Dear City Councilors and Planning Board:
The Charles River Regional Chamber enthusiastically supports the Watertown Square Area Plan.
This refreshing reimaging of Watertown Square was created through a remarkably collaborative public process and positions the square to become something we can all be proud of.
- This plan transforms the square’s most frustrating and unwelcoming traffic patterns, replacing it with a vision that welcomes pedestrians, cyclists, bus commuters, and drivers.
- This plan greatly enhances our existing restaurants’, retailers’, and other merchants’ long-term viability while opening new opportunities and a desirable environment for new businesses.
- This plan smartly unlocks opportunities for multi-family housing, addressing a desperate need for employers struggling to hire, young professionals and their families to live, and for seniors looking to downsize.
- And this plan creates new open public spaces, transforms the Delta into a desirable destination, and opens access to our favorite river.
While there may ultimately be a need to adjust particular building heights or the angle of an intersection, those are deliberations for a later time through the zoning process, streetscape evaluations and other subsequent steps. We also are concerned that the ultimate execution of this project is carefully managed to minimize disruption to existing businesses.
But those are issues to be resolved in the days and years ahead. Now is the time to embrace this remarkably thoughtful, transformative vision and keep moving Watertown forward.
We urge you to adopt the plan as written.
Submitted by Greg Reibman, President & CEO of the Charles River Regional Chamber
Bravo Greg! It so hard to explain the dynamism that has been lost by people not being able to move in or out. You hit on it here:
This plan smartly unlocks opportunities for multi-family housing, addressing a desperate need for employers struggling to hire, young professionals and their families to live, and for seniors looking to downsize.
This is exactly what we need — unlocking. Too much is locked up in housing, money, investment, job creation, opportunity for growth, real sustainability, family structure, and innovation. This stasis has to be dissolved.
Yes! Thank you for writing this letter of support. The exact details and execution may need work but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The Watertown Square Area Plan is a big step in the right direction.