amazing. So on that topic, I think when I also think about these two studies and petitions coming together, Cambridge Street feels a little bit more granular and nuanced. There's something to me about the Mass Ave where after Porter, it's all the same. And, you know, there's like the Ringe Day Street moment. There is certainly where Linear Park crosses, right? There is the Alewife moment. And so it's not recommending that necessarily zoning needs to address that. But, you know, because I defer quite frankly to... really to some of the architects and lawyers in particular on this and you know people more familiar with development and how that that happens but um i do feel like as a community member i i feel like the community might not see the vision right because it's it often also one of my observations from the planning studies is is we look so much on the street side we talk so much about the ratio of the street to the building and i feel like the community would benefit from understanding Also, the residential side's the butt up, right? Because certain concerns are going to be relative to that. Pro, we heard that last, the previous planning board meeting. Some were very pro. They love seeing a 12-story building in their neighborhood. Some were very concerned. On the same tone, I would say Porter Square should be an exciting place for a big development. And, you know, although I do agree specifically not everyone who wants and has input and a stake in this can come to meetings it's always striking when you get you know such a an unbalanced input i didn't feel that we had that on the multi-family housing certainly this is different right these are not as much you know people's quite people's homes it's a slightly different thing but it just makes me me think about that um I would say that because of some of the conversations we're having, and we all recognize that zoning is a course tool in a way, I think I would reiterate, we've talked about this before, if maybe there's a regular moment annually that the city helps the planning board understand, What's the state of housing procurement and development? And paired with that, what's the status of, say, the urban forest, the tree canopy cover? Because I think that there's also this moment after Envision where they're kind of multiple, I won't call them competing, but they're overlaid. objectives that really should be working together um and we want it all i want all the affordable housing and i want all the trees right so um maybe it's this this opportunity to make sure that we have a regular kind of update on is it working because ted always brings this up and i think it's great is is zoning is a living process if it's not working It can change, right? It certainly doesn't make these decisions light, but I feel like it might help, especially as a newer planning board member, to know that I'm going to get kind of a regular check-in on how's this going. A more minor comment is the public commenter who mentioned about office space, and I think Diego mentioned that as well. I agree. Office space as ground floor active doesn't strike me as that, so I would reconsider that. as as an acceptable version to get the the bump up in heights um and i think that is it thank you thank you appreciate it uh damn

Yeah, thank you. And I really appreciate hearing the other comments, especially Ted's and Mary's and Ashley's. A couple of clarifications on my feeling about open space, because I do support and broadly, I think we're looking at housing production. At a narrow level, I think that the open space requirement for me has more to do with the street frontage potentially and the lot size than it does height. So I'm just thinking something like, you know, if you've got a building that's going to be 150 feet long, I would love to see that broken. And one of the only ways to break that, so urban design guidelines say we want a forecourt. I can't get a developer client to build a forecourt unless there's a requirement for open space. Otherwise, it's 10 feet, right? Or in this case, three. So if we don't want to have, and my fear on this is really, we're just going to end up with six-story buildings, right? Just from the economics of it. To build, once you go to the high-rise code, the cost per square foot doubles or more than doubles. So my experience is that 12 stories is the only point where economically feasible developments happen once you hit the high rise code. So I am also Struggling with the scale and setbacks and the streetscape, the urban design feel, our role as a planning board in having some design advisory at the very least for projects of this size. The economics of building are a bigger lot is better, right? But we've got lots of little lots. So there's this dynamic of, well, how does that little lot work? Is it feasible at all? um and if we want to get the kind of housing production that we're looking at in terms of these mandates um you know are we really saying hey we really want 12 stories so there's some economics in here that i'm still not not clear about uh and how that that specifically works um mostly i think that um I'd really like to see something along the lines of using open space to help break up that street front. I'd also really love to have our ability to weigh in on projects that maybe are not 75,000 square feet. We've had this discussion about special permit. We have design advisory that's non-binding for AHO projects. I think that there's opportunities to weigh in on the granular level. I think that Mary's really precise in identifying that that's really going to be where the character happens. And I'd like to see the economics of this to fundamentally meet those housing development goals. I have no idea whether those are going to create more affordability other than the inclusion area, the IZ portion, and whether or not these are going to be more affordable, the market's out. They're going to be market rate. I hate to hear people banding about that this is luxury housing. This is housing, and the economics have to work. So if we're going to not have strictly six-story buildings, I want to make sure that there's something in here that... makes that housing production achievable and palatable, right? That it does what we really want it to do, to be attractive and to meet our open space and our sustainability goals. The last point I'll just make is building code also addresses some of the issues that were brought up by a couple of callers. We're not going to have um zero lot line walls facing neighborhoods um you can't have windows in there in flat walls so um the the setbacks are going to play into this considerably to have reasonable openings to have balconies and private open space all the things that are necessary for a livable project um and then yeah i think i'll i'll leave it there um I'm certainly very, very supportive of this. I'm supportive of housing production. I just really want the zoning to take into case the smaller lot sizes, the issues around larger, longer buildings that are not hitting higher heights and really provide that kind of granular character that we're all looking for.

