Waltham Overrode a Veto to Legalize 2,000 Route 128 Homes

On the night of Monday, August 3, the Waltham City Council voted 12 to 1 to override Mayor Jeannette McCarthy’s veto and make roughly 2,000 new homes legal on three Route 128 office campuses. As I write this, the number of those homes that anyone has permission to actually build is zero.

Both of those sentences are true, and which one matters depends entirely on your time horizon. If you are buying a house in Waltham this fall, the second sentence is your reality. If you are underwriting a Waltham rental property you plan to hold for ten years, the first one is.

I have been writing about Massachusetts trading empty offices for housing for most of this year. Most of that coverage, mine included, has been about policy. Waltham is the first place where I can point at a specific parcel, a specific vote, a specific losing side, and a recorded deed. That makes it worth walking through carefully, because the details are where buyers get this wrong in both directions.

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What the council actually approved

The three new zoning districts are called RCI 1, RCI 2 and RCI 3, for Residential Commercial Industrial Limited Overlay. The council created all three unanimously in June. McCarthy signed two of them and vetoed the third on July 1, which is the part most of the coverage compressed into “the mayor opposed housing.” She did not. She opposed one district.

That district is Bay Colony, a 135 acre office complex west of Winter Street that includes 870 Winter St., Raytheon’s headquarters from 2003 until the company moved to Arlington, Virginia in 2022. It is the biggest of the three sites and the one with the least transit.

Notice that the site numbers add to roughly 2,100 and the cap is 2,000. The cap binds. It is not a rounding of the three site figures, it is a ceiling the developers accepted on top of them.

The lone vote against the override came from Council Vice President Randy LeBlanc, and his stated reason was not the housing. He said he was disappointed the council had not worked more closely with the mayor. On the other two districts the override was 13 to 0.

Waltham did not really have the option of saying no

Waltham has about 15 million square feet of office space, which makes it the largest suburban office market in Massachusetts. Nearly half of the city’s property tax base is commercial, a higher share than any municipality in the state except Boston and Cambridge.

That is a great structure when the buildings are full. It is a serious problem when they are not. On the Route 128 stretch from Needham to Woburn, close to 25% of roughly 36 million square feet was vacant or available for sublease as of June 30, 2026.

Be careful with that number, because a lot of writing about Route 128 blurs it. Roughly 25% is the availability rate, which counts empty space plus space a tenant is still paying for and trying to unload. Straight direct vacancy on the 128 belt is lower, around 18% in the second quarter. Both are bad. They are not the same statistic, and anyone quoting one as the other is not reading the reports.

Councilor Cathyann Harris put the local version of it plainly: “We have significant office vacancies, acres of parking lots built for employees who are no longer coming into these buildings every day.”

It is worth saying that Waltham office is not uniformly dead. Boston Dynamics signed a 322,000 square foot lease there, the largest new suburban deal in the region since 2022. What is happening is a split. Good buildings still lease. Nineteen eighties suburban office with a surface parking field does not, and that is most of what these three campuses are.

The mayor’s objection was narrower and better than “no”

I want to be fair to McCarthy here, because the easy version of this story makes her the obstacle and that is lazy.

Her veto rested on three things. Bay Colony sits far from any station, so she argued it should not get the same zoning benefits as the two more transit accessible districts. She objected to reduced parking requirements at a site where everyone will drive, calling it a dangerous precedent for the city. And she pointed at the western edge of Bay Colony, where the property line runs up against a single family neighborhood on the Lincoln border.

The first two are real. A 1,200 unit district with cut parking ratios and no rail stop is a car district, and Winter Street already backs up. The third is the one buyers in Lincoln and west Waltham should take seriously, because it does not get solved by a zoning vote. It gets solved, or not, one special permit at a time.

Where I part company with her is the counterfactual. Vetoing the district did not preserve the neighborhood’s edge. It preserved a mostly empty office park next to the neighborhood’s edge, with a tax base that keeps shrinking. That is not a neutral outcome, it is just a slower one.

