Two sides clash at zoning hearing for proposed Roxbury development

Winthrop Street development would house birth center, other nonprofits, but some community members object to loss of housing, history

For Nashira Baril, her proposed project to redevelop four parcels in a residential area near Nubian Square would mean the next step toward the completion of a dream to bring a birth center into Boston, plus the creation of a permanent home for five other nonprofit organizations.

However, a collection of neighbors and community members said the same project would mean a change from the residential neighborhood they love.

The two sides clashed at a zoning hearing for the proposed development, officially called the Community Movement Commons, on Feb. 4, with the project team and some residents speaking in support and a collection of neighbors voicing opposition to a development they say would disrupt the continuity of their neighborhood.

Ultimately, the Zoning Board voted to defer a decision for three weeks to give the project team more time to engage with its neighbors.

Opponents of the project have expressed concerns about the size and commercial use of the proposed building, as well as what they said is poor or limited communication from the project team and the fact construction would mean the demolition of two long-standing — but currently vacant — homes.

For the team and community members who support the development, the opportunities for greater maternal health care, as well as permanent homes for nonprofits doing work in the community, are hard to ignore.

Boston’s only birth center

At the heart of the proposed development is the Neighborhood Birth Center, which would be the only facility of its kind in the city.

A birth center is designed to serve as an alternative to a hospital as a place for expectant parents to give birth. It’s intended to offer a home-like environment to give birth and generally make use of the service of midwives rather than doctors.

A 2020 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that a lack of data makes it challenging to identify trends between birth location — if a child is delivered at a hospital, a birth center, or at home — and maternal mortality and morbidity.

However, other research has shown that care from midwives, who would provide the services at the birth center, can lead to fewer cases of infant mortality and severe injury, reduced need for cesarean sections and fewer premature births

Across the country, and in Boston particularly, health experts recognize a need to address inequities in maternal health outcomes. According to a 2023 report from the Boston Public Health Commission, Black infants in the city experience higher rates of low birthweight, pre-term birth and infant mortality.

Supporting birth centers generally has been a policy priority for both the city and the state. A 2023 report released by the state Department of Public Health identified birth centers as a way to reduce racial disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality and recommended updating the department’s regulations for the centers.

In 2024, the city of Boston announced a $50,000 award through the Healthy Pregnancies and Births Grant to Neighborhood Birth Center to support work done by Neighborhood Birth Center.

Baril, executive director and founder of the center, clarified that the Wu administration has expressed support for a birth center generally, though not necessarily in this location.

And for some community members, the possible benefits of the birth center are a big draw.

Peaches Cobb, a neighbor who lives on Winthrop St., said she is “totally enthused about this project.”

Cobb has a background as a doula — another kind of maternal care provider who provides guidance and support but typically doesn’t have formal obstetric training — but is not affiliated with the birth center.

Other neighbors said that if the project was just the birth center, they’d be ok with it. But, while over half the built space in the proposed design is slated to house the birth center, the project is not exclusively dedicated to it.

“It was a whole mystery. All they were promoting was a birthing center, a birthing center and Black maternal morbidity and all that. Fine. People were for it, no problem,” said Daphne Ellison, another Winthrop St. neighbor.

But then she learned that it would host five other nonprofits as well, an inclusion she said wasn’t always clear.

If built, the other about half of the building, besides the birth center, would be divided between community spaces, like a gathering room and a kitchen, as well as offices for the collection of five nonprofits — comprised of the Center for Economic Democracy; Matahari Women Worker’s Center, a non-union organization representing women workers in the domestic and service industries; Sisters Unchained, which supports women and girls whose parents have been incarcerated; Resist, Inc., a foundation that funds social justice efforts; and the Movement Sustainability Commons, which supports other justice-focused nonprofits.

Two houses at 23 Kearsarge Ave. and 14 Winthrop St. are at the center of a community debate. PHOTO: AVERY BLEICHFELD/BAY STATE BANNER

Some in the community said that proposals for commercial building just don’t fit.

“The landscape of the neighborhood is just not conducive to the plans that they’re trying to present to move forward with,” said Rep. Chynah Tyler, who represents the district.

Baril said this location was important to the birth center to make sure it has the home-like feel she envisioned and because it’s close to Boston Medical Center, which the center has signed an agreement to partner with in instances where emergency medical care is required.

Already, the neighborhood hosts two schools and four houses of worship. Limited parking is already a concern, some residents said, which in their eyes means that enough non-residential construction is enough.

“It has just been rampant with the development and the selling and the reconstruction and the tearing down, and they’re doing over,” Ellison said. “It’s just too much.”

But for others, the already changing landscape means that they have trouble turning away a project just because it isn’t a residential development.

“I wonder about the picture that is being set up that this is like houses and houses and houses and houses, and we are ripping down all the houses and making buildings when a lot of what’s around there are two schools and four churches,” said Stephanie Crawford, who lives a couple of doors down from the proposed site of the development.

Community members have said they object to switching the zoning of the parcels away from residential to house office space. Some described the development as an “office park,” a description Baril called “simply not true.”

