The first six-story housing built under Cambridge’s new zoning rules could be at the site of a long-standing family-owned funeral home near Central Square.
A.J. Spears Funeral Home is expected to close operations at 124 Western Ave., Riverside, starting next year, 62 years after its founding in 1964. In preparation, the Spears’ family is selling two plots, which include the funeral home and an attached house at 132 Western Ave., to developer DND Homes. Thanks to new residential zoning rules, the developer hopes to build 50 to 60 units, with 20 percent required to be set aside for affordable housing.
Anthony “Tony” J. Spears, the home’s funeral director, explained in an interview that a combination of factors led to the decision to close, emphasizing his mother’s aging and his own health issues. Spears has served as funeral director for nearly 40 years and runs the home with his 93-year-old mother, Artis B. Spears. Though Tony’s sister Andrea works on the business’ legal side, Tony and Artis are the only full-time employees. Things have been busy.
“This job kills you,” said Tony Spears, 65. “I want to live a normal life for a couple years.”
Spears also cited the rising costs of running a funeral home and the decline of the funeral home’s original customer base – from death, of course, but also because families are leaving the neighborhood.
After closing the location, he plans to partner with another funeral home in Cambridge to keep offering services. Still, Spears said he was “torn many nights” over the decision to close and sell the building where Artis and the late Andrew J. Spears, his father, opened the business.
The sale is contingent on a demolition permit from the city, after which the developer can get started on the building permitting process.
“Everyone’s nervous”
Cambridge passed a zoning amendment in February allowing for larger buildings across the city to mitigate rising costs in increasing the city’s meager housing construction. Instead of being limited to three stories, housing developers can build up to six stories without a special permit if they work with a big enough plot and make 20 percent of the building affordable.
Five months later, there are no six-story buildings far enough along in the permitting process to start construction. City staff warned in the run-up to a vote that the zoning policy change would be slow to produce significant effect.
The Spears family’s plots, which includes a house attached to the funeral home, total more than 11,000 square feet. Patrick Barrett, a local developer who was recently brought onto the project as DND Homes’ lawyer, thinks it’s a real possibility the development will be one of the first six-story buildings built under the new regulations. Local developers are all trying to make sense of the new zoning, he said.
“Everyone’s nervous, I think especially for the guys who are going to be first developing under the new zoning,” Barrett said. “And they still haven’t done a lot of the economic feasibility that needs to be done.”
The first step, a demolition permit, requires the Historical Commission to determine whether a building is historically significant and therefore “preferably preserved” compared with the proposed development. The commission can order the demolition to be delayed by a year to find ways to preserve a building.
At a May developer-held meeting for neighbors, Allison Crump, who previously served on the commission, offered her opinion to neighbors worried about the development’s impact.
“It would be very surprising to me if they don’t find the existing buildings preferably preserved for this project,” Crump said.
The commission was not reachable for comment.
Tony Spears scoffed at the idea that the building could be blocked from demolition and said that his family has “never heard once from the Historical Commission” before this year.
“Where was the Historical Commission when we needed to upgrade?” Spears said.
The original funeral home was built in 1833, according to the city’s property database, with an added chapel section built in 1984 by Spears’ grandfather. Spears maintains that the historical significance of the A.J. Spears Funeral Home is in the people and the business, not the building.
Barrett, who previously was a neighbor of the Spears, agreed. “The historic nature of the property is in the use that the Spears family has driven,” Barrett said. “If you want to put a statue of Artis, that’s fine. I would actually recommend you do that. She’s awesome.”
Early stages
Most details of the development are up in the air, including the number of homes and building design. The developer is looking to build rentals and not condominiums, Barrett said, and is likely not planning to build parking.
“We don’t see any issue with no-parking in this area, since there is a lot of transportation,” a representative of the developer said during the meeting in response to attendees’ concerns.
Central Square, a five-minute walk away, is one of the most transit-accessible in Cambridge, with a red line MBTA stop and stops for six bus routes. Even so, some attendees worried new residents will bring cars that take up valuable street parking.
The development may also incorporate a 3,000 square-foot property next to A.J. Spears’ Funeral Home at 122 Western Ave., said Tony Spears. DND Homes was not reachable for comment to confirm the status of the next-door sale.
For Barrett, the funeral home’s sale offers an opportunity to do “exactly what the council asked us to do, which is to build more housing.”
The developer has worked on developing a run-down house near the funeral home with two detached luxury townhouses at 2-4 Soden St. Barrett cited prior zoning regulations as part of the reason more housing wasn’t built on that plot.
“They built two houses where they should have built, like, eight,” Barrett said
Spears, on his part, called the townhouses “absolutely beautiful” and was in part inspired to sell to DND Homes from seeing its work on the other side of Western Avenue.
This post was updated June 25, 2025, to clarify in headline that the planned closing of the location is for 2026.
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Ahhhh Central Square. The place things get dumped in Cambridge.
Call me when there’s literally ANY “six story development” outside of Central/Kendall.
