Image courtesy of Cube3 Architects
Texas homebuilder Gables Residential is taking advantage of a Natick MBTA Communities zoning district to build a large, new apartment complex.
The company filed plans for a 219-unit building at 273 West Central St., next to the West Natick commuter rail station and currently home to a 60,000-square-foot retail plaza.
The project is scheduled for site plan review by the town Planning Board on March 25. As it meets the requirements of the local MBTA Communities zoning, the development will not need zoning relief, but its stormwater management plan will need approval from the town’s Aquifer Protection District.
Plans for the 5-story complex, to be dubbed Natick Crossing, filed with the town show a building that wraps around an amenity courtyard with a pool, and sits atop a partially underground, 184-spot parking podium. Other amenities called out in Gables Residential’s application include a fitness center and club room.
Plans show 74 surface parking spots filling out the lot, including five for an unspecified, 4,000-square-foot “non-residential” ground-floor commercial use, plus a 14,000-square-foot public plaza and a public mixed-use path running between the building and MBTA station’s parking lot next door, and connecting the station to West Central Street, one of Natick’s major arteries.
Natick’s main MBTA Communities zoning district, passed last fall and called the “West Central Corridor,” is written to encourage the devleopment of two new, mixed-use hubs around the commuter rail station and the intersection of West Central and Speen streets, with density and required ground-floor commercial uses falling away as distance from the station increases.
Low-rise multifamily developments currently dominate the area south of West Central Street, while the area between West Central and the MBTA railroad tracks is filled with largely single-story industrial, retail and small office buildings. At 3.4 acres, Gables Residential’s parcel is the largest to have been upzoned after a 4.65-acre Roche Brothers supermarket lot. Most other upzoned parcels are just over or slight less than 2 acres.
Just over the town line, Framingham’s own commuter rail station has drawn over 1,400 new multifamily units in the wake of a 2015 upzoning focused on the city’s downtown. The most recent, a 181-unit project from two former executives at national multifamily developer AvalonBay Communities, landed a $47.3 million construction loan from First Citizens Bank & Trust in November 2025.
However, Framingham did not upzone new areas outside of its downtown mixed-use district in aiming to comply with the MBTA Communities Act.
