A campus of 20 buildings is planned for the land assembled by the company Healthpeak, Cambridge’s Planning Board heard Tuesday at a developer check-in ahead a formal application for a special permit in March.
Mixed with the inherent optimism of the presentation were recurring acknowledgments of the economic uncertainty of the moment. Last month, the MBTA gave up on a plan to redevelop a neighboring 30 acres around the Alewife T stop because of “current market conditions.”
A neighborhood that has been referred to as Cambridge Point (but not by presenters on Tuesday) would remake the largely industrial Alewife Quadrangle area in the Cambridge Highlands into a new neighborhood with 2,076 homes in buildings of up to 12 stories, retail and a pedestrian and bike bridge over rail tracks that brings residents near the Alewife red line T stop – and a potential new Commuter Rail stop.
The “planned unit development” special permit sought by Healthpeak is used to make a very large project feel cohesive.
“The goal was to create a real neighborhood, a real neighborhood with a mix of uses,” architect David Manfredi said during the presentation. “The big idea, of course, is to reach out beyond the neighborhood, not to create an enclosed place, but to create a place that expands beyond itself.”
There are connections that go to the Minuteman Trail, allow bicycling to North Station or Lexington and bring people to Fresh Pond, “a connection which just doesn’t exist today,” Manfredi said.
A “New Main Street” with restaurants, entertainment and retail is envisioned as hosting street fairs, branching off of Concord Avenue between two new residential buildings and continuing between two commercial buildings to the north – essentially extending the business area around the Concord Rotary another two blocks. The street, which “will get another name,” could be closed to car traffic every weekend, Manfredi said.
Four parking lots are planned in the Healthpeak presentation, three going next to residential buildings distributed around the campus, and a small park is planned toward the south of the campus next to a residential building; a green area with a pond would go in the middle of a cluster of commercial buildings in the north.
Economic complications
Healthpeak, a Denver life sciences developer, has described its project to investors as 36 acres accumulated with $616 million in land buys begun in 2021 – enough to spark a construction moratorium while staff and residents did a complete Alewife area rezoning. The company probably has holdings worth up to $1.5 billion to $2 billion in Cambridge, said Doug Brown, a neighbor who took part in the rezoning with the city’s Alewife Working Group. Healthpeak has made purchases outside the campus area, including Discovery Park, an office complex it bought for $720 million in 2020.
A lack of lab tenants over the past few years have frozen or forced new focuses for projects across Cambridge and Somerville. The permitting, groundbreaking and construction on the new neighborhood’s total 4.6 million square feet could be good for Cambridge’s economy and a good sign for the economy in general.
“They are struggling with the market, but they are continuing with the permitting process,” deputy city manager Kathy Watkins said Feb. 3, at a City Council budget meeting, “to make sure that they are in a good position to move when that makes sense for them to move.”
Heathpeak team member Rylan Squirrell acknowledged the difficulty persists. “When we first acquired these properties, we found ourselves in the blow-and-go days of life science, where everything made financial sense. Nowadays, with increased interest rates, inflated construction costs and regulatory uncertainty, we are met with some very serious challenges – not just for the life science development,” Squirrell said. “Despite all those challenges, Healthpeak is committed to move forward.”
A question of timing
The economy makes the timing and order of construction “very difficult to say,” Squirrell said. “If you would have asked me five years ago, I would have said we start on all the lab right now … We’re trying to get to a correct answer and a true answer so that we can determine when to move forward.”
A timeline question from Planning Board member Ashley Tan was kicked down the road to March also because the special permit application describes the phasing.
“The zoning is pretty intentional about what has to happen when,” Galluccio said. “There are some big benchmarks within the zoning when the bridge has to begin construction, when residential construction has to begin, and there’s this height tied to the Public Works conveyance” – that is, by welcoming a municipal use into the proposed neighborhood, the developer is able to get one story higher on its residential and commercial buildings.
Another complication: Some of Healthpeak’s properties are still encumbered with leases and will become available only “when those leases burn off,” Rafferty said.
Healthpeak was grateful for the income from those leases, though, “given the commercial economy,” Galluccio said.
Resident input
Brown, speaking before the meeting in a phone interview, also said the complicated economic and zoning picture left him waiting to see how the project would come together. “What are you building first, and when? What does this look like over 20 years?” he said, noting that “it took them 30 years to build North Point,” a neighborhood by East Cambridge.
He was leery too of the name Cambridge Point, which he said wasn’t vetted with neighbors.
It was Brown who was invoked by Galluccio, though, in talking about what was exciting about the new neighborhood. “His comment to me was, you should give us a reason to want to go there. And I think that’s as good a guiding principle as what we’re trying to achieve in this mixed-use neighborhood,” Galluccio said. In what “may be the last remaining undeveloped portion of Cambridge, there’s a real opportunity here to create something special out of what is, candidly, not all that special.”
Department of Public Works space
The proposed neighborhood’s area is broken into three in terms of zoning that limits height. The northernmost slab is the tallest overall, with residential buildings of up to 12 stories and commercial buildings up to eight; in the southern half, residential buildings can again go up to 12 stories, but commercial buildings are limited to six; and in a chunk at the west, residential buildings are limited to six stories and commercial buildings to three.
It’s in this small, westernmost parcel within the proposed neighborhood where space is set aside for the city’s Department of Public Works, which had been eyeing the Quadrangle for years as it began feeling squeezed at its 2.8 acres at 147 Hampshire St., Wellington-Harrington – offices that are now in poor shape and unable to keep up with the city’s needs, officials have said. The city was slow to buy, and when developers jumped into the area, DPW was priced out.
It has been leasing 4 acres on Mooney Street; Healthpeak is giving it 1 acre. Watkins on Tuesday called it a helpful part of satisfying the needs of Public Works. “We are really excited to get an acre that would be fully, permanently in the city’s control,” she said.
The acre is slightly south of the property in use now by the DPW, requiring a relocation as well as a downsizing, Watkins said.
Other steps the city has taken for the department: In May 2023 the city seized a former industrial lot of roughly an acre on Webster Avenue near Inman Square for more than $14 million; DPW will be using the property temporarily. The city followed that in August 2023 by paying $8.3 million for a parking lot on Sherman Street in Neighborhood 9 near Fresh Pond. That may become a Department of Public Works facility atop a buried 2.1-million-gallon tank meant to absorb stormwater to prevent Combined Sewer Overflows of waste into public water.
A roundtable conversation with city councillors is expected in the next couple weeks about some of the properties and how they’re used. “The one that’s most immediate is the Webster Avenue parcel,” Watkins said. A trailer will be brought in to activate the site this summer, but “ ultimately, that is a really logical place for housing” rather than for the DPW.
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