Zoning is a permission slip, not a construction schedule

This is the part I most want buyers to hear, because it is where people talk themselves into bad decisions.

The vote changed what is legal. Every individual building at Bay Colony still needs a special permit from this same City Council, plus formal site plans. None have been issued. The peer review the city commissioned estimated the three districts could theoretically hold up to 5,990 units at full buildout, which is why the 2,000 cap exists at all.

For a sense of the real clock, look at what BXP is doing a few miles up 128 in Lexington, on a project that is already fully approved and financed.

So when someone tells you Waltham is about to be flooded with 2,000 apartments, the honest answer is that the first residents of the first building are realistically late this decade, and the last ones are into the 2030s. A Waltham listing near Winter Street today is not about to be swallowed by construction. It is also not going to sit still for fifteen years.

What Waltham actually costs right now

Here is where I can add something the national coverage cannot. I pulled every closed sale in these towns directly from MLS PIN, January 1 through August 28, 2026.

Waltham is the cheapest town on this stretch of 128, and it is not close. A buyer priced out of Newton at $1,594,000 or Weston at $2,532,500 lands in Waltham at $829,000. That gap is the entire reason this rezoning is interesting to investors, and it is also the thing most likely to compress over the next decade.

Waltham also runs a real rental market already. There were 321 closed leases in the city over the same window, second only to Newton’s 410 among these towns, on a much smaller housing stock. Two thousand apartments are not landing on a town with no renters.

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The rent number that should change how you underwrite this

Now the number I think is genuinely underappreciated. I split every closed Waltham lease by the construction year of the building.

This is why “2,000 new units will lower Waltham rents” is too simple. These will be new, amenitized, elevator buildings with structured parking. They will price against Lexington at $5,000 and Newton at $3,800, not against Waltham’s $2,600 median. In the near term they add supply at the top of the market, not the bottom.

For an investor holding older Waltham rental property, that cuts two ways, and I would not pretend otherwise. The new product will compete for the same renters. It will also mark the ceiling roughly $2,000 a month above where your pre 2000 units sit, which is the clearest argument I have seen for a renovation thesis in that city. The spread is the opportunity. The competition is the risk. Which one you get depends on whether you upgrade before the first building opens or after.

One honest caveat on this chart. The two newer tiers are 15 closed leases each. That is a real signal and a thin sample, and I would not build a pro forma on it without pulling the individual comps.

What it does to the towns around it

Bay Colony’s western edge touches Lincoln, which closed 36 homes all year at a $1,323,375 median. That is a very small, very expensive market with essentially no rental stock. Nothing about this rezoning changes Lincoln’s inventory. What it changes is what sits across the property line, and over a decade that is a legitimate question for a Lincoln buyer to ask before writing an offer on the Waltham border.

Weston is more directly exposed, and in a way most coverage missed. The proposed commuter rail station BXP is negotiating with the MBTA at the Jones Road site would also serve a neighboring Weston development built under the MBTA Communities law. If that station happens, two towns get a transit asset that neither could have built alone. The MBTA has released very little detail so far, and I would treat the station as a real possibility rather than a plan.

The infrastructure package is more concrete: roughly $30 million split between the state and the developers, funding a new connector between two heavily trafficked state roads, an upgraded road through an adjacent neighborhood, a bus hub, and a new fire station.

Lexington already ran this play, then partly undid it

Before anyone treats a zoning win as permanent, look at Lexington.

Under the MBTA Communities law, Lexington went from approving two multifamily units in a decade to roughly 1,600 apartments and condos built, approved, or in process. Then residents got a look at it. In 2025 Town Meeting voted 164 to 9 to cut the multifamily district from 227 acres down to 90 and tighten heights and densities. Planning Board member Tina McBride’s line was “There is such a thing as too much growth.”

The affordability lesson is in there too. The cheapest condo at 89 Bedford Street starts at $1.2 million. Lexington rezoned aggressively, got real production, and the production came in at the top of the market. That is the same dynamic my Waltham rent data is pointing at.

