Zoning Board denies latest proposal for controversial Milton Avenue site

The latest chapter in the long saga of 96 Milton Ave. came to the Zoning Board of Appeal last Tuesday, and the board denied the owner’s proposed changes to the three-decker, recommending that he go back to the community.

Owner Kelvin Sanders and his Last Layer Realty, LLC are seeking to legalize enclosed porches on each floor of the house, which has come under intense scrutiny from neighbors who say he has been warehousing sex offenders in the house.

Harold Raymond, who spoke on behalf of the project, said Sanders bought the property two years ago and was looking to “clean up what the previous owner [did]” and sell the house.

No one spoke in favor of the project at the meeting and the board denied the appeal. While the panel tried to keep objections to the latest proposal about the porch enclosures, those who testified against it spoke to a larger issue of mistrust and lack of openness in earlier dealings with the landlord.

They referenced other “illegal issues” in the house, and neighbor Dawn Barrett said of the porches, “as a community, we want it opened up.” Besides that, she said, the building plan provided to the board indicates an intent to add additional rooms, which the panel said was beyond the scope of the proposal at hand.

Among neighbors and the Dorchester United Neighborhood (DUN) Association that Barrett formed in response to controversy around the house, the large three-story structure at the corner of Stockton Street remains a point of unease and uncertainty.

In the summer of 2016, Barrett noticed a number of men going in and out of the house on land that abutted her property. She began searching the Sex Offender Registry Board for the address and found that a number of moderate-to-high risk sex offenders were living in the house, illegally, she suspected.

The city’s Inspectional Services Department gained access to the property through a tenant and discovered in late October of that year that the building was apparently being used as a lodging house despite being zoned as a standard three-family.

In the intervening two years, Sanders had proposed adding bedrooms and petitioning the city to make the property a legal lodging house. Facing serious opposition, he withdrew the plan on the day of its hearing.

“I was trying to make it legal as a rooming house, but I decided not to do that and that’s why this got sparked,” Sanders said last week, “because these porches were like that for the last 20 years.”

Raymond said there are about four bedrooms on each floor and the building would be purchased by FamilyAid Boston to house several large families.

FamilyAid spokesperson Shannon Arnold said in an email on Monday that “FamilyAid Boston no longer has a purchase and sales agreement for 96 Milton Avenue, and has no further plans to purchase the property.”

The agency declined to elaborate on the reason for the change, although a representative from City Council President Andrea Campbell’s office told the Zoning Board that FamilyAid “backed out of buying this property because of other issues they saw with the building.”

Representatives from the mayor’s office and City Councillors Campbell and Frank Baker both spoke in opposition to the proposal.

Jovan Lacet, a Mattapan attorney who regularly attends DUN meetings, said “the present owner really hasn’t been clear about what’s going on with this project… If they were really just trying to clean it to sell the project, in today’s market they can sell the project as is.”

The board’s denial was unanimous, so Sanders cannot bring back an identical proposal later on. He can, however, come to them again with a new plan.

“It sounds to me like you guys need to do some work with the community,” board chair Christine Araujo said.


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