After a nine-year detour through the courts, Vail Court is back on Thursday’s agenda of the Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust much where it left off.
The long and narrow, city-owned 28,000-square-foot lot at 139 Bishop Allen Drive near Central Square is again due to get a developer and be shaped into homes. Under overlay zoning first adopted in 2020, the all-affordable building here can go up to 12 stories if the model pencils out with other requirements such as 30 percent open space and 5-foot rear setbacks.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for a lease, said Cassie Arnaud, senior manager for housing development for the city, at a May 20 meeting reintroducing the project.
“This is not going to be happening anytime within the next, I would say, at least a number of years,” Arnaud said. That’s despite the trust deciding that “they want to continue the same process that we had been on the path of back in 2017” to speed things up as much as possible: a request for qualifications process, which chooses a development team and then takes a hands-off approach.
There will still be a need to pull together project funding from many sources, “one of the many reasons why affordable housing development is complicated,”Arnaud said.
The city once hoped to start construction on affordable, senior or transitional housing at Vail Court in the fall of 2018, replacing an empty and decrepit pair of three-story buildings – 24 apartment total – caught up in a decade-plus legal battle between members of the Abuzahra family. City councillors approved a $3.7 million eminent domain land taking in September 2016, then $750,000 more in June 2017 to tear the buildings down.
The Abuzahras sued, and the legal battle became with the city. Councillors agreed to another $4.3 million payout July 21, 2025, for a total $8 million cost at Vail Court that freed the city up to act. (The family reportedly wanted $50 million.)
Development process ahead
City staff and the nine-member board of the trust will develop RFQ standards this summer, put out the call in the fall, select a team early in 2027 and facilitate its planning and project funding, according to presentation materials for Thursday’s meeting.
Affordable-housing developers move through permitting without discretionary approvals but follow requirements and guidelines to ensure good design and development outcomes, Arnaud said. “The overlay has a mandatory process for community review, and all of our overlay developers to date have always exceeded that minimum process,” she said.
Suggestions have come in that the Vail Court land be used as housing for seniors; people with accessibility needs; the unhoused; victims of domestic violence; or artists.
Public comment then and now
Public comment so far has included calls for the trust commit to less than 12 stories “and noted that anything above six stories would pose an issue for the immediate abutters,” as well as for the opposite – that the trust “ensure that the community input process is not used to limit the amount of new housing.”
Another call came for thoughtful handling of parking; so far there has been no call for the site to be built with no parking, though it is a block from bus routes traversing Massachusetts Avenue and around 0.1 miles from the Central Square red line T stop. The idea of eliminating parking at Vail Court was brought up when the trust last considered Vail Court – in 2017. Parking minimums were eliminated by the council citywide in October 2022.
A question arouse about whether the city would take the neighboring parking lot to create a larger building footprint, staff said. This came up in 2017 also.
“A few participants asked about the adjacent parking lot, and whether it could be added to the project,” according to meeting minutes from Aug. 23, 2017. “That parking lot was under separate ownership and was not being developed in conjunction with Vail Court.”
Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust, 4 p.m. Thursday, at City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square. Watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.
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