Allston Residents Refocus Agenda

Kairos Shen, the popular chief planner for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, came to Allston last night intending to discuss long-term riverfront property development along Soldier’s Field Road.

But at the community wide planning meeting, Shen quickly found his agenda derailed by a smattering of area residents. Aggressively, and at times angrily, they steered the discussion to what they denounced as the City planning agency’s botched handling of the Charlesview Apartments relocation—the “largest and most dynamic” change to the neighborhood in many years.

“There’s this massive development that’s going to be dropped in the middle of the community almost without notice,” said Bruce E. Houghton, local resident and president of his namesake chemical corporation. which operates a plant in Allston. “Where was that going to be discussed?”

Houghton, a member of the mayor-appointed Harvard Allston Task Force, said that the BRA had failed to critically examine the Harvard-sponsored plan to relocate hundreds of residents to an eight-acre swath of housing to be built in North Allston. Now, with the City on the verge of approving the project—the stipulated community input period comes to a close next month, and only one public meeting has been held thus far about the most recent plan—Houghton and other neighborhood activists say their concerns about proposed housing density, open spaces, transportation, and retail opportunities can wait no longer.

And as is common during planning discussions in Allston, blame quickly shifted to Harvard as well.

“Harvard University has been completely recalcitrant,” said local resident Brent Whelan. Like some other critics of the current plan, he said the proposal’s faults could be alleviated if the University would allow for residential development on more of its unused Allston land holdings.

Until “Harvard is an actual participant” in the planning process, a viable agreement would be impossible to come to, he said.

Harvard representatives sat nearly silently at the back of the room, with Kevin A. McCluskey ’76, Harvard’s director of community relations for Boston, interjecting that they had “looked at this session to focus on the community wide planning process,” not specifically Charlesview.

—Staff writer Peter F. Zhu can be reached at pzhu@fas.harvard.edu.