SAUGUS — As the town continues to explore ways to boost Cliftondale Square, Joe Vecchione, who chaired the committee tasked with producing a report on how best to revitalize the area, said he believes housing could hold the key to bringing the square back to life.
But, Vecchione explained, the town’s zoning bylaws currently prohibit the construction of housing in Cliftondale Square. He said that decision was made amidst the growth of the shopping mall and the rise of single-family homes to support nuclear families, a move that grandfathered in existing properties.
As a result, Vecchione, a Town Meeting member and former member of the Planning Board, intends to put forward a zoning overlay to re-allow housing in the area at Annual Town Meeting in May, but with strict caps to prevent high-rises from coming in. The primary goal, he said, would be to attract mixed-use development, with one floor of commercial space and two floors of residential units.
“I’m looking to keep this within the scale of the neighboring and appropriate to the scale of the neighborhood,” he said.
Vecchione’s vision for Cliftondale would limit the number of units per acre of density to 20, meaning if every parcel in the square were redeveloped there would be 140 new units added.
He held a public forum on the zoning overlay last week in an attempt to garner feedback from Town Meeting members and elected and appointed officials. During the forum, Vecchione said, he dispelled concerns that he sought to bring development akin to the scale of Route 1 to Cliftondale.
“Some of the feedback I got on the call is that, ‘Joe Vecchione’s proposing six-story high rises with hundreds upon hundreds of units,’ which is not the case,” he said, stressing the need to effectively communicate the proposal with Town Meeting members who may not be as well versed in zoning verbiage. “It’s evident by the zoning changes on Route 1 that people are kind of scarred by any new housing.”
The revitalization of Cliftondale Square has been a key priority for town officials in recent years, with the committee convening in 2021, Town Meeting approving the purchase of two properties in the square, and Town Manager Scott Crabtree securing several grants for the area, including $2.3 million in federal funding.
In revitalization discussions, members of the Board of Selectmen as well as other town officials have floated the idea of Cliftondale needing some sort of “anchor” — a restaurant or business that would attract residents to the area, and could spark foot traffic. Vecchione, though, sought to dispel that notion, saying he believed it was “passive.”
“Everybody wants an anchor store or an anchor restaurant. But right now, the existing commercial components are really not scaled or have the capacity to really support what everybody wants,” he said. “Nobody’s knocking down commercial space to build commercial space, it’s just not going to happen. There needs to be that mixed-use component to provide the financial incentivization to do so.”
To that end, the town has repeatedly tried to incentivize businesses to invest in Cliftondale, Vecchione said. Over the years, Saugus has offered tax breaks, low-interest loans, storefront improvement programs, and micro enterprise grants to developers in the hopes that they would invest in Cliftondale. But, he said, those efforts failed to breathe new life into the area.
As a result, Vecchione said he believes it is time the town took revitalization efforts to the legislative level.
“We’ve tried a lot of other avenues to try to get investment and reinvestment back to the square, try to incentivize property owners, but nothing has ever yielded that. The idea I’m bringing forward … is not a new one. It’s just one that hasn’t been brought to that legislative level,” he said. “With the momentum that has been gained over the past couple of years … it’s the right time to bring that zoning overlay forward.”
With more than three months to go until Annual Town Meeting in May, Vecchione said he would be holding at least two more meetings to garner community input on the overlay, with the idea of finding common ground amongst all interested parties, of which there are certainly no shortage.
Vecchione cautioned that the overlay would not be some sort of magical solution to all of the issues in the area, but said he was confident that should he win approval from Town Meeting, there would be an additional incentive for property owners to buy into Cliftondale.
“I’m not gonna say that rezoning is going to change the square, that’s never a guarantee,” he said. “But what it will do is provide the opportunity for whether a property owner wants to reinvest in the property, they have the ability to do that.”