A 130-unit apartment building is officially funded for Lexington's Hartwell Avenue corridor, where a $45.75 million construction loan will turn a former office building into 190,000 square feet of housing. The site at 7 Hartwell Ave, once home to the Russian School of Mathematics, is slated for completion in June 2028, with 110 market-rate units and 20 affordable units spread across five stories.
JLL Capital Markets arranged the financing on behalf of developer Dinosaur Capital Partners, according to Connect CRE. The JLL team, including Michael Schwarze, Anthony Cutone, Joe Marinaro and Madeline Joyce, secured a fully funded construction loan through Affinius Capital, which the outlet reports recognized “the strength of the opportunity.” Cutone called the financing “a significant milestone for high-quality multifamily development in Lexington,” per the same report. Additional detail from Boston Real Estate Times shows New York-based Axonic Capital co-originated the loan alongside Affinius, marking the sixth deal executed under a strategic mid-market financing partnership between the two lenders.
What's Actually Getting Built
The project was designed by Icon Architecture, with Callahan Construction Managers serving as general contractor, according to the Town of Lexington. Plans call for a 400-square-foot ground-floor café, 195 indoor bicycle spaces, 90 underground auto parking spaces and 42 surface spaces, all on a 1.61-acre lot. The Lexington Planning Board unanimously approved the site plan review, special permit and two waivers on April 17, 2025, following virtual public hearings held in January, March and April of that year, under Section 135-7.5 of the town's Village & Multi-Family Overlay Districts bylaw.
Per Connect CRE, the project is shovel-ready and carries a higher-leverage loan structure that the outlet says reflects strong lender confidence in the sponsorship team and Lexington market fundamentals. The site sits close to the Route 128 life sciences and technology corridor, with what the outlet describes as exceptional transportation access serving what it calls an affluent and underserved market where demand for luxury rental housing exceeds supply.
A Zoning Fight That Already Happened
The development exists because of Massachusetts' 2021 MBTA Communities Act, which pushed Lexington to create its Village High-Rise Overlay district for redeveloping aging commercial parks near Route 128, according to Banker & Tradesman. Lexington was among the first Massachusetts towns to pass zoning compliant with the law's Section 3A, doing so in April 2023. But the enthusiasm didn't last uniformly: Lexington Town Meeting voted 164-9 in March 2025 to shrink the town's MBTA Communities zoning footprint from 227 acres down to roughly 90 acres, removing Lexington Center from the overlay and lowering height limits elsewhere, as reported by the Belmont Citizens Forum.
Because 7 Hartwell Ave had already cleared Planning Board approval before that rollback, the project remains legally compliant and unaffected by the smaller footprint, the Belmont Citizens Forum reports. Hoodline previously covered how Lexington's zoning ambitions hit turbulence at Town Hall earlier this year, as the town wrestled with balancing state mandates against local pushback over density and traffic.
One Corridor, Hundreds of New Apartments
7 Hartwell Ave isn't rising alone. It's part of a broader wave of commercial-to-residential redevelopment along the corridor that includes BXP's approved 312-unit project at 17 Hartwell Ave and JLB Partners' approved 290-unit complex at 131 Hartwell Ave, according to Banker & Tradesman. The pipeline has shifted Lexington from producing virtually no multi-family housing for decades to managing hundreds of proposed apartments simultaneously.
The site also falls within Lexington's Hartwell Area Transportation Management Overlay District, which requires developers to implement traffic mitigation measures and pay municipal fees tied to existing congestion at the Bedford Street/Hartwell Avenue intersection, per the Town of Lexington. That framework was adopted to streamline multi-modal traffic planning in cases where individual developments can't independently fix intersection performance on their own.
Why the Numbers Matter for Renters
Connect CRE reports median home sale prices in the community have reached $2.1 million, underscoring why rental demand in Lexington runs so high. That figure tracks with separate data from Commonwealth Standard Realty Advisors, which found single-family home sales in Lexington averaging $1.99 million through mid-2026, with median list prices holding between $1.6 million and $1.98 million. Condominiums haven't offered much of a discount either: the Gundersheim Group Real Estate reports a year-to-date average condo sale price of $1.41 million through June 2026, with a median sold price of $956,400.
Against that backdrop, Connect CRE frames 7 Hartwell Ave as addressing a critical housing shortage in one of Greater Boston's most desirable communities. Dinosaur Capital Partners is simultaneously working on a separate adaptive reuse project in Boston, converting the top 10 floors of 31 Milk Street into 110 apartment units with 22 income-restricted units, a project that received $4 million in state assistance and that Hoodline covered when unions picketed the downtown conversion earlier this year.
