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Over 18 acres of municipal real estate on Boston's Frontage Road is expected to be declared as surplus property and offered up to developers, including the Boston Transportation Department tow lot.
Michelle Wu wants to make one thing clear: this won’t be a rerun of the Winthrop Square garage redevelopment saga.
As the Boston city council debates the sale of 18 acres on Frontage Road in South Boston to private developers, it’s likely to demand a bigger say about what gets built there, said Wu, chair of the council’s planning, development and transportation committee.
“We need to know in greater detail what we want to get out of this from a civic value perspective,” Wu said. “Do we want to reserve part of the parcels as open space, or workforce housing, or require a certain level of affordability?”
Wedged between I-93 and MBTA tracks, the properties don’t jump out as prime real estate. Current uses include the city’s impound lot for towed vehicles and repair shops for police cruisers and public works vehicles.
But in a compact city with few easy development sites left, the Frontage Road parcels are likely to attract widespread interest. They border the 19-acre Widett Circle food wholesalers’ property, which has been on the market since late 2017, and a transit-friendly section of Dorchester Avenue being rezoned for 16 million square feet of new development.
“It may be hard for some to imagine this as a high-density, exciting neighborhood,” said Brendan Carroll, director of intelligence for Boston-based Perry Brokerage. “But the Prudential Center sits on land that once looked exactly like this.”
There are limits to developers’ appetites, even in Boston’s heated real estate market. Not a single firm bid on SouthGate, a 5-acre site between Kneeland Street and I-93, when the Massachusetts Department of Transportation offered it up for sale last year.
Jonathan Davis, CEO of the Boston-based Davis Cos., said a sticking point with SouthGate was MassDOT’s minimum $167 million bid. Davis is more optimistic about the potential of the Frontage Road parcels, given their proximity to the MBTA’s Red Line.
“It’s very strategically located real estate,” Davis said. “You have to take a longer term view of the parcels. People are going to want to be near Andrew or Broadway (stations) before Frontage Road, and it’s going to take a while to create a context.”
Steve Adams
Capturing Public Benefits On-Site
Recent flooding during coastal storms and cost of repairing the aging facilities prompted the mayor’s office to begin the disposition process, including a search for replacement locations for the services that run out of the property. Nearly 60 percent of the land is used for surface parking.
How much developers would be willing to pay to pay will hinge on the amount of density approved for the site. The BPDA this year is beginning a planning study of the Newmarket area, where a new MBTA commuter rail station opened in 2013, and interest in the area intensified after Widett Circle’s selection as the preferred stadium site in the city’s abandoned Olympic bid.
City councilors are likely to demand a say in the specifics of any development deal. The Frontage Road parcels represent a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to address many of the city’s hot-button real estate issues, ranging from affordable housing to preservation of open space and improving public transit access, Wu said.
When the city prepared to sell its defunct Winthrop Square garage in 2015, councilors balked before handing control of the 1.1-acre parcel property to the Boston Planning and Development Agency, which issued the request for proposals and controlled what would be built in its place.
The council relented after the BPDA agreed to give 100 percent of the proceeds to the city, and the BPDA chose Millennium Partners’ plan for a 1.65-million-square-foot high-end office and luxury condo tower that could generate up to $163 million. Those funds have been earmarked for everything from a bus rapid transit plan to maintenance of Boston Common.
In contrast, the size of the Frontage Road parcels offer a chance to capture public benefits on-site, Wu said. Those could include affordable and workforce housing, open space and connections to the planned 3.5-mile South Bay Harbor Trail from Roxbury to the Seaport District.
Wu’s committee will recommend whether to transfer the property to the city’s public facilities commission. But it’s not required to do so until late in the process, giving the council more leverage over shaping the final product, she said.
“Winthrop Square was going to be a tower no matter what,” Wu said. “But this (site) could be anything. This is about what we want to get out of this.”
That discussion will likely result in a series of trade-offs, Perry Brokerage’s Carroll said.
“You have the city trying to get the most amount of money for its assets. On the other side you have the city with a responsibility to create places where people of all incomes can live and participate,” he said. “If the city says it wants to monetize this to the maximum, almost by definition the uses will not be affordable.”
