More labs, housing pitched near Boston Landing

Jun 22, 2023

Real estate development firms IQHQ and Hines are again expanding their local presence with proposals to develop labs and apartments near the Boston Landing commuter rail stop, adding more development to a stretch of Allston-Brighton where a number of large-scale projects are either underway or have recently won city approval.

Hines, a Houston-based real estate giant known locally for the tower now under construction atop South Station, has proposed a 316-unit apartment building at 22-24 Pratt St. in partnership with Framingham-based Calare Properties. A Hines-managed entity bought a house at 24 Pratt St. for $1 million in August.

The property sits immediately alongside a cut-through road to a broad single-story industrial building at 22 Pratt St. That building, currently home to Superior Automotive Warehouse, fronts commuter rail tracks near the long-awaited I-90 Allston Multimodal Project that's proposed to eventually straighten the highway alongside the railroad tracks.

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The Pratt Street site abuts Allston Green, a three-building, 349-unit compact living residential development near where Cambridge Street crosses the Turnpike that was approved by the Boston Planning and Development Agency board in December 2020. It's also just down the Pike from two additional projects the BPDA board approved last month: a 12-story lab and seven-story residential building on Braintree and Everett streets, and a 150-unit condo at 52 Everett St. The Everett Street condo project is the fifth building to come out of the redevelopment of a Stop & Shop grocery store next to the Boston Landing mixed-use campus and Commuter Rail stop.

Hines is proposing to demolish the existing properties at 22-24 Pratt St. and build 316 apartments in their place, ranging in size from studios to three-bedroom units, with open space, parking, and ground-floor "activated uses."

"The Project has frontage on and access to Pratt Street," wrote Sean Sacks, head of Hines's Boston office, in an April 3 letter of intent to the BPDA. "The Project presents an opportunity to transform an underutilized site into much needed transit-oriented housing."

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Meanwhile, California-based life-science developer IQHQ is proposing to demolish the existing one-story retail property at 103 North Beacon St. immediately outside the Boston Landing campus and build a 150,000-square-foot lab with retail space and two levels of underground parking. It's also just down North Beacon Street from the building that houses music rehearsal studio the Sound Museum, where IQHQ is planning a three-building lab campus totaling more than 412,000 square feet.

The developer envisions the 103 North Beacon St. site "as a conduit for activity," with extra-wide sidewalks along both North Beacon and Arthur streets to "facilitate Arthur Street becoming the connector between Boston Landing and the North Beacon Street Corridor," attorney Darren M. Baird wrote in an April 4 letter of intent to the BPDA.

IQHQ is developing several more projects in and around Greater Boston, including the $1 billion Fenway Center air-rights tower, another Fenway lab at 109 Brookline Ave., and multi-building lab campuses in Cambridge's Alewife neighborhood and Andover, with plans underway to convert the longstanding Hotel Buckminster in Kenmore Square into lab space.

Catherine Carlock can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @bycathcarlock.