Stoneham Approves Office-to-Residential Conversion at 1 Montvale Avenue

STONEHAM -- January 23, 2025, Stoneham Board of Appeals approves conversion of largely vacant office building at 1 Montvale Avenue to 51 residential rental units while rejecting two contested variance requests. The board voted unanimously Thursday to grant parking and dimensional variances for the Montvale project, conditioned on structural repairs to a garage wall abutting 12.5 Flint Avenue and installation of a gate separating the Montvale and Flint Avenue parking sections; a traffic assessment by Van Asse Associates engineer Jeffrey Dirk found the project would generate 13 percent fewer average weekday vehicle trips than a fully occupied office building, and up to 55 percent fewer during peak hours. In a separate five-to-one vote, the board denied a third-heard application to build three two-family duplexes on a 72,000-square-foot lot at 104 Pond Street, with Chair Tovin Shulman noting he had "not heard anybody say they preferred this" after sustained neighborhood opposition and a legal argument from Attorney William Heaney that the application failed all three statutory hardship criteria under MGL Chapter 40A Section 10. A petition for a two-car garage at 24 Keene Street also failed five to one after an abutter testified she had seen plans for a conforming tandem-garage alternative.