When you ask him about making a collection of office parks in Newton and Needham the next center for high tech innovation in Massachusetts, Greg Reibman is a believer.
“We believe the inner suburbs of Newton and Needham are a good alternative to Boston or Cambridge for companies that can’t afford [downtown rents] or that want to avoid the gridlock of Kendall Square or the Innovation District,” he says.
As the president of the Newton Needham Chamber of Commerce, it’s part of Reibman’s job to promote his green suburbs as serious players in the state’s thriving high-tech scene.
But it’s not necessarily a pipe dream. As anyone in the Greater Boston commercial real estate world will tell you, there’s little office space available to lease in Cambridge’s biotech epicenter, Kendall Square. Unless you’re a top-performing, deep-pocketed firm, the little space you can find is often out of reach financially. And in Boston’s Innovation District, rents have done nothing but climb as firms like State Street and PricewaterhouseCoopers build sleek new office buildings in the area.
With that in mind, the two Boston suburbs, better known for solid school systems than groundbreaking scientific research, have teamed up to turn their portion of Route 128 into the Bay State’s next high tech corridor.
The partnership started by the Newton Needham Chamber of Commerce is known as the N2 Innovation Initiative. Participants are determined to convince potential companies and residents that the area has not just great schools, but increasing retail and restaurant amenities, as well as far less traffic to contend with than the urban alternatives.
Already, the two municipalities are host to approximately 150 businesses engaged in high tech activities, as well as life sciences and other startup and industries that the state classifies as “innovation economy sector businesses,” according to Reibman.
New Zoning
The most high-profile of those tech-centered tenants, at least in recent memory, is TripAdvisor, the popular travel website. The company will relocate to Needham from Newton, moving into a roughly 280,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility being built in the newly named Center 128, the former New England Business Center near Route 128. The firm will leave Newton in 2015.
“Folks that live out in the suburbs aren’t all that interested, by and large, in commuting and fighting that downtown traffic every single day,” says TripAdvisor President and CEO Stephen Kaufer in a video on the Newton Needham chamber’s website stressing the N2 initiative. “The employees that happen to live downtown or in Cambridge can easily take the shuttle bus out to where we are. We looked around and this was clearly the best option for us.”
That “best option” was a result of new zoning the town enacted about years ago. The zoning allowed for denser real estate development, as well as allowing for retail and residential projects near the office parks, said Dan Matthews, chairman of Needham’s Board of Selectmen.
The new zoning is essential to allowing real estate developers to construct new buildings much closer to one another in the town’s office parks, where innovative minds can bump into each other and share ideas, said Justin Krebs, principal for Normandy Real Estate Partners. The New Jersey-based firm owns the TripAdvisor site and is building the firm’s new headquarters.
Center 128 is a master-planned park with development potential for up to 830,000 square feet of commercial space. Krebs said he is in talks with multiple potential tenants, one that, if a deal is made, could move into new digs six to 12 months after TripAdvisor. He would not disclose the tenant because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
“As we build out the park we’re looking to include additional retail and restaurant amenities so people don’t have to leave the campus,” Krebs offered. “We’ll also have a rotating cycle of food trucks. We’ve always talked about creating a kind of Kendall Square West location. Our buildings are much closer together than you typically see in suburban parks.”
Speaking of additional construction at Center 128, TripAdvisor is likely in the planning stages of expanding its brand new headquarters by about 150,000 square feet. In a public filing the firm said it plans the expansion sometime in 2016 or 2017. TripAdvisor did not respond to a request for comment on the future expansion.
In Newton, Normandy just received approval to build a 580,000-square-foot transit-oriented development near the MBTA Green Line’s Riverside station. That project will include 225,000 square feet of office, 290 apartments and 20,000 square feet of retail.
New construction can be beneficial to a municipality’s bottom line. Plus, there are plans for new lane construction on I-95, as well as better access to office parks through a new Kendrick Street highway exit and enhancements to the Needham Street and Highland Avenue corridor.
But a major looming challenge is public transportation. While the commuter rail travels through the area, Reibman said he is hopeful that someday the MBTA Green Line could extend into Needham, or even the Silver Line.
“There’s a rail trail that just broke ground for a bike path … that runs parallel to Needham Street. That could one day hold a Silver Line or extended Green Line to Needham,” said Reibman. “It’s in the discussion phase. But now we have preserved the trail as a public right of way,” so there’s no danger of losing that railroad track space that in the future could potentially be a way to get rapid public transit to Needham.
“We’ll have shuttles to commuter lines and T stations from Center 128, but the Commonwealth and [state Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Greg Bialecki] understand we need to continue to expand public transportation infrastructure for more train and bus links,” Normandy’s Krebs added.
Email: jcronin@thewarrengroup.com
