Union Point Weymouth Runs on 450,000 Gallons a Day

House Speaker Ron Mariano has been to enough groundbreakings at the old South Weymouth Naval Air Station that he joked last Tuesday he has enough souvenir shovels to “start my own construction company.” He said it standing next to Governor Maura Healey and Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll at the October 27 kickoff the developers are calling Reimagine the Base, and the line landed because everyone in the crowd knew the history. “It’s been 35 years,” he told Banker & Tradesman, “and trust me, it seems like 135.”

The headline most people took away is 6,500 homes. That number is real. It is the full build-out the joint venture of New England Development and BGRE (the former Brookfield Properties) has approval to pursue across 1,400 acres in Weymouth, Abington and Rockland. But the shovel that went in the ground on October 27 dug a road, and the thing that decides when those homes actually show up is not a zoning vote or a ribbon. It is a number measured in gallons per day.

I work with buyers and sellers across the South Shore, and over the past week I have had the same question three different ways: should I sell before the wave hits, should I wait for the new stuff, and is my Union Point house about to lose value. To answer it honestly I pulled every recorded MLS PIN sale on the base for the last two years, read the water filings, and lined up what each news outlet actually reported. Here is what the calendar looks like once you follow the water.

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What actually started on October 27

The work that began is a roughly $20 million infrastructure package, as New England Development’s John Twohig described it: new drainage and sewer pipe, lighting, and the relocation and widening of Shea Memorial Drive off Route 18. The route runs about 1.5 miles, about a mile of it new roadway, east from Route 18 past the Shea Field Memorial Grove, then south toward the Union Point Sports Complex and the roundabout on the parkway, according to The Patriot Ledger. It carries water, sewer force mains, drainage, electric and gas, plus two sewer pump stations tying into Route 18. The developers told the Southfield Redevelopment Authority in August that pipe work would start in September and paving would land by spring 2027. The Ledger puts the whole job at about a year.

The other pieces of the milestone are money and land. The state, through MassWorks and MassDevelopment, has put $35 million toward water, sewer and road work over the past two years. The developers paid Washington Capital Management $65 million for the remaining development land this summer. Weymouth Mayor Michael Molisse called that sale “a good day for Weymouth and the entire Commonwealth” when it closed, per the Boston Real Estate Times. Healey said the World War II era hangar comes down “in a few short months.”

What did not start is housing. Twohig told the Ledger residential construction begins in early 2027 and commercial construction in early 2028, with full build-out taking 15-plus years. Banker & Tradesman reports that the first two apartment complexes are scheduled to start in March. Twohig’s own description of what comes next is the most useful sentence anyone said all week: “You really have to get the housing piece done and that’s a couple of years to build.”

The base closed in 1997. LNR’s SouthField plan stalled in the 2008 crash. LStar’s “smart city” version ended in partner litigation and LStar was removed in 2019. Mills Corp. had pitched a megamall before either of them. About 1,275 to 1,300 homes did get built in the northwest corner near Route 18, which matters a great deal for the data below, but the bulk of the land has sat dormant for a decade. This team spent six years on permits, bought the land, and is spending real money on pipe. That improves the odds. It does not change the plumbing.

Three water accounts, three sets of rules

The easiest way to understand Union Point’s timing is to think of the project as holding three separate water accounts. Each has a different balance, a different opening date, and a different rule about which town is allowed to spend it.

Account one: Weymouth, 450,000 gallons a day, open now. Weymouth has allocated 450,000 gallons per day of town water to the project. Here is the catch the developers spelled out at an Abington Select Board hearing on September 8, as reported by South Shore News: Weymouth’s rules bar that water from crossing into Abington or Rockland. So every unit in phase 1 is in Weymouth. Twohig put it plainly: “All in Weymouth, because that’s the only place we have water.” Divide 450,000 gallons by 2,500 homes and you get about 180 gallons per home per day, before a single square foot of retail or medical office. That allocation is sized to phase 1 and not much more.

It is also not a large cushion for the town itself. Weymouth is permitted to draw 5 million gallons a day and has averaged about 86% of that, according to the 2024 version of the town’s own MWRA question and answer page, which also says the town sits at least 600,000 gallons a day under its limit. Weymouth has dealt with water bans since the 1960s and was under a 1999 state consent decree that froze new connections. When a town in that position promises 450,000 gallons to one project, it is promising most of what it has left.