Thank you. Dan, appreciate that. Joy, let's hear from you.

yeah and um I think, for the most part i'm also very much in alignment with what other folks on the planning board have brought up as kind of key issues and areas of support, I really I guess. appreciated um Mary Lydecker's point about potentially getting some more regular touch points to just sort of contextualize um especially some of these larger kind of like the the six-story upzoning these more um I guess broader um discussions that we tend to have to just get a little bit of the lay of the land to help ground some of those conversations I think that would be really really valuable so I um I really appreciate that she brought up that point um And then I think, again, just reiterating some of the conversations we've had around economic incentive structures. I think Diego's point about does this conflict with the AHO? How does retail factor into this? I think those are conversations that are ideas that are worth sort of maybe noodling on a little bit more because it would be. you know, unfortunate to kind of go through this extensive process and then, you know, not necessarily see the outcome that we were intending or see some sort of weird unintended consequences there. And so I guess I would reiterate those points too. And then the also, the other thing I wanted to kind of loop back to was Ted's kind of going back in time and talking us through how the population has changed over time, I think, ESPECIALLY WITH SOME OF THESE CONVERSATIONS, I TEND TO, WELL, ONE, KIND OF TYING IN THE POINT OF AFFORDABILITY, THIS IS, YOU KNOW, THESE PROPOSED ZONING CHANGES ARE DEFINITELY LIKE ONE TOOL IN THE TOOL BOX THAT SHOULD IN THEORY BE WORKING IN CONJUNCTION WITH ALL OF THESE OTHER POLICIES AND PROGRAMS AND SUBSIDY INCENTIVES THAT WE HAVE SORT OF IN PLAY HERE. BUT I TEND TO TRY TO IMAGINE LIKE 30, 40 YEARS FROM NOW WHAT A PLANNING BOARD DISCUSSION might look like. Some people maybe still, you know, tuning in to those. And there were times many moons ago I worked in D.C. government on housing and I talked to people who had been working in the government for decades and they'd be like, oh, if only, you know, we had this in place back then, like 30 years ago, you know, we'd maybe be having a little bit more tenable conversations now. I guess that's all to say that I'm generally supportive of these comments. I think it's a really foundational tool on the toolkit to help future residents, future planning boards, future agencies kind of have the adequate tools at their disposal to keep navigating through these changes as Cambridge continues to grow and thrive. And so I think those are all my comments.

Thank you. I have just one follow-up question in regards to the AHO. I know, you know, obviously we saw the proposal last week, which was 12 stories, but, you know, they could have gone up to 13. These proposals now are letting all of the projects go to 12 or above. Well, not all, but 8, 12, above, whatever. the margin on the affordable housing overlay is really gone. And a lot of the other incentives, like not having to provide parking and different things like that that were in there, those were all gone too. So my question is, in your discussion with the affordable housing developers, what did they say in terms of what will they need to be able to continue to develop affordable housing if these changes are made?

