LLOWELL — In the middle of Lowell’s commercial downtown, a nearly complete five-story apartment building is on the verge of becoming one small part of a solution to the state’s housing woes.
The Hildreth Building at 45 Merrimack St. was designed by well-known architect Henry Van Brunt and completed in 1884 when Lowell was a thriving city known for its busy textile mills. It used to house two “five-and-dime” chain department stores — Woolworth’s and Kresge’s — with offices on the upper floors.
After the department stores closed amid Lowell’s 20th-century decline, a CVS and discount clothing chain moved in. Over the past few years, those closed, too, and most of the offices emptied out.
What was left in Lowell was a solid old building that could molder away — or, with a little smart policy making, could find a new purpose.
In 2024, David Steinbergh, principal at development company RCG, pulled permits to convert the aging office building into market-rate rental housing, with first-floor retail. With the help of several public programs, the initial units were completed this April, tenants started moving in in May, and around 60 percent of the 50 apartments were leased out by September. Steinbergh said the units were garnering interest mainly from young professionals who already live or work around Lowell and want to move downtown or into a newer apartment.
State officials estimate Massachusetts needs another 222,000 homes — of all types — between 2025 and 2035 to meet demand.
Gateway Cities like Lowell — cities with potential to anchor their regional economies — can play an important role in building this badly needed housing. They often already have the infrastructure to support housing, like streets and sewers, and many of them are served by existing commuter rail lines. Some, like Lowell, have cultural institutions, entertainment, and restaurants. Politically, leaders of Gateway Cities are often more receptive to large-scale housing than their suburban counterparts.
The cities are already punching above their weight.
According to a 2025 report from MassINC Policy Center, developers in the state’s 26 Gateway Cities built around 12,000 new homes and apartments in 2023 and 2024. In 2024, Gateway Cities permitted 106 multifamily buildings, the highest figure in more than a decade, MassINC found.
A separate analysis by the Boston Foundation found that between 2020 and 2025, some of the biggest building booms were in Gateway Cities: There was an increase in total housing units of nearly 1,300 in Lynn, 1,400 in Haverhill, 1,600 in Lawrence, around 1,900 in Revere and Worcester, and more than 2,400 in Quincy.
Gateway Cities are some of the state’s largest cities outside Boston, and they have long attracted both new immigrants and native-born Americans seeking employment in their industries. Historically, this meant mills and factories. Today, these cities are more likely to host health care, educational institutions, and growing industries like biotech or advanced manufacturing.
Lowell’s experience highlights the role Gateway Cities can play in building housing. In Massachusetts’ fifth-largest city, nearly one-third of the population is foreign-born, according to census figures. Lowell has one of the country’s largest Cambodian populations and communities with roots in Africa, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, India, and elsewhere.
It’s also home to the University of Massachusetts Lowell, which is in the midst of an effort to create the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor, a vision for redeveloping a stretch of Lowell between the university and downtown by recruiting new defense, industrial, and engineering companies into renovated spaces and building nearly 500 new housing units plus retail and restaurant space.
Julie Chen, chancellor of UMass Lowell, said the goal is to incentivize more college graduates to stay in Lowell by bringing in well-paying jobs and the small, market-rate apartments attractive to young professionals. Chen said she sees potential for Gateway Cities like Lowell to become “satellite cities,” with their own ecosystem of jobs, housing, transit, and skilled workforce.
If Lowell isn’t among the most prolific cities today in building new housing — according to the Boston Foundation, Lowell built 680 units between 2020 and 2025, growing its housing stock by 1.6 percent — that’s likely because it had already renovated its largest available spaces.
In the early to mid-1900s, manufacturing companies and textile mills in Lowell closed, leaving behind large industrial spaces. Allison Carter, the city’s director of economic development, said in the 1990s and early 2000s, many abandoned mill buildings were turned into housing. A city population that drastically declined from around 1920 to 1980 began rebounding. As of the 2020 census, Lowell had 115,000 people, surpassing its 1920 peak, and the population has continued growing.
