The most consequential vote in Waltham’s recent planning history is scheduled for Monday, August 3rd, and the stakes could not be more concrete: fifteen city councilors will decide whether to override Mayor Jeannette McCarthy’s veto of a rezoning that would allow up to 1,200 new homes on a stretch of mostly vacant office buildings along Route 128 — or let the veto stand and send the city’s largest housing opportunity in a generation back to square one.
The vote arrives as Waltham faces the fiscal arithmetic of a commercial real estate market in structural decline. Many office buildings in the city now sit vacant, their owners seeking tax abatements from city hall. Waltham raised its residential tax rate by 5 percent this year to make up the difference. BXP — formerly Boston Properties, and Waltham’s single largest taxpayer — has proposed turning three aging commercial districts along Route 128 into more than 2,100 apartments and condominiums: 1,200 units at the Bay Colony campus on Winter Street, 300 to 400 at a Jones Road site, and 600 on the former Polaroid headquarters property at 1265 Main Street.
The City Council unanimously approved all three rezonings in June. Then, on July 1st, McCarthy vetoed the largest — the Bay Colony parcel, in northeast Waltham — in a letter that cited concerns about parking standards, building height, and the project’s proximity to the Lincoln Woods residential neighborhood. “Why, with all the land that is available on the site, was it placed so close to the existing neighborhood?” she wrote, as reported by the Boston Globe. She approved the two smaller districts. The August 3rd meeting is the council’s only opportunity to override the veto.
Waltham’s Tax Math: What Empty Offices Cost a City
The Route 128 corridor in Waltham is the most specific incarnation of a national phenomenon that has been grinding through municipal budgets since 2020: nearly half of Waltham’s property tax base comes from commercial real estate — a higher share than any Massachusetts municipality except Cambridge and Boston. When tenants leave and buildings go dark, that tax base erodes faster than cities can replace it…