Thomas Breen photo
Developer Nick Falker (right) with local architect Dylan Hayn.
The developer of a new six-story, 44-unit market-rate apartment complex planned for a Howe Street parking lot has cleared his last regulatory hurdles for the project, and plans to start construction in March.
At the most recent meeting of the City Plan Commission on the ground floor of 200 Orange St., commissioners granted unanimous site plan approval for Broadway Living LLC’s planned new multi-family apartment complex at 104 Howe St.
Cambridge Realty Partners’ Nick Falker, who owns the Broadway Living holding company, told the commissioners at the meeting this past Wednesday night that he had initially envisioned building a taller residential building with at least 60 units. But his company ultimately pulled back from that denser project because that would have required a zone change.
The surface parking lot at 104 Howe St.
“Is it all market rate?” City Plan Commissioner and Westville Alder Adam Marchand asked. “No thought of affordable?”
“We did underwrite” that possibility for including affordable when “we were considering a larger project,” Falker said. But no more.
He said his company plans to begin construction in March, with a 12 to 15-month construction timeline.
The resulting 44-unit complex will contain a mix of studio apartments, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms, and four-bedrooms, he said. There will be 22 on-site parking spaces, for which the landlord previously won a special exception from the Board of Zoning Appeals. The city’s zoning code would have otherwise required this project to have at least 40 on-site parking spaces.
The audience at Wednesday’s City Plan Commission meeting.
“The parking lot is currently very underutilized,” Falker said about the lot atop which this new apartment complex will be built. Falker’s company also owns the 84-unit apartment complex right next door at 100 Howe St. The surface parking lot is currently used by tenants of that building, he said, as well as by local businesses that reserve parking.
“The occupancy for the lot is fairly low.”
The cooler weather appears to be slowing 3/5ths down.
More seriously, this project would have been (somewhat) more likely to have included affordable units if the developer had been allowed to build at greater density. But residents of neighborhoods like Dwight, which have a real need for affordable housing, are wary of denser developments.