"It's one of the largest, what I would call underutilized, parcels in Belmont," Select Board member Roy Epstein told Town Meeting members in the fall of 2024, describing a 126,726-square-foot industrial site on Hittinger and Brighton Streets that had been rejected, reconsidered, and rejected again as a candidate for new housing. The site, known locally as Purecoat North, still is not zoned for the multifamily building its owners have proposed. A short distance away, in Waverley Square, similar parcels already are.
That gap is the story most buyers researching Belmont in 2026 are missing. The town's compliance with the state's MBTA Communities Act reads, from a distance, like a single sweeping change: Belmont rezoned for density, multifamily housing is now allowed, the character of the town is shifting. Zoom in on the actual map and the picture is narrower and more interesting. Belmont did not rezone itself. It rezoned two specific commercial squares, drew a boundary around each, and left everything else, including a parcel its own Select Board called one of the town's most underutilized, exactly where it started.
The Map, Not the Median
Belmont's median sale price sat at $1.4 million over the three months ending June 2026, down 7.2 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to Redfin's trailing data, with homes selling in an average of 17 days on roughly seven competing offers. Read on its own, that number tells a story of a town cooling slightly after a hot run. It says nothing about why some parcels in Belmont are suddenly worth dramatically more to a developer than they were eighteen months ago, while others a few streets away have not moved at all under the new zoning.
The answer is geography, not price trend. Belmont's 3A zoning, adopted by Town Meeting in November 2024 by a vote of 213 to 8 and given final state approval by the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities in April 2025, covers about 50 acres total. Roughly 27 of those acres, or a little over half, sit in Waverley Square, which was designated the town's required "contiguity district" and had to carry at least 50 percent of the total rezoned land under the law's technical rules. The rest sits in Belmont Center. Everywhere else in town, including neighborhoods that feel adjacent to those two commercial hubs, kept its existing zoning.
Inside the mapped boundary, multifamily housing is now allowed by right, meaning a qualifying project does not need a special permit or a Town Meeting vote, at a minimum density of 15 units per acre. Outside it, nothing changed. That single fact, more than the town's median price in any given quarter, is what now separates a parcel with real near-term redevelopment upside from one that only looks like it has it.
Same Corridor, Two Very Different Answers
The clearest illustration sits along Brighton Street itself. Two industrial-adjacent parcels, both discussed at length in the same public process, ended up on opposite sides of the line.
| Parcel | Status under the adopted map | What that means right now |
|---|---|---|
| A typical lot inside the Waverley Square 3A district | Inside the boundary | Multifamily allowed by right at 15+ units per acre, no special permit needed, still subject to standard site plan review |
| Sherman Gardens (Belmont Housing Authority, Waverley neighborhood) | Cited as a reason Waverley was chosen as the anchor district | BHA has proposed replacing the aging 80-unit complex, built in 1971, with a 125-unit mid-rise, with 2026 as the earliest possible construction start, pending state bond funding |
| Purecoat North (Hittinger and Brighton Streets) | Excluded from the adopted 2024 map | The owner's proposed 225-unit mixed-use building has no by-right path yet; it depends on a separate, still-unresolved 2026 corridor planning study |
The Purecoat family, who have owned the plating business on the site for more than five decades, brought a preliminary plan to the town in 2024 for a roughly 225-unit building with ground-floor retail. Epstein testified that the site currently generates about $100,000 a year in property taxes and that redevelopment under a residential scheme would raise that figure by a factor of ten. It was, on paper, exactly the kind of project the MBTA Communities Act was designed to unlock. Town Meeting excluded it anyway, voting down an amendment that would have folded the Purecoat parcel into the district by a margin of 79 in favor to 162 opposed. The parcel most associated with Belmont's redevelopment ambitions sits, as of the adopted map, outside the zoning that would make those ambitions by-right.
Sherman Gardens tells the opposite story. The Belmont Housing Authority's aging senior complex was one of the reasons planners chose Waverley as the town's anchor district in the first place. Its proposed replacement, a 125-unit mid-rise with elevators, sits within the neighborhood that now carries the town's largest by-right capacity, and the earliest construction window the Housing Authority has published is 2026, contingent on state bond funding coming through.
Same era, same public process, two parcels a short walk apart, two entirely different regulatory positions.
The Line Is Still Moving
If the story ended with the 2024 vote, this would be a straightforward before-and-after. It has not ended. According to the Belmont Citizens Forum's May/June 2026 newsletter, the town's planning consultant, able.city, presented a proposal on March 30, 2026 to divide the broader Brighton Street corridor into four distinct subdistricts, each with its own zoning treatment. The first of those zones, spanning east Hittinger Street, explicitly includes Purecoat North and the neighboring Crate Escape property. The planning team's stated goal for the corridor is a "Belmont-scaled" mixed-use center, balanced against fiscal needs, neighborhood character, and housing affordability.
Nothing here is finalized. But it means the parcel that got excluded in 2024 is actively being reconsidered in 2026, through a different planning process than the one that produced the original 3A map. A buyer who wrote off Purecoat North's redevelopment potential based on the 2024 vote would be working from an outdated picture. A buyer who assumes the reverse, that any parcel near Brighton Street now carries multifamily rights, would be working from one that never existed.
What This Means If You're Looking at a Belmont Address
For a buyer or investor evaluating a specific property, proximity to Waverley Square or Belmont Center is not the test. Inclusion on the adopted map is. Belmont's Planning Department maintains the current 3A zoning map on the town's MBTA Communities Zoning Project page, and it is worth checking a specific address against it rather than relying on general impressions of a neighborhood's direction. Because the boundaries are parcel-specific and have already shifted once during the process, a professional review of a given lot's status is the only reliable way to know what it can support today, and to watch for whether the Brighton Street corridor study changes that answer again.
By-right zoning also does not mean a project is guaranteed or fast. Even inside the district, projects still go through standard site plan review, and public projects like the Sherman Gardens replacement remain dependent on financing that is entirely outside the zoning question, including the state bond funding the Housing Authority is still waiting on.
FAQ
If my house is outside the two rezoned districts, does the new zoning affect its value at all? Not through any new by-right development right on your own lot. The zoning change only applies within the mapped Waverley Square and Belmont Center districts. Property outside those boundaries kept its prior zoning classification.
Could the boundaries expand again? Possibly. The Brighton Street corridor study now underway, separate from the 2024 vote, is actively considering new subdistricts along that corridor, including parcels like Purecoat North that were excluded from the original map. Nothing has been adopted yet.
Does by-right zoning mean a project will definitely get built? No. By-right status removes the need for a special permit, but projects still go through Belmont's site plan review process, and projects tied to public financing, like the Belmont Housing Authority's plan for Sherman Gardens, depend on funding timelines that are separate from the zoning itself.
Belmont's zoning story in 2026 is not a town that opened its doors to density. It is a town that opened two very specific doors and left the rest of the building exactly as it was, with a third door still being negotiated in real time. If you are weighing a purchase, a teardown, or a long-term hold anywhere near Waverley Square, Belmont Center, or the Brighton Street corridor, that distinction is worth more than any median price you will find on a portal.
Allison Blank & Company works with buyers and sellers across Belmont and the western suburbs who need more than a listing search, they need someone who can read a zoning map the way they read a comp sheet. Start your Belmont market plan with our team before you make an offer on a parcel whose value depends on a line you can't see from the street.
