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Earlier this month, the Boston Planning Department released an update on the Allston-Brighton Community Plan.

The updates follow a community engagement period that spans June 2024 though October 2025, engaging over 1,400 people across over 50 events. These include an open house in July 2025 and a digital survey. 

In the end, the team reviewed over 2,368 comments evenly distributed across the neighborhood, which was divided into ten focus areas. The comments reflected common themes through different focus areas, including increasing the density of housing, improving pedestrian and cyclist safety, addressing parking and traffic issues, and creating more green spaces. 

The Planning Department also announced two new staff members to the team with significant expertise in zoning: Jack Halverson, a Zoning Reform Planner for the City of Boston and previously led the Allston Mobility Plan, and Andrew Nahimas, a Senior Planner for the Boston Planning and Development Agency. They join a team currently comprising ten residents in a community advisory group along with eight local organizations and staff across seven different city departments.

District 9 city councilor Elizabeth “Liz” Breadon anticipates that the community plan will enter the “mapping stage” within the next year, which would translate the input from the plan into specific action items. 

Barbara Parmenter, who leads the pro-housing Allston Brighton Housing Action Coalition, believes that the input in the community plan will be critical for influencing a major effort to rezone Allston-Brighton.

Currently, Parmenter believes that the current zoning code, which has not been updated in decades, subjects developers to high costs and potential lawsuits — dissuading especially smaller developers from building more housing in the area. In fact, 90 to 95 percent of the residential units in Allston-Brighton could not be rebuilt today under the current zoning code, she says.

“It’s completely out of date. Everybody is asking for variances all the time,” she says. “I can’t even rebuild my house if it burned down according to the current zoning code.”

Parmenter says that the Allston-Brighton Community Plan would help shape the zoning code to make it easier to build developments that fit the neighborhood’s needs. Rezoning would allow the process of development to be more streamlined and encourage developers to increase the housing supply in the area. 

“It’s really important that we come to an agreement as a community; let’s have the arguments now in the next few months about how we want this community to look and function. Let’s get the zoning in place, and hopefully for at least a number of years, we can have developers and homeowners build according to that and not be bogged down by lawsuits and things like that,” says Parmenter. 

Beyond rezoning, Parmenter believes that the Community Plan should have a list of priorities for capital investment to shape capital investment for the City as well as larger developers and institutions. 

The Allston-Brighton Community Plan began in 2022 at the request of the Harvard Allston Task Force, which Parmenter serves on. At that time, Parmenter recalls Article 80 meetings taking place every night. Lab and innovation space development, too, increased as Harvard University called Western Avenue “the Allston innovation corridor.”

“There was just a lot going on, and we didn’t have a Community Plan to think about all this,” says Parmenter. 

When members of the task force heard from Councilor Breadon that the neighborhood was not on the priority list for a Community Plan by the City, they turned to Harvard University, who agreed to collaborate on it. 

Today, as development slows, Parmenter says that the Community Plan comes at the right time to consider the future of the neighborhood.

“Things are moving more slowly, but I actually think that it gives us breathing space to actually have this planning process to think about, you know, what we want, what’s best for us, what’s best for a city, et cetera.” she says. ■