ZBA delays housing permit on Totten Pond Road again over infrastructural issues

A plan to bring a large housing development to west Waltham is nearing the finish line at the Zoning Board of Appeals, but it’s not there yet.

That’s the update from the ZBA’s special Thursday meeting on March 12, where it discussed a proposed 340-unit housing development at 455 Totten Pond Road that has been in discussion since March 2025.

Michael Cantalupa, chief development officer of developer The Davis Companies, said his team would return to the board on March 31 with a plan to address potential sewer capacity issues identified by Waltham’s Engineering Department. 

In advance of the March 12 meeting, the project’s development team found that city sewer plans underestimated the local system’s capacity, failing to reflect a 2011 sewer construction project. The team calculated that the 455 Totten Pond Road project would not overtax local pipes.

City Engineer Robert Winn, however, said that his department collected recent data indicating that some pipes in the neighborhood were already at or near capacity. This data, he said, might mean that city sewer models were even further off and would need to be completely recalibrated for the neighborhood to accurately calculate the project’s impact.

Winn proposed that the developer pay the city’s sewer consultant to recalibrate its model and, if the recalibration showed it necessary, commit to funding a project to widen local sewers at a few key points. He predicted this project would take multiple months and would involve replacing 570 feet of sewer pipe.

Assistant City Solicitor Michelle Learned argued that in light of Waltham’s Administrative Consent Order with the state about sewer flow and its existing supply of affordable housing, if the developer refused to pay these mitigation costs, the potential for future overflows would qualify as “damage … great enough to outweigh the regional need for affordable housing.”

Cantalupa said he would like to work out a “sharing of costs” agreement with other projects in the area so the cost of any sewer mitigation wouldn’t fall entirely on The Davis Companies.

Other sticking points in the proposal

On the whole, Learned said the preliminary agreement the developer proposed for the project was still insufficient but was “getting closer” to terms the city could deem acceptable.

Previously, Learned argued that The Davis Companies had not allocated enough funding toward mitigating the infrastructural effects of adding 340 units of housing to the area. This week, Cantalupa proposed an agreement that included more mitigation funding, which also reduced or eliminated previous funding offers including a contribution to the city’s general housing fund, in order to allocate more funding toward installing sidewalks along Totten Pond Road.

ZBA chair John Sergi has previously championed the Totton Pond Road sidewalk extension to make the area more pedestrian friendly for new residents. He expressed a desire for the company to be directly involved in the sidewalk construction in order to make sure it was completed by the time the building was ready for occupancy. He also added that the company should look into the cost of potentially adding bike lanes to the road.

Cantalupa said his company was willing to work with the city on the sidewalk project but did not want to be solely responsible for completing it because of concerns over private property rights.

City pushes for more affordable units

One of the more controversial parts of this building has been its housing affordability measures. Previously, the development team proposed using federal housing vouchers to significantly reduce housing costs for some veterans, but upon learning that the developer would still earn market rent on the units involved, board members rejected the plan. 

Cantalupa said his team had eliminated any language referencing the housing voucher program from the agreement. Because the project is proposed under Massachusetts General Law Chapter 40B, which requires eligible buildings to price a minimum percentage of their units at levels affordable to local residents, 85 of the building’s units are already required to be priced at levels affordable for households making 80% of the area median income.

At some prompting from Learned, who pointed out that all previous Chapter 40B projects approved by the city have offered a minimum proportion of those units at prices affordable to lower-income residents, Cantalupa said his team was potentially willing to price 11 of the 85 units affordably for households making 60% of the median annual income. This would be equivalent to 13% of the project’s affordable units, the lowest proportion of deeper-affordability units the city has allowed so far.

Learned also requested that the company include free parking spaces with affordable units, which the city has required on other projects. At the very least, she requested residents in affordable units be given a larger discount of 20% for renting parking spaces.

The city has also requested the project revisit some additional traffic issues such as changes to its driveways to prevent queuing issues from spilling into city streets, and making signal improvements at a newly installed intersection near the Veterans Memorial Skating Rink.