The Wu administration plans to kill a long-planned laboratory and affordable housing project on city-owned land on Tremont Street in Roxbury and will instead consider building a new Madison Park vocational high school on the site, which has been dormant for a half-century.
The abrupt reversal, disclosed at a community meeting Monday night, closes another chapter of failed attempts to redevelop the 8-acre parcel across from the headquarters of the Police Department. It also dashes the dreams of residents of seeing a potentially powerful economic generator, with prized jobs in the much vaunted life-sciences sector, and much-needed affordable homes come to a part of the city long starved for both.
While the idea of a new high school campus is also welcome, it is not what the neighborhood had been promised — “2,710 good-paying jobs with long-term career tracks,” according to its developers, as well as “a commitment to job training in the life sciences industry for those in the Roxbury community.”
The announcement triggered bitter reactions from members of the community at Monday’s meeting.
“This is, fundamentally, taking agency away from the Black community, and frankly, it’s just racist,” said Rodney Singleton, a Roxbury resident and community leader. “It’s not just land. It’s economic power as well. And to bereft that of the community is good old Boston racist politics, and we should not be in that business.”
The market for life science development has cratered since 2023, when the development rights on the parcel known as P3 were awarded to the HYM Investment Group and My City at Peace, which were set to expire at the end of this month.
Instead of renewing those rights — as is often done in these situations — Boston’s planning chief, Kairos Shen, told a Roxbury neighborhood group Monday that the city will let the designation lapse and take the site back.
Separately, Boston recently won state approval to help finance new construction or renovation of Madison Park, at an estimated cost of around $700 million. So rather than extend the “false expectation” of a life-sciences lab campus on P3, Shen said, the city will instead examine putting Madison Park there.
“Rebuilding Madison Park as a world-class vocational school for our community is a generational opportunity that is now within reach for the first time in decades,” a Wu administration spokesperson said Monday. “Now our top priority is to deliver the best possible school project in the most cost-effective way, on the fastest timeline.”
HYM and My City at Peace first explored a project in 2018 and eventually won rights for a five-building mixed-use development. The proposal was developed in partnership with multiple minority- and women-owned businesses, and won broad support from the Roxbury community.
In a joint statement, HYM and My City at Peace said the team was “deeply saddened” by the decision and remains “fully committed” to the parcel and the Roxbury community.
“For too long, Roxbury has been left out of Greater Boston’s sustained economic growth,” the statement said. “We are determined to help change that trajectory.”
The decision also shocked and surprised many at Monday evening’s meeting of the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan Oversight Committee.
“It just does not sit right with me,” said Dorothea M. Jones, a committee member. “It’s almost like the land is being taken back a second time from people in this community.”
Meanwhile, Singleton said it was galling for Boston to ask for state funding to build a high school when the city had already planned to funnel $91 million in public funds to the renovation of White Stadium in Franklin Park.
HYM and My City at Peace’s proposal included more than 600,000 square feet of lab space and 466 apartments and homes for sale — many of which would be at deeply discounted prices — along with retail space and a nonprofit center and museum for Embrace Boston, an organization that honors the legacy of Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King Jr.
But progress has been slow. In the three years since HYM and My City at Peace won development rights, the life-science lab market has fallen on hard times, with vacancy rates at record highs. Finding financing for a lab campus, which would then subsidize the affordable housing, is challenging, Shen said.
“It’s not news to anybody that we are at a dramatic downturn of development of all kind throughout the city,” Shen said. “It’s affecting all of the neighborhoods of the city, and Roxbury is not immune to that economic condition.”
Meanwhile, using the site instead for a new Madison Park could help contain costs of that project, said Trish Cafferky, the city’s deputy chief of operations. Rather than putting students in a “temporary swing building” on adjacent sports fields, they could stay in place as new facilities were under construction.
The estimates of between $680 million and $720 million to build a new school or renovate the existing one are “massively higher than what we had budgeted for,” Cafferky said. “This is expected to be, likely, the most expensive school project in the history of Massachusetts, let alone Boston.”
Madison Park is the city’s only technical vocational school, and includes a wood shop, cosmetology lab, and dental hygienist training facility. A new Madison Park could include added programs like early childhood education, robotics, biotechnology, and veterinary science, among others, Cafferky said.
“Imagine that the culinary shop actually also has a bakery that community members could walk into,” she said. “Imagine that there’s a veterinary clinic, and you can bring your animals in to get checked.”
The state process to rebuild a high school takes several years. It would kick off this summer with a roughly nine-month “eligibility period.” The City Council would have to vote on the project, and the city would aim to hire a consultant team next summer before designing the school in 2028 and building it by 2030 — if all goes according to plan.
Shen did acknowledge the “significant time and effort” HYM and My City at Peace have put into developing P3.
“The dedication . . . will put them in a good position to continue this work once the feasibility study for Madison Park is completed,” Shen said. “They will be well-positioned to participate in a redevelopment of what remnant parcel might be available at the end of the feasibility study.”
For Ricardo Louis, a Roxbury resident and chief executive of Privé Parking, the de-designation is both surprising and heartbreaking. The 500-space underground parking garage that his company would have helped develop at P3 would have been Privé Parking’s first project as parking and transportation consultant, and the company would have both operated the garage after it opened and had an equity stake in it.
“Having equity stake is a game changer,” Louis said. “There has never been someone Black, local, that has equity stake in any public garage in the city of Boston.”
Losing the planned future home of an Embrace Boston museum and cultural center is unfortunate and disappointing, especially heading into the MLK holiday and at a time when communities of color are under attack nationwide, said Imari Paris Jeffries, the chief executive of Embrace Boston. Part of why “The Embrace” monument is located in Downtown Crossing was so the organization could build a center that would spur economic development in a historically Black neighborhood, he said.
In a statement Monday, Embrace Boston said it was “profoundly disappointed and deeply concerned” at the decision to let HYM and My City at Peace’s designation lapse.
“This project was built on years of community input and Black-led leadership and vision. That history should matter,” the statement said. “To see this vision abruptly altered without meaningful engagement with affected partners undermines the very principles the city has publicly committed to upholding, particularly when years of trust, participation, and coalition-building are at stake.”
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