Developers are eager to put up a 19-story lab building at Assembly Row, but they are hearing concerns from Somerville’s Planning Board about adding unusable space to a market that’s been glutted since the Covid pandemic.
Divco West sees its 120 Middlesex Ave. as the future gateway to a life science corridor that positions Assembly Square to compete for tenants with Cambridge’s Kendall Square.
“Things may appear slow on the surface,” said Nicole LaBossiere, the company’s senior director of development, at a Thursday presentation. “Having an approved project to offer will allow us to compete in what is truly a competitive environment.”
It’s those conditions – with persistent reports that one-third of Greater Boston lab space is empty – that worried Planning Board members. “That’s quite a lot of capacity,” member Lynn Richards said.
Though a permitted project might take anywhere from three to seven years to put up, and in that time the market could improve, Richards still wanted to hear what Divco West’s market research was saying, and how quickly the company could pivot to leasing the building purely as office space. That could let Somerville avoid needing “to make a deal and provide all sorts of tax incentives, et cetera, et cetera, to get a tenant” to fill a vacant building – as has happened elsewhere in Assembly Square.
Richards’ concerns about a lack of lab competition were shared by other Planning Board members, but the office market has also been soft. A 20-story office building at 40 Thorndike St., East Cambridge, opened its doors Oct. 8, 2024, and still hasn’t found a tenant.
Divco West is designing 120 Middlesex Ave. in a 60-40 split for lab and office, and said it would not be a problem to go all-office if necessary. Though as a lab building it needs an interstitial floor for mechanical uses, that story is structurally no different than others and will be built with windows. “It’ll be easy to convert that mid-mechanical-level floor to a tenant space without much redo,” said Jeff Kim of the architecture firm Perkins&Will. “It’s designed as any other floor.”
Five years for 19 stories
The building is expected to have 16 occupiable levels at a height of 259 feet – towering over the nearby Somerville District Court – with 596,000 square feet of gross floor area but individual floor plates of about 35,000 square feet. Five and a half levels of below-grade parking can accommodate about 520 cars, Kim said. The proposed facade combines glass and metal panels in a layered pattern. A raised, protected bike lane is part of the landscaping design, as well as enough plantings to mitigate an urban heat island effect: Trees help cool a warming planet.
The building has been in the works for five years, during which the city asked for changes in design such as for parking access, which was relocated, and for the corner of the building to be pulled back to allow for the addition of a 12-footwide multiuse path.
“Our permitting journey’s been challenging and costly, but the past five years have resulted in an even better building,” LaBossiere said.
That’s cost Divco West about $1.5 million, said Anthony Galluccio, an attorney working with the company. He agreed the process has been worth it. “The upside of a very challenging permitting process, an expensive one,” he said, “is that we won’t have an empty building. The days of building to spec are over for the foreseeable future.”
A must for marketing
Galluccio assured the board that at Divco West, “we still believe this is this is a lab site,” though there could be “variations” or “hybrids.” He also urged appreciation for the developer’s openness to the permitting process and applied some pressure for that process to enter a different phase: “The worst thing that can happen during this – let’s call it a downturn – is that companies like Divco walk away.”
He and LaBossiere called the permitting critical to filling the building.
“We are monitoring the market on a daily basis,” LaBossiere said. “We’re at the point where we need the fully entitled building to articulate what we have available, and to be able to have those discussions with various types of tenants … to be able to move or pivot quickly.”
Chair Michel Capuano assured the Divco West team that the Planning Board was generally supportive of the project. He also asked the developer to return Sept. 3 for a few more questions.
