Letter: Commons at Forest Hills project will eat up local parking

The 289 residential unit project proposed for the 3-acre Hughes Oil site on Washington Street near the Forest Hills station will have only 168 parking spaces that tenants must pay extra to use. We know that people riding the subway to work have cars; high-rent, two-bedroom units are shared by two tenants often with two cars; these tenants will be eligible for JP parking stickers; and people like to park their cars for free in quiet residential neighborhoods for days on end while they ride the subway to work. Look out, residents of Hampstead, Anson, Spalding, Rosemary, Hall, Boynton, McBride, Child, Brookley, Rossmore, Tower and many other surrounding streets! This project will bury us 24/7 with several hundred more parked cars added to our neighborhood streets. And we will not be protected from them by our current resident-only designations.

The developer’s 140-page filing with the Boston Redevelopment Authority does not breathe a word about this. Its glowing descriptions of building materials, etc., are nothing more than lipstick on a pig. The pig is the hundreds of tenants’ cars that will clog every on-street parking space in our established neighborhoods, driving out families that can’t take it any more. Every big old house, and every two- and three-family condo unit that currently uses on-street parking in front of it will take a hit in value.

This project is touted as “transformative.” By squeezing 93 units per acre onto this site (far more than anywhere else in the neighborhood) without adequate parking, this project will “transform” the quality of life, safety and property values of surrounding residential owners into tens of millions in profits for a private developer. And the more parking misery caused to us by this project, the higher the rents the developer can charge for its 168 on-site parking spaces!

The BRA meeting on this project at Curtis Hall is curiously scheduled for Wed., Aug. 21, when most of us residents are out town on vacation. I urge the BRA to reschedule the meeting on this massive project for a time in the fall when the neighbors have had time to understand what it means for us and are back in town to attend it.

Carol Kemp

Jamaica Plain

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *