Who will kick-start The Link?

THE RIGHT TOOLS: A rendering of a proposed pedestrian walkway between two office buildings on Clifford Street in The Link “developer’s toolkit,” released by the Interstate 195 Redevelopment District Commission this month. / COURTESY I-195 REDEVELOPMENT DISTRICT COMMISSION
THE RIGHT TOOLS: A rendering of a proposed pedestrian walkway between two office buildings on Clifford Street in The Link “developer’s toolkit,” released by the Interstate 195 Redevelopment District Commission this month. / COURTESY I-195 REDEVELOPMENT DISTRICT COMMISSION

Even before the relocation of Interstate 195 opened up 19 acres of land for development in downtown Providence, the city’s core already featured numerous underutilized properties waiting for the right building project.
So will the former highway land, now being marketed nationally by brokers Jones Lang LaSalle as The Link, attract private-sector investors previously uninterested in Providence?
Like the Jewelry District when the highway ran through it, the real estate world appears split on the question.
“I think you are going to find demand from a variety of sources for the big, rectangular-shaped parcels where you can build something large,” said Kenneth Hecht, principal of Hecht Development in Gloucester, Mass., and owner of 95 Chestnut St., a factory-office conversion abutting The Link. “There are some pretty attractive parcels and others, because of where the highway went, have some weird shapes that may need to be glued on to another parcel.”
Hecht said he sees the scarcity of space in the Kendall Square area of Cambridge, Mass., eventually encouraging entrepreneurs to look at The Link as a less expensive Ivy League alternative.
Richard Baccari II, vice president of development at Providence-based Churchill & Banks, which has expressed interest in land from The Link on the city’s East Side, predicts more modest demand, at least in the early days.
“I think it will be slow initially,” Baccari said. “The overall economy is going to have to improve to get national developers interested in Providence.”
As reflected in the choice of Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle as broker, the I-195 commission has emphasized attracting national players, particularly potential corporate tenants, to The Link.
“[The Link] is going to need both local and national,” Baccari said. “There is no better champion than those here already, and I think the local developers are probably going to be the first getting progress started. It is going to be hard to get an outside developer to come in and pioneer until they see something happening.”
Neither Baccari nor Hecht said they were ready to discuss any specific plans for a Link bid. Locally based residential and retail development, especially on the East Side parcels, could be first out of the box, but national reach could be crucial to attracting businesses to The Link and generating demand for the job-producing offices or labs prioritized by the commission.
I-195 Commission Chairman Colin Kane, himself a developer at Peregrine Group LLC in East Providence, has been careful not to raise expectations for a flood of proposals on The Link.
“I don’t have a clue,” Kane said after the commission approved the development guides and prospectus for The Link earlier this month, about what the market reaction would be. “I would say this area and land is an extraordinary commodity.”
While keeping expectations for The Link modest, Kane added that he expected bids for the East Side parcels to become “competitive” relatively quickly.
The 139-page “developer’s toolkit” approved by the commission this month lays out the rules and procedures that will govern how projects will be chosen.
Along with The Link’s central location, the I-195 commission has advertised its “one-stop shopping” permit process as an attribute rare for land elsewhere in Rhode Island and across the country.
The state law that created the commission put it in charge of local land-use permitting that would normally go through city planners and the zoning board.
And in the roughly two-and-a half years since the commission was formed, it got The Link parcels, most with some level of industrial contamination, preapproved by state environmental regulators.
Combined, these factors allow the commission to offer an applicant preliminary approval within 30 days, something unheard of in most commercial development and very important to securing financing and potentially tenant commitments.
What’s less clear is what the role of public participation will be in deciding which projects move forward and in what form.
Kane said projects will be negotiated behind closed doors until final approval.
That includes zoning variances, which normally generate close interest, and in many cases intense opposition, from abutters. Zoning relief could be particularly important on parking, where the downtown code requires one space for every 1,000 square feet of office space, or 0.75 spaces per housing unit, but the commission wants to encourage parking concentrated in large, shared garages.
To maximize development on The Link, the I-195 commission may have to mix, match and coordinate what goes on each parcel so they work together.
This is particularly important to get something out of the small and oddly shaped parcels that are unlikely to draw significant interest on their own, but could be utilized if combined with one of the larger and more desirable lots.
To take advantage of qualified proposals while keeping the door open for good opportunities that may not present themselves immediately, the commission has put in place a “rolling” applications cycle with a new batch of proposals reviewed every three months.
There are 21 separate parcels available on The Link, and the toolkit provides design guidelines for each parcel plus sample “scenarios” illustrated with photos from other cities.
Most of the suggestions are three-to-seven story, mixed-use buildings with separate options for apartments or offices on the upper floors.
Some of the highlight suggestions include:
• On the 1-acre South Water Street parcel wrapping around the Captain Joseph Tillinghast House – three-story townhouse apartments above a parking podium.
• On the 1.4-acre Wickenden and Pike streets parcel – a five-to-seven-story office building combined with a three to four-story apartment building and ground-floor retail.
• On the 2.6-acre parcel at the intersection of Dorrance and Clifford streets – two seven-story office buildings around a central green.
• On a 2.25-acre parcel on Clifford – an eight-story, 400,000-square-foot, large floor plate office building.
• On the one-half-acre parcel at Hoppin Street near Interstate 95 – a 16-story office building or high-rise student apartment building. •

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