Brighton Elders Question Kimco Rep About Whole Foods Project

Around 60 residents of Brighton's Covenant House and Patricia White Apartments' low-income senior housing buildings on Washington St. met with a representative of New Hyde Park, New York's Kimco Realty shopping center-owning real estate deal-making firm on Jan. 10, 2019 in Covenant House's community room at 30 Washington Street. The elderly residents and Kimco's representative discussed Kimco's proposed plan to construct a 229-unit, luxury apartment complex on top of a new Whole Foods grocery store/cafe across the street from Covenant House, at 15-35 Washington St., near the Boston-Brookline boundary line.

Under the City of Boston's 1965/1975 General Plan, the Washington St.-Corey Rd. neighborhood around Kimco's proposed construction site was designated in the early 1970s to be an appropriate area to construct low-income rental housing for Boston's senior citizens. Yet when asked by one Covenant House resident to indicate what the approximate market rents would be for the 229 residential units Kimco is proposing to construct across the street and whether any residential units would be affordable to low-income senior tenants, the Kimco representative refused to fully disclose any specific information about what the rents would be and how many units would actually be affordable to low-income elderly tenants.

The Kimco representative spent most of his presentation time explaining how constructing a new Whole Foods store with a larger cafe on the first floor and a larger grocery store on the second floor (below a 229-unit market rate luxury apartment building), on the previous site of now-closed Citizens Bank branch building across the street from Covenant House, would "enhance the shopping experience for Whole Foods customers." The Kimco representative also asserted that Amazon's current Washington St. and Corey Rd. Whole Foods store is "not large enough to meet the business needs of Whole Foods;" and he hinted that "unless a new expanded Whole Foods store is constructed" at 15 Washington St., "Whole Foods may not consider it profitable to keep its store open" and the neighborhood "might end up with no supermarket" on Kimco's commercially-zoned shopping center site.

In response, however, another Covenant House resident who shops at Whole Foods regularly questioned why, if the main concern was to expand the Whole Foods store's size, Kimco didn't just reconstuct and add a second floor to the existing Whole Foods building at Washington St. and Corey Rd.--instead of now proposing to construct a new building for Whole Foods as part of an excessively high apartment complex on its shopping center site? And a third Covenant House resident asked why, since many low-income senior residents in the neighborhood find the food prices at the Whole Foods store over-priced, and can only afford to shop at a Market Basket store , Kimco doesn't now just lease its shopping center store to Market Basket rather than to Whole Foods?

Some of the Covenant House and Patricia White Apartments residents did say they liked the idea of constructing a new Whole Foods store and cafe at the Allston St. and Washington St. intersection in Brighton. But other residents of the low-income senior housing apartment buildings asked questions expressing their concerns about how Kimco's proposed project might increase traffic congestion on Washington Street, parking difficulties, noise, loss of sunlight and impact on the quality of life for neighborhood residents, during the 2 years or more construction period and after its completion.

In addition, other elderly residents of Covenant House and Patricia White Apartments asked questions expressing concern that, during construction of Kimco's proposed project, fugitive dust, asbestos, contaminants and pollutant material (possibly contained beneath the existing Whole Foods parking lot) might be released during demolition and excavation work; and that utility services might be temporarily shut off in nearby buildings, and Whole Foods might be closed temporarily at times and construction work each day will be beginning as early as 7 A.M., during the two or more years it would take to complete construction of the proposed Kimco project.