Cambridge Crossing (NorthPoint) | East Cambridge/Charlestown | Cambridge/Boston

HenryAlan said:
This is what I long to see under the Expressway, along Albany Street. It could be so much better than the mix of parking lots and drug dealers.
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I'm not sure that's really possible. Trains can be made relatively quiet and don't pollute. They can be pleasant to be around. But cars on a highway are loud as hell and pollute like crazy. That's not a nice dining experience.
Can you think of any examples of nice shops and restaurants under a highway? I supposed there has to be something other there, but highways are pretty fundamentally unpleasant to be near.
 
ritchiew said:
Can you think of any examples of nice shops and restaurants under a highway? I supposed there has to be something other there, but highways are pretty fundamentally unpleasant to be near.
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I doubt there are as many under roadways as there are railroad tracks, but I visited this one in Tokyo. Sanagi Shinjuku. It's under a pretty big elevated highway.
 
District Six, in San Francisco also comes to mind, although it's a food truck enclave, rather than brick and mortar. My thought, though, regards something that is an actually building underneath the highway, very much like the German elevated rail example. Couldn't such a building be insulated from the noise and polution?
 
Lrfox said:
I doubt there are as many under roadways as there are railroad tracks, but I visited this one in Tokyo. Sanagi Shinjuku. It's under a pretty big elevated highway.
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Looks cool, but that's not a highway. That's Koshu-Kaido Avenue, and there are intersections and traffic lights on either side of that short bridge. Cars going 60+mph (like on the Expressway here) would be much, much louder.

HenryAlan said:
Couldn't such a building be insulated from the noise and polution?
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Yeah, somewhat. The Ink Block, for example, must have some thick walls and good HVAC. But the fixes can't be cheap or easy, otherwise we'd probably try to fix that for all the people living along highways with higher risk of respiratory problems.

With the tens of thousands of miles of highway that have been around for decades, I did think we'd come up with one clear example of what you're hoping for here. But if we're struggling to find even one, it doesn't seem very plausible.
 
ritchiew said:
But there's another level of improvement, like this viaduct in Berlin. Make the trains so quiet that shops and restaurants can comfortably move in underneath.
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Vienna and London (and I'm sure other cities in Europe) also have retail under (mainly rail) viaducts.

It's a fair point that permanent retail tends to occurmore under elevated rail (rather than highway) lines. I don't necessarily think the latter is impossible - but the best examples I can think of for utilization of highway underpasses are linear parks like in Miami, NYC (West Side Highway in the UWS ... FDR down by the South Street Seaport) and I remember seeing plans for something like that in Toronto too. And per Henry Alan, any of these uses would beat the current mix of parking lots and drug dealers.
 
Site Progress June 2023

not my photos. note the construction offices moved from Parcel LM to Parcel D

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beck4537 said:
Nice pics. There's still a lot of land available to develop. Does anyone know if there are more plans for housing for the remaining parcels?
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Yes, the approved Parcel R (the one closest to the elevated green line; across N. 1st St. from the REI) is slated for housing. There are many other unbuilt parcels within CX earmarked for housing too, but I hope these developers don't stall on that too much on housing due to the lab slowdown affecting financial situation. The city planning process sought a balance of commercial / residential, but thus far these developers have completed much more of the commercial space than residential. These next couple of years will be a test to see if CX is actually serious about getting residential done.
 
bigpicture7 said:
Yes, the approved Parcel R (the one closest to the elevated green line; across N. 1st St. from the REI) is slated for housing. There are many other unbuilt parcels within CX earmarked for housing too, but I hope these developers don't stall on that too much on housing due to the lab slowdown affecting financial situation. The city planning process sought a balance of commercial / residential, but thus far these developers have completed much more of the commercial space than residential. These next couple of years will be a test to see if CX is actually serious about getting residential done.
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I have some bad news for you...
 
Patrick Winn said:
Oh ya? What's the bad news?
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It's just King_Vibe being King_Vibe: everything sucks, everyone is rotten to the core, only bad things happen...; )

That said, I share the skepticism of how much (and how soon) more housing will get built here, but I do believe that if anything (of any category) gets built anytime soon at CX, housing will be in the mix (most likely Parcel R to start) due to Cambridge's fairly vigorous housing-commercial ratio policies in these master-planned developments. Sure, the dev. may stall overall, but next steps in monetizing any aspect of these unbuilt parcels in the future (so long as city still gets a say in what's permitted) likely will involve housing. Just ask Boston Properties how that works in Cambridge.
 