The total space reserved for offices for the five nonprofits would be about 22.6% of the built floor space of the project, according to design numbers shared with the Banner.

Still, community members opposed to the project said that any office space is too much.

“Why Roxbury? Why Winthrop [Street]? Why Kearsarge [Avenue]?” Ellison said.

Others pointed out that the city and region are in the middle of a housing crisis, suggesting now is not the time to build new commercial construction.

“The city talks about how housing is vital, and here we have six businesses — nonprofits — who want to demolish two homes to build an office building in a residential neighborhood,” said Sophia Burks, who lives on Winthrop St., during the zoning hearing.

But Chrislene DeJean, senior director of People and Culture at the Center for Economic Democracy, who had to move out of Boston, said she knows what it’s like to be pushed out of a city but still sees reason to do this project.

“I’m definitely attuned to the housing crisis right now,” she said. “I’m also thinking about we have the opportunity to create, so what are we creating for our futures?”

One point of concern for him: The birth center would only have four beds to serve expectant parents — something he pointed to as an example of how the project is less focused on the birth center, even as it promotes it as a main part.

But Baril said that, generally, birth centers don’t tend to have more than two to four beds, at risk of losing the home-like atmosphere that they try to achieve so as to set themselves apart from hospitals.

“Any bigger than that and you lose what makes a birth center a birth center, which is the level of care, the intimacy, the home-like setting,” she said. 

Other neighbors see the new home for the nonprofits as a benefit for the community. Cobb said that if it moves forward, she’s happy the project will be built in Roxbury.

“All these are organizations that are needed in Roxbury,” she said.

The community space element of the project, too, is appealing to her. Cobb said that element will bring value and unity.

A lot of residents on the street don’t know each other, Cobb said — a sentiment expressed by Crawford as well. New community space in the proposed development could help with that.

Already, Crawford said, the events Community Movement Commons has held to get to know the community and provide information about the project has connected her with other neighbors she hadn’t met.

Baril said she sees the inclusion of the community space as a reflection of how the nonprofits want to interact with their neighbors.

“That is our offering to the community, and that is who we are as organizations,” she said.

Neighborhood communication

Neighbors like Nadine Riggs, who lives at 43 Winthrop St., said she feels the Community Movement Commons team hasn’t been receptive to community concerns.

One issue for Riggs was how the CMC team handled a meeting before they purchased the land. That meeting was held in mid-January of 2023. The organization closed on the deal on Feb. 2.

At that meeting, Riggs said, community members expressed opposition to the project. When, weeks later, the sale went through anyway, she said it felt like they had been lied to.

“Two weeks later [after the community meeting], you signed the deed,” Riggs said. “So that is how this all kind of began, and it’s been an argument and a struggle since that time.”

Baril rejected that description and said that she heard some support at that first meeting and more from community members who reached out afterward, but she said she didn’t feel comfortable speaking up at the gathering.

And even at that meeting, the team from Community Movement Commons hadn’t settled on making the purchase, Baril said. She recalled speaking with the Center for Economic Democracy’s then-director, Aaron Tanaka, the night before they closed on the deal to discuss if it was worth it in light of the community concerns.

The assessment, Baril said, was that they felt there was enough community support — even if, at that initial meeting, there were loud voices in opposition — that it was worth doing.

“I’m not in this business to fight community,” Baril said.

Bil Marzuki, who lives at 41 Winthrop St., also said he felt like the Community Movement Commons team hasn’t been willing to compromise on the project.

“It’s been, ‘This is our way. This is how it’s going to be. We’re not going to sell, you’re going to have to take this,’” he said.

But compromise could be challenging. Marzuki also said that there is no situation where some of the project’s staunchest opponents — himself included — would agree to the proposal.

And the project design hasn’t been static. The initial proposal had portions of the building that were four stories tall. The proposed built area would have clocked in at nearly 20,000 square feet, leaving less than 9,000 square feet non-built for green space and parking.

When the CMC team heard community feedback looking for a shorter building with a smaller footprint and more green space, they went back to the drawing board and came back with an entirely new design.

The new proposal, the one currently under consideration by the Zoning Board, is just over half the size. At its highest, it’s two stories tall. The non-space on the parcels — the green spaces and the parking — make up almost 3,800 square feet more than the built space.

David Saladik, an architect at MASS Design Group working on the project, said that in his experience, a change of that scale is much larger than what he sees in the typical process.

For Crawford, the original four-story design felt too large. She said she was glad to see the project shrink after neighbors voiced concern.

“I thought it was really cool to be able to have such an open mind about what the community was wanting, and also about not overcrowding that space,” Crawford said.

Impacts on historical legacy

Tearing down the homes has also been a sticking point for the neighbors in opposition. Many of them say they’d like to see the building stay put.

“This is Boston — we renovate old things all the time,” said Riggs, the neighbor at 43 Winthrop St. “We repurpose old things all the time.”

Much of that concern, they said, comes from the legacy they said the two homes have in a neighborhood that has been designated as the Moreland Street Historical District.

