SWAMPSCOTT — In a contentious community meeting held Tuesday night at Swampscott High School, representatives from the company developing a mixed-income housing project on Elm Place presented more changes to their site proposal.
Representatives from WinnDevelopment explained that in addition to significant design changes presented at another community meeting last month, they had now included 11 designated visitor and employee parking spaces in the site design, along with other amenities intended to encourage residents to use alternative modes of transportation.
“There’s a big discussion about parking and traffic. The more parking spaces, the more cars you have. The more cars you have, the more traffic you have,” said Adam Stein, executive vice president at Winn. “What we’re trying to do is build an efficient building at a Commuter Rail station.”
The original proposal for the building included 128 units and 108 parking spaces in a five-story building with a very modern design. In the June meeting, Winn presented a new design proposal, which went down to 120 units and up to 124 parking spaces, with a “New England coastal” architectural design which better matches the traditional buildings in town. The building is also shorter, ranging at different points from two stories to four and a half, and taking advantage of the grade decrease of the ground near the back of the property to lower the building’s roof.
While the June meeting — held over Zoom — was fairly positive, with many participants praising the design team’s changes, Tuesday’s meeting had a completely different atmosphere, with residents often loudly interjecting during the panel’s presentation to criticize the size and scale of the proposal and share concerns about traffic impacts.
“The issue for everyone in this room is it’s too big for our little town,” one participant said. “Do you see any five-story buildings in this neighborhood? There aren’t any.”
Gilbert Winn, CEO of WinnCompanies, explained that the project had to be that size in order to get necessary funding and resources from Massachusetts under the state’s 40B law, which promotes the building of affordable housing developments.
“In order to get the funding that you need to do affordable housing, it has to be a certain size to have it be sustainable and attractive for many decades to come,” Winn said. “It has to have enough market-rate and middle-income units to be sustainable.”
Swampscott currently has 3.7 percent affordable housing, well under the state’s mandated 10 percent. While only 40 percent of the Elm Place development would be labeled affordable, all 120 units would count toward the town’s subsidized housing index, bringing it up to approximately 5.4 percent.
Many meeting attendees brought up the town’s issues with traffic, especially on busy Essex Street, and worried that the addition of 120 housing units would increase those problems. Winn explained that the proximity to the Commuter Rail station would decrease residents’ reliance on cars, making it so that residents would most likely not need to own more than one car per unit, if any.
The development team is also considering installing a transit screen with information about public transit in the lobby of the building, along with several bicycle parking locations on the site. In addition, they are considering partnering with companies like Zipcar to provide rideshare services and designating Zipcar spaces in the parking lot.
“I want to foster more discussion as a team. I want to foster more interaction,” Stein said. “But if the answer is, ‘we’ll only support this at 88 units,’ we’re not going to get there. So let’s try to be constructive and have discussions. We have to be in the world of reality here.”