The most prominent builder in North Cambridge may now be the quasi-governmental agency the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority. Its board voted Thursday to put up six stories of mixed-income housing at 2326 Massachusetts Ave., creating 16 condominiums to each sell for around $800,000, and is moving toward taking over a project at 2400 Massachusetts Ave. that was pitched in 2024 as providing 56 homes and retail.
The project, hailed by the Planning Board and welcomed by neighbors, arrived with the authority as an equity investor and limited partner that would buy and dedicate middle-income homeownership units within. The CRA was a low-interest-rate lender and mortgage holder, even offering to let developer North Cambridge Partners LLC defer interest payments.
“Unfortunately, in the current high-cost environment, the project was not finding the initial investment that it needed to move forward,” said Tom Evans, the authority’s executive director, on Thursday.
North Cambridge Partners has moved on with an offer to sell the property to the CRA for future housing development, said Kyle Vangel, the authority’s director of projects and planning. If the board approves a purchase, planning and community input would start this summer to shape the priorities for another mixed-income housing project, including some affordable homeownership element and ground-floor retail. The 27,786-square-foot site holds a two-story retail and office buildings along Massachusetts Avenue with a parking lot behind. North Cambridge Partners’ plan was to put up a total 94,867 square feet of gross floor area, with 7,161 square feet to be used for retail, with tiers of varying heights – up to around 70 feet at its highest, but lower-slung on Cedar Street and Alberta Terrace.
The plans and green-hued, industrial design were popular. But since they were proposed, the avenue has been rezoned twice, CRA member Kathleen Born noted.
The rezonings were cited also by North Cambridge Partners’ principals, Dan Sibor and Tim Rowe, in a letter shared via a new residents called Noca Neighbors.
“We worked with you and the city through one rezoning, and then the city subsequently rezoned the site two more times, significantly changing the context for redevelopment. Each of those changes required substantial rethinking,” the letter says. “At the same time, the broader environment for multifamily housing development worsened, including high interest rates and elevated construction costs … we had hoped that the city’s decision to allow substantially more height on the site would help close the financial gap through greater scale, but unfortunately it was not enough.”
The letter continues:
A major part of the difficulty was the city’s current inclusionary housing framework, which requires that 20 percent of square footage in market-rate ownership projects be sold at about one-fifth of the market price. We understand and share the city’s aspiration that housing should be more affordable. But in the current financing and construction environment, the inclusionary housing requirement made this project impossible for us to finance. We explored every path we could think of, including discussions with many local investors and with prospective capital partners as far away as Japan and Singapore. In the end, every investor reached the same conclusion: The project was not economically feasible.
Thursday’s vote by the CRA was a signal – in the form of notice to the state – that it is moving toward a purchase.
Mixed income at 2326 Mass. Ave.
The project to the east, meanwhile, took a more decisive step, with board members selecting Ascent Dev to turn the site into six stories over 20,046 gross square feet holding 16 homes, three of which would be affordable. A request for proposals went out in November with a preference that every unit owner had access to outdoor space – their own, or a shared space – and for a model that housed people who had a mix of incomes. Three proposals came in. The winner, Ascent, is a partnership of the firms DVM Housing Partners and Oxbow Urban.
As the request for proposals said:
Mixed-income development is a model that has become a focus of the CRA, as these projects contribute needed permanently affordable units to the Cambridge community, while cross-subsidizing the production and maintenance of these units with market-rate units that address the overall housing shortage. This model creates an optimal balance of community benefit and financial resilience.
The language is suggestive of a model for “social housing” without using the term, and the term wasn’t used at the CRA’s meeting either. It was, though, the topic of a Tuesday panel called “Beyond Urban Renewal: Retooling Redevelopment Authorities to Create Social Housing in Massachusetts” that took place at Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The talk explored a study prompted by the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority and supported by the Cambridge Community Foundation and Harvard’s Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston, with Evans on the panel and Cambridge mayor Sumbul Siddiqui giving opening remarks.
Vangel called 2326 Massachusetts Ave. “our first time doing one of these mixed-income projects,” and Born noted that as the project is built under a recently adopted Massachusetts Avenue rezoning, it will be a kind of demonstration project for the many similar sites along the street. The white “antique house” from 1881, considered to have two and one-quarter floors and called in “average” shape by city assessors, has been used as office suites for the past few decades.
The CRA held off on development to see if the zoning passed. “Had it not proceeded, we would have had to do retail, and we weren’t sure if that was necessarily something every development team would want to do here,” Vangel said. Ultimately, the request for proposals went out without insisting on retail. “We were agnostic. We received some proposals that did provide retail. Others did not. The one we’re recommending is not one that did.”
The new zoning allows for all-residential buildings of up to eight stories by right, or up to 12 stories if the ground floor gets an active use. This building is proposed at six stories, which “allowed us to keep the price point where we really feel it’s marketable,” at $800,000 per home, said Kevin Maguire of Oxbow Urban.
The median market rate sale price for a Cambridge condo was $870,000 as of 2024, according to the City of Cambridge Assessing Office.
Ascent is expected to start construction toward the beginning of 2027 and build over the next 14 to 16 months, bringing units online in June 2028, said Dariela Villón-Maga, founder of DVM Housing Partners and a member of Ascent Dev.
The total project development cost is a little over $11 million, but for the CRA, this is not a profit play; it’s part of a mission to build at least 20,000 square feet of below-market-rate, for-sale housing. This site, expected to fulfill at least 2,000 square feet of an affordable homeownership commitment, was marketed to developers as coming with a low-interest loan for 80 percent of that cost. Ascent made an offer of $850,000 for the site, with $200,000 as an initial deposit and the rest due upon sale of 75 percent of the condominiums, Vangel said.
The payment structure “was to make the project more accessible to developers that may not have access to the capital to pay for all of the land upfront,” Vangel said. “We wanted to help de-risk the project.”
In East Cambridge and Riverside
In other actions, the CRA board voted to advise and offer technical support to the East End House multiservice center as it looks to relocate from its crumbling, 150-year-old neighborhood center to a new facility. That move is aided by $16.8 million in community-benefit money from a BioMed Realty project, as approved in August by the City Council. The search is on for a location – ideally with affordable housing in its upper floors – in East Cambridge or within a quarter-mile of the neighborhood’s designated boundaries. A nonbinding letter of intent says the East End House will consider selling its 105 Spring St. site to the authority. “It is a very well located site and could be a good site to develop housing on in the future,” Vangel said.
The board’s second letter-of-intent vote Thursday was to help the Cambridge Community Center in Riverside become a Resilience Hub, including with energy system upgrades and building renovations.
A resilience hub would welcome people in cases of emergency. “If it’s too hot, too cold, whatever it may be, we could continue to operate and if need be become an emergency shelter for up to 239 people,” said Darrin Korte, executive director of the Cambridge Community Center. The center was sought out by the city in 2019 to become the city’s first resilience hub “for many reasons,” he said, including a 5 Callender St. location just outside a flood zone, with “a big gym with a big roof that can put a lot of solar panels on it, and we have space for battery and generator. There’s a lot of potential.”
The center was founded in 1929 by four black pastors because other gathering spaces in the city were open only to white people. “They wanted to create space where the community could gather, congregate and build community, and that’s still the motto we live by,” Korte said. “We hear the needs as they arise from the community and work quickly and nimbly to adapt as best we can. The resilience hub project fits right into to that. We’re a very trusted organization. People know that they can turn to us when needs arise.”
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