A six-story building with 85 apartments proposed between Fresh Pond and Danehy Park got a generally positive review from the Cambridge Planning Board on Tuesday, but its hearing was continued to a future meeting to keep looking at a few design elements.
As with many recent big projects, resident comments were focused on issues related to cars – in this case, doubts that developers’ studies were accurate about how much parking was needed and how new drivers in the area would affect commute times.
“Someone mentioned that during rush hour, traffic is backed up on Concord Avenue as far as Birch Street? I’ll tell you, it’s backed up as far as Fayerweather Street,” resident Bruce Pritchard said during a public comment period. “Traffic going in both directions is so heavy and congested, and it’s only going to get worse with a project of this size.”
Planning Board members’ interests were on a wider variety of topics. Members said they hoped at the next project meeting to get deeper into issues from the mix of promised apartments to the placement of windows and a transformer, “because so much of today was really focused, as it should be, on traffic and parking, which is such a neighborhood concern,” member Mary Lydecker said. “I’d like to see it again, but I want to reassure the applicant that it’s not because I don’t think it’s a good project and has merit.”
The project has complications imposed by combining three parcels across a triangular block from Birch Street to Bay State Road, bending around an apartment building at 42 Bay State Road across from Bonny’s Garden Center.
The project is “somewhat unusually shaped,” said Johanna Schneider, the project’s legal counsel.“We have designed the building to have two true fronts.”
It is pulled back from property lines more than zoning requires to not crowd its neighbors, and it steps back at the upper levels, Schneider said, while being highly sustainable – all electric and Passive House compliant.
The developer is the anonymously named BSR Birch LLC, represented by Seth Grady. His scant online résumé identifies him as an independent consultant.
A neighbor’s question about expected start and finish dates for construction was ignored.
The 91,585-square-foot project, at 9 and 25 Birch St. and 30-36 Bay State Road in Neighborhood 9, is proposed under multifamily zoning passed last year, with 80 percent of the homes as studios and one-bedroom units and 16 of the homes being set aside as affordable. Use of the zoning makes the board’s input on design essentially advisory so long as BSR Birch follows its guidelines.
Green roof
Out of what Schneider called “an abundance of caution,” the project seeks a special permit for its green roof: A law says 80 percent must of the roof must be used to pursue goals of environmental sustainability such as solar arrays or plant life, but space is so tight that BSR Birch worries it’ll slip below the threshold as the project goes along.
That limitation keeps the project in dialogue with the board despite the developer having a solution to offer: “We are absolutely hopeful and will make every effort to continue to comply. In the event we cannot,” Schneider said, BSR Birch wants the board to let it make up the difference by putting money into the city’s Affordable Housing Trust, which builds and preserves affordable homes.
Board members, though, wanted to keep talking about the roof. Lydecker said she was “very underwhelmed” by the plan. “It doesn’t seem very welcoming. It’s hard to to figure out how it’s serving the users.”
Family units vs. parking limitations
At least four of the members also hoped to see more three-bedroom units in the project.
“It is such a wonderful location near the parks and Fresh Pond,” member H Theodore Cohen said. “It would be a great place for families.” Ashley Tan noted that three-bedroom units were “also great for young people who want roommates, who want a little more community,” and Carolyn Zern reminded BSR Birch that the city has emphasized a wish for more family-sized units.
The goal is at odds with the developers’ thinking around unit mix – that the more studios and one-bedrooms, the fewer households will need cars. It plans 15 residential parking spaces, and they are meant to prioritize pickup and drop-off, loading and a handful of other needs.
That “aligns with the city’s goal of minimizing vehicle use” and is “intended to attract tenants without vehicles,” said the city’s transportation commissioner, Brooke McKenna, in a memo to the Planning Board.
Cambridge doesn’t have parking minimums for developments. “So getting any is good,” Cohen said.
Add New Street, subtract offices
The site is near Concord Avenue, which would give residents easy access to a couple of bus lines. The Alewife red line subway stop is a 20-minute walk, and the city’s Department of Transportation offers an elaborate list of ways the project would steer future residents toward bicycling (there will be 99 bike parking spaces and a nearby Bluebikes rental station).
An “extensive” parking study over a 15-block area in October 2025 looked to see how well an expected demand of 49 new cars would be absorbed into the neighborhood. It found between 54 and 63 on-street spaces available even at peak residential use. “This indicates that the area streets have sufficient capacity available to accommodate the expected project parking demand,” said Scott Thornton of Vanasse Associates.
Neighbors said they were “a little skeptical” of the study (one called it “wildly optimistic”) and shared anecdotes about their struggles to find street parking. There was an aha moment when Kelly Boss noted that the parking study was done before the opening of the 106 apartments at 52 New St., which has around 40 parking spaces. As a result, Boss said, the study “is not up to date.”
Sure, Thornton said, “there may be some spillover,” but there’s around 71 employees in the buildings that will be gone when BSR Birch builds the new apartments, making for “50 or so vehicles that will no longer be traveling to the area once the site is is developed.”
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