Early stage 8 Cliff Road housing proposal meets strong resistance from Wellesley neighbors
In a crowded Wellesley High School cafeteria full of passionate residents—there were tears, there was anger, there was an on-the-spot election campaign launched for a Town Meeting seat—the town earlier this week hosted a public meeting to present the 8 Cliff Road housing development project to the community.
(See a Wellesley Media recording of the meeting embedded below.)
The initial plan for the condo development, at the intersection of Cliff Road and Rte. 9, would aggregate three parcels of land at 489 Worcester St., 4 Cliff Rd., and 14 Cliff Rd., into a 168,000 square foot parcel to be renamed 8 Cliff Road. This development conceptually includes 60 market rate units and 9 affordable rate ones, and has been discussed in recent months at Select Board and Wellesley Housing Development Corp. meetings.
Wellesley Executive Director Meghan Jop began the nearly 3-hour meeting on June 15 by giving a presentation that explained the standard process of any proposed development to potentially be approved for construction. According to the Frequently Asked Questions sheet handed out during the meeting, the development team is looking “for denser development” of multi-family housing units in an area of single-family homes.
Two members of the 8 Cliff Road development team, Victor Sheen and Peter Holland, spoke about their preliminary plan and listened to resident concerns. It was heavily emphasized by the developers and the town that the project was still in the “concept phase” with many more hurdles to jump before being approved.
“The town through the Select Board, Planning Board, or Zoning Board has also not made any determinations regarding support for the project at this point,” Jop wrote in an email to Swellesley following the meeting.
During the meeting, Sheen said that two of the reasons for proposing 8 Cliff Road were to build an option for older residents to downsize and to support the Wellesley Housing Production Plan and Unified Plan goals. These goals include increasing housing in high-transit locations (“MBTA communities”) and supporting and welcoming “a diversity of people and households”.
“In terms of how this project meets the current housing plan, and then the unified plan, we believe it checks most of the boxes if not all of the boxes that the town has identified, through a public process, as their priorities and goals,” Sheen said in a follow-up interview. Sheen, whose earlier projects in town include multifamily developments on Linden Street and Weston Road, said during the meeting that the development team will consider changes to the number of proposed units, traffic patterns, and more based on community feedback.
Despite the preliminary nature of the project, many residents in attendance were against the development itself and raised concerns about how it could increase traffic congestion and destroy historic preservation. One resident also warned that this could be just the beginning of big changes to the neighborhood—she said her family has been approached separately by a developer interested in purchasing their home for another multi-unit project.
Dan Chiasson, who lives on Cliff Road near the proposed development site, was one of these people.
“The houses that face the road on Cliff, number 5, number 11, number 4, and number 14, really make up a distinct historic and scenic landscape, and to take down two out of the four will completely ruin that appeal,” Chiasson said in a post-meeting interview. He added that what he dubbed as the “cheesy Epcot like ‘tribute to Europe’” design, would also look and feel out of place.
Resident Ann Rappaport, an active town government member, said during the meeting that even though the town is committed to “preserving its historic character” in the Unified Plan, approving the 8 Cliff Road proposal would be a “travesty to the historic fabric” of the town in addition to undercutting the value of the other current historic homes.
Sheen said that since the meeting, the team has begun to modify its plan to potentially preserve 14 Cliff Road and that an analysis of how to preserve other existing historic homes are underway.
Many of the residents who got up to speak during the Q&A expressed distrust of the Select Board and developers. This stemmed mainly from not being told about the proposal earlier, and what they viewed as a lack of communication on the part of the development team.
Wendy Garber, a resident who has attended past meetings on the topic, said that despite multiple attempts from neighbors on Cliff Road and other town residents to contact the developers and ask questions via written comments, they received nothing back.
“I don’t mean for this to be adversarial, but I think you need to be able to sit and hear our concerns because we have not had an opportunity to voice them,” Garber said. “ I think town boards need to understand that people in the town are concerned about this, we do not want to be told what to do, we want to have a say in this, and that is how this town is supposed to work.”
Holland and Sheen said during the meeting that they had emailed and spoken with neighbors from Cliff Road on many occasions.
Other meeting attendees brought up concerns that the safety of children living in the Cliff Road neighborhood would be compromised by increased traffic and speeding from Route 9 and intersecting roads. They also disagreed with the results of a Preliminary Traffic Impact Assessment submitted by the development team to the town.
Ann-Mara Lanza, a Select Board member and co-founder of the Building a Better Wellesley advocacy group, emphasized that it was still early but the town would eventually also do its own traffic assessment. It has not been done because the project needs to be better defined first, she said.
Some residents expressed support of the development proposal, including resident Andrew Burnet Mikula, a steering committee member for Building a Better Wellesley.
“I’d certainly like to see something built here, and I think the current plan is better than nothing. The most important reason why is this: there are a lot of people who already live in Wellesley whose housing needs aren’t being met right now,” Mikula said in a post-meeting follow-up.
Lanza said that she understood the frustrations of residents about 8 Cliff Road, but acknowledged from the Select Board perspective, every time there is a project proposed people support Wellesley’s housing goals, but do not want the traffic and changes that come with it.
“It isn’t like any of these concerns are unreasonable,” Lanza said. “But the question is, if we as a community support these goals, then we as a community have to figure out where we’re willing to build the housing to help.”
