News

Bulfinch looks to combine labs with housing at Mission Hill property

BOSTON, MA – February 28, 2022

The Bulfinch Cos. Inc. has proposed building new laboratory space alongside residential units on the same site at the edge of the Longwood area in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood.

The Boston-based real estate firm envisions an 88,000-square-foot mixed-use development at 804-814 Huntington Ave. The 1.3-acre site is now home to a parking lot and a one-floor building that was most recently leased to New England Baptist Hospital, according to a filing with the Boston Planning and Development Agency published Wednesday.

The site would include a larger building for lab and research and development and a smaller building for residential space.

“804 Huntington’s extremely desirable location in the Longwood Medical Area, with its proximity to major hospitals, research institutions and public transportation, makes the location an ideal mixed-use opportunity to combine life science and much-needed housing to the Mission Hill community,” Bulfinch President Robert Schlager said in a statement.

Of the project’s total square footage, about 63,000 square feet would be for the lab-related uses, and 25,000 square feet for residential, according to the filing. Bulfinch bought the property last year for $11.5 million, according to property records. Newmark will represent Bulfinch in the leasing of the lab building.

“We are increasingly seeing the co-location of life science and multifamily uses on the same site, especially as medical, academic and research clusters continue to drive economic activity and the correlated need for housing,” said Michael Greeley, senior managing director in Newmark’s Boston medical-academic practice group.

Stantec is serving as the project’s architecture firm. The project is designed to be LEED Silver Certified, according to the filing. The residential building would be built to the “passive house” standard, which is meant to drastically drive down a facility’s greenhouse gas emissions. Both buildings would include rooftop solar-energy installations, the filing said.

Parking will be “below-grade to the maximum extent practicable,” the filing said, citing the significant grade changes from Huntington Avenue to Hillside Street. The filing did not reference the number of proposed parking spots, though it held that a quarter of the spaces would be equipped to charge electric cars, with the remainder wired to do so in the future.

Bulfinch plans to make another filing with the BPDA with more details about the proposal some time in the next month.