The City Council approved the new special permit for the Northland development Monday night, ending a journey that spanned six years and exemplified the complexities of post-COVID-19 large-scale development.

The project entered the approval process in 2019 with a plan to build a mixed-use commercial and residential development on 22 acres in Upper Falls, and it was granted a special permit.

The voters then affirmed the approval in a 2020 referendum. But the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation crisis that followed sent construction costs through the stratosphere, and developers started changing plans.

Northland came back to the City Council last year asking for its special permit to be amended, with office space removed and replaced with more housing, because office space was now in low demand with the normalization of remote work.

After several public hearings, the project was approved by the Land Use Committee and sent to the whole Council for a vote a couple of weeks ago. But Councilor Randy Block “chartered” it (ordered it held until the following meeting), saying he needed more answers about traffic impact and what the new plan would bring the city as far as fiscal benefits.

On Monday, Block was not swayed.

“A development of this size is bound to have major impact on traffic,” Block said before directing the room to an overhead projector showing a traffic study, which predicts traffic will spike on Needham Street with the addition of the Northland development.

“I don’t go to Needham Street very often, but last Saturday at noon I happened to be traveling north from the Needham and Oak intersection,” Block said. “The oncoming traffic was breathtaking.”

Councilor Andrea Kelley, chair of Land Use, noted that her committee unanimously voted in favor of the amended special permit.

“It was an extremely thorough, thoughtful and convincing process,” she said.

Kelley took issue with Block’s move to delay the vote at the previous meeting.

“I feel that, though a totally appropriate legal move, to charter is really an effort to push a minority opinion that was not supported in the committee,” Kelley said. “And honestly, it’s a little bit of a sour grapes approach when ones opinion isn’t supported by other people.”

Councilor Pam Wright cautioned against putting that much housing on a commercial-zoned swath of the city.

“A business tax base brings in so much more money than residential units,” Wright said. “We have a very limited business/commercial zone throughout the city, and it has been decreasing from 16 percent to 11 percent over the past ten years. The city tax burden is then carried by residential units, making it more difficult for families to stay here and new families to afford to buy in Newton.”

Wright said the taxes on residential property she owns in Watertown went down more than 20 percent after that city saw an influx of new businesses set up shop there.

Councilor Andreae Downs noted that traffic studies show less impact in the newer version of the Northland project than if the developer stuck with the 2019 version, because this new version eliminates office space.

“This is going to be a great development if it gets built,” Downs said. “It will be a real asset to the neighborhood. It will allow us to have 880 new apartments, it’ll be sustainable, it’ll retain the historic mill building, and it will beat like heck the current dirt lot that is there now unoccupied.”

The special permit amendment request, and thus the fate of the Northland project, was passed by a vote 19 to 4, with one councilor absent. Block and Wright, along with John Oliver and Julia Malakie, cast the “no” votes.

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Editor’s Note: Attorney Alan Schlesinger of Schlesinger and Buchbinder, who represents Northland, is a member of the Newton Beacon Board of Directors.