Account two: Brockton, 350,000 gallons a day, preliminary. To avoid waiting six to eight years on the Abington portion, the developers signed a preliminary memorandum of understanding to reserve 350,000 gallons a day from the City of Brockton, delivered through the Abington-Rockland Joint Water Works. In March they pitched an $8.5 million developer-funded pipe to make that connection. The North and South Rivers Watershed Association has already flagged concerns about diverting that water. An MOU is a starting point for a negotiation, not water in a pipe.

Account three: the MWRA, roughly 14 million gallons a day, 2031 or 2032. The permanent answer is a 6.7-mile, 36-inch transmission main from the Blue Hills Reservation in Quincy through Braintree to Weymouth’s Great Pond treatment plant. The line would carry roughly 14 million gallons a day, about 5.5 million of it for Weymouth and the base, with the rest available to other South Shore towns. The Draft Environmental Impact Report covered only the route. As the watershed association notes, the actual approval to move water out of the MWRA system comes later, through a separate Interbasin Transfer Act review. That is one more gate between today and the first gallon.

Look at the fourth and fifth bars together. Banker & Tradesman, citing the state environmental filings, reports the project could draw more than 1 million gallons a day by 2040. Even if the Brockton deal closes exactly as sketched, Weymouth plus Brockton is 800,000. The interim water gets you phase 1 in Weymouth and, maybe, an early start in Abington. It does not get you 6,500 homes. Only the MWRA line does that.

Where the reporting disagrees

My rule for any news hook with numbers in it: read every account before repeating one. On Union Point the three main outlets, plus the town and the watershed group, disagree on almost every figure that matters for timing. Most of the gaps are rounding, ceilings versus estimates, or numbers that drifted as the design matured. On a $700,000 decision, you should know the range.

The pattern in that table is the useful part. The pipeline cost has only gone up as the design has firmed: $90 million to $120 million in the town’s early estimates, $120 million in Banker & Tradesman’s October report, $132 million in the watershed association’s May comments on the draft report. The finish date has drifted the same way, from 2031 toward 2032. Phase 1 has held steady around 2,500 units across six months of reporting. When I build a calendar for a client, I use the stable number for the thing that is stable and the later date for the thing that keeps slipping.

A realistic delivery calendar

Put the reported start dates and the water gates on one grid and the picture is less dramatic than the headlines. The road and utilities run through roughly fall 2027. The first two apartment buildings start in March 2027. If they take the “couple of years” Twohig described, the first residents move in sometime in 2029. That date is my estimate, not the developer’s, but it is consistent with everything they have said in public.

Two details on that grid matter. First, the earliest new homes are rentals, partly because, as Twohig admitted, “some of the commercial people want to see that something’s actually happening.” For-sale townhomes, condos and single-families follow, spread across years, because builders release only what they can sell at the price they need. Second, the dashed row is not a construction row at all. The Abington side has no start date because it has no water. Its calendar begins when either the Brockton deal is real or the MWRA line opens, whichever comes first.

So when someone tells me 6,500 homes are coming to the South Shore, my answer is yes, over something like 15 years, with the first few hundred arriving around 2029 and the Abington and Rockland pieces waiting until the early 2030s unless Brockton comes through. That is not a wave. It is a slow release spread over the next decade and a half.

What 1,275 existing homes already tell us

The best evidence about what new Union Point housing does to nearby prices is the Union Point housing that already exists. The base has more than 1,275 single-family homes, townhouses and apartments, per the Ledger, built mostly between 2011 and 2019 under the SouthField and Union Point banners: the townhouse condos on Trotter Road, the single-families on Stonehaven Drive, Snowbird Avenue, Parkview Street, Skyhawk Circle and the greens, and the newer Stonebridge homes on Manchester Street. Many of the 1,275 are rental apartments, like the Mastlight buildings near the parkway, which never trade on the MLS. The ones that do give us a clean read.

Over the two years from November 1, 2024 to October 30, 2026, MLS PIN recorded 44 closed sales inside the base footprint: 28 single-families and 16 condos. Here is how they compare.

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• Union Point single-families closed at a median $847,500, or $389 per square foot, on a median 2,252 square feet and a median build year of 2014.
• Every other Weymouth single-family closed at a median $655,000, or $414 per square foot, on 1,578 square feet and a median build year of 1948 (749 sales).
• Weymouth single-families built in 2008 or later, off the base, closed at $865,000, or $383 per square foot, on 2,342 square feet (37 sales).
• Union Point condos closed at a median $537,500, or $395 per square foot, against $462 for newer off-base Weymouth condos (median build year 2023, 50 sales) and $385 for the older Weymouth condo stock (289 sales).

