Petra Develpment LLC
In a unanimous roll call vote, Board of Alders granted zoning relief to Wooster Square’s latest proposal for new apartments at its regular meeting Thursday night.
87 Union developer Noel Petra asked the city for a zoning change from a warehouse-oriented district to a central business/residential, or BD‑1, zone to allow for denser, mixed-use development.
This is the final approval Petra needed.
Paul Bass Photo
Petra
“We would like to start building in late spring or early summer,” Petra (pictured) said Friday.
The final plan was modified after meetings with the community. Petra withdrew a request for a 3.5 floor to area ration, rather than the 3.0 he ended up with.
“We met with the community. They said, ‘We’d like it to be less dense’” and have more parking,” Petra said. “We modified our plans. We ended up with a slightly less-dense” project.
The project will replace warehouses and a plumbing supply store with a mix of studios, apartments, townhouses, and retail. Petra said Friday he expects to include 285 to 300 apartments in the final development and have storefronts line the entire length of the Olive Street portion, as well as along Union Street. The original plan called for 325 apartments.
Petra’s planned community is the second to receive zoning relief this year on the same block of the western edge of Wooster Square, connecting the neighborhood to downtown with hundreds of new homes.
Spinnaker, the developer for the first project in that immediate area, at the old Comcast building at Chapel Street between Olive and Union, applied for a similar zone change from BA to BD‑1 for their parcel. That request was recommended for approval by the City Plan Commission in May and ultimately approved by the Board of Aldermen at the beginning of August.
Board of Alders President Jorge Perez abstained from the vote Thursday night because his wife works for the law firm representing the 87 Union project.