Interviews!

Lunch at Quincy Market after meeting a developer on State St.

Last week we started contacting developers and city board members as well as one student from Harvard who completed a similar project. The positive feedback we received from people was very exciting. Most responded within a day and said they were happy to meet with us.

This week we have already have completed six interviews and have gotten a lot of really good information. The developers were really helpful in allowing us to understand their side of the problem. They want to limit their costs when building as much as possible and don’t see a need to spend extra on adapting their building to climate change unless given a good reason or incentive. The boards said that they wanted to see more changes to the city that would protect the city from the risks of climate change but at the same time they did not want to deter developers from wanted to build there because of added high costs that other cities don’t have. One of the most exciting interviews we have had was with Erica Blonde, a Harvard graduate student who last year did a project very similar to ours in Chelsea. It was great to hear what type of research her group did and what type of adaptations they came up with. She is going to send along some of the information that she and her group used that she feels will be beneficial to our group. She was very excited about the project and already expressed interest in coming to see our group’s presentation at the Boston Public Library.

             We plan to start taking all of the results from our interviews into a matrix that will allow us to analyze the important information in a way that will help us create our guidelines for the boards. Overall, I am excited to see our project finally coming together with some concrete results and not just the literature research that we have already done. 

A picture in front of the apartment complex of the developer we met with