Today, Carter said the spaces that remain available for new housing are the hardest-to-develop buildings and smaller projects, like office-to-housing conversions. As in many cities since the pandemic, offices emptied as more people worked from home. Many retail businesses are struggling, Carter said. Within a third of a mile of the Hildreth Building, two other office buildings — 37 Kirk St. and 169 Merrimack St. — are being converted to housing.
The city is also renewing its focus on an area referred to as JAM — for Jackson, Appleton, and Middlesex streets — that’s been targeted for renewal for two decades, with mixed success. Now, Draper Labs is seeking to build a commercial building there, there are plans underway for 362 market-rate rental apartments, and a plan for another 125 units, with some restricted for low-income residents and others that will be market rate.
The process of converting offices to housing can be challenging, because buildings are designed differently based on their use. In the Hildreth Building, each apartment is a different shape and size. A closet might be an old safe. In one bedroom, the only natural light comes from a skylight. Developers had to add air conditioning and make the building handicapped accessible. The building is considered historic, which involves other restrictions. Its uniquely shaped windows required 214 custom-designed panes, the designs of which had to be approved by the National Park Service in order to obtain a historic preservation tax credit.
As with many Gateway City projects, financing can be difficult, because construction costs are high, but rents and prices are lower than around Boston. Overall in Lowell, the Boston Foundation found the median price for a single-family home increased from $310,800 in 2020 to $510,000 in 2025 — compared to more than $830,000 in Boston. For the Hildreth Building, Steinbergh said construction cost $18 million, and units will rent for between $1,700 a month for a small studio up to $2,700 for a large two-bedroom — far less than what new construction apartments would fetch in Boston. Renovating the building involved lining up tax increment financing from the city, federal and state historic rehabilitation tax credits, and state Housing Development Incentive Program grants, which fund redevelopment in Gateway Cities.
Because HDIP supports market-rate housing, rather than low-income housing, it has been controversial. But that’s exactly why it’s so important to Gateway Cities, many of which already have a variety of housing restricted to people with low and moderate incomes. What they often lack is market-rate housing that might help rejuvenate the downtown business climate.
Lowell is also seeking more unusual sources of financing — for example, leveraging international recognition as a “frontrunner city” for urban development to match developers with a Canadian organization seeking to invest in US real estate.
The Hildreth Building’s bottom floor now hosts shops from the Hive, a collective of quirky independent businesses forced to relocate when their former home, a mill building, was sold. One day, fliers advertised a Goth Mart, Trans and Queer Artist Day, bicycle warehouse sale, and Spring Equinox Market featuring “witchy items, spring creations, tarot readers, & more.”
The Hive founder Rachel Chandler lives in the predominantly Portuguese and Brazilian Back Central neighborhood, walking distance to downtown. She describes the appeal of living in Lowell as a place where she has parking and a backyard along the Concord River, and she can walk to ethnic food restaurants and find customers for her store’s natural soaps, bulk herbs, and bamboo toilet paper. Chandler said residents appreciate the “gritty side of Lowell” along with the “authenticity and quest to find the new novel thing that’s cool and trendy.”
Not every Gateway City has the old mill spaces of Lowell or Lawrence — but each community has its own housing opportunities and challenges.
In Chelsea, for example, city manager Fidel Maltez told the editorial board the city is already dense, and the main way to ensure available housing is to rehabilitate existing homes and keep them habitable and affordable.
Holyoke has long struggled with fixing up abandoned, blighted properties, where the home’s value is too low to recoup the construction costs.
In Boston-area communities like Everett, builders can benefit from buyers priced out of Boston because of rising housing prices, while Western Mass. communities like Pittsfield are not likely to see that bump.
If Massachusetts is to remain vibrant, officials in each Gateway City will need to figure out what role their city can play in the effort to build more housing of all kinds. And the state will have to maintain strong support through programs like HDIP for the cities willing and able to add new housing at scale. Lowell is an example of what it can look like when a community takes the initiative to solve the state’s problems — and its own.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.