Wu shakes up clueless press office | Online local news startups on rise as newspapers fall | Taxpayer tab is $46 million and rising in decade-old state drug lab scandal | Contrarian Boston debate poll results | Boston says it wants new housing, but does it really? |
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Bureaucracy gone mad? Amid a dire housing crisis, a Roxbury developer’s plans for a new apartment building are mired in a never-ending City Hall review process
For a city that says that it’s desperate for new housing, Boston certainly seems to go out of its way to make it hard for anyone who actually tries to build it.
Just ask Scott Webster, head of Triple W Development in Roxbury. Webster has spent the last four years - and hundreds of thousands of dollars - attempting to line up the myriad of City Hall approvals needed to break ground on a new, relatively modest six story apartment building next door to Roxbury Community College.
His proposed 1 Elmwood St. project now faces a potentially make or break vote on July 25 in front of a neighborhood architectural preservation group.
The hearing comes more than a year after Webster won a green light from City Hall’s two main permitting agencies in what he thought was the final seal of approval for his 40-unit apartment building.
It turns out it was anything but that.
“I am barely holding on,” Webster told Contrarian Boston. “Like anyone else, once you are in it, you’re in it. You are trying to find a way to keep it going. It’s just a shame the process is what it is.”
Instead, Webster was informed last year that he had to undergo a whole new vetting process before the Highland Park Architecture Conservation District board, which had just recently gained jurisdiction over his proposed Roxbury development site.
Over the last year, Webster and his team, which includes his two sons Joseph and Sean, have been forced to downsize the project, which would take shape where an older, and not particularly distinguished, wooden building, part of which dates to the 1800s, now stands.
Webster and his development partner, Minkoo Kang, have reduced it by a floor to six stories, eliminating the basement, and lowered the total number of units to 39, from 47 previously.
They’ve also increased the number of affordable units, to be rented out at below market rates, to seven, or 18 percent, up from the 13 percent requirement.
Webster and Kang, who has been effectively working for free over the past year, are now hoping the changes to the project will be enough to win over the board of the Highland Park ACD.
The pair has also been working closely on the changes with the project's design firm, West Work, headed by Katherine Faulkner, FAIA.
Overall, the project will feature smaller, studio, and one and two-bedroom units in the 400 to 600 square foot range, with the aim of keeping the market-rate units available for around $2,400 a month in rent.
Still, the changes, along with delaying the project, have also reduced the number of apartments that will be able to be built.
And at a time when high interest rates and high building costs have shelved plans across the city for new apartment and condo buildings, Webster said he has the financing lined up to move forward.
Given the dramatic fall off in new housing construction over the past two years, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu should be throwing the guy a parade, not letting a minor commission run amuck and kill a deserving project.
“It is very discouraging for the community as a whole to slow down more housing in the city when it is desperately needed,” Webster said.
The verdict is in: Sizable majority of Contrarian Boston poll respondents want Dems to consider replacing President Biden as the party’s standard bearer
That’s the result of a poll Contrarian Boston took in the wake of Biden’s dismal showing in Thursday night’s presidential debate.
Seventy-six percent of the 353 readers who responded want to see the Dems at least consider their options for replacing Biden as their candidate, following what can only be described as a debacle of a debate performance by the 81-year-old president.
“You should have worded it “should democrats replace” — not CONSIDER replacing,” wrote one long-time local Democrat and Contrarian Boston subscriber who served for years in local government. “Oh dear god that was a horror show.”
Meanwhile, the editorial board of The New York Times is now calling on Biden to drop out of the race.
Not just Annie Dookhan: Suffolk County DA agrees to dismiss more cases as questions mount about evidence of possible wrongdoing by other chemists in decade-old state drug lab scandal
By Maggie Mulvihill
The fallout from the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute scandal, now more than a decade old, is continuing, as this spring the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office agreed to drop charges against at least three drug defendants, Contrarian Boston has learned.
The decisions by Suffolk County DA Kevin Hayden came in part because the state Inspector General never disclosed multiple referrals it made to the Attorney General for possible criminal conduct committed by chemists and supervisors at the lab, besides disgraced chemist Annie Dookhan.
Contrarian Boston last year reported on the referrals, which the Inspector General’s office kept hidden since 2013, after a Superior Court judge ordered their release following years of attempts by drug defendants’ lawyers to obtain the materials. A spokesman for DA Hayden declined comment.
The Hinton scandal, and similar misconduct involving former chemist Sonja Farak at the state lab in Amherst, led to the dismissal of tens of thousands of drug convictions across the state, making it the largest crime lab debacle in U.S. history.
To date, the scandal has cost state taxpayers at least $46 million, with costs continuing to mount as defendants challenge their convictions due to the widespread misconduct at the Hinton lab and the state laboratory in Amherst.
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