Boston officials are pressing the new owner of Faneuil Hall Marketplace for additional oversight on their leasing and capital improvements strategies. Photo by Steve Adams | Banker & Tradesman Staff

Construction loan interest rates halting development. Home prices rising and for-sale inventory nowhere to be found. Towns throwing the doors open or slamming them shut to MBTA Communities zoning. Boston’s property tax fight. Insurance costs threatening to bankrupt affordable housing operators.

You know the biggest stories of the year in Boston real estate. But what about the ones you missed that could still have a big impact in 2025?

Here are the five most important sleeper stories we covered in 2024.

5) New Faces in Charge at Faneuil Hall

Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp. may have sold its Faneuil Hall Marketplace leasehold in January after a successful pressure campaign from Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and then-Chief of Planning Arthur Jemison. But how will the new owner, J. Safra Real Estate, cope with the estimated $40 million in deferred maintenance? And what about dreams held by the mayor and some advocates for the nation’s first “festival marketplace” to eventually become a showcase for the best of Boston’s neighborhoods, not just another mall filled with familiar suburban chains?

We obtained emails between J. Safra and city officials via a public records request this fall that showed city officials had offered a lease extension to J. Safra through 2123 if the company would submit a tenanting strategy to the city every five years. Industry experts say the tourist destination in the shadow of City Hall is losing out to freshly minted shopping destinations, like the Seaport District, and helping drag downtown Boston with retail and food offerings most locals consider, well, “meh.”

But will talks between the city and J. Safra produce a high-profile, election-year win for the same mayor who sees empty downtown storefronts as a key economic development opportunity – and an important tool to reviving downtown, as a whole?

4) Boston Rethinks Zoning, Development Reviews

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Rezoning the city to allow for more growth and more predictable development reviews were key, if sometimes overlooked parts of Wu’s 2021 mayoral campaign platform. And it looks like she’ll be able to deliver on key parts of them in time for the 2025 mayoral race.

This spring, city planning officials began testing the waters on reforms to the Article 80 development review process that would standardize community benefits asks – no more convoluted, one-off negotiations where any political actor could upset the apple cart if they wanted to – and put an end to community review panels made of inexperienced residents who often don’t represent neighborhood opinion or who, at worst, might not understand how to read a floor plan.

Another reform mooted in November: An end to confusing design reviews that can sometimes trap projects for over a year.

And the city formally adopted a “menu” of options in February that planners and neighborhoods can use as the city goes through its “Squares+Streets” commercial district rezoning effort this year and next year, which it’s hoped will open the door to even broader zoning changes around the city.

But so many of these changes are still in draft form, with even the draft recommendations for the earliest Squares+Streets district – Roslindale Square – putting off specific zoning recommendations for later. Many won’t get set in stone until 2025.

That makes next year a big test of the Wu administration’s determination to set these changes in stone despite the mayor’s stated conviction that they’re essential to making the city more affordable by lowering development costs and building more housing.

But that could be a real challenge in an election year when some of the proposed changes have generated unhappy rumblings from the city’s powerful, if not always representative neighborhood groups who will lose some of their power to extract things from developers or keep development out of their turf, altogether.

3) Boston’s ISD Moves into 21st Century

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Kairos Shen, newly appointed city chief of planning, answer questions from reporters after a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce government affairs forum at the Boston Renaissance Hotel Sept. 25, 2024. Photo by Sam Drysdale | State House News Service

For developers and builders who’ve gotten through the permitting process and now have shovels in the ground, dealing with Boston’s Inspectional Services Department can sometimes be a notorious headache. In her speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce this fall, Wu even acknowledged that it can be like “nailing jelly to a wall” for some.

To change that, the mayor used that same speech to announce that she planned to haul ISD into the 21st century, investing millions to “fully digitize” its inspection process by the middle of 2025.

In addition, ISD is getting reorganized to provide fast-track permitting teams for smaller and simpler developments and another dedicated to big, complex projects so that “if you’re trying to build a skyscraper, you could get stuck behind someone who’s building a triple-decker,” Wu said.

2) Cambridge’s Upzoning

A small apartment building in Cambridge. Support for expanding multifamily housing by-right was widespread among candidates for Cambridge office in a 2023 questionnaire. iStock photo

Pro-housing city councilors have been making steady advances in Cambridge over the last few years, starting with 2020 citywide zoning amendments that gave density bonuses to all-affordable buildings, plus a follow-up change in 2023 that allows 10- to 15-story affordable buildings in response to a 2021 fight that halted a 9-story building near Porter Square.

Housing advocates and a Harvard University researcher say the rezonings got 700 new affordable apartments under construction in just a few years. Our reporting this year showed that despite this success, it hasn’t opened the floodgates to housing production fully: Affordable developers still take pains to placate neighbors due to some process factors and a need to access city affordable housing dollars, and partly because many of the affordable developers operating in the city are small and can’t handle more projects right now.

This year saw the Cambridge City Council’s pro-housing coalition turn its focus towards boosting market-rate production, too. Many developers blame the city’s very high, required affordable housing set-asides and tough permitting environment for dramatically restricting how much housing gets built in one of the most expensive rental markets in the state.

A political and planning process kicked off this summer seems to be circling a likely compromise: Allowing 4-story multifamily buildings citywide (down from 6 stories in the earliest proposal) and adding a 5,000-square-foot minimum lot size requirement, but giving a two-floor bonus to buildings with affordable units. The council will vote on the concept in February, which could open the door to modest increases in housing production.

1) Single-Stair Buildings

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“Building code changes.” Those three words will probably make most people’s eyes glaze over.

But they can be powerful: A series of energy-efficiency and other changes included in this year’s updates could add up to $15,000 per unit to multifamily construction costs, according to a prominent developer.

Researchers at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, Boston Indicators and Boston-based design firm Utile hope to tap into some of that power with a push they kicked off in October, to legalize new single-staircase multifamily buildings.

In a short, pithy report, the researchers argued that in smaller lots, 70-year-old requirements that apartment and condominium buildings have two separate stairs offer virtually no safety benefits, particularly given advances in fire protection like sprinklers. The U.S. has one of the highest rates of fire deaths in the developed world only thanks to the number of people who die in single-family house fires, they noted.

And for its questionable benefits, the two-stair requirement makes it impossible to build infill housing on a huge number of lots near the Boston area’s transit lines.

If Massachusetts brought itself in line with cities like Seattle and New York City to allow so-called “point-access” buildings up to 6 stories with a maximum of four units per floor, the researchers said they identified enough underutilized lots near the MBTA’s four subway lines to unlock around 130,000 new homes. That’s more than half the state theoretically needs to meet its housing needs.

The idea has since seized the imaginations of some notable housing advocates and designers, so watch for a fight over this idea during the next round of updates to the Massachusetts building code.