Boston’s suburban office properties often make poor candidates for housing conversion, with their large floorplates and other restrictions, but paradoxically they could offer an excellent opportunity for creating new housing.
Faced with rising vacancy rates inching up and rents inching down in class B buildings in some areas of the metro, developers are eyeing lab conversions and ground-up biomanufacturing projects. Some, as Steve Adams reports this week, are even optimistic that potential exists for an even greater market shift in favor of biomanufacturing if federal policy shifts to reduce some drug companies’ incentives to produce their products in China and elsewhere overseas.
As Mark Development has discovered by trying to convert an office building planned for its Riverside development into lab space, the state’s recently passed Housing Choice zoning reform can pave the way for the type of lab rezoning some see as the future of suburban office space. Thanks to the large housing component of the development and its legal structure as a mixed-use project under state zoning law, only a simple majority of Newton officials will need to approve the zoning change needed to enable the switch.
More jurisprudence on the topic is obviously needed to explore the limits of this approach. But as owners of suburban office parks look to find ways to revive their assets amid what may prove to be a long-term decline in office demand, they should strongly consider whether a similar approach may work for them.
With frequently unified site control, plenty of space to build townhomes and apartments on underused parking lots, and declining prospects, the office parks that dot our suburbs offer some of the best opportunities to quickly boost the area’s housing supplies. Better still, next to boosting public transit, building housing close to job and activity centers is one of the best tools policymakers have for congestion-busting and reducing our collective carbon emissions. The greater the share of trips that can be taken on foot or by bicycle, the more households that can get by on one car – or even none – instead of two, and the better off we all will be.
The intense investor and lender interest in life sciences real estate should not be ignored, and neither should municipal leaders sleep on it if they want to help ease our housing crisis and preserve their communities’ tax bases. State leaders can lend a hand, too, by helping local transit agencies better connect these sites to existing transit infrastructure. Creative development proposals need to be encouraged and supported as they break new ground, figuratively and literally, trying to adapt to our post-COVID reality.
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