Getting Growth Right In Littleton, Westford
Photos/Livia Gershon
Westford's Cornerstone Square (right) is 96 percent full; Red Hat opened a new building in Westford (top left) and FIBA Technologies installed gas pipes at its new Littleton location.
FIBA Technologies is moving its headquarters to 53 Ayer Rd. in Littleton.
If you want to talk growth in the northern part of MetroWest, Littleton and Westford are obvious places to start. Take software company Red Hat's ongoing success and recent 100,000-square-foot expansion in Westford. Or, take IBM's 2012 opening of a major software development lab in Littleton. Or look at any number of retail, mixed-use and housing projects that have moved forward in the two towns over the past year.
Chris Kluchman, Westford's director of land use management, said the town has been “very busy even during the economic downturn.”
“A little unusual; compared to other communities, we have seen kind of a steady building of both residential and office and commercial,” she said.
Between 2003 and 2013, while employment in Massachusetts grew just 3 percent, the number of people working in Westford rose 14 percent, to 12,585, according to state data. In Littleton, it jumped 23 percent to 6,445. And average weekly wages in both towns are well above the state average.
There's no doubt that geographic luck plays a part in that growth. The two towns' positions — right on Interstate 495, with easy access to Boston via Route 2 and the MBTA — makes Littleton and Westford attractive places to do business. But the growth is also a matter of planning — local officials' decisions to support particular sorts of development in specific places. Both towns are redoubling their efforts to not just grow, but balance that growth intelligently.
A little over a year ago, Westford formed an economic development committee (EDC) to help guide efforts to grow businesses in town. This September, Littleton did likewise.
“Obviously Westford is growing rapidly, as is Littleton, so we're trying to look to make sure that we bring the right types of businesses to town that will fit into the town's business corridor,” said Tom Barry, chairman of the Westford EDC.
Boom At Cornerstone Square
The balance involved in making development happen is clear at one of Westford's largest and most visible developments, Cornerstone Square, off I-495 at the corner of Boston Road and Route 110. The 240,000-square-foot retail plaza, anchored by a Market Basket store, officially opened just over a year ago, and it's now 96 percent occupied, according to developer Robert Walker of Westford-based RAVentures. The plaza is getting ready to welcome a branch of Jeanne D'Arc Credit Union, a Lowell General Hospital Urgent Care center, and several more tenants.
On a recent Friday, at lunchtime, the Cornerstone Square Panera Bread was packed. One customer, Valentina Burbank, said her job requires her to travel around the area, and before the development went up she usually ate lunch in her car if she was in Westford.
“There was nowhere to go quickly and have something that's a little healthy,” she said.
Walker said a variety of factors have played into Cornerstone Square's successful first year, including the easy access to the highway and the relatively high income levels of Westford residents. But he said the growth of large employers in town also played a role.
“It brought in more daytime population,” he said. “It's almost like a chicken-and-egg kind of scenario.”
The other side of the chicken-and-egg question, according to Ivan Pagacik, chair of the Littleton EDC, is that companies want to find locations where employees will be happy and comfortable, something that promotes recruitment and retention. Pagacik said one big demand from people in Littleton is for more small shops and places to eat. The recurring theme, he said, is, “We want more shops, we want the coffee shops ... a downtown walking area.”
Littleton Point Holds Promise
The Point, a planned mixed-use development on Route 119 off I-495 in Littleton, promises to bring some of those amenities to town, Pagacik said. That project, scheduled to open in the spring, is getting support from Littleton, including a push to win five pouring licenses for establishments there, according to Bergman, town administrator.
“The bigger picture is that The Point is the focal point for the development that the town has been actively encouraging for Littleton Common, that section of town,” Bergman said.
Bergman said Town Meeting voted in 2010 to establish a district and an overlay zone designed to promote hotels, restaurants and high-end retail in the area, and the plan is coming along, with construction underway.
While both Littleton and Westford are working to develop big employers and the retail and restaurant sector in tandem, they're also working toward other kinds of balance. One perennial issue is making sure roads and infrastructure keep up with economic growth. To serve the traffic drawn to new retail development, MassWorks funded drain and roadway improvements near The Point on Route 119 in Littleton, Bergman said. Meanwhile, in Westford, developers like RAVentures have had to make road improvements as a condition of town permits, Kluchman said. She said the town is also getting state support for a project to help with traffic flow between I-495 and Route 110.
“It's always a balance of the amount of development with the transportation improvements,” she said.
Yet another kind of balance the area is also working on is workplaces versus places to live. Barry said Westford wants to ensure it has enough reasonably priced homes to support industry.
“It's important for us to have entry-level housing for employees to move to Westford,” he said. “If employees out of the Boston area wanted to work for a Red Hat or Juniper Networks or one of these companies, where do they live?”
But Barry's Littleton counterpart, Pagacik, said a big part of his committee's mission is bringing in enough commercial growth to pay for town improvements without burdening residential taxpayers.
“We need to be cognizant of the taxpayer and try to maintain a taxable structure that doesn't force people out of town,” he said. “That's always a challenge.”
Both Westford and Littleton have received state help to pursue that goal. In June, Westford was granted permission to join a state-designated Economic Target Area (ETA), which meant access to potential tax breaks. Red Hat was able to take advantage of the ETA to get a break to support its expansion.
Another company winning a tax break was FIBA Technologies, a growing company that builds equipment for energy industries that's in the process of expanding to Littleton. With employees spread across facilities in Millbury and Westborough, business development manager John Finn said, the manufacturer needed a location where it could consolidate its business offices and add production capacity. He said FIBA liked the space it found in Littleton, at 53 Ayer Rd., but it had other prospects.
“One thing that appealed to us about it was that the town — from the inspectors to the planner, the selectmen, everybody — really embraced our business and what we wanted to do and really made it a very easy move,” he said.
FIBA bought the building, a run-down warehouse built in 1965, and is revamping it now, with plans to be fully moved in by the end of March, Finn said. The reuse of an old building helps with another kind of balance that both Westford and Littleton are working to achieve: encouraging development while preserving green, open space.
Bergman said one of Littleton's goals for the past several years has been to make economic development “consistent with community character.” Among other things, that means keeping active farms and open land in town. To do that, of course, the town needs to work even harder to get the most it can from the parts of town it wants to see developed.
“We want to do as good a job as we can of taking commercially zoned land, we want to make that as high quality as we can.” n
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