MIT plan for Kendall Square gets roundtable
Note: This event is completed. The videos from the ultimately three-hour, 20-minute meeting are for now viewable only here.
Original story: The City Council plans a roundtable meeting from 9:30 a.m. to noon Friday to look over the plans for 26 acres in Kendall Square proposed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the council’s rules of the roundtable, there will be no public comment or voting, and the meeting will not be televised – ostensibly to allow a frank, informative, give-and-take approach to conversation.
More on how at least four of nine councillors initially planned to televise the roundtable is here.
The roundtable remains open to the public, who by state law are free to record it with sound and video and to transmit those recordings. The Tech – the news source for the MIT community – and Cambridge Day are working together to stream the roundtable live on the Web for anyone unable to attend but who wants to see and hear the proceedings. This hasn’t been done before, but the news sources hope it will go smoothly and be available as a resource Friday and in the future at this address or through copies of the video given to each site.
The meeting should be watchable here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cambridge-day
Other news sources who want to stream the meeting should find embed codes available during the stream or can contact Cambridge Day for technical help by clicking here.
Thank you to Cambridge Day and The Tech for making this important meeting more broadly available to the public.
It’s an important step — especially considering the way the council has actively crammed this controversial proposal through our city’s zoning process…
During the week of March 3rd, the MIT/Kendall plan was simultaneously before the Planning Board, the Ordinance Committee, and also on its way to the city council. At that rate, it’s nearly impossible for members of the public to keep up. So thank you again for giving us an opportunity to follow along online.
My hope is that the council won’t rush this to a vote in early-April. Instead, the council should wait until MIT delivers the findings of its graduate student housing report in July.
Thank you. I find the councillors’ objections specious at best. More and more of late, citizens have been recording roundtables of the city council and the school committee that are of general interest and making these recordings available over the internet, and our elected officials, especially the city councillors, have to know by now that this is happening. To suggest that CCTV’s cameras have the power to make them look foolish in ways that cameras and audio recorders wielded by the rest of us don’t is ridiculous. David Maher tried to do the right thing here, and it’s a shame that too many of his colleagues weren’t willing to join him.
Mike,
I appreciate your passion, but here is the timeline for the proposal:
Initial Petition filed 5/2/11 almost 2 years ago
First petition expires 10/11/11 after many hearings at the Planning Board and Ordinance Committee. One of the reasons it expired was that the Planning Board and Council wanted to wait for the K2C2 process.
Petition Re-filed 12/17/12 and is currently at the City Council with the matter still before the Ordinance Committee. Planning Board has provided a favorable recommendation to the Council.
That the matter would be before both the Planning Board and the Ordinance Committee in the same week is part of the process.
So two years of dialogue, debate and discussion so I would not consider the petition “crammed”.
I also disagree with waiting for a study by MIT for this petition. MIT has stated many times that they are performing the review and expect to be done in July but in no way does the study of graduate student housing change what is in the petition. There is many places on which MIT could build housing including in Kendall Square and elsewhere. This petition does not foreclose on the opportunities to build housing.
I would also point out that building housing for 5,000 graduate students would necessitate the construction of many housing towers, the number would depend on whether you build dormitory style housing (no kitchens and communal bathrooms and showers) or apartment style. If you assume 5,000 students and 5,000 units at 1,000 sq ft per unit (includes common spaces too) then you are looking at 5,000,000 square feet of housing towers. This would equate to something like 12 Archstone Northpoint like towers or more than 40 Peabody Terrace like towers. That’s a lot of towers!
Will this be archived?
Yes. Ustream allows an upload to YouTube in addition to storage on Ustream itself, and putting this on YouTube will be tried. In addition, resident Charles Teague is filming, and often makes sections of public meetings available. In the end, there may be four or so ways to access a recording of this meeting.
Charlie, you can’t assume 1000 sq. ft. per student. Probably around 1/3 of that.
Mark,
I guess it all depends on what is desired in each living unit and how much common area there will be in terms of hallways, elevators, common rooms, etc. so yes, can get less than a 1,000 square feet which is why I gave example of 40+ towers like the 22 story ones at Peabody Terrace. 24 Peabody Terrace is 22 stories tall and has about 120 units in total for the building and has minimal amenities on the first floor (post boxes and a stroller storage closet). Creating 5,000 units in these type of structures would require more than 40.
Have the sayers of nay opined on what they would like MIT to do? I see some people who are late to the argument chime in with the need for graduate housing, and the only number touted is that 5,000 tally quoted from B. Spatocco. So do the naysayers mean to suggest that they wouldn’t approve a square foot of development for commercial interests until 5000 units are made?
There is, I believe, 240k sqft of housing on the horizon for this (MIT) project, there are also a couple hundred units of housing slated for the Alexandria Project, at least 300+ units of housing going online at North Point (with many more to come), and an additional 144 units going online this summer in Kendall. A good start no?
Charlie’s assessment of what it would take to build 5000 units is probably a little over zealous, and Mark “Kajillion Dollars” Jaquith is a bit under. Even in a non-union labor shaped micro-unit universe you’d need roughly 2 million sqft. This does not include the beloved parking/mechanical needs of a such an imaginary structure. Where would you put it all? Should we assume graduate students will all want to live in this dystopian future where yards and the ability not to sleep next to your stove no longer exist? I house many that simply wouldn’t go. What would you charge for these units? MIT already does a bang up job subsidizing student housing throughout the city. If they charged $1000/br (seriously subsidized with new construction) they’d still be over $200/br of what I and my evil cohort of land owners charge. Just saying…
Typically the naysayers fall in to the “I’ve lived here a million years and I own the place” mentality or the newly appreciated “I just showed up and I know what is right vive le 99%” category. Neither of which makes it clear: What they want and how to get it. However what these groups invariably agree on is that someone else should pay for it.
I’m really interested in what this study will show in the summer. Should the MIT proposal hinge on it? Absolutely not, but I can see the angle telegraphed by trying to connect them. My guess is that we’ll need a couple thousand units to offset some graduate demand, senior demand, and new cantabridgian demand. When it is discovered, as many of us already know, that Central Square is the ideal place to put these units, that there is a symbiotic relation between the workspaces in Kendall, will the naysayers still fight development?