10.25.2024

The housing crisis has been good for Elizabeth Warren’s multimillion-dollar Cambridge Victorian | Celtics top league in beer prices | Roxbury apartment developer finally clears key hurdle | Harris losing altitude in polls | Save the MCAS: Vote No on Question 2/by Matt Hills |

News tips? Story ideas? Email us at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com

No wonder there’s a housing crisis: Almost out of money and his back against the wall, a Roxbury developer wins tentative approval after a years-long, never-ending City Hall review process

That would be Scott Webster, head of Triple W Development in Roxbury.

Webster’s quest to build an six-story apartment building in the face of opposition from neighborhood NIMBYs and heartless city bureaucrats has made headlines since Contrarian Boston first broke the story last June.

Now after four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, Webster won tentative approval Thursday night from the Highland Park Architecture Conservation District board for his 1 Elmwood St. project after a heated, two hour debate.

Webster and his development partner, Minkoo Kang, had previously won a green light from the city’s zoning board only to endure a grueling, months-long review of their proposed Roxbury apartment building by the neighborhood architectural district panel.

Scott Webster, head of Triple W Development, works with his sons, Joseph, on his right, and Sean, on his left.

Critics on the panel said plans for the six story building was too tall and dense for the neighborhood, despite the site being next door to Roxbury Community College and The Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.

Comparisons with those larger buildings were deemed irrelevant by some board members since they fell just outside the boundary of the Highland Park architectural district.

Kang noted, as the meeting began, that the project’s survival hinged on the architectural board’s decision, with financing partners awaiting word.

Webster and his family “are at the very end of their resources,” Kang warned.

While the board voted to approve the project’s height and massing, the meeting was not without drama, with one project opponent resigning her seat in frustration.

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 now stands, part of which dates to the 1800s.

Still, the developers have made a number of changes to address concerns raised by the neighborhood design panel, reducing it by one floor to six stories, eliminating the basement, and lowering the total number of units to 39, from 47 previously.

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.

“I am super excited about the project,” Kai Grant, a neighborhood resident and local business person, told board members during the public comment section of the meeting. “The single units … are perfect for millennials to move into our community, especially young Black millennials, as well as some of the elders who have been displaced and want to move back to Roxbury.”

Warren’s blind spot: Progressive senator’s adopted hometown of Cambridge offers a prime example of what goes wrong when private sector housing development is stifled

When it comes to the housing crisis, Sen. Elizabeth Warren apparently has little use for complaints from developers on just how tough it is to build new homes, apartments and condos.

Too bad then, that she hasn’t been paying much attention to what is going on in Cambridge, where the progressive Dem has lived for decades in a multimillion-dollar Victorian and where upscale NIMBYism and restrictive local regs have made new housing of any sort a rare occurrence.