By Matt Visor - The Boston Globe
Sunday, September 3, 2006
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Huge project tied to commuter rail hub serves as focal point of Westwood's effort to reinvent tax base
WESTWOOD -- Like so many Massachusetts communities, this suburb was facing a classic financial bind: with its budget already tight, taxes on homeowners were increasing, as were vacancies among its commercial tax base, while state aid was declining.
But what Westwood officials chose to do next could serve as a lesson for communities that are strapped for money but also uneasy about, if not outright hostile to, inviting a flood of new development to expand their tax bases.
Mindful of its reputation as a tough place to do business, Westwood sought advice from developers on how make its regulatory processes more efficient. It rezoned parts of town to make way for new development. And it hired an economic director who had helped successfully revitalize another suburb.
The result is Westwood Station, a megadevelopment of hotels, housing, and commercial and office space that will deliver at least $8 million in new taxes to the town -- expanding its tax base by 20 percent.
Westwood is certainly not alone in embracing growth. Many communities have wooed developers to help rebuild stagnant downtowns, or taken advantage of new state policies to steer compact, dense mixed-use projects to locations near mass transit stations.
The process in Westwood initially began about 10 years ago when town officials began eyeing a University Avenue industrial park as a place for growth. For a developer, it was an ideal location, positioned just off the highway where interstates 93 and 95 meet, and near a major rail station where commuters could hop a rail line into Boston, or an Amtrak train to New York and other points to the south.
Yet the University Avenue park remained under developed. Westwood did adopt a modest change to allow for more office space, and as a result, NStar officials decided in 1999 to build the utility's headquarters there.
But when no other large development followed, about four years ago Westwood officials took the unusual step of inviting business-development officials to talk about what the town was doing wrong.
``We said, `Well, do you want to know the truth?' " recalled David I. Begelfer , chief executive of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties. ``They were really known as being a fairly difficult community to develop in."
The message got through.
``The one thing we heard loud and clear was that `Westwood is not open for business, it's anti business,"' said Steve Rafsky , chairman of the town Economic Development Advisory Board. ``We needed to change that feeling out there."
Rafsky became a point person in convincing other Westwood residents to open up, and in particular for Town Meeting to adopt pro development zoning.
He and other allies had some factors in their favor. For one, without new growth, residential taxes would likely keep increasing rapidly, something most homeowners were not anxious to see. Indeed, by 2005 the town's average tax bill had gone up a whopping 54 percent in five years -- nearly twice the average increase statewide.
Another plus: the University Avenue industrial park was an obvious location for new development.
Like many Massachusetts communities, Westwood had a traditional approach to zoning that generally kept residential land use separate from retail, office, and industrial, to keep neighborhoods from being overrun by commercial activities. Moreover, communities usually placed limits on how big stores, offices, and factories could get, to avoid being overwhelmed by too much commerce and congestion.
Yet such zoning rules are ill suited to the latest trends in development. Developers, facing a scarcity of land, increasingly want larger projects that would pack housing, offices, and retail space into one location. This trend was in part sparked by an anti sprawl movement that advocates a return to a more dense urban or village life.
In several Town Meetings during 2004 and 2005, Westwood residents approved about a dozen zoning changes, allowing for denser developments and creating three mixed-use districts to allow developers more flexibility in building residential, commercial, and retail at the same spot.
The previously dry town also won approval from the Legislature in 2004 to issue liquor licenses to restaurants, a must for the kind of high-scale development the town was seeking. Also in 2004, the town hired Joyce G. Moss , who had previously overseen a successful redevelopment of Natick's downtown, to be its new economic development director.
As intended, the changes caught the notice of the real estate industry. Cabot, Cabot, & Forbes began purchasing parcels of land, and by last year had assembled nearly 140 acres along University Avenue.
Then developers surprised Westwood with plans for a massive new development to include up to 1,000 residential units, three hotels, and 3 million square feet of retail and office space -- two-and-a-half times the space in Boston's 52-story Prudential Tower.
``Once they started buying, they just kept on going," said Steven H. Olanoff , vice chairman of the Planning Board. ``No one at the time realized how big a development we were ultimately going to get."
After the shock wore off, many in town began to embrace the concept, forming a steering committee in October to meet with the developers and provide feedback on what the town wanted. A portion of the town website was devoted to putting up preliminary sketches and notices of upcoming meetings.
``We were both trying to accomplish the development of this industrial park for different reasons," said Michael A. Jaillet , Westwood's town administrator. ``For them, more or less, it's for the profit margin. For us, it's developing a strong commercial tax base."
As the plan has evolved, the developers added more open space to the site and agreed to build a community center. To calm fears of a spike in school-aged children, the developers intend to build one and two-bedroom condominiums that would be more attractive to young professionals and empty nesters -- not big families
``We generally go in and try and understand the goals and objective of the community," said Jay Doherty , president of Cabot, Cabot, & Forbes. ``It is a more demanding process. It takes more out of the developer. But in the end, it produces a greater consensus about how the project can happen."
Despite cooperation, there are still major hurdles. Traffic issues remain a sticking point, and some residents have been put off by the large scale of the project, saying they would not have voted for the zoning bylaw changes had they known this project would be the by product.
Officials in nearby towns have also expressed opposition to the project, fearing traffic back-ups along the highways.
But already, some outside observers are pointing to the project as a success story in collaboration, and Westwood officials say they have fielded calls from communities across the state asking how they changed their approach to development.
R. Lisle Baker , who teaches on property, land use, and zoning at Suffolk University Law School, said communities increasingly are becoming comfortable planning for growth. Some are revising master plans, while others encourage developers to meet with town planners early on to iron out sticking points.
``It's important for people to be able to do their homework in advance -- to make sure they know what the issues are and think them out before they dedicate significant resources," Baker said. ``It takes more time at the front end, but it's more successful at the back end."
Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com.
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