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WOBURN – Is Woburn’s largest-ever slated private redevelopment about to get a whole lot more residential?
Tonight, the Woburn Planning Board will open a public hearing in City Hall to consider a zoning amendment that would allow a Boston developer to add hundreds of new housing units to the so-called “Vale” redevelopment of Montvale Avenue’s old Kraft Foods property.
The Planning Board, which is acting in an advisory capacity to the City Council on the matter, is scheduled to meet at 7 p.m. tonight in City Hall’s main hearing room.
According to the proposal, which would amend the provisions of the city’s 2018 technology and business use overlay district (TBOD), the list of allowable uses in the area would be modified to allow for up to 504 housing units where a massive life sciences campus was previously planned. Per the draft language of the zoning change, all of the housing units would be restricted to persons aged 55-and-above, which is allowed under Mass. state law for sites with at least five-acres of land area.
Back in 2016, Kraft Foods, which had long operated a gelatin and food manufacturing plant on a 107-acre plot of land that bordered I-93 and stretched to borders of Stoneham and Winchester, shut down after 95-years of operation. Hoping to shape the future of the sprawling property, the City Council and former Mayor Scott Galvin two years later established a new overlay district around the land that encouraged a mix of retail, housing, and high-end manufacturing or office park uses on the East Woburn site.
Two years later, Boston developer Leggat McCall revealed it had purchased the site from corporate giant Kraft Heinz with the hopes of constructing 800,000 square feet of Class A office and research and development (R&D) laboratory space, 75,000 square feet of retail space, a new hotel, and a housing mix that consisted of the following:
• Roughly 120 garden-style apartments;
• 95 townhouses;
• A 103-unit congregate elderly housing complex;
• And a 103-unit assisted living and Alzheimer’s care facility.
Back in 2020, the Boston firm split off that housing component after selling the development rights to national home builder Pulte Homes and Iowa-based senior housing develoeper LCS.
During the final days of 2021, the City Council amended the TBOD to allow for Leggat McCall to replace the office park and hotel components with a 1 million square foot life sciences campus. One of two proposed multi-story parking garages was also scrapped from the original redevelopment plan.
Under the revised redevelopment vision, some five multi-story R&D and laboratory buildings were to be cluttered around a central green with a new multi-tenant dining area that included a brew-pub and a coffee shop.
Leggat McCall asked to substitute the office park for life sciences due to dramatic changes to the market for Class A office space in the wake of the COVID-19 era. However, not long after the council OK’d the new focus towards biotech and research uses, the red-hot market for life science space also collapsed.
