Environmental concerns have bloomed around a six-story, 84-apartment project approved Tuesday by the Planning Board for the area between Fresh Pond and Danehy Park in Neighborhood 9.
The concerns didn’t play a role in the board’s unanimous approval, because they are legally “outside of the land use purview of the Planning Board, and also outside the expertise of the board,” as explained at the meeting by Mason Wells, an associate zoning planner with the city.
The project is proposed under multifamily zoning passed last year, with around 80 percent of the homes as studios and one-bedroom units and 15 of the homes being set aside as affordable. Use of the zoning makes the board’s input on design essentially advisory so long as the project developer BSR Birch follows its guidelines.
Still, an elaborate process of approvals needed from at least four city and state departments and agencies was laid out by chair Tom Sieniewicz as part of the green light. In terms of remediation, he made it a condition that the developer comply with the “very stringent state and local regulations” and “communicate freely about happenings around those particular issues, which obviously have a lot of special concern from the abutters.”
“I’m sure the city will be tracking this,” member Mary Lydecker said, among several members who used remarks to urge that environmental issues be prominent in the developers’ thinking and community response.
The contamination at the site appears to have leached over the years from 445 Concord Ave., a Cambridge Self Storage business on a site that once held electronics manufacturing, metal machining and other industrial activities, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. Oil, trichloroethene, vinyl chloride and other chemicals have been identified at the Concord Avenue site since 1987, and its spread to the proposed residential site at 9 and 25 Birch St. and 30-36 Bay State Road was discussed at the projects’ first meeting in July.
McPhail, a geotechnical engineering firm, was brought onto the project because of it, said Johanna Schneider, the project’s legal counsel, in July. The firm would evaluate environmental conditions at the site to report to DEP so the land could be “cleaned up as necessary to ensure that this is a safe site for residential use.”
That is happening as announced, said Seth Grady, who represents BSR Birch. “In September, McPhail filed on our behalf with MassDEP” and is preparing a follow-up submittal expected in December to be followed by a community meeting in January to update the neighborhood, he said in a Thursday letter.
“We have a professional team experienced in working on sites with soil or groundwater contamination in busy city neighborhoods. The building will sit directly on a concrete slab at ground level, so we won’t need to dig deep, as we would for an underground parking garage. This means very little soil will be disturbed. The building is also designed so that construction won’t cause groundwater to flow any faster or differently than it already does naturally.”
During the meeting planned for early 2027, the developer would “have a better sense of our construction schedule” and should be able to say when it expects to start preparing a construction management plan for review and approval by city staff, Grady said.
Questions and concerns
Neighbors, led by Bay State Resident abutter April Boss, expressed dramatic skepticism during public comment Tuesday about the environmental issues and a few design elements. Boss’ concerns were not put to rest at the meeting or in Grady’s letter.
On Friday she sent comprehensive emails about her issues to the environmental group the Conservation Law Foundation; the city manager, City Council and other officials and staff in Cambridge government; local school officials (because the construction site is near a two-school campus); and state officials. By that time, she had formed an organization, Friends of Bay State Road and Birch Street, and built a website, responsiblecambridgedevelopment.org.
The emails included overlapping information and made public records requests and requests for regulatory clarification and raised issues about the developers’ failure to notify neighbors properly ahead of its community meetings 10 months ago. Boss, her husband and others were able to speak with the board at its summer meeting and last week, though Boss said her official notification for the Thursday meeting also arrived late.
“I strongly support building more housing in Cambridge – I rented here for 13 years before my family was able to buy a home in 2025,” Boss said in letters and to the board. “But my experience with this project has raised serious questions about whether Cambridge’s development process is keeping pace with the speed of development and providing residents meaningful participation.”
There are wrinkles to some of her complaints to the more than two dozen agencies, organizations and individuals, including citing a section of law that requires the board, “when evaluating a special permit, to consider whether a proposed use would create a nuisance or hazard detrimental to the health, safety or welfare” of the city. “The presence of contamination on the development property makes this criterion directly relevant to the board’s review,” Boss said. “We are asking the board to fulfill its land-use responsibilities by evaluating whether the proposed development, including its construction activities, could create or exacerbate hazards affecting neighboring properties and the surrounding community.”
Construction activities aren’t mentioned explicitly in the evaluation of “nuisance or hazard” that Boss cites. It speaks to whether a site’s “proposed use” would be a nuisance or hazard, and the proposed use the Planning Board addressed was an apartment building.
Design and traffic
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, but board members have been generally positive about the designs and updates based on suggestions and comments at the July meeting. For instance, a wish for more family housing led to two of the affordable units being combined into a single home (lowering the overall unit count by one). There’s been a redesign of recreation space on the rooftop – the main, if precautionary reason BSR Birch seeks a special permit, as the law says 80 percent must of the roof must be used to pursue goals of environmental sustainability such as solar arrays or plant life, and space is so tight that the developer worries it’ll slip below the threshold as the project goes along.
At the previous meeting, traffic and parking had been neighbors’ major concerns. BSR Birch assured the Planning Board that its traffic studies took the recent addition of homes into account.
As the project moved beyond the board’s purview – barring an appeal in Land Court, staff said – Sieniewicz acknowledged neighbors’ issues about “some hiccups in notification.”
“I understand the frustration there, and maybe it’s more serious than frustration,” Sieniewicz said. “This isn’t the forum to dig that through with all the evidence,” but he emphasized the need for the developer to communicate better with neighbors.