I can respond to that a little. This is Jeff. I'll respond to that a little bit. We have had conversations with our housing department on this, and they are in close contact to affordable housing providers. So they're aware of these proposals as they have been of the multifamily zoning amendment and other efforts that are being made. I always feel a little uncomfortable speaking on their behalf, so I absolutely won't not do that. But I'll just point out a few things that I think shouldn't be lost in the discussion. Yes, there is a bit more, I think, of an equivalency in terms of height under the proposed zoning and then the AHO. But there are still a lot of advantages that the affordable housing overlay confers. including as-of-right permitting is a big one. Some of the requirements that we talked about, some of these standards with stepbacks and other design-based standards that are really meant to be prescriptive so that developers in the market have access some kind of strict standards that they need to follow. Some of those are many of those are sort of believed for an affordable housing overlay development, including as we saw with the with the proposal, the planning board saw there's there's no requirement for for a non-residential or commercial use of the ground floor, meaning the full building can really be utilized for for affordable housing. And while I think that one of the big drivers of the affordable housing overlay originally was to have some kind of a delta to try to provide for more kind of economies of scale for affordable housing development, I think it still is really difficult to compare just kind of apples to apples based on size and density, like what the economic factors are and how they balance just given that they're so different, affordable housing, um you know requires very different kind of funding and and financing mechanisms which in some cases don't really um promote uh or lend themselves well to taller high-rise development i think in some of the there have been some suggestions out there that well this means that now affordable housing developments are going to be even even taller I don't think that's necessarily the case. I mean, the economics of it don't necessarily play out where you just go, if you simply go taller for affordable housing, that somehow the economics kind of balance themselves out. So I think it's really a complex issue and we try to be In communication, I mean, part of the issue is just as kind of Joy was noting is the other tools in the toolbox, right? I mean, affordable housing is not just about zoning. I think we've done a lot with the affordable housing overlay to try to remove impediments in the zoning to promote affordable housing development. And some of the subsequent efforts are kind of looking at sort of market rate inclusionary housing in a similar way in terms of removing zoning impediments. Affordable housing development also requires public resources, and that's another big piece of it. And they'll have to be, like the city always does, as the market changes, sometimes in response to economic factors, sometimes in response to zoning, or a combination of the two, then the city is going to have to evaluate how it allocates its resources, as well as other public resources and subsidies that go into affordable housing development. So kind of a complicated answer, but that's my sense of things. And I think it'll, you know, it doesn't, it's not going to change the way the city, you know, pursues, you know, affordable housing opportunities, but it is, you know, it is and may well have some impacts that we'll see down the road. And I did want to note a couple, I'll note this now, and then I wanted to say maybe a couple of things just in response to some of the discussion before we wrap up, but on the point about um monitoring housing production you know both on the affordable and market side that's now after the multi-family zoning that's something that's actually baked into the multi-family zoning that there's now an annual housing review that's prepared um and it's it specifically says that it's going to go to the city council but i would imagine that it's a it would be a good topic of discussion to bring to the planning board as well so i'll i'll certainly be pushing to make sure that the planning board has that insight available to them and that you have an opportunity to talk about it with us.

Great. That would be very, very helpful because I think we're all in agreement that you know, keeping track of that and, you know, the progress that we're making is really, really important. You know, we need to be able to have the feedback as to whether these things are really working or not. I guess, you know, with the affordable housing overlay, I understand what you're saying, Jeff, but, you know, I also feel like the as of right piece also was a little bit given away because, you know, we've done away with special permits where there's you know unless it's over 75 000 square feet there's just advisory you know etc at any rate my point is just this i think you know i understand that we need housing it's clearly yeah the other night i was talking to to jeff and i was saying back when i worked in the city for the city we did the east cambridge rezoning and back then it was even lower heights than there are there now and and back then people were saying it felt like you know why are we developing manhattan Right. So here we are again, you know, 40 years later or whatever. And, you know, the Manhattan references are popping back up and still we're not going to be anywhere near like Manhattan, but we will be different. And I don't know that that's a bad thing. But. You know, I mean, times change. You have to change with them. And I think, you know, from my perspective, a lot of what we did along the riverfront and other areas has made a lot of difference. And it's been a positive difference for the city. So, you know, I have big concerns because my biggest fear is that there's going to be another zoning petition that's saying not affordable housing needs another six stories and that we're constantly going to be in this catch up kind of thing. And I really don't want to see that. So, um, So I'm very torn on this. On the one hand, I want to support these petitions, but I also have a lot of fear around it because, you know, I mean, we've seen that repetition in the past where it's like, okay, we raise these heights and then we have to raise... raise them for AHO. And I think particularly my concern is because we went through these very long planning studies. We did a very nice job of getting public participation. People were comfortable with the hikes that were proposed, which now have been slightly changed. And we've heard that people are concerned about that. But if they went through a planning study and said 12 stories is what we're comfortable with, then, you know, to me, that should be the framework that we're working within. And I would really hate to see that, you know, eroded by a very good competing interest, yet having to come back and say, well, you know, what the planning study said is one thing, but we also have this affordable housing objective. So anyway, at this point, I'm probably kind of just rambling, but I feel like You know, there's just so many objectives that we have. And it's just hard to figure out how to, you know, where to call the limits on some of these things. I would say that I think it would be helpful on the planning studies that when you have these groups, that you go back to them with the proposed zoning. maybe before it's filed, to get reactions from them to it. Because, you know, I'm disturbed a little bit by the folks who have said tonight that, you know, if you had said that this was what we were really talking about, then the level of support would have been different. So anyway, my points are, I think, probably running contrary to what most of you were thinking. But I would just... like there to be a strong statement that, you know, we have concern about where this is going to lead in terms of the AHO. Dan, did you have something you wanted to add?

