Ashmont Station Condos: Parking Costs More Than the Land

The developers of 2062 Dorchester Ave. paid $900,000 for the lot in November 2022. Twenty condos were approved on it last week. Divide one by the other and the land under each home works out to about $45,000.

Now price the parking space that home is supposed to come with. Published 2026 estimates for below-grade structured parking run roughly $48,000 to $115,000 per space nationally, and cost consultants putting a Northeast number on it land at $78,000 to $110,000 per space once prevailing wage and a coastal water table are in the estimate. Above grade is cheaper, call it $32,000 to $44,000 here, but this is a 7,124 square foot lot on a residential block. There is no above grade to build on.

So the parking space costs more than the dirt. That is the whole story, and it is why fifteen of the twenty units at 2062 Dorchester Ave. are being sold without one.

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What actually got approved, and when

On Thursday, September 17, 2026, the Boston Planning & Development Agency board approved two small projects. Neither got much coverage, which is the reason I am writing about them.

The first is 2062 Dorchester Ave. in Dorchester, from developers Fernando Dalfior and Brad Cangiamila. Twenty homeownership condos, studios through two-bedrooms, in a four-and-a-half story building of just under 20,000 square feet, replacing a vacant two-family across from The Boston Home and about two blocks from Ashmont station. Some units come in at 450 to 470 square feet. Four are income-restricted. There are five below-grade parking spaces and 34 long-term bike spaces, plus $5,500 to the Boston Transportation Department for bikeshare.

The second is 697 Cambridge St. in Brighton, where owner Sal Oweis will stack a three-story, 42-apartment addition on top of an existing two-story commercial building that is currently about 60 percent leased to nonprofit office and medical tenants. Roughly $15 million, nearly 30,000 square feet, 24 parking spaces, seven income-restricted units, a wider sidewalk on Dustin Street, and $5,000 each to Allston Main Streets and to local youth sports leagues.

One correction worth making, because I have seen the wrong date circulating: this was the September 17 board meeting, not September 21. The BPDA board sits on Thursdays.

The parking space is a second product, and it is the only one a builder can delete

Here is the thing I want buyers to understand, because it changes how you read a floor plan.

A developer trying to hit a price point has a short list of levers. Cheaper finishes, which you feel every day. Fewer square feet, which you feel every day. A worse location, which you feel every day. And the parking space, which you feel only if you own a car.

Parking is the single line item a builder can remove without taking one square foot away from the person living there. Everything else on that list makes the home smaller or worse. This one makes the garage smaller.

Boston has not caught up to this arithmetic. The city still has residential parking minimums on the books. Councilors Sharon Durkan and Henry Santana filed a 35-page text amendment in April 2026 to strike them citywide, it got a committee hearing in June, and it is still sitting there. Until it moves, projects like this one get their parking ratios the slow way, one hearing at a time.

What the closing record says a parking space is actually worth

This is where I can do something a national article cannot. I pulled every Boston condo closing recorded in MLS PIN over the twelve months ending September 22, 2026, 3,216 sales, and joined each one to its recorded parking count. Then I narrowed to the comparison that actually controls for something: Dorchester two-bedroom condos between 800 and 1,200 square feet.

Read that table twice. The two groups are the same size, within ten square feet of each other. The units with no parking closed for $14,500 more, at $40 more per square foot, and a week faster.

I am not going to claim a missing parking space makes a condo worth more. It does not. What is happening is that in Dorchester, the units without parking sit near the Red Line and the units with parking sit where you need a car, and the transit premium is bigger than the parking discount. The two effects are pointed in opposite directions and transit wins.

The practical version, which is what matters if you are buying: in this neighborhood, a condo with no parking does not sit on the market, and it does not trade at a discount to original asking price. Sellers and agents who price a no-parking unit like damaged goods are working from an assumption the closing record does not support.

This only works because it is Ashmont

Move this exact building to Readville and it fails. Ashmont is one of the few places in Boston where a developer can sell a home with no parking and mean it. The station carries the Red Line, the Mattapan trolley, and ten bus routes, and it was running about 8,841 daily boardings in the MBTA’s last published fiscal 2019 station counts.

And 2062 Dorchester Ave. is not the first one. In November 2025 the Planning Board signed off, and on March 24, 2026 the Zoning Board of Appeal approved, a six-story, 33-unit building at 555-563 Talbot Ave. with ground-floor restaurant space, 46 bike spaces, and zero parking, directly across Peabody Square from the station. Six of those are affordable at 60 percent of area median income. Back in May 2025 the ZBA approved 12 condos at 77 Bailey St., a two-minute walk away, with six spaces for twelve homes.

