City planners take stock of Jamaica Plain’s Washington Street corridor

Egleston Square Main Street Executive Director Luis Edgardo Cotto says market forces are threatening many long-time residents.

Between Egleston Square and Forest Hills, Washington Street provides a series of vignettes that speak volumes about Jamaica Plain’s cultural and economic diversity: bodegas and Dominican restaurants, hipster bikes parked in front of the Canto 6 bakery, the Egleston Square YMCA, triple-deckers, large brick apartment buildings and bars that still cater to the area’s dwindling working class.

Last week, a team of city planners from across the United States viewed that economic and cultural diversity up close, walking the mile from Egleston to Forest Hills as part of a planning exercise aimed at generating ideas for development along the corridor. The tour group, members of the Urban Land Institute, then spoke in the Boston Redevelopment Authority Board Room to a group of city officials and neighborhood activists about the area’s potential, calling for large, transit-oriented development projects near Forest Hills and smaller in-fill projects between Williams Street and Egleston Square.

They called for a master plan to guide growth in the area. BRA director Brian Golden, who attended the meeting, said his agency will soon develop a master plan for that corridor, as well as other areas of the city.

Those master plans, Golden said, would be incorporated in a larger master plan for the entire city, providing a unified vision for housing, economic development and transportation in Boston.

“We haven’t done a city-wide master plan in 50 years,” Golden told the gathering in the BRA board room.

Mayor Martin Walsh, who attended the meeting, said the Urban Land Institute’s study of the area would inform master plans for Egleston Square and the city.

“What you are doing here today is giving us ideas on how we can move forward,” he told the planners.

Walsh has called for the construction of 53,000 new housing units in Boston, an ambitious plan he says will ease pressure on Boston’s real estate market — one of the most expensive in the country. The BRA’s city wide master plan, and the smaller plans it will encompass, will help the city prioritize areas for construction of new housing.

Recommendations

The Urban Land Institute is a nonprofit association of urban planners, city officials and real estate developers who share information, best practices and ideas on urban land use. As part of ULI’s Daniel Rose Fellows program, a team of urban planning professionals spent four days in Boston studying the corridor and presented their recommendations last Thursday.

While many of the ULI recommendations were specific to Egleston Square, some recommendations were directed at lack of uniformity and predictability in the process of obtaining approval for new projects.

Calvin Gladney, a Washington, D.C. real estate developer, said the city’s Article 80 process, through which developers are required to obtain community support for their projects, is too cumbersome. Gladney suggested that many of the specifics developers and neighborhood residents typically fight over — building height, density and parking — should be governed by a plan that would prevent what he called “parcel-by-parcel fights.”

“What we’re proposing is a more efficient development process,” he said. “If you want to build 53,000 new units in this city, the development process has to support development activity. Since we’re outsiders and we’re going to run and get on a plane, we can say that.”

Many of the ULI team’s specific recommendations for the corridor were centered on the vacant, city- and state-owned parcels near Forest Hills.

“While a lot of people might not appreciate density or high-rise development, this is a place where you can do it,” said Rick Dishnica, a San Francisco-based real estate consultant, speaking about the vast swaths of vacant land near Forest Hills. Dishnica and others from the Urban Land Institute said the vacant parcels would be a good site for affordable housing, large retail projects and office space.

Beyond Williams Street, growth potential is limited by the density of the street scape, which features both residential and commercial uses. Along that stretch of Washington Street, developers have proposed the construction of a six-story, 76 unit apartment building on the site of a former electrical supply store.

Yet the ULI presenters said commercial uses would have the greatest impact on the area’s revitalization.

“Housing may not be the primary driver,” Dishnica said. “Commercial activity should be what you’re focused on.”

Among the recommendations the group offered were increased funding for storefront improvements and the redevelopment of the site currently occupied by the Greater Egleston YMCA to accommodate retail space. The panel of housing planners also recommended establishing design standards for development along Washington Street, façade improvements for storefronts, improved lighting along the street, better landscaping and trees, enhanced code enforcement, better pedestrian crossings and stricter regulation of billboards.

Displacement

Among the hot-button issues the panel did not investigate was displacement of moderate- and low-income residents in the area, many of whom are leaving in the face of precipitous rent increases.

When City Life/Vida Urbana organizer Maria Cristina Blanco asked members of the panel about their ideas, the panelists offered none.

“So no recommendations for people who are being displaced now?” she asked.

“We really haven’t drilled down to that level,” a panelist responded.

Department of Neighborhood Development Director Sheila Dillon, who is a fellow with ULI, said her agency is considering ways to maintain affordability in the area.

“We looking at the existing housing stock and how it could be acquired by nonprofits and benevolent for-profits,” she said.

Washington Street between Egleston Square and Forest Hills has traditionally been a working class community. Up until 1987, the elevated Orange Line, which had stops at Egleston Square and Green Street, cast a shadow over the street and was thought to have depressed real estate values on Washington and nearby streets.

In recent years, as Jamaica Plain has gentrified, rents and home prices along Washington Streets have been on the rise.

In an interview following the meeting, Egleston Square Main Street Executive Director Luis Edgardo Cotto said a wave of new buyers and renters is sweeping toward Washington Street from the more affluent side of Jamaica Plain closer to Jamaica Pond.

“Jamaica Plain is now one of the hottest real estate markets in the country,” he said. “Properties consistently sell for 60 percent higher than the asking price. Displacement is very real.”