BRA to begin Bartlett yard development

Yawu Miller

For decades dozens of MBTA buses belched diesel exhaust and leaked oil late into the night while waiting for repairs at the Bartlett Street yard.

Within the next two years, the yard could see as many as 400 units of affordable housing developed there. Or a mix of affordable and market-rate housing, retail and light manufacturing.

What developers ultimately build on the MBTA-owned lot depends largely on what community residents decide in a process that will begin Nov. 21 with a community planning meeting sponsored by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

“We want to go into this with an open mind and look at it with an eye toward housing,” said BRA project manager Hugues Monestine.

An open mind may be an important asset for the BRA, given the often competing visions of development for the Roxbury area. While the Roxbury Master Plan has targeted the Bartlett Street yard, which occupies an entire city block, as a space for housing, the Dudley Square Main Streets organization is advocating mixed income housing in an mixed use development.

The notion of packing as many as 400 units into the space represents outmoded thinking about housing, according to Main Streets Director Joyce Stanley.

“It’s ridiculous,” Stanley said of the notion of building a dense development. “It would be like the old projects.”

Stanley said she would like to see housing units clustered around the edge of the parcel, which is bounded by Washington, Guild, Bartlett and Lambert streets.

“We would like to bring jobs and amenities to the area,” she said. “Now that there’s a large space there, it could be made into a community of its own.”

Aside from Main Streets and the Roxbury Master Plan, there has been no major input on the development of the former bus yard.

At the November 21 meeting, the BRA will begin the process of soliciting input on the request for proposals which will be used to solicit developers.

First, the Roxbury Master Plan Oversight Committee will make recommendations for the RFP. After the RFP is developed, Roxbury residents will have the opportunity to review proposals.

So far, no developers have expressed interest in the parcel.

“Nobody has actually come out, partly because nobody knows when the RFP is coming out and nobody knows what kind of remediation has to be done with the site,” said Roxbury Neighborhood Council member Patricia Courtney.

The Bartlett Street yard, originally designed as a trolley storage facility, has long been thought to have contamination from waste oil and petro-chemicals, but testing on the site has not yet been conducted.