A decision to acquire property and build another 50 affordable homes shared the spotlight with a retirement Wednesday at a meeting of the Cambridge Housing Authority board.
Members toasted executive director Michael Johnston, even breaking for cake midway through the meeting, as he retires after 34 years at the agency. Friday is his final day, when his role as a builder and preserver of affordable housing and provider of housing subsidies will be taken by Clara Fraden.
Amid the speeches, work got done, including moves toward developing land under Affordable Housing Overlay zoning at 16-28 Porter St., Wellington-Harrington, near the Twin City Plaza at the Somerville city line.
“The location just screams what the overlay was about. Every neighborhood in the city should offer opportunity to our families, and this is just over the top – it’s near transit, it’s near the mall,” said Elaine DeRosa, the board’s chair. “It’s near the school, it’s near the parks. And it’s going to be cheaper than all the other things in the neighborhood.”
The purchase price is $7.1 million, and predevelopment expenses brings the total to $10.2 million, said Margaret Moran, the authority’s deputy executive director of development. The city has committed to provide $6 million of that through the Affordable Housing Trust. That places the expected 53 homes to be built at about $130,000 each, “slightly less than what we’ve been seeing on some deals.”
The authority expects to build a mix of homes with between one and three bedrooms. A for-profit developer looking at the site planned 68 units, most being studios and one-bedroom apartments, Moran said.
The Porter Street site will join “a pipeline of projects” the CHA has in place that Moran feels is “going to move the dial in terms of the numbers of affordable units.” She estimated that with developments and upgrades on Mellen Street in the Baldwin neighborhood and Jackson Street in North Cambridge, there are 190 family homes coming.
Johnston’s retirement
Johnston said some goodbyes during his final report as executive director, recounting a packed retirement party last week that grew out of a nostalgic visit to Jefferson Park – a pair of massive, adjoining housing complexes in North Cambridge that has been in progress since before he took the job in 2017. Jefferson Park State wrapped up in 2018; Jefferson Park Federal is due to be done by the fall of 2027.
“I remember when you guys hired me as the executive director, my first summer I was emptying out those basement units, the 57 units, and how horrendous and horrible those units were,” Johnston said. “Today, I wanted to see JP before I left … I have to tell you. JP is pretty darn phenomenal. This is what deeply affordable housing should be.”
He walked into one of the refurbished units and was shocked to find “everybody was there to say ‘surprise’ and scare the shit out of me,” Johnston said.
Looking back, Johnston told an unusually crowded meeting room, “I couldn’t have asked for a better job.”
Along with the partying comes a formal resolution from the board recognizing Johnston’s work. It says that since his appointment he has rehabilitated 10 authority properties, extending “the useful life of more than 1,153 housing units by decades”; overseen the transitioning of 1,255 units to long-term project-based vouchers; and supported more than $572 million in capital investment.
The work of the authority encompasses more than 13,500 people in and around Cambridge, and more than 9,500 of its clients and renters live in the city, representing roughly 8 percent of the city’s population. But under Johnston, the CHA has also grown as a regional force, and among his final acts Friday is speaking at a groundbreaking of the Brockton Housing Authority, a consulting client since 2019.
Commenting on HUD policies
The final report also cited policies coming out of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development that CHA staff would give public comment on. One would ban families from public housing if any members are undocumented, which Johnston called “horrendous” and against the values of Cambridge.
Another policy allows housing authorities to set term limits on residency. Johnston said that in authorities that had tried it, largely with five-year terms, “every single one got to the five years and found the households weren’t ready to be self-sufficient. Taking away the subsidy was only going to make them homeless.”
The final policy was for work requirements to qualify for housing that Johnston said were unnecessary. The last time CHA had run its numbers, the number of households without earned income was “a couple of percent.”
In CHA housing, “most families have multiple wage earners, and if they don’t have multiple wage earners, they have household members that are working multiple jobs,” Johnston said.
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