Chambers Street Residents Excluded from Designer Selection Process - Again

NEEDHAM, MA - Sometime before the meeting of Thursday, July 11,2024, single sheet flyers (shown above) were distributed by hand, from the Needham Housing Authority (NHA) to the front door mailboxes of the residents of the cluster style community housing for the elderly, on Linden Street, across from the High Rock School playing fields.

The "Dear Residents..." flyer was a courtesy note to give residents fair notice about strangers walking around the neighborhood.   Other information on the proposed re-development is published out there but does not always reach the tenants.  No Chambers Street residents were notified.

A notice about the Site Walk was published online at NHA's Request For Proposal on June 24, 2024.  I might not have heard about it, as quickly as I did, if not for Jim Flanagan, the newest NHA Board member, who posted the notice on the Needham Housing Coalition  (NHC) Facebook page.  So, thank you, Jim.  And thanks to the NHC for its community networking. 

There was also a story by Cameron Morsberger, dated July 1, 2024, on The Needham Channel (TNC) and in the Needham Local online news service, about NHA's Solicitation of Proposals for Linden/Chambers Project.   

Cameron is doing great.  Nevertheless, there is a slight misnomer, which is entirely understandable, due to the NHA habit of changing the name of whichever current project is being promoted.  Today's Linden Street Redevelopment used to be the Linden and Chambers Street Redevelopment project.  It had to be downsized (to less than 250 units) to make it manageable under Section 22 guidelines.  Likewise, the Modernization and Redevelopment Initiative (MRI) name was changed, when it was restarted later, to be called the Preservation and Redevelopment initiative (PRI) implying the deemphasis of Modernization, which was one successful program to upgrade the Veteran's single family housing in 2001.  It was a kitchen extension and modernization program.  

Today, NHA is biased in favor of a tear down and build up redevelopment and against a sustainable approach to our existing housing stock. 

An introductory presentation, held the day before, on July 10, 2024, was listed at the State procurement website.

Without an active community room, the communication among the residents is impaired.  5 Chambers Street was shut down for "upgrading."  With no accessible space for community use at 164 Linden Street, which was designed, built, and used as a community building, but appropriated by NHA for maintenance and storage purposes.  This has created an unresolved and ongoing zoning use violation.  The upshot is the elderly tenants have no place to meet.  With no common area, there is, also, no place to post public notices about the Redevelopment plans or anything else.

The NHA thinks an online notice on the Town web page to be sufficient, as it is considered to serve as the legal minimum requirement.  NHA wants, as a spokesperson has said, to be transparent.  NHA is doing the best it can to post notices about the NHA Board meetings on the locked door to the closed community room, at 5 Chambers Street, but no notices were posted about the Linden Street Site Walk at Chambers Street.

With the high heat, and no place to meet, the newly reformed Linden Chambers Residents Association (LCRA) found a cool place at the Public Library.  While everyone loves the library, and while the extra effort to get there was worth it, the preference would have been for a common area, at the Linden and Chambers Street Buildings, closer to home, for group meetings.  

The Linden Chambers Residents Association (LCRA,) in many ways, has been distracted and hampered in our effort to meet all the obligations in restarting a Local Tenant Organization (LTO,) to gain an approved status with the State Tenants Union, to be certified under the rules and regulations of the Commonwealth, and to be recognized, ultimately by NHA.  

NOTE:  The headline refers to a previous occasion when a request for information was denied, on the basis that the process was not subject to open meeting laws, regarding public access to the selection of designers.  The request was for the time and place of the meeting, so as to attend and witness, what the architects and engineers had to say, including BH+A.  

So, while the NHA was willing to share the summary results of the interviews, at the next subsequent Regular NHA Board Meeting, NHA denied and discouraged the participation of the public at large, and specifically, the resident Tenants.   And now NHA is doing it again.  

As Ronald Reagan said to Jimmy Carter, "There you go again."