Apartment tower will fill Bay Village parking lot

Say so long to yet another Boston-area parking lot.

South Carolina-based Greystar Real Estate Partners plans to fill a former surface lot at 212 Stuart Street in Boston’s Bay Village with a 126-unit apartment building with spreads ranging from studios to two-bedrooms.

The city approved a 19-story residential development at the site in 2017, and construction could start as soon as the end of this month. Greystar’s building could open in early 2022.

Rents are expected to start at $3,500 a month for the smaller units, with two-bedrooms retailing for around $7,000, per the Globe’s Tim Logan, who broke the news of Greystar’s plans. Beyond the future building’s prime location near downtown, the developer plans to justify such rents with amenities that include regular cleaning services.

Greystar, which manages and/or owns dozens of buildings in the region, paid another builder $17.7 million for the 0.2-acre lot—which showcases once again how valuable such parking facilities can be to developers.

Chicago investment firm L3 Capital bought the surface parking lot at the corner of Newbury and Dartmouth streets in Back Bay for $40 million in July 2019. That lot is expected to host a new development, probably retail. A couple of months before that $40 million deal, developer Related Beal of Boston closed on the $218 million purchase of a Fort Point lot it plans to fill with a major mixed-use project—including loads of lab space.

There are several other lots either slated for redevelopment or on the block—including another one at 132 Arlington Street in Bay Village, a fact all the more notable because Bay Village is Boston’s smallest neighborhood.

Beyond the value of the land and the potential for returns in an apartment market where $3,500 for a studio seems perfectly normal, there’s the fact that the region’s relationship with the automobile is changing. Parking norms in downtown Boston are shifting slowly in favor of more room for mass transit, app-hails such as Uber, and pedestrians and bicyclists.

Plus, who wants to sit that much longer in Boston traffic?