If there was doubt that the groundbreaking Wednesday at the Jefferson Park Federal project was serious, despite the obvious gravity of representing a $250 million price tag for 278 affordable homes, the ceremonial event drew to Cambridge the acting U.S. Housing and Urban Development secretary, Adrianne Todman, and her Secret Service contingent.
Rent will be as low as $650 a month at the Cambridge Housing Authority project in the Alewife neighborhood, while market rate for a two-bedroom apartment is around $4,175 in Cambridge, CHA executive director Michael Johnston said. The new housing will come along in two phases, in 2026 and 2027, and bring some 600 families off the authority’s waitlist. Eighty-five percent of the units being built have two or more bedrooms; about half have three or more.
The design includes six buildings with more than 100,000 square feet of open space, including a mix of private patios and shared courtyards with playgrounds, a park and bike-sharing stations. There will be two new Head Start classrooms and a food pantry.
The seriousness wasn’t obvious in the pretext for the event: Like all groundbreakings, it gathered people to pose for photos holding ceremonial shovels and making ceremonial scoops of dirt at a construction site.
The speeches were a different matter. Local and state officials as well as Todman spoke to the same very serious goal of eliminating red tape in pursuit of building more housing.
A series of speakers laid out the theme to the hundred-plus people gathered at the once and future Jefferson Park Federal, with the rebuilt Jefferson Park State project in the background and Rindge Towers housing behind that.
There were many partners in getting the massive amount of funding needed for the project, Johnston said, thanking state lenders, the city’s legislative delegation and Cambridge officials and staff. The city provided an “unprecedented” $43 million through its Affordable Housing Trust, he noted.
“It was the passage of the Affordable Housing Overlay that really paved the way to get Jefferson Park off the ground and moving,” Johnston said, referring to zoning passed by the City Council in 2020 and amended last year to streamline permitting for affordable-housing projects, including making design reviews more advisory. Jefferson Park was the second project to come through the overlay.
What Cambridge is doing
When City Manager Yi-An Huang took the microphone for a speech, he acknowledged the $43 million contribution with a joke, telling Johnson: “Yes, I am always available for your calls and texts. I do shake a little bit when I pick up the phone.”
The overlay now has a dozen projects on the books with more than 700 units in the pipeline and 450 under construction, but it is not all the city is doing, Huang said. While the council takes steps legislatively, staff have been reviewing permitting processes, and recently gave a progress report to the council.
“We’ve brought the average time from fee to permit for new construction down from 40 days to 10,” Huang said. “We’ve installed new systems, and there are more ways that we are looking to improve.”
Huang quickly turned his joke around. “As Mike said, this is the largest contribution from the trust to date – $43.6 million,” Huang said. “We are excited and willing to go further if there’s a bigger project.”
Personal meaning
The work has personal meaning for Huang and other officials. When Huang’s father arrived in America, “the first place he lived was Rindge Towers, because that was the only place he could afford,” the city manager said.
Side by side at the ceremony were officials who grew up in those towers or other public housing: city councillors Ayesha Wilson and Sumbul Siddiqui, a former mayor, and former councillor and current state Rep. Marjorie Decker. Mayor E. Denise Simmons made the connection while speaking: “Four of the elected officials in Cambridge, myself included, all grew up in public housing,” Simmons said. Once Jefferson Park Federal is built, “somewhere here, another mayor or representative will be cherishing and building memories.”
Jennifer Maddox, deputy secretary at the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, said the administration of Gov. Maura Healey “is all-in on housing production and supporting projects like Jefferson Park.” She cited the Affordable Homes Act with its $2 billion for public housing stock, MBTA Communities Act that demands affordable homes in transit communities and tax cuts signed last fall with increases to a housing development incentive program and low-income housing tax credit.
“Housing advocates across the country are blown away by what is happening in the commonwealth,” Huang said, citing a speaker’s anecdote at an MBTA Communities Act event the previous day – work at the state and local level that helped draw a Biden-Harris administration official to Cambridge.
Federal improvements
The work being done by the Cambridge Housing Authority was “amazing,” Todman said, “truly a model for other housing authorities across the country.”
The administration is trying to help, and plans to do more, she said.
“We know we need to do more to help communities thrive, and that includes making sure that we are improving housing conditions not just for people and families that live here in Cambridge and in Massachusetts, but across this great country. It’s one of the reasons way back in 2021 President Biden and vice president Harris began to look at ways the federal government can be part of the solution,” Todman said. “This was not a plan just for HUD because we have ‘housing’ in our name. It was every agency across the country that we needed to make sure was doing this the right way, because we know that housing supply simply has not kept up with the demand that’s occurred over the past 10 to 15 years or so, and we know that because of that accelerated demand, costs of housing have gone up.”
While the Biden-Harris administration can boast of providing the most rental assistance to Americans than any in the past 20 years, Todman said she was on hand mainly to talk about an announcement in August of $100 million in grant funding focused on cutting red tape, called Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing. The program sent $3 million toward that goal locally.
“It takes, on average, about three years to go through the permitting process [to build homes]. That’s way too long. People need housing now,” Todman said. “We’re getting to some commonsense solutions to get the housing that we need built more quickly and with urgency. I look forward to seeing how that $3 million is deployed here.”
A stronger
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Wow, what an amazing event! Congratulations to CHA and to all of Cambridge really!
We are lucky to live in such an inspiring City, and so great to have the Biden-Harris administration recognize Cambridge as a model for our nation’s cities and for HUD Secretary Todman to attend and speak about the urgency of building more housing!