J&Co 3rd Attempt at Over Development of Framingham's Nobscot Village
After its influence on the Mayor & City Council leadership failed by a hair to force Nobscot rezoning last December, J&Co is back for more
The Nobscot community thought that the J&Co developer had been defeated back on December 17, 2024, when 6 City Councilors were ready to vote to exclude the Edmands/Edgell parcel, controlled by J&Co, from the Framingham MBTA Communities Act (MBTA CA) rezoning compliance plan.
The J&Co vision for their Nobscot parcel was 1,000 multi-family units on a 30 acre lot adjacent to the Edgell/Edmands intersection, totally at odds with the current zoning which is for single family homes.
The Planning Board had cut that to 500 units, but it still was a giant development, totally out of scale with the neighborhood, and abutting Edmands Road, which is essentially a rural lane, with speed bumps to mitigate even the current trickle of traffic through its bucolic landscape.
Anyone who has negotiated the Edgell/Edmands intersection knows that hundreds of added cars would choke that intersection in peak hour traffic, and transform a quiet, manageable locale into a jammed up nightmare.
So, hopes ran high that the J&Co plan for high profits and destruction of a neighborhood would collapse once the City Council voted.
Then, City Councilor George King, a stalwart supporter of the Mayor's plans to deal a high density development favor to J&Co, tabled the vote to February 4, 2025, to avoid a defeat for the Mayor and J&Co. If the City Council vote had proceeded, it would have permanently moved the J&Co Nobscot parcel off the table for rezoning.
King's gambit kept the J&Co Nobscot development in play, but had the downside that Framingham would miss the December 31, 2024, deadline for submitting its MBTA CA compliance plan to the state
The Mayor, knowing he was up for re-election in November 2025, figured that the optics of possibly losing state grants by missing the compliance deadline was too politically risky, so he pulled a last minute maneuver, whereby he overrode the City Council’s authority in MBTA CA zoning by submitting his own MBTA CA compliance plan to the state on December 23, 2024.
That plan ditched all of the year long Planning Board and City Council considerations by pitching the downtown Central Business District (CBD) as the sole MBTA CA compliance zone. It was a desperate move, as the CBD's 225 acres were four times larger than the state requirement, and its units exceeded the required 4,355 by 50%.
It was a tour de force in overcompliance, compounded by the refusal of the Mayor, his administration and the Planning Board to fold in any credit for prior development in Framingham. The unit requirement could have been as low as 2,500 if prior developments, such as The Buckley, and the extensive apartment and condo buildings along Route 9, outbound past Temple St., had been submitted as part of the compliance plan.
The full story of how the Framingham’s MBTA CA compliance process ran off the rails is explained in a prior article:
How Framingham's MBTA Communities Act Response Ran Off the Rails
The record since the Mayor’s submission is that the state found that the submission was acceptable, subject to a pro forma housing affordability study which should almost certainly meet with state approval.
In all of this, the Mayor, the Chair of the City Council, Phil Ottaviani and the Chair of the City Council Finance Subcommittee, George King, acted in concert to attempt to bring high density overdevelopment to Nobscot, and high profits to J&Co, but failed.
There have, in fact, been two attempts by J&Co to succeed in their development plans for Nobscot.
One was in the Fall of 2023, where they tried to use a citizen petition approach to catalyze rezoning Nobscot. City Councilor Adam Steiner wrote a guest article in this newsletter arguing the case against J&Co:
Guest Column By Framingham City Councilor Adam Steiner on Nobscot Development
The Nobscot community reaction to the J&Co proposal was strong enough to beat back that first attempt.
The second attempt aimed to bring rezoning to Nobscot under the umbrella of the MBTA CA, as detailed above. It was teed up by the Mayor shortly after that first attempt failed. The Mayor sent a query to the state to see if the J&Co parcel would dovetail with the MBTA CA requirements, and the state said yes on November 6, 2023. That document can be viewed here.
A year later the Mayor and his cohorts on the Planning Board ambushed the Nobscot community with a last minute inclusion (on September 19, 2024) of the J&Co parcel in the city’s compliance plan.
But that was ultimately beaten back as described above by 6 City Councilors lining up against it: Long, Ward, Steiner, Mallach, White Harvey, Bryant.
The Third Assault by J&Co on the Nobscot Community
All was quiet on the Nobscot front until a notice was recently circulated by J&Co to abutters of the controversial Edmands/Edgell parcel. Here it is:
Now, the game is on again, and it is critical that as many residents as possible turn up to that meeting to find out what J&Co are up to, voice their opposition to any Edmands/Edgell rezoning to support J&Co plans, and give the developer good reason to cease and desist.
It seems almost certain that J&Co are holding the meeting, nominally for a ‘discussion’ with neighbors, but actually to get credit for ‘including’ the neighbors in their new planning process. Next, they will proceed to push their new scheme through the planning board and try to get City Council approval for rezoning.
The current City Council should be 6-5 against that, but in a disturbing move City Councilor Brandon Ward has now joined the Mayor’s re-election campaign by serving on the host committee for the Mayor’s July 17 fundraiser, along with George King and Phil Ottaviani.
Is he shifting into the Mayor’s camp on Nobscot development?
He has acquired a challenger for his District 2 seat on the City Council in Carol Spack, so it will be interesting to see how he threads the Nobscot development needle in campaign debates.
In general, the Nobscot community will no doubt keep fully engaged on zoning issues, and remain on full alert for anything involving J&Co.
While the Sisitsky/Ottaviani/King axis controls all of the leadership positions in the city, anything could happen.