Yeah, so this has nothing to do with AHO, although it does have to do with the numbers and prediction for housing production. So I guess two things. One, it would be really great to know what the housing production predictions would be if people are really going to be in, let's just say, six stories, right? We've got it. I think actually that probably exists. My concerns, I think, again, are that The way that this is written right now, it preferences larger lot sizes, which we don't have, and B, The reality is that unless things are really incentivized to go tall, we're gonna just have deck plus four, deck plus five projects built. And if that's the case, then I really wanna emphasize that some of the setbacks, some of the private open space pieces be kind of a little bit more, I guess, be more addressed specifically at projects of no more than eight stories because again, you're going to get a long street front and you're going to have no retail at all. There's it's going to just be, you know, 150, 180, 200 foot long residential block that six stories tall. And so it's not it's going to kill our urban design guidelines if there's not some some requirement for for for publicly accessible open space. And then if we are incentivizing taller buildings and 2026 Mass Ave is a good example. It's on the corner of Walden. And if that building was required above eight stories to have a 12 foot setback, those upper floors wouldn't work. That project would be dead. It would not. It just is not out of a lot width that would support that production. So it would be back to being a six or eight or I think originally nine story building proposed. at a loss of 30 plus units. So I think some nuance about smaller lot size development and the setback and open space requirements for buildings of less than eight stories and some like the massive overlay always had um some degree of ground floor openness and retail requirement and if we're saying hey you don't you only build eight stories there's no open space requirement and there's no ground floor retail requirement so i'm looking at a worst case scenario saying we're not getting housing production and we're getting a really crappy urban left um streetscape so i'm looking for a little bit more nuance and not allowing that to happen

Okay. Great. Ted.

Well, thank you. So the question's really for Dan. You keep talking about small lots, and then you talk about you're going to have something that's 150, 200 feet long. I'm confused. What do you see as a small lot versus a larger lot that would allow for much taller buildings?

yeah so it's a great question ted so um you know most of our lots range between 50 to 80 feet i looked at planning maybe to evan and eric because they've looked at it most in depth but that's kind of a general lot size that i see along mass ave um generally less than 100 feet um so If you're going to have a development on that you want it to go taller right it doesn't doesn't make a lot of sense if you can't get to 12 stories you're going to stick with with six stories, or you know, maybe seven. Just from my sense of economics so. In a case like that, if it's on a corner lot, you're never going to get, you're only going to get the six stories because you're not going to get upper floors that come anywhere close to 15,000 square feet. You're going to be talking about, you know, at best eight. So I'm approximating here. But just for that example, you really have narrower If you want to produce housing, you want it to be taller and you want to make those lots make sense. If you have an accumulation of lots that allow you to have a longer stretch and the economics don't allow you to go to eight, 12 stories, this zoning would allow a long street front, some break, but no open space and no retail. So I've got two examples that are balancing out. One is lower, larger lot. Another is smaller, higher lot. And there are holes in this that say, hey, if you follow the letter of this in Mass Ave 12, and you've got a narrow lot, the requirements of setbacks potentially for a corner or something that abuts a side street would basically say, no, it just doesn't make any sense for that lot. You're only going to get six stories.

Does that make sense? I guess you lose me when you talk about you're going to have a longer lot, but only six stories. And I don't see where if you've got that bigger length, why aren't you going up? Why isn't it economic to go up to the, you know, the eight or nine or 12? I mean, this is, I'm not an architect. This is not what I do. I just don't quite understand what you're saying.

So my position is that the economics of building don't really start to kick in until you hit barely at the 12 stories. So my worry is that because it's more economical to build at a deck plus six on any lot, that if it's built that way, which a developer could very easily choose to build that way, that we end up with a really unfortunate street situation. And I can't say definitively that somebody is going to build to 12 stories just because they can when the construction cost is potentially double. And whether that economics work out or not really depends on a bunch of different factors. But I'd like to avoid the situation where I can't make the choice for the developer where they go, but the economics may not incentivize the 12 stories for a whole variety of reasons.

