Ground Broken For Suburban Boston Apartments
Work has started on the Alta Legacy Farms, a 240-unit apartment development in Middlesex County, Mass., west of Boston.
By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor
Hopkington, Mass.—Work has started on the Alta Legacy Farms, a 240-unit apartment development in Middlesex County, Mass., west of Boston. According to the developer, Wood Partners, the development will be completed by the end of 2013, with pre-leasing slated for next June.
The property is part of the master-planned Legacy Farms, a 730-acre suburban project consisting of 700 single-family and attached houses in addition to the Alta Legacy Farms community, which will be the only permitted apartment site in the town of Hopkinton. Six acres of the apartment development will be restricted land set aside as permanent conservation land, while the master-planned Legacy Farms will include six miles of walking trails, playing fields and village center.
Alta Legacy Farms will consist of 156 one-bedroom units ranging from 772 square feet to 1,000 square feet, and 84 two-bedroom units of about 1,200 square feet. Thirty-nine one-bedroom and 21 two-bedroom units are classified as affordable housing, and will be offered to residents earning 80 percent or less of area median income.
Hopkinton is one of the places near Massachusetts’ 128 Tech Corridor, and has seen considerable population growth recently. Between 2000 and 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population grew by nearly 12 percent over the decade, to nearly 15,000.  Multifamily housing in the town property hasn’t kept pace, since there was none before Alta Legacy Farms.
The corporate headquarters of EMC Corp., a major maker of software and systems for information management and storage with revenue of about $20 billion annually, is located in the town. Other employers of significance within a 10-mile radius—largely but not exclusively tech— include A123 Systems, Barry Controls, Caliper Life Sciences, E.L. Harvey & Sons, Liberty Mutual, Bose, Genzyme, TJX and Fidelity Investments.