Read that carefully and the base has never earned a premium for being new. Its single-families trade at essentially the same price per foot as other newer Weymouth houses of the same size, and its condos trade well below the newest condos in town. Union Point homes also sold a touch slower (a median 58.5 days from listing to closing versus 53 for the rest of Weymouth) and a touch further under original asking price (99.5% versus 100.0%).

One reason is a monthly fee most Weymouth houses do not carry. Of the 28 Union Point single-families that sold, 23 listed an association fee, with a median of $225 a month. Off the base, only 4 of 37 newer single-families listed one. A buyer pays for that fee out of the same budget that pays the mortgage, so it shows up in the price. The other reason, I think, is uncertainty. For two decades a buyer on the base was buying next to an unknown. Nobody could tell you whether the land behind you would be a town center, a mall, a movie studio or nothing, and the market discounted the not knowing.

The station premium went to the other side of the tracks

South Weymouth station on the Kingston Line sits on the west edge of the base, which means most of Union Point is within walking distance of commuter rail to South Station. You would expect that to show up in the base’s prices. In the data, the station premium is real, but it goes to the older homes on the west side.

Compare houses of similar size. Off-base single-families within half a mile of the station, mostly mid-century homes of about 1,500 square feet, closed at a median $447 per square foot. Similar-sized homes more than 2 miles from the station closed at $419. That is a premium of roughly 7% for being near the train, on a small sample of 17 sales, so I would call it directional rather than precise. Now compare Union Point’s single-families with other newer Weymouth houses of the same size: $389 versus $383. No station premium at all.

On the base, the train has been offset by everything else a buyer weighs: the association fee, the long shadow of construction, and the open question of what gets built next door. That should change as the base fills in, on the construction calendar rather than the ribbon-cutting one.

Weymouth, Abington, Rockland and Hingham: no supply shock coming

Now scale the 6,500 against the market it lands in. Over the last 12 months, MLS PIN recorded 542 residential closings in all of Weymouth. Phase 1’s 2,500 units equal about four and a half years of the town’s entire resale volume, which sounds enormous until you remember three things. Roughly half of the units are planned as rentals, based on the 50-50 split the developers described to the Town Council in May. The for-sale half will be released over many years, not dumped at once. And the first of anything arrives around 2029.

These are tight markets. Abington had about one month of single-family supply on the market as of today. Weymouth and Rockland had about two, Hingham under three. Single-families in Weymouth and Rockland closed above original asking price at the median. New construction is a rounding error in most of these towns right now: homes built in 2025 or later were under 2% of closings in Weymouth and Abington. Rockland is the exception at 8%, and that new supply has not stopped its single-families from closing at 101.6% of original ask.

That is why my view for existing owners is simple. If you own a single-family in Weymouth, Abington or Rockland, there is no near-term supply shock to sell ahead of. The homes that compete with yours in 2027 and 2028 are the same resale homes competing with you today. When Union Point’s for-sale product does arrive, most of it will price at the top of the local stack, the way newer Weymouth homes already do at a median $865,000, which is a different buyer than the one shopping a $600,000 Cape in Abington.

Hingham is the interesting outlier. It is not part of the base, but it has its own water problem. A regional MWRA study presented to its Select Board in July 2025 put a South Shore pipeline at up to $240 million, with Hingham’s share estimated at $20 million to $28 million. The Weymouth line is designed with spare capacity for exactly that kind of neighbor. If you are watching commercial or multifamily land in Hingham, the MWRA timeline matters to you as much as it matters to Abington.

The Abington 55-plus phase is a water question, not a demand question

Abington’s share of the base is 179 acres, planned for office space, institutional uses and age-qualified 55-plus townhomes. I hear people suggest it is on hold because nobody wants it. The record says otherwise. Developers told Abington’s Select Board in September that they already have more than 2,500 homes “pre-sold” on the Weymouth side across multifamily, single-family, townhome and 55-plus product. I read that as builder commitments for parcels rather than signed buyers, but either way the demand side is not the constraint. The constraint is that Weymouth water cannot cross the line and nothing else is connected yet.

