Homeowner’s Rehabilitation Inc. plans to build affordable homes along Concord Avenue in the Cambridge Highlands, along with a management office, resident services office and common space for residents that will be shared with Finch Cambridge, a nearby 98-unit building built by HRI from 2018 to 2020.
HRI owns six contiguous parcels at 729-755 Concord Ave., bought for $12.5 million on June 1 with the Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust, said Sara Barcan, executive director of the Cambridge nonprofit developer of affordable housing.
“HRI is deeply invested in the Cambridge Highlands neighborhood,” Barcan said in an email. Referring to Finch, which was built to environmental passive house standard, she said, “we will take the lessons learned from that project and the other developments that we have advanced since Finch opened in 2020 to design a beautiful, highly efficient new property that will provide critically needed affordable housing.”
The goal is to build at least 100 more new affordable homes at this site, but “our team has just begun to advance the schematic design of the project and has not yet finalized any details,” Barcan said. “We look forward to selecting an architect this summer.”
The Alewife neighborhood was rezoned in 2023 to transform it from an industrial area to a mixed-use neighborhood, and HRI’s land borders on where the for-profit developer Healthpeak plans to build 42 acres of a new neighborhood to be built over the coming decades. Healthpeak’s plans include a bridge over train tracks to near the Alewife T station, making the area more accessible to people without cars.
The project will rely on Affordable Housing Overlay zoning that in 2023 increased the by-right height of buildings with 100 percent affordable units to 13 stories along the city’s main corridors, including Concord Avenue.
“The Affordable Housing Overlay and climate resilience zoning have created a path that will maximize this site’s potential as it is redeveloped into new affordable housing. This is an opportunity to reimagine the future of underutilized former industrial sites in Cambridge, and to see how they can transform to meet the city’s evolving needs,” Cambridge city manager Yi-An Huang said in a press release.
HRI said it will hold community meetings and events about the project in the coming months.
This post was updated June 15 with information throughout from Sara Barcan of HRI.
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