Unfortunately between still-high demand for construction services (meaning contractors can get away with charging an arm and a leg sometimes) and stabilized-but-not-deflating construction materials costs (remember: they jumped up a bunch during the pandemic), buildings cost a lot more to put up today before you even talk financing. And high interest rates mean that a) investors now have a much less risky option for their money in the form of U.S. Treasurys, so they're demanding bigger returns and b) banks are just charging more for their loans -- if they will give you a loan at all, since a recession could hurt demand for high-end apartments like these, should one be underway when your building finally opens in a year or two.

Put it all together and it's a much less sure bet you can make enough money from rents to afford the interest on the loans you need to put the building up in the first place. It's a bit more complicated, and any actual CRE finance people on this board can explain the details, but that's the basic gist.
 
bigpicture7 said:
It's just King_Vibe being King_Vibe: everything sucks, everyone is rotten to the core, only bad things happen...; )

That said, I share the skepticism of how much (and how soon) more housing will get built here, but I do believe that if anything (of any category) gets built anytime soon at CX, housing will be in the mix (most likely Parcel R to start) due to Cambridge's fairly vigorous housing-commercial ratio policies in these master-planned developments. Sure, the dev. may stall overall, but next steps in monetizing any aspect of these unbuilt parcels in the future (so long as city still gets a say in what's permitted) likely will involve housing. Just ask Boston Properties how that works in Cambridge.
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Have to admit, I don’t know anything about the process you mention, but I imagine these empty plots will be highly coveted. I walk through CX a lot and it is an incredible development. I was there yesterday, and was amazed by all the wildlife present now in the re-created wetlands park: schools of thousands of little fish, turtles, birds. The neighborhood has great access to public transportation and thousands of people working for major corporations there now. I think anything they build there will be occupied almost immediately, so I hope there’s not too much red tape.
 
Patrick Winn said:
Have to admit, I don’t know anything about the process you mention, but I imagine these empty plots will be highly coveted. I walk through CX a lot and it is an incredible development. I was there yesterday, and was amazed by all the wildlife present now in the re-created wetlands park: schools of thousands of little fish, turtles, birds. The neighborhood has great access to public transportation and thousands of people working for major corporations there now. I think anything they build there will be occupied almost immediately, so I hope there’s not too much red tape.
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Several developments in Cambridge are Planned Unit Developments that are overseen by the Planning Board and undergo a special permitting process that is separate from as-of-right zoning. The MXD district in Kendall, the Canal District in Kendall, Volpe Redevelopment, MIT SoMa/NoMa developments, and many others, are run this way, as is Cambridge Crossing. While I suppose anything is possible, there is a lot of precedent in Cambridge that these special-permitted PUDs are held accountable to the terms of their master plans. Even if the developer were to sell, the new owner would still be bound by the terms of these agreements. It'd be a different story if a developer was just operating as-of-right, in which case they can build whatever they want within zoning. I am not an expert in this by any means, so any better-informed aB'er, please feel free to correct me.
 
Will be interesting to see what shops open and how retail will activate this stretch. Surprised how few entryways face the ped-way (esp building on left).
8/4:
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From the master plan (SO many scale figures!):
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bigpicture7 said:
It's just King_Vibe being King_Vibe: everything sucks, everyone is rotten to the core, only bad things happen...; )

That said, I share the skepticism of how much (and how soon) more housing will get built here, but I do believe that if anything (of any category) gets built anytime soon at CX, housing will be in the mix (most likely Parcel R to start) due to Cambridge's fairly vigorous housing-commercial ratio policies in these master-planned developments. Sure, the dev. may stall overall, but next steps in monetizing any aspect of these unbuilt parcels in the future (so long as city still gets a say in what's permitted) likely will involve housing. Just ask Boston Properties how that works in Cambridge.
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I don’t know why I’m being singled out as some kind of doomsayer for my accurate reading of the real estate markets and honest description of the papertecture in a lot of recent developments. Hell, I’m one of the few people on this forum still bullish on the MBTA.
 
king_vibe said:
I don’t know why I’m being singled out as some kind of doomsayer for my accurate reading of the real estate markets and honest description of the papertecture in a lot of recent developments. Hell, I’m one of the few people on this forum still bullish on the MBTA.
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I think us readers would appreciate a bit more info than "I have some bad news for you... " to simply keep us guessing. Give us the "why" and we'll know what you're talking about. It would be thoughtful of others.
 
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