Client Success
Nutter represents BXP in a Waltham rezoning that opens two Route 128 office parks to housing.
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Situation with Client: BXP, the nation’s leading publicly traded developer of premier workplaces, owns two aging office campuses along Route 128 in Waltham, Massachusetts: the 135-acre Bay Colony Corporate Center on Winter Street and the 201 Jones Road. BXP sought to reposition both campuses as mixed-use neighborhoods. Waltham’s zoning allowed only limited commercial use at the sites, so redevelopment depended on new zoning. However, the city had no framework for commercial-to-residential conversion at this scale.
Action We Took: Nutter drafted an overlay zoning framework and petitioned the City Council to adopt it. The result was three Residential Commercial Industrial Limited Overlay Districts: RCI 1 at Bay Colony, further divided into three subdistricts; RCI 2 at Jones Road; and RCI 3 at the adjacent former Polaroid campus at 1265 Main Street, with a combined cap of 2,000 housing units, neighborhood-scale retail, and other commercial uses. City Council special permit review was retained for every individual building. BXP and Nutter negotiated the framework over roughly eight months directly with the Council, its outside peer-review consultant, and abutting neighborhoods.
Result: The City Council adopted all three districts unanimously in June 2026. BXP can now pursue special permits for what would be the largest housing development in Waltham in recent memory, and one of the region’s most ambitious suburban office-to-mixed-use conversions.
