A 92-apartment building proposed for 350 Rindge Ave. is bringing its developers a familiar kind of Cambridge whiplash: If they expected community excitement about new homes built using Affordable Housing Overlay zoning, they are hearing from residents willing to see a project undone for its lack of off-street car parking.
Most of the resident questions and comments at a Wednesday online meeting about the North Cambridge project were about the needs of drivers, with remarks about infrequent buses, bad red line train service, long traffic backups along Rindge Avenue and such fierce competition for parking that the Comeau baseball field lot across the street fills nightly (and illegally).
The project by Boston Communities and the Affordable Housing Services Collaborative, near the MBTA stop at Alewife, proposes 17 parking spaces within a garage and five street spaces for ride shares, deliveries and loading. Those are new to the plan since an April 15 community meeting.
“One of the biggest pieces of feedback we received during our last meeting related to parking,” said Matt Robayna, a principal of Boston Communities. While the AHO does not require off-street parking, “we understand there’s going to be a demand for it, and we understand that that is a priority of the community. I know some folks would argue that [the proposed 22] is still too low a number.”
The 10-story building – by comparison, the neighboring Fresh Pond Apartments are 22 stories – may get on a Planning Board agenda this summer or early in the fall, seek state funding in the winter of 2027 and, in a “best-case scenario,” start construction in 2028 and finish in 2030, said Matt Robayna, a principal of Boston Communities. The company has an agreement with the current owner to buy the property, he said.
Twenty-six of the homes at a 350 Rindge Ave. residential building would be family-sized at three bedrooms, about double the number typically required by the state for new affordable projects, Robayna said. That means there will be 174 bedrooms in the building and between 174 and 348 new residents of the densely packed neighborhood.
Along with new housing, the Ferro’s Foodtown grocery store would return after construction to be ground-floor retail. “We had a lot of people provide comments that they were interested in making sure that Ferro’s was returning to the site, and that is our intention,” Robayna said.
The store and attached Krispy Krunchy Chicken fast-food restaurant, opened in the spring of 2024, would have to shut down. “The owner of Ferro’s is working through the concept for the new space, which will likely include prepared foods,” Robayna said.
Finding more parking
Hearing concerns about parking, the developers looked at expanding beyond the current proposed 4,900-square-foot garage. “We’d have to eliminate the retail component to this project, which is a nonstarter – that’s one of the basic premises of our project, is making sure that Ferro’s Food Town gets preserved here,” Robayna said. The next nearest grocery stores are a Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, both a little over a half-mile away.
Saving Ferro’s but squeezing in 13 more parking spaces underground was estimated to add about $3 million to $4 million to the cost of the project – or around $300,000 for each additional parking space, he said.
The development partners weren’t sure more parking is necessary since asking Peabody Properties, their future property management company, about what it has observed of car use at its other affordable housing in Massachusetts. Peabody looked at its 44 properties within 0.5 miles of a subway or commuter rail stop, finding that “a lot of the properties they manage really do not have very much, if any, parking” from Salem to Arlington to Boston. Nearly one-third have no parking, Robayna said.
Public comment
Residents responded with skepticism. One presented information from a meeting ahead of construction for the Rindge Commons North project: That for every Rindge Commons unit with a parking space, there was a car. “We can assume that most people need cars, and if you go to the Department of Transportation, they say even in urban areas, you can assume about 80 percent of people are going to need cars,” said one speaker who was not identified fully. “You need about 72 parking spots, and you’re offering 17. Where are those people going to park?”
“People need cars, especially low-income people. They work at places that are hard to get to by public transit,” the resident said.
Frequent public commenter James Williamson was critical not just of the lack of parking and reliance on mass transit, but of the continued “concentration of poverty” in the area, considering the Fresh Pond Apartments, Rindge Towers and two Jefferson Park housing projects on Rindge. The idea of baseball field bleachers being cast in shadow also upset him.
“Maybe this project is too big, given how big the towers are,” Williamson said. “There is a way of addressing the parking by making the project a more modest project.”
Regardless of the Peabody research, the developers are working on leasing off-site parking spaces in the large garages on the other side of Alewife Brook Parkway, including the the MBTA garage at Alewife Station. “That’s not something that they would like to do because of their proposed redevelopment efforts,” Robayna said of the transit agency. But “until the garage is redeveloped, there is excess capacity here.”
Open space and other aspects
Boston Communities plans on having at least one more AHO community meeting before submitting its project to the Planning Board. Robayna said the development team was willing to talk about overall improvements to traffic flow along Rindge Avenue.
Other amenities and aspects of the project got less attention Wednesday: bike parking in outside racks and within the building; tables, chairs and benches around the building; a rooftop amenity at the second floor, where the residential tower narrows; and plans to have comprehensive pest management during and after construction.
The building, designed by Prellwitz Chilinski Associates, is more than 14 feet back from the right-of-way line and has the potential for more amenity space in back as well as room – contributing to at least 15 percent open space overall. That’s “to meet local zoning, but also provide areas for some green space,” said Robert Leyen, of the architecture firm.
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