As a principal at Arrowstreet who excels at developing design solutions for contradictory constraints, Scott Pollack is responsible for some of the firm’s most complex developments; guiding these challenging projects through planning and approvals. He has also been instrumental in leading Arrowstreet’s planning for the U.S. military, such as for the Office of the Secretary Of Defense’s Healthy Base Initiative, which aims to improve health outcomes and create a healthier environment for military members and their families.

You’ve been a resident and member of greater Boston’s land use community for many years, what do you think of the shift to a life sciences economy and the seemingly endless demand for housing in the region?

Over the last 3 decades, Boston’s real estate economy  has proven its ability to adjust to macro-economic trends, something that I haven’t necessarily seen in other markets.

Boston’s universities, municipalities, and real estate community have been surprisingly flexible in their willingness to enable the Life Sciences sector. As an industry, Life sciences building requirements have changed significantly, and the need continues to adapt and grow because colleges and universities are continuously researching and producing new ideas, companies and innovations. We, as an industry, are responsive to those changing demands, and that puts Boston in a good position for the future.

Regarding housing, like most cities in the United States, we fell behind in production during the 70s and 80s, and we’ve been trying to catch up ever since.  What many people don’t realize about the housing shortage is that it is driven by pure demographics. The average household size today is about half of what it was 50 years ago when you look at the census data, and I believe eastern Massachusetts is even a little farther ahead in this trend of smaller household sizes. Combine that with improvements in the healthcare system that allow aging residents to stay in their homes and continue to live alone, so that, even for the same population, you need twice as many households for the same population size.

Planning for housing growth is a challenge because many people think that if you add housing, you inevitably add school–age children, but it’s not necessarily true. By adding housing units, we’re allowing people who lived in and grew up in those communities to stay in those communities. Surprisingly, many major communities in eastern Massachusetts have declining school-age populations and have closed a number of schools because of this. It’s a demographic problem as well as a lifestyle and trend issue. Since we’re not going to go back and tell people that they have to live in higher household densities, we’re going to have to provide more housing.

Even though we have declining family sizes, we still have family housing issues, due in part, to older people staying in their homes well after their children form new households. The rollover in family housing that used to happen, just is not happening anymore.

What projects are you working on in 2022?

Arrowstreet continues to do a lot of housing work as well as interesting Life Science/Lab projects. We’re looking at a lot of repositioning of existing commercial assets, whether they be well-placed, but not very busy shopping centers, or other assets that need to be updated or reused in new ways.

I personally am spending a lot of time thinking about the future of planning. I’m working with the Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Development Center to think about how one takes an evidence-based or data-driven perspective to master planning instead of thinking of master planning as something you do and then it lives as a static document on a shelf for 10 or 15 years. Planning needs to be continuously updated as a living document as people and institutional needs evolve because that kind of rapid change is the nature of the world that we live in today.

How is this plan to modernize planning going?

It’s actually going well. The good news is, there is a wide recognition that we can’t continue to do things the way we used to  because the world is changing so quickly. There’s also a recognition that both economics and zoning have driven us to a single-use-building philosophy. Because of building code or lender requirements, or just because people want to be efficient, we tend to create buildings to very specific sets of requirements and dimensional controls. The height of floor-to-floor for office, lab, and housing are different and we’ve really optimized things for their particular use. However, as the nature of our society changes, so does the need for building and space flexibility.

We didn’t used to be this way – take a look at the wharf buildings in Boston. They have gone through multiple lifetimes as storage, office buildings, artist’s lofts, condos and apartments, and now they are home to tech companies. We just don’t create buildings like this anymore. Perhaps if we really try to think about a resilient and sustainable future for a world that keeps changing and our space needs keep evolving, we’ll see that need to be more adaptable. I’m not just talking about movable walls or furniture that can change; the big part of the capital and carbon cost is the frame and structure of the building.

There are economic, legal, building code, and zoning reasons why we’ve ended up like this, but now we’re fighting to make a more resilient and sustainable physical world and our tactics needs to be reconsidered. We’re looking at how can you use data in planning to think about how to reduce our physical footprint so we are heating and cooling less space, yet still conveniently provide all of the things that people need to live and do their jobs.

We spend a lot of time looking at quality of life issues as part of these masterplans and are trying to understand if, for example, people have access to public outdoor space so they can eat their lunch outside on a nice day. Is there access to food, fitness, daycare – all of the same issues that we face in society at-large exist in a microcosm at our military installations. So, it’s a great test bed for us to look at those issues and try to give them the best solutions we can for the sacrifices they make for us – whether or not you agree with the missions they’ve been given by our government.

You are an active member of the REA Comm – what have you learned from participating in TAPS? Would you recommend that experience to members?

I would absolutely recommend it, and I do all the time. I’ve also been on a local product council and recommend those experiences to meet and learn from the really wide range of smart people that are in the real estate community in this region.

We also have a responsibility to our communities  to provide resources to people that don’t necessarily have access to them otherwise. TAPs are a great way to learn about the place that you live. I know much more about  New England than I did before I joined this committee.

Tell us about what you do in your spare time.

In late-April, my wife and I are heading to Marfa in west Texas. It’s home of some very significant late-20^th-century art. I’ve been to a number of significant places like the Lightning Field, or Spiral Jetty, or Robert Irwin’s Central Garden the Getty Museum, but I’ve never made it to Marfa because it’s in the middle of nowhere – three and half hours from Midland Texas. We are really excited to spend some time in the desert and see art that just doesn’t exist anywhere else. Then to chase that, we will go to Big Bend National Park. This will be our first big trip since 2019, and we’re looking forward a blend of nature and art.