The stakes for the two smaller towns are real money. Officials estimated nearly $24 million a year in net new tax revenue at build-out: about $14 million for Weymouth and $5 million each for Rockland and Abington, per the Boston Real Estate Times. An updated fiscal study cited at the September hearing put Abington’s net gain at $4 million to $4.5 million a year after town services. Rockland heard from the developers back in October 2025 that it could face years without that revenue if no water solution emerges. Every year the MWRA line slips is a year of tax revenue those towns do not collect.

If you are in Abington or Rockland and waiting for a new 55-plus townhome on the base, I would plan on the early 2030s and treat anything sooner as a bonus tied to the Brockton deal. If you are a seller there, that same delay works in your favor.

What I would do, depending on where you sit

If you own at Union Point now. Your house is about to get a lot more context. Over the next few years the land around you turns from question mark into a planned neighborhood, which is what the old discount was pricing. That is the good news. The other news is that from about 2029 your resale competition includes brand-new homes on the same base, often with builder incentives. If you were already planning to sell within two or three years, the next two springs, before new for-sale product shows up, are a clean window. If you are holding long term, I would hold.

If you are buying one of the earlier SouthField homes. Underwrite years of construction next door. The construction management plan bars heavy trucks from cutting through existing residential streets like Snowbird Avenue and Trotter Road, routing them through Route 18 and Route 228 instead, and promises dust control and staging yards away from homes. That helps, but a 15-plus year build-out means a working construction site for most of the time you own the house. Ask which parcel sits closest to you, what it is zoned for, and when it is scheduled. Price the association fee into the payment, and do not pay a premium for “new” when the market has not paid one in two years of sales.

If you are a small investor watching new supply. The new supply that arrives first is rental, starting around 2029, in Weymouth, within walking distance of commuter rail. If you own a small multifamily within a couple of miles of the station, those first two complexes are your competition at the top of the rent range, with concessions to lease up. They will not move rents on an older two-family in East Weymouth in 2027. You can follow more on this in our investment property coverage.

If you are selling in Abington, Rockland or Hingham. Sell on your own timeline. Nothing on the base competes with you for years, and the Abington and Rockland pieces are explicitly waiting on water.

My read

The October 27 ceremony was a real milestone, and I do not want to be cynical about it. After a megamall, a smart city and a foreclosure, a developer bought the land, raised state money and started laying pipe. That is more than anyone has done in a decade. But the calendar at Union Point is set by gallons per day, not by who shows up with a shovel. Weymouth’s 450,000 gallons builds phase 1. Brockton’s 350,000 might start Abington early. The MWRA line, now somewhere between $100 million and $132 million and due in 2031 or 2032, is what builds the rest. South Shore buyers should not price a 6,500-home wave into 2027 or 2028, because it is not coming then.

If you own on the South Shore and want to know what your home would sell for today, before any of this arrives, start with our home value tool, or reach out and I will pull the actual comps for your street, on or off the base.

Sources

• Banker & Tradesman: Weymouth Air Base Redevelopment: This Time It’s Different? (Oct. 28, 2026)
• The Patriot Ledger: Work begins on the 6,500-home South Weymouth redevelopment (Oct. 29, 2026)
• South Shore News: Union Point reaches milestone, water bottleneck halts Abington phase (Sept. 14, 2026)
• South Shore News: Infrastructure work to begin in September (Sept. 4, 2026, on the Aug. 27 SRA meeting)
• TownBrief Weymouth: SRA board sets September start for Union Point roads (Aug. 27, 2026)
• South Shore News: Union Point reset, 3,000 homes and the MWRA pipeline (May 11, 2026)
• South Shore News: Developer proposes $8.5M Brockton pipe (Mar. 27, 2026)
• South Shore News: MWRA pipeline on track for 2031 (Mar. 22, 2026)
• South Shore News: Rockland faces years without tax revenue (Oct. 15, 2025)
• South Shore News: Hingham explores MWRA water connection (Aug. 6, 2025)
• Boston Real Estate Times: $65 million land sale advances redevelopment (July 7, 2026)
• Town of Weymouth: MWRA Water Q and A
• Town of Weymouth: MWRA water supply project open for MEPA comment (Apr. 2026)
• North and South Rivers Watershed Association: Weymouth MWRA DEIR comments (May 28, 2026)
• South Weymouth station (Kingston Line), location and history
• MLS PIN closed sales in Weymouth, Abington, Rockland and Hingham, Nov. 1, 2024 to Oct. 30, 2026 (2,343 residential closings, 44 inside Union Point), plus active listings on Nov. 2, 2026, compiled by BMN Boston

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