What happened to K2C2? City planners decided to let developers do it bit by bit
Surprising many of the city’s most savvy watchers of development, the Community Development Department long ago decided on its own to introduce proposals from the 18-month, $350,000 studies of Kendall and Central squares piecemeal, parcel by parcel as developers came forward with projects, said Brian Murphy, assistant city manager for community development.
“It’s happening, but in segments rather than in one fell swoop,” Murphy said Monday of the so-called K2C2 process. “It’s easier to wrap your head around it [that way], and some reasons have to do with timing.”
“It’s just a decision that was made as the most effective way to do it,” he said.
Murphy said he couldn’t remember a specific conversation when “within the CDD staff we looked at it [and] said we’d do it this way,” but recalled that the city planners decided the 26-acre plan put forward by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its eastern campus in Kendall Square – proposed in the spring of 2011 and approved April 8, 2013, by the City Council – was the start of the city’s approval of the Kendall portion.
“It made sense as a first-mover piece,” Murphy said.
It means developers design projects following K2C2 guidelines, and if those projects are approved they mark effective approval of the guidelines as zoning law.
View from Planning Board
Hugh Russell, chairman of the Planning Board, confirmed Murphy’s plan, but with two differences: He gave his board credit for the approach, rather than Murphy’s department; and he said it applied only to Kendall Square, and not to Central Square.
In fact, he hoped to find out at a Monday roundtable between the board and City Council how the completed C2 process fit into the coming creation of a citywide development master plan. “The strategy of C2 is a little unclear to me,” he said. “It’s very unclear how C2 fits in. K2 is, in my mind, different.”
In an example of how differently he saw the squares’ zoning approaches, Russell referred at the roundtable to a Central Square proposal called Mass+Main by Twining Properties and Normandy Real Estate and wondered whether the city would keep it and zoning “on the back burner for three years” while a master plan was written. “What do we tell a developer who wants to go forward?” he asked.
Began in 2011
In response to the council, the city began looking for consultants in January 2011 for a study of the two squares, although there had already been a red ribbon commission in place examining Central Square and its future. In April 2011 the city awarded a contract to Goody Clancy, a 100-person Boston firm with experience in Cambridge. At the time, Murphy said the consultant would “not just hit the ground running, but sprinting at breakneck speed.” Goody Clancy’s reports on Kendall and Central were released by his department in December 2013.
In May, Murphy identified MIT’s project, referred to as PUD-5, as “really the first zoning that really by and large followed the K2 recommendations, albeit with some minor adjustments and tweaks in terms of what the distribution was of community benefits … The difference between the K2 recommendations and what the council adopted were quite minor.”
Volpe is “crucial”
Next up in Kendall is a proposal for the 14-acre John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, owned by the government but central to plans for a future, more active and entertaining Kendall Square. Goody Clancy saw the space becoming a block-sized park accompanied across the square by 2,000 to 2,500 new housing units, up to 3 million square feet of office and research space and, at ground level, between 200,000 and 250,000 square feet of retail. The park was described as being a focal point and crossroads for the community, and Russell still calls it “crucial” to the future of the square.
Murphy expected to see Volpe recommendations within the first two months of 2015, and Russell said he knew the de facto developer of the site – the federal agency known as the U.S. General Services Administration Office of Real Property Utilization & Disposal – is “anxious to see how the city has adopted some revised zoning.”
The problem with that, based on what Murphy and Russell himself said about their approach to adopting K2 principles, is that there will be no adopted revised zoning until the government proposes it for its Volpe land.
But Russell said the GSA could just request proposals based on K2’s proposed zoning that “could be evaluated and accepted based on a public process.”
Central Square taking longer
Central, although its process started long before Kendall’s, is taking longer to develop.
In January, Murphy told the Planning Board that an economic consultant had been hired to look at economic assumptions made for Central Square and was “working on a report now. We hope to be [before] the Planning Board with that in the near future … sort of be testing some of the underlying assumptions and whether or not it actually makes sense and to try to come back in with K2 and C2 Zonings for discussions.”