If I could jump in, Mary, there's a little side talk going with the urban design team on our end. And I think they understand the issue that's being raised. And I think that's something that we can look at a bit more to kind of maybe see if there's any of that nuance that Dan is suggesting that we could look into.

Okay.

Yeah.

I don't know enough about the economics either, but we certainly would want to maintain as much vitality or open space, interest, whatever it needs to be, if in fact we're going to end up with just six-story buildings. Okay, any other comments before we move forward? Okay, so we have...

Yeah, and if you'll indulge me, Mary, I'd check to see if there's anything that the team wanted to respond to. Oh, I'm sorry. In case that helps, you know, kind of as we're wrapping up. And one thing I wanted to say, although I don't know if it's really that important to say, I think some board members kind of covered this well, but I did want to address something that came up. I sort of take some responsibility for this. um approach of saying you know let's let's look at these petitions together i'll just re-emphasize these are not like one proposal jam jamming together mass ave and cambridge street these are two petitions that were developed to stand on their own um but you know we we have you know, one of the things that we've really been thinking about a lot as a team and something we've been getting a lot of feedback on is how to make our zoning ordinance a bit more straightforward. And, you know, we definitely acknowledge and, you know, planning processes that, you know, people who participated in them talk about how special and unique their areas are. This isn't this isn't, you know, an attempt to kind of counteract that point. At the same time, I think the recommendations and the goals of each of those planning studies reveal a lot of commonality in what the community's vision is for the future. And so, you know, and that's really what we're focusing on a lot when we put together zoning. And just because areas are unique, I think it's maybe problematic in some cases to say, well, because they're unique, they require completely different approaches to zoning. So I think we've really been trying to balance those things. You know, we realized it was kind of a risk bringing them together and talking about them together. But, you know, I just really want to make it clear that, that they are they are two separate zoning districts the heights are proposed are different setbacks other kind of qualities of these areas are really tailored to the conditions of those streets it's really just that it's the overall approach and the goals and the vision have a lot of commonality. And so we thought it really made sense to have this broader discussion. And I think on the flip side, sometimes we'll have discussions just on a specific area and then we'll get challenged and say, well, how come we're not thinking about this more broadly and, you know, in ways that, you know, that would be impactful in different parts of the city too. So that's just what I wanted to say about that. And I wonder if anyone else on the team wanted to respond to any other specific points before we crack on.

I just had, I think one thing, I'll keep it to one thing because I think it'll help us understand where the board stands a little bit. There was a lot of conversation about office space as active ground story use. And I wanted to clarify that the zoning allows for three different kinds of office space. To contribute to that active ground story. So it's a medical office of a physician or a dentist or something like that. Other professional offices like an accountant, an attorney, those kinds of things or real estate. or insurance kind of agency office. So these are intended to be the office uses that people would be kind of visiting, coming in and out of, not like a general office building office use. So that's why those ones were specifically called out. And it also doesn't include banks. And it doesn't include lab space. And I think these are kind of the uses that I remember, if you all recall, back in July, Drew gave a good summary of the existing businesses that are on Mass Ave and Cambridge Street. And I think especially on Cambridge Street, these are the businesses that actually make up a lot of those ground story uses. So I just wanted to clarify that to understand if that was still a concern of those kinds of office uses or if folks were really thinking about, you know, like other sorts of office uses. Yeah. Yeah.

Mary? I would say on my end, that allays my concerns. I mean, I've still seen a lot of empty-looking dental offices that don't exactly enliven, but I think it's also important and people are going in and out. So I think you described kind of medical, attorney, insurance, but no banks. Or lab spaces. Or lab spaces. I'm okay with that.

Yeah, I think that's reasonable. Okay. Nobody's disagreeing, so I think we can clarify that decision. Okay. So it sounds as though from what's been discussed then that the board is in favor of recommending the petitions, both petitions, both Mass Ave and Cambridge Street be adopted with a discussion that we had had tonight, both pros and cons, I guess. We do need to do two separate votes though. And just for clarification, this will be a vote of the full board members. So on Mass Ave, is there a motion then to, recommend adoption of the petition, which would include a summary of this discussion this evening.

This is Tom, so moved.

Is there a second?

Ms. Ted's second.

And could we have a roll call vote, please?

