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| 2012 - The Design Building at Becker College's Worcester Campus Image from Becker College website. |
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2017 - The New Design Building at Becker College's Worcester Campus @ Lincoln Square
Cropped image of "Worcester Memorial Auditorium, Worcester Massachusetts, July 2009"
by John Phelan, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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And perhaps they could purchase one of the soon to be empty UNUM buildings and renovate it into student housing. MCPHS has done wonders for downtown in terms of getting feet on the street.
ReplyDeleteEric,
ReplyDeleteCM O'Brien recently said on the Jordan Levy show that there are sevral developers looking at the UNUM property. Of course, he was not at liberty to discuss anything specific. He also went on to say that it is the goal of the administration to have 1,000 housing units downtown in the near future.
I thought the former Worcester Auditorium would be a great place for WPI to buy and turn into an acedemic center. A project like that would dovetail nicely with their interests in Gateway Park and the housing that is proposed for the former Loncoln Sq. boys club and the old Voke school. As for the formwer Worcester County Courthouse, IIRC the same developer that will be converting the boys club into market rate housing was also interested in the courthouse. Not sure where that stands now because I'm somewhat suprised they haven't started on the boys club yet. They were initially suppposed to start the renovations last Spring.
DavidZ
I'm wondering if the LS Boys Club will happen with the current developer - clearly their Plan A did not work or they would be under construction by now.
ReplyDeleteThese are challenging buildings to convert to housing - very inefficient layouts. Given Worcester market rents, I can't imagine the numbers here make sense without historic tax credits to help subsidize development costs. Historic tax credits are often difficult to use as developer wants to cut up gym into units which is generally a no-no with the National Park Service.
It's not impossible, I know of an old school where the gym was cut up into apartments using HTC, but in that case the developer had to agree to preserve a very nice auditorium and had to appeal the decision through the NPS/Interior Dept to get his way.
It's good to hear that we have a goal of building 1,000 residential units downtown.
ReplyDeleteNow let's take it a step further - Specificity is good - let's define downtown boundaries on a map and turn "near future" into an actual date. Put a counter on the City's homepage.... Incorporate this citywide goal into the CM's personal job goals.....
Then wee need to make sure we have the right tools in place - as Robin Williams once said "you can't make butter with a toothpick." We can say we want housing but if our zoning makes it difficult for developers to create housing then we need to fix (and perhaps more importantly, simplify) the zoning so they can build the type of housing we want as of right. Let's adopt the Philly Plan for this defined area - automatic 10 year tax freeze - it worked wonders in Philly.
How about the Worcester Voke building as a potential dorm?
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