The Boston Planning Department met virtually with about 50 residents on Monday to discuss the new draft plans for the West Roxbury Neighborhood Housing rezoning initiative.

The in-person meeting is set for Thursday, August 6 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the District E-5 station of the Boston Police Department, 1708 Centre Street. The proposed updates focus on the residential areas of West Roxbury. Residents and attendees can learn about how updated zoning will: simplify home upkeep and renovation, enable construction of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), encourage housing production, and provide clearer rules for property owners

The proposal for neighborhood housing is pretty simple, in that slightly more density is to be enacted on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. It’s probably more accurate to call them “sub-neighborhoods,” as Project Manager Will Cohen explained that each new zone was chosen based on the collective and whole “feel” of each area of the neighborhood.

“This means that when you see the number of what exists versus the number of what we’re proposing, in most cases what we’re saying is in existing buildings we want existing buildings to be able to add a unit or two,” he said. “That’s generally the principle.”

Does a neighborhood have a lot of two-families? Then the zoning reflects that, and it goes up from there. The districts are Dormer-2, which is for three units for existing buildings / two units for new construction, Dormer-3 for three units, Decker-4 for four units, and Decker-6 for up to six units. Cohen stressed that the maximum units outcome is based mostly on the lot size and surrounding factors, and is not based necessarily on one specific metric.

The comment period for the plan goes until the end of October, and feedback can be submitted on the Boston Planning Department’s website at https://gvimes.link/nhbrhdzng

Unique among the Neighborhood Housing initiatives so far, West Roxbury does not have any of the Dormer-6 zones that Hyde Park and Roslindale currently have. The West Roxbury zones are also capped at 35 feet, regardless of district.

West Roxbury, Cohen allowed, has mostly single-family units, but said those types of units and homes can accommodate more people, and were meant to back when they were built.

“Our analysis 100 percent shows that the majority kind of building that exists in all the zones in West Roxbury are single-family homes, and we think that every one of these districts should have single-family homes,” he said. “But at the same time, we want those single-family homes to have the flexibility they need to have ADUs.”

But he said the needs of residents have changed since most of West Roxbury’s housing was built, before the current zoning for the neighborhood, the whole West Roxbury neighborhood, was enacted.

“The zoning in place today doesn’t line up with the homes that most of you all are living in,” he said, noting only about 10 percent of the neighborhood’s housing stock was built after the 1965 zoning code. “Most of what was built for West Roxbury before and after the World War II boom was a lot like the buildings we see in the outer neighborhoods of Boston and other American cities in the United States: homes able to fit households where you had two-and-a-half kids and a dog. In many cases, that is ideal, on a large lot. We have two kids, no dog, in a single-family home with two cars in a driveway in Roslindale. It absolutely meets the needs of me, a now aging millennial about to turn 40.”

Cohen said things have since changed.

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“While that was a majority in the first half of the 20th century, it was the predominate post-boom demographic piece, here in the 2020s, that represents, depending on how you want to calculate it, a third to a fifth of households in the City of Boston or American cities,” he said. “It’s not that the homes we have now are the wrong size, it’s that they are often configured in a way that doesn’t line up with the demographic pieces that we see.”

Cohen stressed as well that while a district may allow up to four units, each individual lot likely has other factors that make building such a home financially unfeasible, or out of code with other requirements like fire regulations and state living space requirements. He stipulated, though, that they want to finalize those kinds of decisions with as much input from residents as possible.

“If the lot is small enough, and the idea of RD-4 versus RD-3 helps in terms of renovations, then that’s exactly the kind of lot that code restrictions around new construction are unlikely to make people want to propose a four-unit building in the first place,” he said. “The unit count matters, but all the other pieces matter too. And so, part of what we want to use this extended comment period for, is to tease part of that out.”

On the issue of parking, Cohen said the new zoning will allow tandem spaces and other parking fixes that are not currently recognized by zoning. He said that if you have a driveway, for instance, that can fit two or three cars but they have to park in tandem, that’s considered one space because each space, under current zoning, would require independent access. So the new zoning will allow those to be counted differently.

Resident Karen Perez said simply more people will result in more cars.

“There isn’t enough parking,” she said. “The people who live across the street from me have four high school-aged kids, and each parent has a car and one parent has two cars. This is what we would be looking at if these changes are adopted.”

“Homeowners are adding additional living, and any parent here knows that if their young adult comes home, that often comes with potentially a second or third car; it’s just a reality of living in this part of the city,” she said. “Just look at Southie. Southie had parking problems in the 1970s, but you turn all those single-family homes into three-family condos and that can multiply the number of cars from one or two up to six.”

Again, the comment period is open until the end of October. Go to https://gvimes.link/srvynghbrhdzng to comment.