Waltham’s override is more durable than a Town Meeting vote, because it took a supermajority against a sitting mayor and the developer has already committed capital. But “durable” is not “permanent.” Zoning that produces buildings people dislike gets revisited. Watch the first special permit hearing, not the ribbon cutting.

The statewide law everyone keeps citing is not a law yet

Back in July I wrote about the state opening office to residential conversion to all 351 cities and towns. That framework sits in H.5562, the $561 million economic development bill the House passed on July 8, 2026 by 148 to 2. Section 42 would add a new Section 3C to Chapter 40A letting any municipality allow commercial conversion as of right, with $50 million to help towns adopt it.

It still has not passed the Senate. No conference committee, no signature. And even once it does pass, it is opt in, town by town.

That is the whole point of the Waltham story. The state tool that would have made this easier does not exist yet, and Waltham did it anyway, the hard way, with its own overlay districts, a veto, and an override. Waltham also already complied with the MBTA Communities law in late December 2024, zoning for up to 4,002 multifamily units on top of these 2,000. State Senator Michael Barrett’s read was “Waltham is showing us how it’s done.”

Put those together and Waltham has legalized something on the order of 6,000 homes in a city that closed 238 sales in eight months. That is decades of legal capacity. It is also a reminder that legal capacity and delivered units are different things, which is the same gap the state bill will run into.

What I would actually do

For buyers looking at Waltham right now, this is a reason to buy, not a reason to wait. You are buying the cheapest entry on Route 128 in a city that just proved it will approve housing over a mayoral veto, with $15 million of state road money and a possible rail stop attached. The construction disruption is years away and will be concentrated on three former office campuses, not spread through the residential neighborhoods.

For buyers in Lincoln or Weston near the Bay Colony line, ask the specific question. Pull the parcel, find out which subdistrict it abuts, and read the buffer and height limits in RCI 1. “Near a rezoning” is not a risk. A particular property line is.

For investors, the vintage rent spread is the actionable number, not the unit count. Waltham’s older rental stock trades at a large discount to what new product achieves there, and the town has now guaranteed that new product is coming. Underwrite the renovation, not the appreciation.

And for owners thinking about selling in the next two or three years, none of this shows up in your comps yet. It will not for a while.

If you want to know what your Waltham or MetroWest property is worth against these numbers, you can start with a home value estimate, or just reach out and I will pull the actual closed comps for your street. I would rather give you the real numbers than a range off a national website.

Sources

1. Boston Globe, “Waltham’s mayor vetoed 1,200 units of new housing. The City Council said to do it anyway.” August 4, 2026.
2. Boston Globe Editorial Board, “The veto override Waltham needed.” August 11, 2026.
3. Banker & Tradesman, “Councilors Buck Waltham Mayor to OK BXP’s Office Park Overhauls.”
4. Banker & Tradesman, “BXP Buys Waltham Properties for $30M After Rezoning.”
5. Banker & Tradesman, “Mayor Vetoes BXP Rezoning, Citing ‘No TOD Benefit’.”
6. Waltham Times, “City Council overrides mayor’s veto of Bay Colony mixed-use zoning.” August 4, 2026.
7. Massachusetts Legislature, Bill H.5562, An Act relative to economic development in the commonwealth.
8. Boston Globe via Boston.com, “After ambitious state law, Lexington welcomed a wave of new housing. Now people there are having second thoughts.” March 13, 2026.
9. Boston Real Estate Times, “BXP Breaks Ground on 312-Unit Residential Project at 17 Hartwell Avenue in Lexington, MA.”
10. BXP, 17 Hartwell Avenue property page.
11. Mass.gov, Multi-Family Zoning Requirement for MBTA Communities (Section 3A).
12. Bisnow, “Suburban Slowdown Drives Boston-Area Office Vacancy Above 20%.”
13. MLS PIN closed sale and closed lease records for Waltham, Lincoln, Weston, Lexington, Newton, Needham and Burlington, January 1 to August 28, 2026, queried directly by BMN Boston.

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