The Boston Globe: Here’s how Newton’s 822-unit housing development finally happened
Larry Gottesdiener is the chair at Northland, a Newton real estate firm with $8 billion of assets under management, and also manages the Atlanta Dream WNBA team
On paper, the 822-unit Pattern District project developed by Newton-based real estate firm Northland is exactly what’s needed to address Massachusetts’ housing crisis.
It will be hundreds of apartments — including 145 set aside at less-expensive rents for lower- and middle-income tenants — surrounding 1.5 acres of green space on what has long been parking lots, and a renovated mill that sits on the National Register of Historic Places. When complete, Northland says the project will be the largest privately funded development in the country to meet the rigorous environmental standards required for Passive House certification.
Newton being Newton, it took a decade to arrive at a topping-off ceremony for the first of the project’s eight buildings. After Northland formally pitched the project in 2016, it faced intense scrutiny; some residents were skeptical that Newton — a majority single-family-home community located 13 miles from Boston’s downtown —could handle additional traffic and housing stock.
Still, in 2019, a supermajority on Newton’s 24-member City Council approved a special permit and rezoning to allow the project to move forward. When critics petitioned to block the entitlements via ballot referendum, residents voted to support the project by a sizable margin.
This project exemplifies the level of investment and effort it can take to build large residential projects in Massachusetts. Why did Newton fight this for a decade?
What made it so intelligent?
Given sort of a natural reluctance for a community to believe a developer, I think they were reticent to see that we shared the same vision. For example, a big issue was permeability. [Neighbors were] concerned we were going to create a walled-off compound that was going to be a separate and distinct village, and that was never our intent. The councilors ensured that the buildings were broken up, so they didn’t have these horribly long impermeable walls of buildings that made accessing and getting through the site difficult, and that we put parking underground, which was always our intent. The challenge came when we hit the referendum, and won the referendum on March 4, 2020. The next week, COVID shut down the country.
What was the process like to get a supermajority on a 24-person council? How many folks did you have dedicated to this project?
There were stalwarts — Newton’s own Kent Gonzales[Northland’s vice president of development], Mike Medeiros [vice president of construction], and of course the indefatigable Peter Standish [senior vice president of development]. Nobody, neither supporters nor opponents, ever leaves a meeting with Peter Standish believing that he is anything other than a professional of the highest character and integrity. Newton is very strict about ex parte meetings. They communicated to us through the public hearing process. In a group of 24 you have different priorities: affordable housing, green energy, the impact on public schools and infrastructure. You need to build a coalition, and you need to listen. Peter and Kent had hundreds of community meetings, and learned what the residents of Newton wanted and what they felt they needed. That’s how we tailored our project. We were really aligned to a great degree, but it took time.
Immediately after the referendum came the pandemic. Northland wasn’t necessarily at the point of grappling with supply chain slowdowns that impacted other active construction projects going on at the time.
COVID shut things down. But it’s really the inflationary impact of COVID that was challenging. It really froze capital activity for quite a bit of time.
You say this will be the largest privately funded Passive House project in the country. Passive House is an energy system that aims to control air flow through a building’s envelope to ultimately reduce energy costs, but it’s expensive upfront. How much of the sustainability element was part of this project from the beginning, and how did that fit into cost?
That was the underpinning of the whole project. We were fortunate that we were ahead of our time. Newton is a very special community, and it’s been our corporate home for 50 years, so we have great affection for it. [Northland’s founder and former chief executive] Bob Danziger always set an example of a corporation’s responsibility to its home. This assemblage had opportunity for historic renovation and addressing a toxic heat island and obsolete acres of parking lots — which undermine the quality of the groundwater running off into the Charles River — by creating green spaces and gathering places in a corridor that’s devoid of both. We were very early at the time; there were maybe one or two Passive House projects in the country.
When you had another delay because of the referendum, what was that cost?
I’m not political, so it was a crazy night to be at our quote-unquote campaign headquarters, counting the ballots as they came in, ward by ward. The most challenging part of that was that if you lost, then there was possibility of never bringing this vision to life. Fortunately, Peter was such an effective coalition builder, and we had great coalition partner partners. I just walked into that being like, ‘Can a developer ever win a referendum?’ and was pleasantly surprised that we won in a landslide.
To what extent do you think it helped to be locally based? Is that more important in Greater Boston than in other communities where Northland does business?
New England’s a pure place of deep roots. We operate all around the country, but you go into certain parts of the South and Sun Belt, and even parts of California, and it’s less grounded to a degree. I think that was important. It was ironic. At times we were called carpetbaggers, and I’m like, “Well, wait, that doesn’t really make sense.”
Wait, ‘carpetbaggers’? Because you weren’t here in 1863?
I don’t think that was the issue. I don’t think it was “carpetbaggers” because we didn’t come over on the Mayflower. I think there was a narrative that some adopted because we’re developers. But Bob Danziger set a standard, and he’s been a steward and a philanthropist in the community for 50 years. Our roots here were very important.
When did you come onboard?
In 1997, I merged a company that I started, called Essex Partners, into Northland. We retained the Northland name, and Bob stepped down. Shortly after the merger, we looked at these three parcels together — Bob’s original acquisition in 1976 that became Marshall’s Plaza, this town road industrial site, and the historic mill together — and started pursuing them.
Northland has put $100 million into design and underground infrastructure so far. To just now be at the point of topping off one building, when you’re not bringing in any income, is pure expense. How much of that is just the work Northland does?
It’s a very different side of the house than our other business plan, which is the acquisition and investment of apartments and mixed-use, where you have an income stream immediately. The development business is money out until you finish. As much as 20 percent of that $100 million is all the people that helped bring this to life: architects, engineers, lawyers, contractors, consultants, urban planners. But the bulk of that was horizontal infrastructure.
What’s your ballpark for total development cost?
Nice try.
Oh, come on, I had to try.
It’s extensive. We have great gratitude that our investors are aligned with us.
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