Hyde Park developments would drop nearly 130 apartments and condos in neighborhood

Critical Mass. is a weekly roundup of the most notable development news in the Boston area. This go-round includes projects in Allston, Fenway, and Hyde Park as well as a big plan for making Boston buildings more environmentally friendly.

Advancing one of the more closely followed parlor games in Boston-area real estate, Harvard narrowed to nine the number of development teams competing to develop the first 14 acres of an Allston parcel along Western Avenue that the school envisions as helping host what it calls its its Enterprise Research Campus.

Now from advancement to retreat. Citing feedback from residents, Scape, the British firm that had planned to build a handful of student dormitories in Boston independent of any college or university, has instead decided to pivot to mostly market-rate housing at each site. All total, there would 1,357 units in the three buildings in Fenway.

Hyde Park might be a neighborhood to watch now in terms of construction. Developers want to build a four-story, 48-unit condo building with retail at River Street and Central Avenue, per Universal Hub. The proposal follows another from a different team that envisions a five-story, 32-unit residential building with retail on the other side of the nearby train bridge (that proposal’s rendered up top). Then there’s the plan for a four-story, 47-unit apartment building at 99-105 Fairmount Avenue.

HYM Investment Group

Farther in to town, the development team behind the first residential tower at the massive Bulfinch Crossing complex going up on and around downtown Boston’s Government Center Garage has dubbed it the Sudbury. The 480-foot, 46-story tower is due to include 368 apartments and 55 condos. Look for it to start opening in spring 2020.

Developer Related Beal has outlined what it hopes to plunk on the 6.5 acres of Fort Point waterfront that it acquired in May. Under preliminary plans, the company would develop three buildings totaling 1.1 million square feet, with two of those buildings rising to as high as 180 feet and about one-third of the total square-footage (or one building) devoted to housing. Another building would be for lab space and the third for offices.

Finally, new standards that would require that all newly constructed city-owned buildings in Boston be carbon neutral could be in place in 18 months under a proposed change in the city’s zoning. The city also wants new regulations that would require owners of large buildings to retrofit them to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050.