Green Line Extension Drives Up Home Prices Along Route
The Green Line extension won’t be completed for a few years, but the real estate boom is now.
Home and condo prices are soaring in hitherto overlooked sections of Somerville and Medford in anticipation of a multibillion-dollar extension of the Green Line.
Long anticipated, the extension of the Green Line from Lechmere to Union Square in Somerville and College Avenue in Medford became a firm reality earlier this week when the federal government came through with more than $1 billion for the project.
There are still years of planning and construction ahead: Green Line cars are not ready to trundle down the new line until 2017 and 2018. But the appetite for real estate along the proposed route is roaring now.
Somerville neighborhoods along the route of the planned T expansion like Magoun Square and Winter Hill are abuzz with activity on part of real estate investors and humble home buyers alike, notes veteran Coldwell Banker real estate agent Sara Rosenfeld, who has been selling real estate in Somerville since the early 1980s.
“Some of the prices have been astronomical,’’ Rosenfeld said. While Magoun Square and Winter Hill have bus service, for Boston-area buyers, there is just nothing like T service, she added.
She is now getting prices for homes in both neighborhoods she wouldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago, having just closed on a house on Wigglesworth Street that is selling in the high $600,000’s.
“Never in my existence would I think a house in that neighborhood would sell for that price,’’ she said.
In fact, prices started to surge a year ago, notes Rosenfeld, who is now recommending the west end of Malden for buyers still hoping to buy a single-family house for under half a million.
The Green Line extension fits into a long history in the Boston area of real estate booms following T line construction and expansion.
The Red Line extension in the mid-1980s out to Alewife, through Porter and Davis Squares, is widely credited with helping transform those neighborhoods into some of the most coveted in the Boston area. Somerville’s Magoun Square will have not one, but two nearby T stops planned, at Ball Square and Lowell Street. Parts of nearby Medford will also benefit from the stops.
Winter Hill will have its own stop with the planned Gilman Square T station. Another spoke of the planned Green Line extension will connect up to Union Square, further heightening already robust interest in that neighborhood, Rosenfeld noted.
Along with rising home prices, the corridor along the new Green Line extension is fast becoming a magnet for developers looking to build new apartment and condo buildings and other projects, notes David Begelfer, chief executive of NAIOP Massachusetts, which represents developers across the state.
A massive development boom is also taking shape in Somerville’s Assembly Square area, where a new Orange Line station just opened in September. The 56-acre Assembly Row project includes new apartment buildings and dozens of stores and restaurants, with Partners HealthCare building its new headquarters there as well.
“The fact that you have mass transit access to those communities will add tremendous value,’’ Begelfer said. “There is no question right now that we see mass transit as being a key element of economic growth.’’
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