I hope they do build six-story housing—people need homes. It’s good to see zoning reform driving progress.
That many units in that space doesn’t say families. It says ‘Young Urban Professionals’ and/or Student Housing. So folks that attend the universities or who are staff at the Universities or who are Pharma employees. This will not help the waiting lists of families trying to stay in the city.
The idea that this building needs to be preserved in perpetuity is ludicrous, but a plaque commemorating the Spears family is a great idea.
50-60 homes means 10-12 subsidized, affordable homes, which represent as much as a $10-12M value to the City—is the Historical Commission going to come up with $10-12M for affordable housing?
Kudos to the authors and interview subjects for an
Glad to see more housing on the horizon. The first will be expensive – of course it will. It means we need even more, even if you don’t like how the people moving into them look.
And let’s not ignore that students and researchers also compete with families for the same housing. Some even have families of their own!
@GrandArch Poobah of Cambridge two parking lots in porter are being converted to affordable housing under AHO 2.0, which means they can be built much higher than 6 stories.
A real shame to knock this building down, a beautiful house. Thell put up 6 story apartment building, how many people do they want in Cambridge? A million..too many already. Stores in Central sq are leaving fast. What is the city doing about that?
“Instead of being limited to three stories, housing developers can build up to six stories” — this is wrong. It’s 4 stories by default, 6 if 20% affordable.
Except any development over 10 units already had a 20% affordable requirement. Nobody would build over 4 stories with less than 10 units. So this rule didn’t accomplish anything.
Under these rules, a building that was slightly less horrible with step-backs on upper floors would provide maybe 1 less affordable unit. Would that be a tragedy?
As far as value, there’s no reason why it should cost a million dollars to build an affordable unit. Just because the city spends more than it should doesn’t mean it provides that much value.
And where does the money for these privately-funded affordable units come from? It’s not free money from the developer. The developer is still getting rich. The money comes from increased housing costs for people who don’t qualify for affordable housing, or do qualify but don’t win the lottery.
@pmadey One of the best things the city can do for businesses is build more housing. More people means more customers, and more affordable housing means more money to spend in stores.
Cambridge keeps adding jobs—those workers need homes. If they can’t live here, they’ll drive in, adding to traffic.
Newer residents are less likely to own cars, and housing turnover has already reduced car use.
More housing is the key to solving many of Cambridge’s problems, especially the top concern: affordability.
@GrandArch Poobah of Cambridge You said “call me when there’s literally ANY “six story development” outside of Central/Kendall.”
Here’s that call:
https://www.cambridgeday.com/2025/06/26/six-story-development-in-historic-neighborhood-raises-concerns-for-residents-along-ellery-street/
@L M N O. That’s not accurate.
The housing crisis is primarily caused by a lack of supply. Increasing supply—even market-rate housing—lowers surrounding housing costs; this is basic economics and well-documented.
Developers are businesses to make a profit. Do you expect them to build for free?
Opposition to development often comes from those who benefit from rising home prices due to restrictive zoning. Criticizing developers for making money while profiting from these policies is hypocritical.
Firefighters can’t afford to live in Cambridge.
But, Cambridge had Rise Up Cambridge guaranteeing 500 per month for certain families who earn less than a certain amount. Cost was
22 million.
Why don’t we subsidize taxes for firefighter’s homes?
To the people concerned that the homes added won’t be affordable: where was that concern under the previous zoning?
2-4 Soden St right across the street turned a dilapidated triple-decker into two extraordinarily expensive townhomes, because that was what was permitted under the previous zoning.
The land acquisition cost made up more than $1 million of the sale price of each of those townhomes. Under the new zoning, that could’ve been 8 or more homes, cutting the cost of building the homes by $750k or more.
I don’t expect developers to cut prices out of the goodness of their hearts if they can make more money, but I know that they aren’t going to cut prices below what they spent to build the homes in the first place. The previous, restrictive zoning made affordability impossible.
Here’s another call for @GrandArch Poobah of Cambridge who said “call me when there’s literally ANY “six story development” outside of Central/Kendall.”
Here’s a 12-story development outside of Central/Kendall:
https://www.cambridgeday.com/2025/07/01/twelve-story-affordable-housing-project-moves-toward-2027-construction-in-north-cambridge/
@cwec: Exactly. The NIMBY crowd said nothing when luxury housing went up under the old zoning. But now that reform allows more housing, they suddenly complain it’s not affordable enough.
It is great to see zoning reform working and much-needed housing being built.
It’s not family housing if there’s no parking. Families need to drive to work on the days (at least) when kids have mid-day dr appointments. Families need to drive to Danehy Park or Ahern Field (or both!) on Saturdays when the kids have soccer. And that’s a minimum, assuming that parent(s) and child(ren) are all 100% fully abled and in desk jobs. Add in a second job or a couple of weekly appointments in Newton or Waltham and you will have a bunch of empty “family” apartments. One car spot per bedroom, minimum, needed for “family” housing.