Millrace Development Partners, the firm currently defending itself against a lawsuit over affordable-housing shortfalls at its Foundry District Lofts project, has pitched a 180-unit mixed-income development for Riverside Heights, a proposal that tenant advocates say the city should scrutinize far more closely than it did the last one.
The proposed development, submitted to the city’s planning department for informal review, would sit on a vacant riverfront parcel near the Kestrel River Greenway currently zoned for light commercial use. Millrace is seeking a rezoning to mixed-income residential, along with density bonuses the firm says are necessary to make the project financially viable.
Aaron Kessler, a spokesman for Millrace, said the proposal includes 36 income-restricted units, roughly 20 percent of the total, a share he noted exceeds the 15 percent standard the council adopted for development near the city’s transit corridor. “We’ve heard the criticism from the Foundry District Lofts situation loud and clear,” Kessler said. “This proposal is designed, from the ground up, to answer the questions people are going to ask before they ask them.”
A credibility problem the company can’t rezone away
That framing has done little to reassure critics. Denise Okonkwo-Marsh, lead organizer of the Lowertown Tenant Alliance and a named plaintiff in the ongoing lawsuit over Foundry District Lofts’ affordable-unit shortfall, said Millrace’s promises should carry little weight until the Foundry Row case is resolved. “They told Lowertown tenants the affordable-unit program had been ‘restructured,’” Okonkwo-Marsh said, echoing testimony from a fellow plaintiff in that case. “Why would Riverside Heights get a different version of the same company?”
Council Member Aisha Muhammad, who represents Riverside Heights and chairs the council’s housing committee, said she has asked city attorneys whether the pending litigation should factor into how the planning department evaluates Millrace’s new proposal. “I’m not going to pretend I can un-know what’s happening with their other project while I’m reviewing this one,” Muhammad said. “That doesn’t mean I’ll block a good project on principle, but it does mean I’m going to ask harder questions about enforcement mechanisms than I might have a year ago.”
They told Lowertown tenants the affordable-unit program had been ‘restructured.’ Why would Riverside Heights get a different version of the same company?
Denise Okonkwo-Marsh, Lowertown Tenant Alliance
Millrace says the two projects shouldn’t be conflated
Kessler pushed back on the idea that the Foundry Row dispute should color how the city treats the new pitch, arguing the company disputes the tenants’ characterization of events at Foundry District Lofts and maintains it has met its legal obligations there. “We’re contesting that case because we believe the facts support us,” he said. “That’s a separate question from whether this Riverside Heights proposal stands on its own merits, and I think it does.”
Muhammad said she’s less interested in relitigating the Foundry Row case than in making sure any approval for Riverside Heights includes enforceable, specific commitments rather than the kind of general assurances she said tenants allege were made and then not honored at Foundry District Lofts. “If they’re serious about 20 percent affordable units, I want that written into the approval in a way that doesn’t leave room for a company spokesman to later call it ‘restructured,’” she said.
Riverside Heights residents have also raised concerns unrelated to the affordable-housing question, including worries about traffic on streets near the greenway and the loss of what several described as one of the few remaining open riverfront lots in the neighborhood, worries that echo the early scrutiny Millrace’s next Foundry Row project has already drawn. A community meeting on the proposal, the first of at least two the planning department has scheduled, drew roughly 90 residents earlier this month, with comments split between cautious support for new housing and pointed skepticism of the developer behind it.
Kessler said Millrace expects to submit a formal rezoning application within the next two months, after incorporating feedback from the community meetings, and that the company anticipates a council vote sometime after that, though no date has been set. “We’d rather take the extra time now than rush something through and have it blow up on us the way the last project did,” he said.
Okonkwo-Marsh said the tenant alliance plans to monitor the proposal closely regardless of how the Foundry District Lofts lawsuit resolves. “Our job isn’t to decide whether Millrace gets to build in Riverside Heights,” she said. “Our job is to make sure that if they do, the promises they’re making right now don’t quietly disappear the way we say they did last time.”
Some Riverside Heights homeowners have taken a more measured view, saying they’re less concerned with Millrace’s track record than with the specifics of the project itself. Neighborhood resident Paul Osei, who has lived a block from the proposed site for over a decade, said he’s cautiously supportive as long as the density bonuses don’t overwhelm the area’s existing infrastructure. “I don’t love that it’s Millrace specifically,” Osei said. “But an empty lot doesn’t do anything for this neighborhood either, and if the affordable units are real, that’s more than what’s there now.”
Kessler said the company is aware its reputation, not just its paperwork, will shape how the proposal is received, and that Millrace has offered to include a third-party compliance monitor for the affordable units as part of the formal application, an arrangement it did not include in the original Foundry District Lofts agreement. “We’re not asking anyone to just take our word for it this time,” he said. Muhammad said she welcomed the offer but wants to see the monitor’s authority spelled out in writing before treating it as a meaningful concession. “An outside monitor is only as good as the enforcement power behind it,” she said. “I want specifics, not another promise.”