The rezoning plan was approved unanimously by the 10-member commission Oct. 22 and is awaiting Wu's signature. Meanwhile, the City of Cambridge approved a recommendation for zoning changes along a busy corridor and square at a Planning Board meeting Oct. 21. The vote follows a city-wide rezoning that eliminated single-family housing, a media report says.

Boston officials noted at the Oct. 22 hearing that the one downtown area that will allow for 700-ft towers already has 500-ft-tall buildings.

The new zoning will encourage building new housing and mixed-use development across Boston’s downtown to help reverse the housing shortage in an area that can support greater development density, says a city statement. While residential uses are now legal throughout the new zoning districts “large hotel, lab and office use will require further approval,” it notes.

For the first time, Boston's zoning code references the state’s shadow laws for the Boston Common and Public Garden and the Federal Aviation Administration regulations for flight paths, says Andrew Nahimias, senior urban designer of the Boston Planning Dept., who presented the plan at the hearing. “Compliance with state shadow law in all cases will supersede local zoning,” he says. “Previously, the laws weren’t referenced within state code; in that way the zoning reaffirms and reinforces those shadow laws.”

The rezoning is part of a seven-year planned downtown zoning process that took place between 2018 and 2023, with three zoning drafts, eight months of public comment and 14 stakeholder meetings, says Nahimias.

The plan has critics, including Leslie Adam, board chair at Friends of the Public Garden, who pressed the commission to pause and reconsider the building heights. In a letter to the City of Boston Chief of Planning Kairos Shen, she writes, “Approving new as-of-right building heights that jump from 155 feet to [between] 500 and 700 feet disrupts the balance established by the state shadow laws, which were enacted 35 years ago in alignment with the lower building heights allowed at that time.”

But the city regards the plan as one that will “strike a balance” between protecting the downtown’s historic character while allowing for development and housing growth, Nahimias says.

Plan Downtown, relaunched in 2022, created a vision that responds to the post-pandemic world where many work remotely and pedestrian traffic has declined, says Shen. Along with the city’s Office to Residential Conversion Program, the new zoning “will maximize our options to reinvest in Downtown and create the vitality that is critical to its long-term success,” he adds.

“The adoption of new zoning for downtown is a watershed moment in the neighborhood’s needed adaptation to the post-pandemic ‘new normal,’ and will usher in a transformative era of investment and improvement,” said Michael J. Nichols, president of the Downtown Boston Alliance.

Across the Charles

Across the Charles River in Cambridge, the rezoning effort is designed to give incentive for opening businesses on the ground floor with food courts and night spots. For the Massachusetts Avenue corridor petition, the main permitted additions under the rezoning would include hotels, craft retail, food courts, food vendors and theaters, a media report notes.

The petition would also relax height limits for residential-only buildings of up to eight stories. For mixed-use projects with active ground levels, including day care centers, libraries, dentists or attorney offices, the rezoning would allow up to 12 stories. The petition does not include changes to nonresidential building height limits or density.

While both petitions are similar, the Cambridge Street corridor petition allows for an increase in residential height to eight stories from six in some districts and up to 15 stories in others, all with the requirement of an active ground floor, the report notes. Those greater height allowances are mostly focused in the squares at each end of the about 2-mile long corridor.