Some 11 months later, the report is not yet final, Murphy said, with $17,339 already paid to consultant Sarah Woodworth on a total $24,950 contract. He expected the final report to be completed by January, because “some of the research informing the analysis, such as interviews with relevant parties, took longer than expected.”
Surprised citizens, councillor
Alerted to Murphy’s piece-by-piece approach to zoning in Kendall and Central squares, councillor Dennis Carlone asked about it at the Monday roundtable, saying it creates “a mess.”
But Carlone – elected to the council only a year ago, but an expert in architecture and urban planning who has focused on development and zoning while in office – hadn’t been aware of the approach before Monday.
“That’s not the way you do planning,” Carlone said. “That’s the opposite of planning.”
Steve Kaiser, a former state government transportation expert who watches development and traffic issues in the city, was also surprised when hearing of Murphy’s approach. “This is sort of the first time I’ve heard that,” he said.
Barbara Broussard, president of the East Cambridge Planning Team, was another surprised city development expert.
“I’m surprised,” Broussard said. “Is this the best approach for getting the perfect, viable square?”
At Monday’s roundtable and in complaints by residents dating back months, the Planning Board has been rebuked for an approach that looks at development project by project rather than as an aggregate or with an overall view.
“Yeah, it’s being done in segments,” Murphy said. “But I don’t think it’s had a dramatic impact on what has happened.”
This post was updated Nov. 13, 2015, to clarify that numbers of housing units, square footage for retail and the like were intended for throughout Kendall Square, not associated only with the Volpe space.
Well that’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard of. So C2 has been reduced to a litmus test to see if you can be rationalized as a PUD and you’re a big enough developer for CDD’s comfort zone. That it was announced in such a way shows a nice mix of over confidence equally paired with contempt for not only people who worked on C2, but the residents now subject to patchwork rerezonings, but a huge F U to property owners in Central Square. This is the kind of stuff law suits are made of.
“The opposite of planning.” Cambridge’s new motto? If so, I don’t see much need for all those planners down at CDD.
Oh, please.
Dennis Carlone was elected to the City Council after calling the C2 process
He, other Councilors, and anti-development activists kept up an insistent call for a Master Plan.
The Council requested the K2C2 report. The Council has not followed up on its own request. This is a Council failure.
Claimer: I was a neighborh representative to the C2 committee, a group that came to concensus of neighbors, businesses, developers, and other stakeholders about the future of Central Square.
Saul,
We all know where the master planning process originated. It was window dressing to spur a moratorium. However, C2 was “master planning” and to reduce it to spot zoning with a PUD moniker is not something anyone should back.
Who decided that spot zoning would be the plan for C2? Who approved a scheme that suggests only certain properties should benefit? When was this all put together? Is this really why the council didn’t move on C2? Is this all CDD?
As one who champions transparency, there is a glaring omission in how CDD’s “plan” came together and how, if at all, it relates the to work we did on C2.
The shame of it is that I actually support development similar to what Normandy has come forward on. 18 stories at this point in the game shouldn’t be too shocking considering C2 came to the conclusion that 14-16 was a good compromise. However if the “plan” is to carve out little swaths of Central Square and dub it a PUD (within an existing overlay I might add and that you call it a PUD doesn’t necessarily make it so) then I plan on fighting this to the full extent of my personal resources. I would say to any other property owner in Central Square that they should do the same. To hell with a city that thinks so little of those who silently contribute the most.
Hey guys, for $150.00 you can file the Central Square Advisory Committee’s zoning proposal yourselves and see how that goes.
Petitions are a terrific way to divide neighborhoods and spin the tires of city hall. They’ve also been a super helpful contributor to the multiple down zoned inexplicably obtuse zoning ordinance in this city. They can also be a great way to table an important issue for two years. Thanks, but no thanks.
Mr. Barrett, could you please try that again and proofread it first so that a person could figure out what you’re trying to say? There could well be something worth considering in among that indecipherable tangle of seemingly random words.