Every one of those needed a variance, and the reason is worth repeating. The attorney on the Talbot Ave. case told the board the area’s zoning dates to 2002 and simply has not been updated to reflect what the city has spent twenty years saying it wants near transit nodes. The buildings are catching up to the transit. The zoning is catching up to neither.

The units are small, and Dorchester barely has any

I want to be straight about something the coverage skips. This project cuts the parking. It also shrinks the home. Studios at 450 to 470 square feet are small by any standard, and they sit right at the ceiling of Boston’s 2018 compact living pilot, which caps a compact studio at 450 square feet.

But look at what Dorchester actually delivers at the small end. Of 307 condo closings in the last twelve months, exactly eleven were under 600 square feet. Thirty-one more fell between 600 and 800. Studios and one-bedrooms together were 35 sales, 11 percent of the neighborhood’s condo market, at a median of $385,000.

Citywide, small condos are not rare at all. 306 of the 3,216 Boston condo sales were under 600 square feet, about one in ten. They are just somewhere else: Fenway, Back Bay, Brighton, South Boston, the West End, at a median $489,000 and $1,027 per square foot. Dorchester did not crack the top eight.

So the honest read on those 450 square foot studios is that they are small and they are the only new product aimed at a segment the neighborhood has essentially never built for. Both things are true.

The other thing new construction in Dorchester has been doing is going the wrong way on parking. Condos built since 2020 in these ZIP codes carry 1.21 parking spaces per unit, and only 12 percent have none. The pre-2020 stock carries 1.01 per unit with 30 percent at zero. At five spaces for twenty homes, 2062 Dorchester Ave. is running 0.25 spaces per unit, about a fifth of the recent new-build norm.

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The inclusionary lottery is the real prize here, and here is what it is worth

Four of the twenty units at Dorchester Ave. and seven of the forty-two in Brighton will be income-restricted under Boston’s inclusionary zoning ordinance, which since October 2024 has required 17 percent of units in market-rate projects of seven or more homes, scaling to 20 percent depending on the project. On a 20-unit building, 17 percent rounds up to four, which makes that building 20 percent income-restricted in practice.

People treat those units as a rounding error. For a buyer who qualifies, they are the single best-priced real estate in the city, and the ownership side of the program is the part almost nobody talks about. Boston’s published limits cap a standard income-restricted studio at $263,474 at 100 percent of area median income, a one-bedroom at $316,830, and a two-bedroom at $368,973. Compact units price 10 percent below that. A one-person household can earn up to $115,800 and still qualify at the 100 percent tier.

Now hold that against what the open market in Dorchester actually did.

Four sales. In a full year, across all of Dorchester, the open market produced four condos priced below where an inclusionary studio would be capped. That lottery ticket is not a consolation prize. It is access to a price the market delivers about one percent of the time.

If you think you might qualify, get registered with the city’s income-restricted housing program now rather than when these buildings top out. The lotteries run on their own calendar and the qualification paperwork takes longer than people expect.

Brighton is a different project solving a different problem

It would be easy to treat 697 Cambridge St. as the same story. It is not, and the contrast is the useful part.

Brighton already has the small-unit market Dorchester lacks. Of 204 condo closings in 02135 over the same twelve months, 84 were studios or one-bedrooms, 41 percent, at a median $416,000. And the parking pattern there is its own argument: Brighton condos with no parking closed at a median $416,000 on 615 square feet, and condos with parking at $697,250 on 958 square feet. Wildly different prices, nearly identical price per square foot, $676 against $670. The market is paying for space, not for the space to park.

The Brighton project is also the better piece of engineering. Adding three floors to a building that is 60 percent leased and keeping the nonprofit and medical tenants in place is harder than building on an empty lot, and it produces 42 homes without consuming a single new parcel. I would like to see more of that on the commercial strips of Allston, Brighton and Brookline. It is just not a homeownership story, and the people I work with who are trying to stop renting cannot buy into it.

Why 20 homes in 2028 beats 2,300 homes in the 2030s

The projects that get the headlines are the big ones. Cambridge approved 2,300 units at Alewife on September 15. A 1,945-unit filing landed on Dorchester Avenue near Andrew Square on September 10. Suffolk Downs is approved for 10,000 homes across 161 acres.

Suffolk Downs is the useful reality check, because it started first. The BPDA approved it on September 25, 2020 after a seven-hour hearing. The Amaya building opened in July 2024 with 475 apartments and is now over 90 percent leased, and a second building of about 473 units is under construction. That is roughly 475 delivered homes out of 10,000 approved, six years in. The project is real and it is working. It is also, on that pace, a 2040s proposition.

