A full commitment by the MBTA for a long-wanted pedestrian and bike bridge was only part of the excitement Tuesday as the Planning Board heard and approved plans for a 42-acre neighborhood to be built over decades in the Cambridge Highlands.
Also new to the plan since the board’s preliminary approval in May was where the bridge might lead: to an “urban rail” station.
The station would serve Cambridge as a whole and shape plans by the developer Healthpeak to remake the so-called Alewife Quadrangle from its current light industrial uses into a new, all-electric neighborhood of around 20 buildings of labs, offices and 2,300 homes across a patchwork of parcels. Buildings would go as high as 12 stories with retail, and there would be 12.3 acres of green space, described as costing $4.5 billion. In the new version of Healthpeak’s plans, the city would get a permanent 1.3 acres for use by the Department of Public Works, up from the 1 acre described in the spring.
A Fitchburg line commuter rail stop at the site has long been discussed by residents, but the MBTA’s interest and approach is new.
“They didn’t want to forgo the opportunity for urban rail, which they characterize as a different form of commuter rail, a hybrid between a subway transit system and commuter rail,” said James Rafferty, one of the company’s local lawyers. The concept is to run faster, more frequent train service on the inner core of commuter rail lines that were first designed to reach into the suburbs, according to the organization A Better City.
A study and report back to the Planning Board will come in “no later than three years,” according to a letter from Phillip Eng, the MBTA’s general manager and the state’s interim transportation secretary.
Representatives of Healthpeak didn’t think the three-year response time would slow down its work on a 14-footwide bridge for its “planned unit development.”
Project phases
Dates are left unclear in developer materials and responses, but homes in the Highlands will be built first, allowing a comatose labs market to revive and provide confidence (and tenants) for the commercial development to follow.
Bridge construction comes after a first phase that includes the DPW land conveyance and mainly 1,000-plus homes, some neighborhood uses and open space. Three phases follow until completion – and, to give a sense of when that might be: Application documents note that four buildings that make up the majority of second-phase development sites are “encumbered by existing leases that prevent construction until 2040.” The property is in use by a Raytheon branch called RTX BBN Technologies, which specializes in military technology.
The bridge would come long before, though, a north-south connector over east-west train tracks that could cut time to the red line Alewife T station nearly in half. A second bridge is planned by the city from Danehy Park on the other side of Alewife Brook Parkway, which also runs north-south, and on Tuesday the architect David Manfredi said there’s been “a lot of conversation with the city and staff about a possible future second bridge” on Healthpeak land that the design of the PUD accommodates.
“So much of the success of this project rests on a pedestrian connection to the Alewife station,” Rafferty said. “The zoning was crafted with that understanding in mind.”
Parking and transportation
The PUD is expected to have more than 3,500 bicycle parking spaces and six Bluebike rental stations, and Healthpeak said it will run a shuttle service to Alewife that comes every eight minutes at peak hours. At off-peak hours and on weekends, the shuttle would run every 15 to 20 minutes. It will be “especially important before the bridge is constructed,” said Selma Mandzo-Preldzic, a transportation engineer working with Healthpeak.
The car parking that was a concern in the spring – an expected 4,600 spaces, mostly in multistory garages that Planning Board members disliked – is decreased in the new plans to a maximum of 4,482 with an opportunity to go to as few as 3,648. That would be aided by sharing spaces as “different users need parking at different times of day,” Mandzo-Preldzic said, but also if a rail station is built, because fewer commuters to the neighborhood would need to drive.
Whatever additional parking is related to T activity will be “on the other side of the commuter rail on T property, not within this development,” Rafferty said.
Resident Eric Grunebaum said the rail stop could “fix the traffic that plagues the area” and argued that it made sense for Healthpeak to convince the MBTA to build the stop by committing to pay for it. In that way, the project would be like new, privately funded Boston Landing and Fenway stops on the Worcester commuter rail line. “Adding a rail stop here will add substantially to the development’s value …conservatively, let’s say it’s a 5 percent value add. That’s about $200 million,” Grunebaum said, “and that’s enough to to fund a rail stop.”
An area transformed
There’s also potential for a multiuse path along the rail line, which involves Healthpeak getting land rights from the MBTA, said Anthony Galluccio, another of the company’s local lawyers. “We’ve prioritized the bridge. They said in not-so-complicated words to focus on the bridge land rights first,” Galluccio said of transportation officials, “then come back and talk to us.”
Alewife is “the most significant area of the city for redevelopment,” said Melissa Peters, assistant city manager for Community Development, who praised the Healthpeak development as balancing economic growth with “much-needed residential development to help address our housing crisis.”
“And not only does it do that, it creates a network of connected open space, provides a new street network, is responsive to and resilient to future climate change and flooding risk,” Peters said. Healthpeak “really is going to transform this area as a neighborhood in Cambridge that is connected, resilient and inclusive to welcome more people.”
