Lab Vacancy Spikes In Cambridge, Making Room For Smaller Firms

Cambridge’s life sciences cluster has historically had little to no lab vacancy, as big players have gobbled up space as soon as it hits the market.

But this year, companies have begun to give back space as the economy cools down, and lab availability in Cambridge has risen dramatically. From Q2 to Q3, Cambridge’s lab vacancy rate rose from 1.4% to 5.2%, the highest level in years, according to Colliers' latest market reports.

While rising vacancy may be bad for landlords, it is also creating new opportunities for midsized companies that previously had a hard time expanding in the hottest life sciences cluster in the country, experts said last week at Bisnow’s Cambridge State of the Market event, hosted at The Royal Sonesta Boston.

“It’s providing our companies with more optionality, and for so long, they had none,” MassBio President Kendalle Burlin O’Connell said at the event. “If they were lucky enough to get space, it was take it or leave it, and [otherwise], you'll have nothing."When the market…

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This Week's Boston Deal Sheet

Alcresta Therapeutics Inc. plans to consolidate its workforce from two separate locations into a new Waltham corporate headquarters.

The life sciences company announced Monday it plans to move its operations to the Stony Brook Office Park in Waltham. The move will combine its operations from its corporate headquarters in Newton and its research and development lab in Natick."Our new facility brings our Corporate and Research functions under one roof in…

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Cities Release The Handbrake On Parking Mandates To Accelerate Housing Growth

A nationwide housing and affordability crisis is as good a time as any to rethink well-settled ordinances, and cities across the country are looking into some of their most firmly entrenched policies: the American tradition of parking spots included with housing.

Advocates say elimination and reduction of minimum parking requirements remove a potential hurdle to building housing, at least in transit-rich areas. Those advocates have notched a string of recent wins. 

Since October, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Culver City, California; Lexington, Kentucky; and Anchorage, Alaska, have been just some of the cities to eliminate parking minimums. They join Minneapolis, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, which eliminated minimums years ago and offer a glimpse into how the parking change can affect housing development.

But there are decades of policies mandating the ratio of parking spaces per newly developed housing unit still to be addressed in much of the U.S., and many residents have deeply ingrained expectations for off-street parking.

“We've been doing the same type of auto-centric policy for the last 70 to 80 years,” Urban Land Institute Senior Director Paul Angelone told Bisnow. “Following World War II, the way that we've done a lot of our urban development patterns, we've been doing since…

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