One neighbor, Carl Todisco, pointed to a legacy at the house at 23 Kearsarge Ave. that he said connects it to Dr. John Collins Warren, who performed the first surgery under anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital and whose family lends their name to nearby Warren Avenue.

According to records from the National Register of Historic Places, the parcel that now hosts the Kearsarge Avenue home was owned and sold by the Warren family to John Warren’s son-in-law in 1834, though the records don’t tie John Warren specifically to a home on the property.

The National Register filing suggests that the house, built in 1834, was most likely the first built in the district that century.

According to the same record, the design for a house on the property was built from plans by “R. Bond” — likely  Richard Bond, a prominent architect in the area at the time.

Nearby historic buildings have been saved and repurposed in recent years. Tyler, the state representative, pointed to the Center for Teen Empowerment, which now has its national offices in a historic home at 130 Warren St.

“It can be done, and it’s been done right on that same block,” she said.

That home’s legacy is directly tied to John Warren, who built it on the property in 1846.

But Saladik said architects working on the project have tried to track down information about the historical significance of the Winthrop Street and Kearsarge Avenue homes and said that the team is skeptical of some of the claims.

“From our perspective, the house, the houses are certainly old, and there is history there, but they’re not historic in any officially recognized way,” Saladik said.

Neither property is individually logged as a historical property with either the city’s Landmarks Commission or the National Register. Saladik said, from the research, he doubts that the houses currently on the properties are the ones that were built in the early 1800s.

The styles described in some of the official documentation don’t match what is currently on the site, he said — both are described as “Gothic Revival” homes, while he said they now better match a “colonial” style home. The city assessor’s website lists both homes as being built in 1890.

Baril said the team, in response to community appreciation for the red house at 14 Winthrop St., considered an effort to retrofit or to see if it could be worked into the design.

The original, four-story design included it at the center of two other independent parts of the building, serving as a lobby — what Saladik called a “radical welcome.” Visitors would enter through the house and turn one way to enter the birth center and the other to go to the offices.

Even then, some community members were opposed to a design that incorporated the red house, with new construction added on.

“It’s like walking into someone’s home and redesigning their living room and saying, ‘Why aren’t you happy? I’ve made it look really good.’ Well, that’s not what I wanted,” Riggs said.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Baril said the team received an assessment that the cost to save the two houses would be several million dollars more. The city of Boston’s Inspectional Services Department had previously determined the building to be “unsafe and dangerous” in 2022 and Saladik said years of disuse left the red house structurally unsound and full of mold.

Long-term stability

For some neighbors, the potential financial stability of a cohort of nonprofit organizations presents another point of concern. Riggs said she worried about what would happen if the project went forward only for some of the nonprofits involved to face financial hardship and have to leave.

During remarks at the zoning hearing on Feb. 4, Tyler, the state representative, said that financial feasibility is a concern for her.

“Especially in a time right now where the landscape has changed as far as funding is concerned — and funding is definitely going to be limited over the next couple of years — I’m concerned about that,” she said.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has sought to freeze federal funding in an attempt to realign outgoing funds with his administration’s priorities. Tyler did not confirm if she was referencing the federal funding landscape in her comments at the zoning hearing.

But, while federal funding is not an uncommon source for nonprofits, all the organizations involved with Community Movement Commons said they’re not expecting the freeze to impact them.

All of the organizations involved in the project said they currently do not receive federal funds. And many of the nonprofits said they feel highly stable in their funding.

Seth Kirshenbaum, co-director at Movement Sustainability Commons, said that his organization, as well as Resist, Inc., which his organization does financial management for, had raised funds for the entirety of their 2025 budget before the start of the year.

Vanessa Ly, who heads Sisters Unchained, said the organization has a 10-year legacy of operations.

In an email, Jéssica Oliveira, director of people and operations at Matahari Women Worker’s Center, said she sees the recent moves from the federal government as an indication that this kind of project is especially important.

“The federal government disinvestment in our communities can be seen as evidence that this project and our collective work is more urgent than ever,” she wrote.

The organizations, together, are providing support to each other and, notably, to the Neighborhood Birth Center, which Baril said will help the center to operate more freely and support a wider range of patients.

Many birth centers, she said, are self-financed and operate in debt, which makes taking insurance challenging due to the structure of reimbursement rates. By partnering with the five nonprofits, she said the center will be able to accept insurance rather than using a cash-pay model.

“We were really committed to not only being covered by insurance but also to a large portion — 50% — of MassHealth, which tends to underpay,” Baril said. “The way to do that means that we have to open debt-free and own the property.”

At the zoning hearing, she said that the project had raised all the funds it needed to build without carrying significant debt and would be fully reimbursed by insurance.

Part of that, she said in an interview, is state maternal health legislation passed last summer. That bill tackled a wide omnibus of topics, including certification for midwives, making them eligible to be reimbursed for insurance.

“I gave birth to both my kids at home. I paid several thousand dollars out of pocket, and I could afford to do so,” Baril said. “It’s like a privilege that I could access, but that licensure will make those midwives able to bill for insurance.”

The project returns to the Zoning Board for its next hearing on Feb. 25.