What wasn’t on the list of Cambridge housing and zoning priorities on Monday: Alewife.
There’s plenty getting attention in the next nine months in a rundown of priorities prepared for the City Council by assistant city manager Melissa Peters, including social and inclusionary housing, Central Square rezoning and cutting some of the red tape around permitting. But with pedestrian and bike bridges and a new commuter rail station possible in Alewife, councillor Patty Nolan wondered what came after.
“Is that on our radar?” Nolan asked, referring to the transportation infrastructure. “And if so, is it for 2027 or some other year?”
After the developer Healthpeak snatched up real estate in the area in 2021 at a furious pace, an alarmed City Council enacted a construction moratorium on office and lab space for a chance to shape what the industrial land might become.
Heathpeak is due to make its application this month for its 20-building campus in the Alewife Quadrangle part of the Cambridge Highlands, but councillor Patty Nolan noted that areas around the Quad that were taken out of the zoning work in 2022 were still not being addressed.
“There were parts left off,” Nolan said, pointing to the Fresh Pond Mall and Terminal Road, a loop from the mall that connects cars with the Alewife Brook Parkway; and a small area near the Concord Avenue traffic rotary. The entire Alewife Triangle area north of commuter rail tracks was kept out of the zoning to let Longfellow Real Estate Partners finish a project there. “It’s the last piece of Cambridge that has not gone through this.”
Peters assured Nolan that “certainly the remaining areas of Alewife are on our radar.”
City staff expected to do its planning on the MBTA schedule, Peters said, since the state had announced in August 2024 a redevelopment of the red line Alewife Station’s aging and underused parking garage and the surrounding 30 acres. A “major” change in economic realities caused the agency to end its search for a development partner in January and put the project on hold.
“We really do find that those types of processes are better when there’s a developer at the table,” Peters said. The city doesn’t have a timeline for exploring zoning changes on its own, and might wait for the MBTA to restart its project. “It’s still on their medium-term plan to circle back to that when the market situation improves.”
Another difficulty: The mall’s owner, Urban Edge, hasn’t expressed interest in redevelopment. “We have time to kind of wait for both more ownership activity and interest, as well as for the economy to improve, while we move forward on some of these other priorities,” Peters said.
Nolan urged staff to keep pushing on a commuter rail stop “regardless of what happens,” because studies showed a need, and connect city work with Healthpeak’s development.