A half-dozen more parcels near Porter Square in Cambridge have been acquired for affordable housing, according to a release Friday by a group of companies working with the city’s Affordable Housing Trust.
The Baldwin neighborhood properties at 20 Roseland St., 22 Roseland St., 28 Roseland St., 1 Frost St., 3 Frost St. and 5 Frost St., between Lesley University buildings and the Somerville city line, join two Massachusetts Avenue parking lots belonging to Lesley by Porter Square that were sold in late November to become two 15-story buildings of all affordable housing. Now owned by nonprofit developer Just A Start, the parking lots are a block from the newly announced parcels.
All told, the six parcels take up roughly 1 acre next to another all-affordable housing development of 40 apartments on Massachusetts Avenue: Frost Terrace, which opened in 2021. Frost Terrace was a project of Capstone Communities with the Affordable Housing Trust; the new parcels were bought by Capstone, Hope Real Estate Enterprises and MPZ Development with the trust.
“We see this an an extension of the first phase of Frost Terrace, as a collective community and an integrated site that preserves the historic homes and open space,” said Jason Korb, a principal of Capstone Communities. For what he hopes will be known collectively as Frost Terrace, “we’d like the fence between the parcels to come down. You will walk the property and not know it was a second phase.”
The seller was the Farrington family, who marketed the properties through the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield – the same firm that handled the sale of the parking lots.
The sale price was $18.3 million for the land and homes, said Jason Korb, a principal of Capstone Communities. “We were like any other buyer – we put in an offer,” Korb said. Initially another buyer won out for the parcels, but Cushman & Wakefield came back to Capstone, presumably when the first buyers of the homes backed out for some reason.
The companies promised “a collaborative process” with the city and neighbors and said they prioritize “robust community input and feedback and are committed to maintaining the historic integrity, where applicable, of the existing structures.” The homes were built between 1886 and 1920 and are assessed as being in average to very good condition.
No immediate action
No immediate action on the properties is expected, as “we are more focused on 2072 Massachusetts Ave.,” Korb said, referring to a project Capstone attempted before amendments to the Affordable Housing Overlay were passed Oct. 16, 2023.
The team isn’t even expecting to hold a first community meeting in the first half of 2025, Korb said, “so there will be plenty of notice.” Without a public process having begun, there is no design concept or expected number of apartments suggested by the partners.
In the meantime, Capstone will use its property management arm to serve as landlords to the tenants in the homes. “We are going to treat [the tenants] with the utmost respect – no one is pushing anyone out,” Korb underlined.
A benefit to this is that money from rent that isn’t obligated elsewhere, such as for maintenance, can be put toward eventual construction on the site, reducing the need for public subsidy, Korb said.
Sean Hope, also of Capstone and Hope Real Estate, said in the press release that “as a lifelong Cantabrigian, I’m excited for the opportunity to further the affordable housing supply in Cambridge with this acquisition.”
Owen O’Riordan, deputy city manager called it an important acquisition that will “dramatically help longtime families and individuals afford to remain in the City, while simultaneously presenting additionally opportunities for new residents.”
The pro-housing group A Better Cambridge became aware of the project when information was shared Monday with the Porter Square Neighbors Association, ABC co-chair Justin Saif said, “Porter has both the red line and a commuter rail line, so it’s a good location for transit-oriented homes, and CDD data shows AH residents already are less likely to have cars,” Saif said, referring to the city’s Community Development Department and affordable-housing tenants. “Cambridge has thousands of residents waiting years on the affordable housing waitlist – we strongly support creating more affordable homes for families who desperately need them.”
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How much of the purchase price did the Affordable Housing Trust contribute to this for-profit endeavor? Asked a different way, why is the City buying land on behalf of for-profit developers when we have so many good not-for-profit housing developers in Cambridge from which to choose?
Because they are building affordable housing.
Good questions Doug. I’m happy we will be getting housing, not a completely ridiculous place for it either. I just hope they are not hideously ugly.
Why does this concern me? Because unlike the Commonwealth’s Chapter 40B program to promote affordable housing which limits profits to 20% of overall project cost and requires that developers submit a pro forma of their financials, the City’s AHO program has no such requirements. As a result, there is no way to know whether a for-profit developer is building quality housing at a fair price or shoddy housing at a discount to maximize profits. Not-for-profits, on the other hand, have no such incentive to lower quality, increase unit counts, or overcharge their tenants.
It’s good to learn that Doug Brown wants to look out for the interests of Cambridge’s low-income residents. He apparently wants affordable housing to be constructed only by the few not-for-profit organizations that do such work. There is no other way, he says, to be sure that the result is “quality housing at a fair price” and not “shoddy housing at a discount.”
If he were to succeed in spreading this beneficence to the rest of the city, people who own or rent homes built by for-profit developers (and who haven’t asked for his proposed assistance), the result would be an even worse shortage of housing and higher prices/rents than Cambridge has now.
Even if only his smaller original plan, for affordable housing only, were already in place, we would have 1,203 fewer affordable homes than we do today — about a 14% reduction.
Finding a decent apartment at an affordable rent has been described as a cruel game of musical chairs. Every relentless round, someone yanks away a usable chair, and another household falls to the ground.
