A two-story lab building at 320 Charles St. in East Cambridge is proposed to be redeveloped into four stories, the developer said Tuesday at the project’s third neighborhood meeting. In a process called “contract zoning,” East End House, a struggling community center, stands to gain $20 million in community benefits if Cambridge approves the project.
BioMed Realty, one of America’s largest life science real estate developers and owned by asset manager Blackstone, wants to build a bigger lab building than what zoning allows on the lot. According to East Cambridge Housing Overlay zoning, the building can be 35 to 45 feet, with a gradient meant to ease the transition between residential East Cambridge and high-rise-filled Kendall Square. BioMed Realty’s plan adds 15 to 20 feet, resulting in a 50- to 65-foot building.
The development comes at a time when the lab space market is still recovering from an economic downturn after a life sciences boom from the pandemic, which would make the prospect appealing to a city that depends on construction and its commercial base to keep its budgets robust and tax rate down.
Lab developments in Davis Square, four subway stops away, have been axed due to stalled demand. But the market in and near Kendall Square remains strong, BioMed said.
The additional height comes at a cost to the developer. In exchange for relaxed zoning restrictions, BioMed Realty will need to give more than $20 million to the city in the form of community benefits, said Sal Zinno, the BioMed Realty vice president overseeing the project. In response to neighborhood input, BioMed is advocating for those $20 million to be given to the East End House, a community center in East Cambridge serving under-resourced children, families and individuals.
Because neighbors have the power to appeal zoning decisions, and neighborhood opinion can factor into city decisions, developers sometimes solicit approval before embarking on the long permitting process.
The current BioMed proposal was created with feedback from previous neighborhood meetings, Zinno said. BioMed also met with a subcommittee of the East Cambridge Planning Team, the recognized neighborhood organization, to workshop the design.
The project would give East End House, which is struggling with facility issues in a century-old building, some “breathing room” to find a new permanent home, said Michael Delia, its president and chief executive.
“We have to be creative in terms of our partnerships,” Delia said. “Private sector support has been critical for many organizations, particularly for ours.”
BioMed has partnered with East End House, including serving on the nonprofit’s board, for almost 20 years, Delia said.
Meanwhile, some neighbors have signed a petition opposing any height increase. Due to zoning reform the city passed in February, a developer would be able to build a 74-foot residential building – taller than what BioMed proposes – in the same lot without a permit. Still, the petition, started March 1 by East Cambridge resident and former City Council candidate Ilan Levy, calls the proposed building a “towering mass” that will affect its neighbors “drastically.”
Levy previously criticized the practice of contract zoning in a Cambridge Day opinion piece during his 2019 city council run.
Developer incentives
The developer “can dangle benefits for certain groups,” Levy said in an interview, “and therefore incentivize people to support their project and pit them against the rest of the neighborhood.”
Members of the East Cambridge Planning Team said they would rather neighbors come to the table and work with the developer instead of signing a “just say no” petition. In part, neighbors would have no say over the design if the developer built the building to be zoning-compliant.
A zoning-compliant building “would create an uninspired edifice without any opportunity to gain valuable community benefits from the increased density proposed at this point,” said Abigail Lewis-Bowen, formerly the secretary of the East Cambridge Planning Team.
Defending contract zoning
Contract zoning in the area is not uncommon. Last summer, Moderna opened its new headquarters in nearby Kendall Square. The building’s existence hinges on an agreement made in 2020 in which the developer agreed to help fund and develop the Grand Junction Multi-use Path in exchange for permission to build a larger building than zoning permitted at the time.
“If contract zoning is done with consideration of city planning, it can be a win-win,” said Jeff Roberts, the city’s director of planning and development.
The building is currently leased to Broad Clinical Labs, which announced its plans to move in August 2024, and was once home to the first Human Genome Project. The future building has no planned tenants.
BioMed told the city’s zoning department last week that it will file a petition soon, Roberts said. The project will likely not break ground for at least another 18 months due to the rezoning and permitting process, after which construction will take around 26 months, Zinno estimated.
This post was updated March 11, 2025, to correct references to the height of the proposed building. It was updated March 14, 2025, to add distinctions about the East Cambridge Planning Team involvement with the project without necessarily approving of the current form.
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Charles Street is within what has been described in our zoning as ECHO, East Cambridge Housing Overlay. This was done with Charles Street and parts of Gore to create a buffer zone for the older residential neighborhood being threatened and overwhelmed by labs. ECHO provided bonus for housing and step down in height to encourage specifically housing over commercial. Now comes Biomed and simply ignores this provision. Instead, during a real turndown in needed lab space they want to encroach into the old neighborhood. No need at all. None. What Cambridge needs is housing. 20 million will not buy East End land and a new building. No way will that ever happen. From the very inception there was working group formed under the guise of ECPT. Truth is many if not most on this working group were not ECPT members and some not even within the geographic reach of ECPT. This was a pitiful play by some well meaning and some not so well meaning people to control the process.
It is simply not true that the East Cambridge Planning Team has approved this plan. This misstatement needs correction.
Additionally, I believe that the stated heights include mechanicals. While I approve of doing that, the fact is that our zoning ordinance specifically excludes rooftop mechanicals from height calculations. Thus this description without the acknowledgment of how much of the height is rooftop mechanicals is misleading to anyone who has any familiarity with how our zoning works. If Cambridge Day wants to adopt a policy of disclosing true heights of proposed buildings, which I would laud and which the City ought to follow as well, then it’s also important to be clear what part of that height is rooftop mechanicals and what is the part of the building that will be used.
As chair of the ECPT Committee charged to evaluate the BioMed Realty project at 320 Charles Street I would be remiss if I did not share with your readers the serious efforts of a devoted group of volunteers from, the East Cambridge Planning Team, Linwood Park neighbors and the East Cambridge Open Space Trust, to understand how to best respond to BIoMed’s proposal. The committee was formed at the request of BioMed and it’s membership included residents and abutters who had worked on the zoning for this area for many years. It had assistance of technical advisors who provided design recommendations which resulted in BMR’s changes to their project that complied with neighborhood concerns about building height, size, shadows on Ahern Field and adjacent homes as well as traffic and the changes at the K-Low school. They considered the impact of the new residential zoning which permits much higher buildings without design controls the residents prefer. We did not specify beneficiaries .