A recently launched North Cambridge organization called NoCa Neighbors joins others formed within the past couple of years, the West Cambridge Neighborhood Coalition and Neighborhood 9 Community, to fill a gap that’s chronological as well as geographic.
NoCa Neighbors aims to fill an informational need, said founder Paul Toner, a former city councillor whose family has lived in the same North Cambridge home for four generations.
“Even before I was on the council, I just got so tired of hearing from people that ‘They didn’t know about it, they never heard about this, this is the first they’re hearing about this issue,’” Toner said in a phone interview Friday. “I’m trying to do my part to engage people in North Cambridge so they’re not taken by surprise.”
He gives credit to organizations such as the Alewife Study Group and Porter Square Neighbors Association for their work alerting residents to projects and issues in their areas, but their interests leave a geographic gap between. NoCa Neighbors expects to look at issues from around Walden Street to the Arlington town line, and from Garden Street north to the Somerville city line.
Work has also dwindled over the years at a neighborhood improvement organization called the North Cambridge Stabilization Committee, which causes that chronological gap. The committee, which once included Toner’s mother – and Toner – as a member, formed some 50 years ago to improve the neighborhood by getting federal money to give grants to businesses, painting houses and organizing other boosts to quality of life, Toner said. It turned into an organization that reviewed development projects and curb cut requests, but as long ago as 2015, then-chair of the Planning Board Hugh Russell referred to the NCSC as having been “more formally organized than they presently are.”
“Everybody that was involved has sort of just slowly, quietly faded away,” Toner said of the committee. Toner asked its leaders roughly a year ago if they wanted to see new leadership rebuild the organization, he said, but got no response. (A voicemail was left Saturday with the committee’s clerk and also got no immediate response.)
Afterward, he met with a group of 10 people and said he was thinking of forming a neighborhood group. “They all thought that was a great idea – especially the part about trying to be nonpartisan,” Toner said. City staff also were happy to hear of another way to touch base with resident. “This isn’t going to be a bike group or an antibike group, this isn’t going to be a prodevelopment group or an antidevelopment group. This is going to be a group that wants to hear about what’s going on so they can make their own decisions.”
It arrives as part of a wave that includes not just West Cambridge and Neighborhood 9 groups, but as the city explores creating a business improvement district in North Cambridge, Porter Square and down Massachusetts Avenue toward Harvard Square. The dues-paying organization or organizations is being urged by leadership at the Porter Square Neighbors Association.
Just across the border in Somerville, a Davis Square Neighborhood Council is on the cusp of official municipal recognition.
Developers at 350 Rindge reach out
NoCa Neighbors is still being birthed, and its two meetings so far have drawn 10 to 15 people from a mailing list of around 60, said Toner, who knows he has work to do in publicizing and promoting the group. North Cambridge has an estimated population of 15,623 in 8,153 housing units, according to Census data.
Developers are already reaching out to NoCa Neighbors and asking to present their projects – most recent was a Wednesday community meeting held by Boston Communities about a project at 350 Rindge. The company plans to build an all-affordable, no-fossil-fuel tower with 92 homes, with the Ferro’s Foodtown grocery store returning after construction to be ground-floor retail. The project is in the very early stages. “If everything goes well and according to plan, they don’t even expect to put a shovel in the ground till 2028,” Toner said.
“Most people thought the design was okay,” Toner said of the 350 Rindge project. The biggest issue was that the 19 proposed parking spots wee seen as too few; parking demand from more than 90 new households could complicate life for North Cambridge Little League families, swimmers at the pool or other users of sports and park facilities across the street. “I suggested trying to work with some of the buildings at the end of Rindge Avenue across on Cambridgepark Drive, which supposedly have a lot of empty spots.”
Take the survey
This suggests what’s missing in representation as well as Toner’s challenge in growing the group: As weather warms, he plans to leave his immediate neighborhood of cozy single- to three-family homes, often handed down generation to generation, to door knock among the dense public housing towers and complexes of Rindge Avenue and the pricier apartments of the Alewife “Triangle” built between Route 2 and Fitchburg Line commuter rail tracks.
“I would love to have them involved,” Toner said of Rindge Avenue residents. “I need to do more recruitment along there and over to Cambridgepark Drive. That’s a whole new neighborhood of apartments around the Alewife T station that is considered part of North Cambridge and part of ward 11 – but not actively, because they’re on the other side of the parkway and people don’t really consider them part of the neighborhood.”
For now, and until a website goes live, Toner is focused on asking people to forward a NoCa Neighbors electronic survey and description.
Survey results that will shape the direction of the group so far suggest people are concerned “not about bike lanes, but about traffic and transportation issues in the neighborhood. People are concerned about the level of development – some people want more, some people have concerns that it might become too much. Support for small businesses, elder services, these are some of the things that people want” to see addressed.
“And also to feel a sense of community,” Toner said.
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