Developers are putting the finishing touches on a proposal for a new life sciences building at 109 Brookline Ave, but concerns remain over the lab’s impact on the community and whether it’s offering enough to compensate.
Life sciences developer IQHQ is in the home stretch of the public review process for its proposal with the project’s Community Advisory Committee (CAC) holding its final meeting this week.
Plans for the 239,000-square-foot building are mostly finalized in anticipation of a January 13 vote by the board of the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA), but some public commentators at the CAC’s final meeting were skeptical the building would be a net boon to the neighborhood.
The building would generate over $2 million in one-time linkage funding for affordable housing and workforce training in the Fenway and is anticipated to bring in around that much annually in tax revenue.
A specific STEM jobs training program was added to the project to mollify anxieties that the Fenway’s workforce wouldn’t find employment on-site, and 1,200 square feet on the ground floor has been set aside for the Fenway Community Center.
IQHQ is also touting a number of transportation improvements to the property. The proposal would widen sidewalks around the building, streamline a loading dock to ease traffic, add a bike lane to Overland Street and fund a traffic study of Kenmore Square and Brookline Avenue.
City Councilor Kenzie Bok emphasized that the traffic study would go a long way toward materially improving traffic conditions.
“From my perspective, a $600,000 serious transportation study is something I would have to spend a budget season or two fighting for,” she said.
“And even if it’s put in the capital budget, whether it’s executed on is a different question. Actually implementing the study’s suggestions is another capital task that has to go in the queue. IQHQ is putting up the dollars to have that study happen with some left over toward actually implementing it.”
Those offers still aren’t enough for some of the area’s residents.
The Fenway has seen an explosion of real estate development in recent years, much of it around life sciences, and some locals say transportation improvements and space for the community center are missing the heart of the community’s needs.
“Every
comment from someone who actually lives in the Fenway is that we’ve
asked the BPDA for years to include affordable housing, a daycare or a
school, and every new project mitigation avoids those pieces,” said
Fenway resident John Bookston. “Fenway will die with what the BPDA is
doing to us. We are dying, slowly. We have fewer and fewer permanent
residents.”
Some CAC
members were also reluctant to approve of the project without a
commitment that it would not house labs of biosafety level (BSL) 3 or
higher, a score that would indicate working with transmissible diseases
carrying a high risk to individual researchers or, at BSL 4, the entire
community in the event of an outbreak.
Developers
said they would “never” propose housing any BSL 4 labs in the building,
but characterized BSL 3 labs as relatively common and vital to
research.
“BSL3 is
categorized by the World Health Organization as being high risk to those
conducting the research and a low community risk,” said Erik
Lustgarten, a senior associate with architecture firm Gensler.
“The
Longwood Medical Area has conducted BSL 3 research since the 1980s,
when AIDS was BSL 3 because it was unknown how infectious it was.”
In
the end, it’s unlikely that residents unsatisfied with the current
benefits on offer will see substantial changes before the proposal goes
up for a BPDA board vote.
Many
of the more critical voices during the CAC’s final meeting acknowledged
that, but insisted it was important to express their concerns in the
hope they would lead to more systemic changes to how the city approaches
development.
“Transportation
improvements are a drop in the bucket when we look at what the
community needs to encompass all this lab space,” said Rich Giordano, a
CAC member.
“We’re
getting 5 million square feet of lab space within about 3 blocks. Where
are these people going to live? Where’s the daycare, the school? What
about all the little shops? Nobody’s keeping track, and now it’s a
couple years too late to start. This isn’t an IQHQ problem. This is a
systemic problem.”
