An Alewife lab and office moratorium is on hold, but councillor says company’s buying spree isn’t
An image from a Healthpeak investor report shows the company’s holdings around the Alewife area.
A conversation about freezing the addition of offices or labs near Alewife was cut short Monday, but not before city councillor Patty Nolan revealed that a company called Healthpeak planned to spend an additional $225 million in the area, after already spending $391 million stealthily acquiring land since August.
Nolan’s proposed moratorium would last until Dec. 31, 2023, or “such time as new Alewife District zoning is ordained.”
The 36-acre, $616 million life sciences campus Healthpeak plans for the Alewife Quadrangle section of the Cambridge Highlands could tilt the area heavily toward a kind of business with little of the mix of uses called for in plans dating back decades. With a moratorium in place, “the city can come up with zoning that ensures the vision that we have laid out in various plans, starting from the 1979 Alewife plan right through to the Envision plan of 2019,” Nolan said. “The other critically important thing is [that this area] is the epicenter of so much of our climate mitigation work. It is in a floodplain.”
After Nolan introduced the reasoning behind her order, though, retiring longtime councillor Tim Toomey used his “charter right” without explanation to stop discussion until next week
Healthpeak promises
Bohn
A company executive, Scott Bohn, assured the councillors – and the eight residents who also spoke during a public comment period – that Healthpeak planned to work with the city on designing its campus.
“We are committed to working cooperatively with the city, community groups and stakeholders to develop this property in a way that achieves key community objectives, creating a great place to live and work,” Bohn said. “We spent a great deal of time studying the Envision Alewife plan and view it as a guiding document for what we seek to develop in this area. We embrace the overarching themes of the Envision Alewife plan, including creating a mixed-use district that includes both commercial and residential uses with focus on urban form, mobility, traffic mitigation, climate, sustainability and public green space, among others.”
Healthpeak, Bohn said, “is in a position to effectuate the change that the Envision plan sought to achieve. A project of this scale requires an extremely thoughtful approach to planning, with input from many parties. We plan to move through the planning process hand-in-hand with the city and the community in an open and transparent manner.” Bohn is a senior for the Denver company and vice president and co-head of its life sciences division.
“Develop and densify”
The address Bohn gave was 35 CambridgePark Drive, a lab building of 224,000 square feet that Healthpeak bought in December 2019 for an eye-popping $332.5 million, which would move the Denver company’s purchases in the area to around $949 million within around two years – before construction costs. Markups paid by Healthpeak for some of the 19 parcels bought since August, even on properties that had traded recently, ranged from 22 percent to 262 percent.
A company investor report says it has been “land-banking” in Cambridge to “develop and densify” property as part of a “mixed-use assemblage over the next decade.”
“We heard [Healthpeak] saying they really want to work with the council, they’re eager to work with us, they want this to be in line with our vision – well, passing this means that we’ll all be working in line with the vision,” Nolan said of her policy order, noting the need for such things as housing, light industrial jobs for residents, pedestrian bridges over train tracks and municipal facilities. “We have a [Department of Public Works] that desperately needs space and that right now is renting some space there, which is going to be at risk if this corner of Cambridge gets developed.”
Twelve of Healthpeak’s acres previously owned by Cabot, Cabot & Forbes had been planned as the base of an “Alewife Quadrangle Northwest Overlay District” rezoning that was presented as based on the three-year Envision plan for the area. But Cabot “conveniently left out the fact that the same plan called for wider streets and sidewalks … in the guise of conforming to the Alewife district plan, CCF was cherry-picking what was to their advantage by obscuring what was not,” Loomis Street resident John Chun told the council. “We can’t repeat the same mistake we did with CCF. We can’t be caught off guard without having the Envision and Alewife district plan reviewed and ordained by the city.”
I was extremely disappointed to watch last night as Councilor Tim Toomey exercised his Charter Right on Councilor Nolan’s sensible proposal to pause lab permitting at Alewife, thus delaying the petition’s referral to the Ordinance Committee for a week.
Given that Councilor Toomey has been in office for 32 years, you would think that he could by now come up with better gimmicks than this to help his developer friends and old school cronies. On the other hand, one might argue that it is precisely Councilor Toomey’s long tenure of do-nothingism on the Council that makes him singularly responsible for the current state of Alewife as failed urban wasteland and, lately, prime international investor shell game.
Over the course of his career, Councilor Toomey has received over $7000 in campaign donations from Healthpeak’s local representative, attorney James Rafferty, with whom he served together on the Cambridge School Committee going back to the late 1980s.
Perhaps Mr. Rafferty, then, can explain why his client Healthpeak has chosen to withhold so much information from the public regarding its recent acquisition plans, which, according to Healthpeak internal documents, will soon total 36.2 acres and at least $625 million in the Alewife District.
For example, one slide in an internal Healthpeak investor presentation categorizes Alewife under the heading “Future Land Bank and Densification Projects.” Another suggests plans to seek “additional entitlements” (aka up-zonings) on their holdings that would then activate a $15 million bonus payable to discredited former property owner Jay Doherty . A footnote implies that local businesses Revolutionary Clinics, Artisans Trading, and Longleaf Lumber will soon see their leases “mature” (developer code for “not renewed.”) Finally, a third comment implies that Healthpeak will look to “densify” its new holdings on Smith Place, a heavily trafficked street that at present lacks even basic sidewalks on both sides.
Maybe Councilor Toomey can ask Mr. Rafferty about all these fancy plans for land-banking and densification in our community the next time he speaks with him. But based on Councilor Toomey’s actions last night, one might assume they have already spoken, and that Councilor Toomey is okay with Healthpeak’s plans for further profiteering in our City. It’s too bad Councilor Toomey is retiring this year: I’m sure Healthpeak would love to keep him around for many years to come.
No surprised that Patty Nolan is opposed. She represents the West Cambridge constituency of single family, low density. As reflected in the recent city council election, a majority of Cambridge residents prefer job opportunities and more housing for everyone. Low density is de-facto exclusionary through high prices.