$250M Jackson Sq. Plan Finally Breaking Ground

BOSTON — All too often with construction projects, there is a groundbreaking ceremony followed by long periods of waiting. The wait is finally over for the Jackson Square development in Jamaica Plain, as state and city officials, developers, and residents will gather on Saturday to “break ground” on the 225 Centre St. project that will mark the first major phase of what will be a 14-building, $250 million mixed use, transit-oriented development. Site work began in December, and there have been infrastructure improvements going on since 2010, but residents of the neighborhood have been planning the redevelopment of the site since 1999. They will finally see the steel start to go up in June, according to Bart Mitchell, President and CEO of The Community Builders (TCB), the project’s developer.

“At this point it’s for real. It’s really a ceremonial groundbreaking, because the project’s been under construction for a couple of months,” ADD Inc. principal Larry Grossman, whose firm designed the project, tells The Real Reporter. “It’s all funded, it’s all permitted, the foundations are done. We started in 2007, but the project started way before that.” Located at the intersection of Centre Street and Columbus Avenue, the complex will be comprised of 103 apartments and nearly 16,000 sf of retail. The mixed-income building will include 35 affordable units, with 10 of the affordable rental units reserved for extremely low-income families. The retail portion will be constructed with an eye towards a pharmacy/convenience store with 10,000 sf of the retail space being built with 20-foot-high ceilings. The remainder (6,000 sf) will be reserved for smaller, possibly local shops, according to Mitchell.

So what finally got the project moving? “One, the state had agreed to fund some critical infrastructure improvements in the neighborhood that needed to proceed construction on the first major building, so there was $2 million of infrastructure upgrades that occurred in 2010 and 2011, and once they were finished, we could start thinking about (getting started),” explains Mitchell. “The second thing was a pretty creative financing structure that made it possible to get going. And we have an attractive interest rate on our first mortgage debt.” Mitchell credits attorneys Jonathan Klein and Joseph S. Lieber of Klein Hornig LLP for their work with the financing portion, which includes a $15.9 million construction and permanent loan, as well as additional funding totaling $31.4 million from MassHousing; $15.4 million in financing from the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust (HIT), and the HIT’s subsidiary, Building America CDE, Inc. Besides the aforementioned $2.3 million Transit- Oriented Development grant from the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, another $7 million in tax credit equity was secured through the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corp. Walsh Bros. is the construction manager for the project, which has an anticipated completion in the summer of 2013, including initial occupancy.

Mitchell and TCB, the country’s largest non-profit urban housing developer, are also busy across town with the Charlesview Residences in Allston on an eight-acre portion of the site of the Brighton Mills Shopping Center. The project will relocate and expand a 213-unit low-and moderate-income housing development to 240 units, and add an additional 100 units of housing, plus 25,000 sf of retail and community space, 243 underground parking spaces, as well as new streets and parks. Harvard University provided the site in exchange for the existing Charlesview site, which is adjacent to the Harvard Business School’s graduate housing.