It's renders like this that make you wonder when DCAMM is going to look at that courthouse complex and see a chance to get a new combined Somerville-Cambridge courthouse tower on the parking lot and sell/lease the current courthouse lot for something else, like affordable housing or more labs.
Well, they were: https://voice.somervillema.gov/assemblynp/
This is a big building and in Somerville, so yes it will take a while. However, "new life science" is not dead. Boston continues to outperform every other market. VC funding returned last year, as did new clinical trial starts, and M&A is picking up - 2023 was a bad year and 2024 was flat, 2025 is picking back up, and we are tracking towards steady pre-pandemic growth rates.
Maybe the industry is doing fine, but life science real estate is not. Availabilities are up to almost 27% with more than 15 million SF available. It's going to take a looong time to absorb all of that.
www.bostonglobe.com
I was building out lab space in the Boston area for my business a couple of years ago and places like Kendall were $100 sq ft and there was no vacancy. It was getting to the point where even Rt 128 and 495 were wildly expensive. Companies were able to fill space for half that price and have the red carpet rolled out in other parts of the country.
