Westbrook Redevelopment Project

[frinkprof]

Welcome to the forum. Thanks for starting the thread and posting.

A few things though. First off, you can't post an entire article like you have. Only an excerpt (say a couple paragraphs), the title, the author, the date and link. It's copyright infringement to post the whole thing. News agencies have taken legal action against forums such as this because of people reproducing the whole article or even most of it. The image and article posting guide is available at the bottom of each page of this forum as a dropdown in the quick reply box.

Regarding the affordable housing inclusion, while I would agree that there may be some issues with execution, I would say that the appetite of developers to include affordable units in their projects does exist. I also don't think that there would be much appreciable compromise on quality, in general, when compared to what the project might be without the affordable unit inclusion. When discussing the issue with developers as a member of the planning committee for my community association, many developers (in fact almost all if memory serves) have said that they have no problem with and actually want to include some affordable units in all their projects. They want to do this because in many cases they believe it enhances the project as a whole for all its end users and as a policy they just believe it is the right thing to do from a corporate citizen standpoint. Where the stumbling block has been, at least in my community's case, is that any benefits that the City would provide for including affordable units (density bonusing, leverage for decisions on relaxation applications, etc.) are offset by some problems with how the City defines what an affordable unit is and how they are managed. Basically the City requires that they be added to the City's Affordable Housing inventory, which has some strict criteria that doesn't always translate well into including them in the developer's plans.

So long story short, it if it is managed a little better on the City's end, it shouldn't have much affect on the quality outcome of Westbrook. The developers agree with the principle, by in large.

Also, I think you're putting too much weight into the City's desire for there to be one developer. I think that was more just the musings of the interviewee. They'll take one, two, three or four developers if that's how it ends up playing out. The parcel breakup was likely for a few reasons.

1. Two or more of the parcels likely have planned public roads (as set out by the ARP) which separate them, all but requiring the separate parcel delineation.

2. It gives them more options to market the parcels to developers (i.e. if their desire for one developer isn't in the cards, the parcels can go piecemeal). It also allows one or two of the parcels to sell now, if that's how it plays out, rather than being stuck with one big parcel that won't sell.