Construction of an all-affordable 10-story, 92-apartment building proposed for 350 Rindge Ave. will be atop the rubble of the Ferro’s Foodtown grocery store, shutting for two years the only convenient and lower-priced place to buy food for thousands of North Cambridge residents.
The work is expected to last from June 2028 to July 2030, Boston Communities said. The developer has an agreement with the owners of the Ferro’s land to buy it when all permitting approvals and financial backing is in place. After construction, commercial space would be leased back to Ferro’s, said Matt Robayna, a principal of Boston Communities, at a Wednesday meeting.
“There’s no way to keep Ferro’s Foodtown open during construction,” Robayna said before the meeting.
The community meeting, held at the neighboring Fresh Pond Apartments, was required because Boston Communities needs a special permit to reopen Ferro’s on its ground floor.
Despite this, the topic of traffic and parking continued to dominate discussion among the dozen-plus attendees at the meeting. The proposed building will have 17 dedicated parking spaces and three for loading and other uses such as ride-share pickup or food delivery. There will be an estimated 243 residents in the new building and a maximum of 348, according to Boston Communities.
Staff at Ferro’s and the attached Krispy Krunchy Chicken fast-food restaurant said there would be no relocation during construction – that each would be out of business for the duration, but each expected to come back afterward.
Expanded liquor license
Krispy Krunchy opened just two years ago, replacing a laundromat, but a grocery store has been open at 350 Rindge Ave. since 1953, according to the Cambridge Historical Commission.
Until a sale of the 11,120-square-foot parcel goes through to Boston Communities and its partner, the Affordable Housing Services Collaborative, the owners of Ferro’s hope to have an expanded alcohol license. The issue was talked about Monday at a summer meeting of the City Council because the new license is no simple matter: Cambridge must ask the state Legislature to allow it.
“Independent supermarkets are facing increasing challenges from large national chains who have greater purchasing power and resources,” owner Vishal Patel told councillors. He called getting an all-alcohol license to replace his beer-and-wine license “an opportunity to help strengthen the long-term sustainability for our store while continuing to provide the convenience and service our customers expect.”
The state allows Cambridge to hand out 24 general alcohol licenses for package stores, of which all are in use, and 24 for beer and wine only, of which 23 are in use (including Ferro’s). To allow Ferro’s to trade up, the city has to ask permission to go beyond what the state allows, city solicitor Megan Bayer said. The request, called a home rule petition, must be presented by a member of the city’s delegation and approved by legislators’ vote.
Ferro’s will give back its beer-and-wine-only licensing when it gets the all-alcohol license, Bayer said. And unlike the 24 licenses granted by the state, the special Ferro’s license can’t be sold or transferred to another business. The home rule petition says that if Ferro’s is displaced “due to redevelopment, lease termination or circumstances beyond the control of the licensee,” it can take the all-alcohol license with it to a new location, but only upon approval of the License Commission and if Ferro’s stays focused on food – meaning owners couldn’t use the new licensing to become just a liquor store.
Playing by state rules
Councillors worried that more businesses with beer and wine licensing would also come seeking to trade up. And councillor Cathie Zusy said that as much as she appreciated Ferro’s for feeding an immigrant community with wide needs for ethnic and speciality foods, she would vote no on helping in this case. It was an “inappropriate use of a home rule petition to be requesting an extra liquor license just for this one business,” Zusy said.
The vast majority of home rule petitions are tiny, specific changes such as this one, vice mayor Burhan Azeem assured her, and the fact that Cambridge usually sends more sweeping requests is actually the rarer thing.
“Maybe this isn’t the best way to handle business, but it is the way the state has set this up,” said councillor Marc McGovern, who wrote the policy order with the home-rule request. “I don’t want to punish this business that’s trying to survive because we don’t like the process that the state has set up. Maybe if [the state] got more of these and didn’t want to deal with them, they would actually move on changing some of these laws and and making it a little bit easier to do.”
In the end, Zusy voted “present” on the petition instead of an outright “no” and eight of the councillors voted in favor, with mayor Sumbul Siddiqui noting her upbringing in public housing nearby. “I grew up going to this place, and so I understand the importance of keeping it there,” she said of Ferro’s.
With the store closed during construction, the nearest groceries are at Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe’s, which are 11 and 17 minutes’ walk away, respectively, according to online maps.
“Barking up the wrong tree”
Cambridge has no parking minimums for development projects, and the Boston Communities proposal is under the Affordable Housing Affordable Housing Overlay, which means that so long as it follows guidelines of the zoning it can be built by right; input from city staff and residents are basically recommendations.
Still, Robayna and his colleagues listened patiently as residents at their meeting spoke out about traffic, parking, height and shadows. A couple of times debate flared among audience members: One young former Cambridge resident seeking to return defended the project’s approach to parking; and another advised her peers that their anger was wasted on the developers.
“They’re the wrong audience. The City Council is the audience,” the resident said. “These guys are working within certain constraints and doing a great service to provide affordable housing. We’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Exploring paths to more parking
Boston Communities looked into alternatives to the current parking plan, but adding surface spaces for cars would mean eliminating Ferro’s – a “nonstarter,” noted Betsy Cook of PCA, the project’s design firm, since there is no project without the grocery store – and building underground parking would add another 13 spaces and cost $4 million. Because the state won’t fund projects that go over a certain expense per unit built, the higher cost resulting from underground parking would lose the state as a backer and make the project impossible, a city representative told attendees, to the agreement of the development team.
The current cost per unit is around $800,000. “Construction costs have really shot through the roof in the last five or six years. It’s probably gone up 30 percent to 40 percent since Covid started,” Robayna said.
The proposed building, moved back about 15 feet from Rindge Avenue, has a rippled facade and third-floor roof deck with a mix of 36 one-bedroom homes, 30 two-bedroom homes and 26 three-bedroom homes, according to Boston Communities. The recent announcement that the building must have an electrical transformer substation means shrinking Ferro’s by around 1,000 feet, to 3,900 square feet, Cook said. The store is now around 6,392 square feet.
Finding spaces to lease
The project is near the MBTA stop at Alewife, bike paths and the Route 83 bus and others, the presenters said, but they were aware of the need for parking and are pursuing a third option to add more: leasable spaces at seven lots across Alewife Brook Parkway belonging to businesses, a church and the state Department of Transportation.
That didn’t convince at least one resident at the meeting.
“Even if they were to give up these available parking spaces, it’s like one or two here and there,” the resident said. “And that’s because there’s also a few apartments that don’t have leases right now. It’s not because there’s like an abundance of parking.”
The Alewife garage has 2,733 vehicle parking spaces. They are intended mainly for the use of commuters who drive in to the city during the workday and take red line subways for the rest of their journey.
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