Graham, Donna
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From: Andrea Rebeck <rebeckarchitect@gqmail.com>
Sent: Friday, July 24, 2020 11:35 AM
To: Board of Aldermen
Ce: Donchess, Jim
Subject: New School Street Housing
CAUTION: This email came from outside of the organization. Do not click links/open attachments if source is
unknown.
Kindly submit this for public comment. Thank you.
Dear Mayor Donchess and Members of the Board of Aldermen:
As a relative newcomer to Nashua (I’ve been here five years now), I was a bit surprised to sce the controversy
generated by the proposed School Street apartment complex. There is no doubt that Nashua needs more
housing, for that market is very tight right now. Affordable housing is especially in short supply, yet the
proposed project is for market-rate units (a euphemism for higher priced), A major concern of nearby
businesses is the loss of parking, both on-street and in the city parking garage, and the devastating consequences
they feel this may have on their businesses.
The developer, Lansing Melbourne Group, LLC, gives this interesting description on its Facebook page: “We
specialize in parking based development, public private ventures, parking planning, parking economics and
financial advising.” Indeed, they are very proud of the parking garage they built in Manchester. Yet, for some
reason, they can’t manage to accommodate parking in their Nashua project.
Adequate parking is one of the biggest factors in market-rate housing’s success. Without it, it is difficult to
attract tenants willing to pay high rents and projects can falter. Parking for this project is to be accommodated
in an existing city-owned garage, but apparently tenants are allowed to park there only during the evening and
night, when the garage is under-utilized? In normal times this arrangement could work. However, times have
changed, both for good and bad. The good part is that more urban dwellers are not interested in owning cars, so
the need for parking might be Jess. On the other hand, thanks to the pandemic, more people are working from
home, so they would not be taking their cars out of the garage during the day to commute to an office. I think
this aspect of the development needs further study.
As an architect who has dealt with several developers in her career, I can hazard a guess as to why the developer
is not including parking on their site: The developer wants to squeeze as many “market-rate” units onto that site
as they can to maximize profits; that’s what developers do. Their seven-story building is already much taller
than most buildings in downtown Nashua. The images that have been published show a solid block ofa
building that comes right up to the sidewalk — with no pretense ofa plaza or even a gracious entry. They
certainly don’t want to waste any of their 160,000 square feet on parking spaces.
Yet they should be required to do so, or perhaps the project is in the wrong place. Existing commercial
neighbors to the site are right to be alarmed. Recent trends in city planning are focused on making the
automobile disappear. There are merits to this trend, but they mostly accrue to large, densely developed cities
like Boston or New York, where public transportation and urban amenities abound. Nashua is not one of those
cities. What Nashua does have, and what makes it so attractive, is its small-scale downtown that still retains
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