CHA's Busy Winter

C-port contains a significant portion of CHA's housing portfolio, including Family Housing at the recently modernized River Howard Homes and Woodrow Wilson Court and Senior apartment buildings like the LB Johnson Apartments and Manning Apartments (adjacent to the Central Square Library). CHA's plans for future development and modernization, as well as property management, have a significant impact in the neighborhood, for CHA property residents, employees, and neighbors.

With that in mind, here are a number of notes about the active Cambridge Housing Authority, including a meeting notice to discuss more:

• CHA's groundbreaking Work Force program, a "comprehensive life skills and vocational training program for low-income youth" was featured in Sunday's Globe:
  
  

  [T]he agency’s unusual role as academic adviser as well as landlord appears to be catching on across the state, with Patrick administration officials encouraging public housing managers to go beyond providing tenants with clean, affordable homes and begin promoting their children’s academic progress... The move is in recognition of a growing body of research indicating that schools alone cannot bolster the achievement of the state’s poorest students.

• Councillor Craig Kelley passed along a note that the Council's Housing Committee will meet Tuesday, 12/8, "regarding the Cambridge Housing Authority (CHA), including multi-million dollar renovation of CHA sites, vacancy on CHA Board, potential changing of status of CHA units from being state-funded to being federally funded and any other issues regarding the CHA that may properly come before the committee."


• Wilson Court and Manning Apartments, both state projects, are among the 12 proposed properties for conversion to Federal Public Housing.

625 Putnam Development Update

UPDATE: I've added the public meeting notice filed by the city at the bottom of the post. Note the waivers for parking and yard requirements asked for by the applicant.

Last week, the Homeowner's Rehab (HRI) and ICON Architecture team held a public meeting to update the progress on the proposed housing development at 625 Putnam (discussed in detail in this post). I wasn't able to attend the meeting, but Jane Jones, a Senior Project Manager at HRI, passed along the following notes:

• A more specific building program has been developed: 40 total units, made up of 10 one-bedroom units, 20 two-bedroom units and 10 three-bedroom units. Three of the units will be handicapped-accessible.
• Structured underground parking will provide 28 off-street parking spaces [ed: 0.7 parking spaces per unit is about what the city recommends for affordable projects such as this with good transit access. Ms. Jones said that about 60% of residents have their own cars in a typical HRI development.]
• The city believes that six new on-street parking spaces could be created on the block to alleviate neighbors' concerns about parking.

HRI will present the updated plans in a public meeting with the City Planning Board on August 18th as the next step in the process.

If others were at the meeting, please share additional info/observations in the comments...

The Public Meeting notice for the 8/18 meeting:

The Planning Board of the City of Cambridge will hold a public hearing on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 7:30 p.m. in the Second Floor Meeting Room at City Hall Annex, 344 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts on a Special Permit application (PB#240) by Homeowners Rehab, Inc., for a 40 unit residential development at 625 Putnam Avenue. The proposal is to construct 27,970 square feet of residential use and 28 parking spaces. The application is for a Multifamily Development (Sections 4.26 and 10.47) with a request to waive the side yard requirements as allowed under Section 5.24.4(3) and waive the parking requirement as allowed under Section 6.35.1(6) and 10.45.

The applicant also requests a waiver of the Special Permit Application fee. Copies of this petition are on file in the Office of the City Clerk, City Hall, Cambridge, Massachusetts and at the Community Development Department, 344 Broadway. Questions concerning the petition may be addressed to Liza Paden at 617 349 4647 or lpaden@cambridgema.gov.

Putnam Housing Development Public Meeting

Just received a notice from Homeowners Rehab (HRI) about the new housing development proposed for the southern corner of Putnam and Sidney, known as the "625 Putnam" project. HRI has acquired two vacant, semi-adjacent parcels in southeast Cambridgeport (see project location map, below). For the project, HRI is teaming with ICON Architecture -- the same team that developed Auburn Court on Brookline Street, pictured at left (image courtesy ICON).

HRI seeks to develop rental housing financed through Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), and other subsidies, allowing them to offer the units to households with low and moderate incomes. In affordable housing-ese, they'll likely have units with renters below 50 or 60 percent of AMI, with a handful below 30 percent. In plain English, this means a typical renter will be a 4-person household earning less than $50,000 a year, or a two-person household earning less than $40,000 per year.

The meeting details, and some project background from the first public meeting:

Date: Tuesday July 21st, 2009

Time: 6:30 p.m.

Location: Morse School Auditorium

The project is being planned as two different buildings. One will front onto Sidney, conceived as "contextual" in massing and design (read: lower height, clapboard). A quick glance at the Cambridge Zoning Map shows that this building falls in a residential "C-1" district, meaning (among other things) it is permitted to be multifamily housing up to 35' in height. The other will front onto a relatively industrial block of Putnam. ICON, in the first public meeting, discussed their thoughts about making this building slightly larger and more contemporary, owing to the transitional context of that block, from residential to industrial/MIT. Of note, this project lines one of the primary points of access to the planned Cambridgeport stop of the Urban Ring.