The Longfellow Area Neighborhood Association (LANA) met recently with Boston Planning Department Planner Will Cohen to garner input about the new Neighborhood Housing zoning initiative going on in the Parkway.

Cohen hosted meetings in Roslindale, West Roxbury and Hyde Park over the last few months, and while some members of LANA were at the Roslindale meeting (and at least one attendee for LANAs meeting was at the West Roxbury meeting), Cohen came to LANA to illicit feedback from neighbors about what they were looking for in the new zoning.

For The Bulletins coverage of the Roslindale and Hyde Park meetings, go to https://tinyurl.com/mvyvdf79 or https://tinyurl.com/kavy964h respectively.

The concern of Neighborhood Housing is that most of the existing housing in these three areas dont conform to current zoning. In West Roxbury, for example, Cohen said that at best there are 100 properties out of 10,000 that do not conflict with six zoning regulations they chose to look at while compiling their data. There are more regulations that surely have conflicts but he said they didnt have the bandwidth to do all of them. In Roslindale, Squares + Streets have brought much of the Square into compliance, but the Roslindale map still shows a clear majority of housing out of compliance.

So, with this mismatching, Cohen said they are looking to rezone much of West Roxbury, Roslindale and Hyde Park to better match the existing zoning so that homeowners who are looking to add on, say, a 50-square-foot addition to their house like the homeowners at 20 Cotton St. who came before LANA to ask for a letter of non-opposition that was unanimously approved they dont have to go through the six-to-eighteen-month Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) process.

LANA Chair Kathy McCabe said she saw a lot of promise in the new zoning, but felt more could be done to help folks along. She did say this was her personal opinion and not necessarily those of the neighborhood association.

McCabe said she moved to Roslindale because she felt it was a diverse, walkable and accepting neighborhood. Those are values that I think are important, that I want to see continue. Roslindale was affordable when I moved here, with many housing choices, she said. Its also a neighborhood that has trees and greenery and I think thats an important value to continue and sustain. I also like the fact that we have a strong neighborhood commercial center with Roslindale Square. Thats important to me to maintain and strengthen.

LANA Member Julia OBrien said Roslindale was built up as a street-car suburb, and said she wanted to make sure that the different neighborhoods in Roslindale had their styles and norms reflected in the Neighborhood Housing process and that it did not treat Roslindale as one big block.

The differences between the various residential neighborhoods are considerable, she said. I care about things like consistent setbacks from the curbstone, and I think it creates a sensible-looking street.

OBrien said she didnt want houses butting up against each other to help preserve the number of trees in private back yards and asked that the rear yard setbacks be maintained. Can you put two oak trees within 20 feet? Not really, if you want a place for a garden as well, she said. Its important I think to think through some of those things.

OBrien also said each streets parking capacity should be taken into account when considering the rezoning, as cars will still be a big part of life in Roslindale in the coming decades.

Resident Nate Stell said he cares most about increasing the affordability in the neighborhood and took an opposing view to parking than OBrien. I want this neighborhood to be a place most people can enjoy because its pretty special, he said. It seems obvious to me that eliminating parking minimums for residential districts would help. As I understand it the sub-districts in our area still require two parking spaces per dwelling unit. I mean we heard a case, I think it was on Conway Street, where they could kick a soccer ball from this place to the train station and they were trying to build two townhouses and were required to build four off-street parking spaces. And this is two-tenths-of-a-mile from the train station and next to Fairview, which has 75 overnight free parking spaces on the street. It makes no sense.

For more information on Neighborhood Housing, go to https://www.bostonplans.org/neighborhood-housing