Royal Crest currently has 588 units on 76 acres. The latest proposal calls for:
Residential - 1,264 units broken out as follows:
385 rental units of multi-family housing that will be part of a Chapter 40B proposal - 97 of these units will have affordability restrictions
439 rental units of market rate multi-family housing
35 "55+ active living" rental units
199 for sale townhome units - $750,000
206 units of student housing (equaling 824 beds)
Commercial Uses:
A 108,500 square foot office building
69,873 square feet of ground floor retail space, spread out among some of the multi-family housing buildings, student housing,
102 room Hotel
How big is this?
Tuscan Village in Salem, NH is and was a commercially zoned area with virtually no residential neighbors and sits on 170 acres and has 2,800,000 square feet of building space on the property or .378 square feet of building space per square feet of land space.
Royal Crest which abuts to residential neighborhoods. It was not zoned for commercial use, sits on 76 acres and proposes 2,118,747 square feet of building space or .639 square feet of building space per square feet of land space. With the parking garages, which is fair to use because that's how we measure it in town and if it wasn't so dense, they wouldn't need as much parking, it comes to .809 or 2.15 denser than Tuscan Village. So a similar amount of building space on HALF the acreage.
Royal Crest will be approximately twice as dense as Tuscan Village and four times denser than Lynnfield Marketplace!
Tuscan Village has 700,000 square feet of retail space and 1,000,000 square feet of office space and 900 units.
Lynnfield Market Place is 79 acres. The mixed-use project consists of 395,000 square feet of retail space, 80,000 square feet of office space and 180 residential units for a total of 680,000 square feet.
Royal Crest will have about 90% less retail/office space and more units. Royal Crest will be vastly residential in comparison to Tuscan Village and Marketplace and will not even be close to their commercial tax revenues.
How much is 70,000 square feet of retail space? It's about one Market Basket supermarket. The proposal is not for a destination shopping experience.
Traffic -
Traffic is expected to be 3.5 times and 14,000 vehicle trips per day. More on the traffic impacts in the next section.
Building heights -
They want buildings as tall as 75 feet, almost double what the existing zoning allows! This will be the new normal for the next developer request but you will be limited to 35 feet on your single family home. Sounds fair right?