On that motion, Ted Cohen? Yes. Mary Leydecker?

Yes.

Diego Macias? Yes. Tom Sieniewicz? Yes. Ashley Tan?

Yes.

Carolyn Zern?

Yes.

Mary Flynn?

Yes.

That's all seven members voting in favor.

Okay. So then for Cambridge Street, the Cambridge Street petition, is there a motion to recommend that the petition be adopted and that we send that to the City Council with a summary of our discussion and concerns and positive aspects as well, discussion of that? Could I have a motion to that effect?

That's Ted.

So moved.

Thank you, Ted. Is there a second, please?

Tom, second. Thank you, Tom.

Roll call vote, please.

On that motion, Ted Cohen. Yes. Mary Lydecker.

Yes.

Diego Macias. Yes. Thompson Avich. Yes. Ashley Tan.

Yes.

Carolyn Zern.

Yes.

Mary Flynn.

Yes.

That's all seven numbers voting in favor.

Okay. Well, thanks to everybody. It's taken us a few hours to get to this, plus the briefings that you've given us in the past. Obviously, a lot of hard work went into it, and it's like all zoning discussions in Cambridge, they're never easy. But so thanks to all of you, and thanks to the members of the public. We have one more item on our agenda this evening, and that is determination of a proposed use at 20 Child Street, which is part of Planning Board PB 179, or previously, excuse me, approved land unit development known as Cambridge Crossing. And Jeff is going to summarize why this is before us.

uh yes this is jeff i'll do it as quickly as i can so this is a proposal to locate a fitness center use at the ground floor of 20 child street which is is also known as parcel n of the north point PUD DEVELOPMENT THAT WAS PERMITTED WAY BACK WHEN. AND THIS IS A DISTRICT OF THE CITY THAT PERMITS A BROAD RANGE OF RETAIL USES. IN MANY DISTRICTS OF THE CITY, IT'S ACTUALLY ALLOWED AS OF RIGHT. BUT DUE TO SOME QUIRKINESS AND THE FACT THAT THE ZONING WAS ESTABLISHED IN A SPECIAL PERMIT WAS APPROVED A LONG TIME AGO. AT THE TIME, A FITNESS CENTER WAS NOT A USE THAT WAS EXPLICITLY AUTHORIZED in the zoning and in the special permit. But there is a provision that allows the planning board to make a written determination to allow a proposed use if it is found to be compatible with and advances the policy objectives of the Eastern Cambridge plan and that it is necessary to support the predominant residential use in the PUD and the North Point Residence District. um so we didn't provide any written comment on this but i would just note that you know we did look at the special permit and and while the use is not explicitly authorizing in zoning which requires the determination the re the overall retail plan that was included with the pu did did anticipate fitness center uses so it's um not something that's that's necessarily unexpected but it does require a finding. So we've met with the proponent, the prospective retailers. Adam Weisenberg, I believe, is present, who is representing the group requesting the determination in case there's any questions.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah, we did have an opportunity to review the package that was submitted by the proponent. Do board members have any questions for Attorney Weisenberg? No. It seemed pretty straightforward to me, and it sounds like a very good addition to the North Point area. So then to my fellow board members, let me just ask, are there any objections to making a determination that the proposed use is compatible with and advances the policy objectives of the Eastern Cambridge Plan and that it is necessary to support the predominant residential use in the PUD in the North Point Residence District. Okay. Seeing no objections, is there a motion then to make such a determination?

This is Tom. So moved that we make this determination.

Thank you. Is there a second, please?

Ted, second.

Thank you, Ted. Roll call vote, please.

On that motion, Ted Cohen. Yes. Mary Lydecker.

Yes.

Diego Macias. Yes. Tom Sieniewicz.

Yes.

Ashley Tan. Ashley Tan, I didn't hear. Yes. Sorry, I didn't hear the response. Okay, I heard yes. Carolyn Zern.

Yes.

Mary Flynn.

Yes.

That's all members voting in favor.

Excellent. All right. Well, to the proponent and Attorney Weisenberg, thank you so much for hanging in there. We waited a long time for a short piece of our agenda, but they had a good outcome.

Yes. Thank you very much and have a good night.

Thank you. So that concludes the business on our agenda. Is there any additional comments from staff?

No, just a note, we will see you next week.

Okay, board members, any other comments? Thank you all for a really good discussion this evening. And without any further ado, I just say the meeting is adjourned. Good night, everyone.