A reasonable remedy for this situation is to allow more chairs in the game. For people who can only afford a box to sit on, Doug Brown is proposing that a city agency disqualify box distributers from operating in Cambridge. The rest of the players would continue to play as they were, shuffling around among the comfortably padded deck chairs.
@Doug Brown wants to make it more difficult to build affordable housing. Good plan, Doug! 🙄
I guess it wouldn’t be a discussion of affordable housing without the great James Zall weighing in. Sorry James, but you have yet again misread the discussion.
There is a philosophical debate to be had about whether public money is best spent enriching private interests. In education, for example, it is well established in Massachusetts that for-profit charter schools are forbidden, as a strong profit incentive can lead to outcomes that are not in the best interests of students. The same may be true of housing- a quest for higher profits may lead to outcomes not in keeping with our public values.
But no one is asking private, for-profit developers to stop building housing. I am only suggesting that they should be required to present their financials publicly, and limit their profits, in keeping with established state programs.
And no one is asking for pro forma financials from private homeowners. But it does seem like a good idea to require such information from any entity, for-profit or otherwise, that takes millions of dollars from the City and claims to be doing good with it.
If we are indeed going to give our public money to for-profit developers, I think it only fair that they operate with the same transparency required by the Chapter 40B program. Knowing that our money is being well spent is in the best interest of all taxpayers. Otherwise, we are likely to end up with ballooning city housing budgets and “affordable” units costing close to $1 million each as a result. Oh wait…never mind.
I must have confused the Doug Brown who’s here to have a “philosophical debate … about whether public money is best spent enriching private interests” with the Doug Brown who’s been heard at more than one public meeting declaring, “We don’t want more tenants here, they’re just transients.”
So now you’re just making up fake quotes, James?
James, your description of Cambridge housing as a game of musical chairs is far from the truth. According to the City’s own data, we have added more than 13,000 new residents between the 2010 and 2020 censuses. If there are no new chairs being built, where are they all living? Perhaps they are living in some of the almost 4000 new housing units that the City says we built between 2020 and 2023:
https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/factsandmaps/demographicfaq
@Doug Brown The housing market is under pressure because housing construction hasn’t kept pace with job creation—a widely acknowledged fact, though you seem to disagree.
This mismatch has driven up housing costs, forcing many residents to spend half their income on rent.
It’s common sense that the solution to a housing shortage is to build more housing. Your apparent denial of the problem seems disconnected from reality.
Over the last 9 years (2014-2023), we have added 40,378 new jobs in Cambridge. While that has pumped lots of money into our coffers, it is ludicrous to think that Cambridge can add that much new housing in less than a decade. By necessity, some of those employees will need to be housed outside of our city. Stop pretending that we are not building new housing. We ARE building housing, and quite a lot of it, but there is not a city in the US that can produce enough housing in a short time to accommodate such rapid increases in new employment.
When the AHO was first being discussed about 6-7 years ago, some people who did not want their zoning changed argued mightily that we didn’t really have much of a housing shortage and could fix it quite easily by non-zoning means. They made the unsupported claim that the Housing Authority’s years-long waiting list of over 20,000 names “really” had only 3,000 people on it.
Since then, there’s been much more data and analysis available about the housing shortage and its consequences, and zoning reform is at the top of most experts’ list of essential remedies.
While many of the problems in Cambridge’s zoning code have continued, our housing situation has worsened. We won’t be able to make up for decades of housing under-production quickly, but a growing percentage of our neighbors say they want the City to do more.
@Doug Brown If we aren’t building enough housing, as you say, the solution is to build more housing. The solution is not to do nothing. It is to do more.
Mr Nice (whatever your really identity is), you need to stop pretending that we are doing nothing. That is far from the truth. We are building thousands of new units, have thousands more already permitted, and spend many millions of dollars per year in funding new affordable developments. We have one of the highest percentages of affordable housing stock in the Commonwealth (14.8%) and are continually adding to that total. Just because I don’t like some aspects of the current proposal doesn’t mean that I am opposed to all new construction. That’s just gaslighting, and you know it.
Doug Brown, research shows that relaxing zoning rules to allow more housing development can lower rents.
The idea that we must create housing for every new job to address housing costs is overly simplistic and misrepresents how supply and demand work.
This misconception is misleading. It is gaslighting.
If we were doing enough, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis, would we?
@Doug Brown No one said we’re doing nothing—that’s gaslighting. No one claims we must provide housing for every job in Cambridge—that’s also gaslighting.
The issue is we’re not doing enough. The housing crisis exists because there isn’t enough housing—something universally acknowledged. If we were doing enough, the crisis wouldn’t exist. It’s strange to have to state the obvious.
I’m very glad these 6 buildings have been bought by Capstone to serve as affordable housing. I think Capstone has done a good job at their existing affordable properties, including Frost Terrace, even though Capstone is a for-profit developer.
The non-profit developers apparently did not want to buy these properties.
I would like it if affordable housing developers (whether for-profit or not-for-profit) had to make their pro-formas public after they finished getting financing for their buildings. That might help residents to see the different costs that impact the affordable housing developers, and to have confidence that the projects are cost-effective. It might even help the developers become more cost-effective by viewing other developers’ pro-formas.