Meanwhile both of last week’s approvals went through Article 80 Small Project Review, the track for buildings of 20,000 to 50,000 square feet or 15-plus units. Permitting and building a 20-unit, four-story building on a cleared lot is a known quantity. If financing holds, someone is closing on one of those condos while Alewife is still arguing about a pedestrian bridge.

If you are trying to buy in 2027 or 2028, the master plans are not your competitive set. Sixty-two approved homes across two small buildings are worth more to you than 4,245 units of somebody’s twelve-year vision.

The honest counterargument

I would rather say this myself than have you find it later.

An approval is permission, not a building. Financing has to close, and construction pricing in Massachusetts has been ugly. Neither of these has a shovel in the ground. Sixty-two homes also will not move a market, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What they do is establish a product type at a price point, and product types are what get copied.

Parking spillover is a real complaint, not a fake one. Fifteen households at 2062 Dorchester Ave. and thirty-three at 555 Talbot Ave. with no deeded space means some of those cars go to the curb, and the residential blocks off Dot Ave. are already tight. The resident permit system has no cap, which is a city problem that the parking-minimum debate never quite addresses.

And resale risk on a 450 square foot unit is not zero. Small units are a thinner buyer pool, and the eleven-sale-a-year market I described cuts both ways: it means there is unmet demand, and it means there is not much of a comp set. If you buy one, plan to hold it. This is not a two-year flip.

What I would actually do

Concrete, in the order I would do it.

1. If your income is near those limits, register now. Four ownership units at Dorchester Ave. will go through a lottery. Get into the city’s income-restricted pipeline before the building is framed, not after the application window opens.

2. Stop discounting no-parking listings, and start negotiating them. The Dorchester record says these sell at full price in about the same time as anything else. If a seller or their agent thinks otherwise, that gap is yours. Look at what a nearby monthly rented space costs before you decide a deeded spot is worth $50,000 to you.

3. Walk the actual walk before you commit to car-free. Not the map. Go stand at 2062 Dorchester Ave. and walk to the Ashmont headhouse at 7:15 on a weekday morning, then do it again in February. Car-free is a lifestyle decision that a floor plan cannot make for you.

4. If you are an investor, the interesting parcel is the one next door. Three approvals inside a half mile, all of them needing variances against 2002 zoning, is a pattern. Only 42 condo closings happened within a half mile of Ashmont in the last year and 157 within a mile, so this is not a built-out walkshed. The lots are there.

5. Watch Docket 2026-0809. If the citywide parking minimum repeal moves out of committee, the unbundled model stops needing a variance and starts being the default, and every transit-adjacent parcel in Boston reprices a little.

The mega-projects will get their ribbon cuttings eventually, and I hope they do. But a first-time buyer trying to get out of a rental in the next two years is not waiting on Alewife. They are waiting on twenty doors near a Red Line stop, priced by a developer who figured out that the cheapest thing he could take out of the building was the garage.

If you are trying to work out whether a car-free condo in Dorchester actually pencils for you, or what your current place is worth before you move, start with a real valuation or just reach out. Happy to walk through the numbers on a specific building.

Sources

• Banker & Tradesman, “BPDA Approves Dorchester, Brighton Developments,” September 18, 2026
• Dorchester Reporter, “Neighbors review proposal for a 20-unit condo complex on Dot Ave. near Ashmont,” September 3, 2026
• High-Profile Monthly, “Boston Approves Housing Projects in Brighton and Dorchester”
• Boston Planning Department, 2062 Dorchester Avenue project file (Article 80 Small Project #4782)
• BPDA Board of Directors meeting schedule (September 17, 2026 board meeting)
• Universal Hub, “New apartment building approved across from Ashmont station” (555-563 Talbot Ave.), March 24, 2026
• Universal Hub, “12 condos approved near Ashmont T station” (77 Bailey St.), May 20, 2025
• City of Boston, Inclusionary Zoning
• City of Boston, 2025 Inclusionary Housing Income Limits, Maximum Sales Prices and Maximum Affordable Rents (PDF)
• Councilors Durkan and Santana, Draft Text Amendment Removing Residential Parking Minimums, April 2026 (Docket 2026-0809)
• City of Boston, Compact Living Pilot guidelines, October 2018 (PDF)
• Terrapin Consulting Group, “Parking Garage Cost Per Space (2026)”
• Boston Planning Department, What is Article 80
• WBUR, “BPDA Approves Suffolk Downs Redevelopment After 7-Hour Meeting,” September 25, 2020
• New England Real Estate Journal, Portico at Suffolk Downs groundbreaking
• Ashmont station, MBTA fiscal 2019 daily boardings
• MLS PIN closed sales, 3,216 Boston condominium transactions for the twelve months ending September 22, 2026, compiled by BMN Boston.

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