Stoneham Rezoned for More Housing. It Started With a Restaurant, Not a Neighborhood.

"I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but multi-family housing can already go in the highway business district tomorrow."

That was Erin Wortman, Stoneham's director of planning and economic development, talking to the town's Planning Board in the summer of 2022. She was explaining something homeowners across Massachusetts have been anxious about ever since the state passed the MBTA Communities Act: that towns served by the T now have to zone for multi-family housing whether they want to or not.

What Wortman's line actually reveals is more useful than the anxiety it was meant to calm. Stoneham didn't open its residential streets to apartment buildings. It looked at one aging commercial corridor, ran the math, and built its entire compliance strategy around two properties that most residents drove past without a second thought. If you're comparing Stoneham to Wakefield, Melrose, or Reading right now, that distinction, where the housing actually landed, tells you more than whether a town checked the compliance box.

The Restaurant That Became the Test Case

China Moon opened on Route 28 in 1953 and stayed in the same family for three generations, run by members of the Der, Tse, and Bing-You families through decades of birthdays, reunions, and Friday night buffets. It closed in December 2020, a pandemic casualty after 67 years at 170 Main Street.

The property didn't sit empty for long. John Melkonian, whose family owns the Stoneham Ford dealership a short walk away, reportedly paid $9.25 million for the three-acre parcel. His stated reason wasn't just redevelopment. It was control: buying the site outright meant he could shape what got built rather than watch a denser project get approved around him under the state's Chapter 40B affordable housing statute, which already allowed multi-family construction there regardless of local zoning.

What Melkonian proposed was a four-story condominium building of roughly 72 units, a mix of one- and two-bedroom homes. Because the parcel sat inside Stoneham's Highway Business District, where housing was flatly prohibited under the town's old rules, the project needed a zoning change before it could move forward. That need became the town's opening to solve two problems with one vote.

How Compliance Actually Got Built

Stoneham's obligation under the MBTA Communities Act wasn't abstract. Planning Board veteran Kevin Dolan put it in real numbers during an August 2022 town hall discussion: "We have 10,000 housing units and the mandate is to increase that by 20 percent." He worried aloud about what that meant for Route 28 traffic that was already, in his words, bad.

The town's planners floated the biggest possible swing first: rezone the entire 176-acre Highway Business District for by-right multi-family housing and call the mandate settled in one motion. Dolan and Planning Board Chair Frank Vallarelli pushed back, worried that a wholesale rezoning would let landowners abandon commercial uses for high-rises and erode the town's commercial tax base.

What passed instead was narrower and more deliberate. A Special Town Meeting in October 2022 created a 7.6-acre overlay running along Main Street from Elm Street to Collincote, stretching from the China Moon site past the old Hugo Harrington's mini golf course. A separate Town Meeting had already carved out a 36-acre mixed-use district near Fallon Road. Together, the two districts gave Stoneham enough zoned capacity to satisfy the state without touching a single block of single-family housing.

That's the mechanism worth understanding if you're evaluating any MBTA Community, not just Stoneham. The law sets a percentage target for zoned capacity. It does not tell a town where to put that capacity. Towns with an underused commercial strip and a motivated planning department can meet the entire mandate on a handful of parcels while leaving residential neighborhoods legally untouched.

The Second Parcel, Three Years Later

The China Moon overlay wasn't a one-time fix. It set a pattern that played out again in a different corner of Main Street.

Rounds Hardware ran at 290 Main Street, at the corner of Montvale Avenue, for 65 years under second-generation owners Bill and Bruce Round. The building itself had a longer history: a former National Guard armory that the elder Round purchased from the town in the late 1970s and converted for commercial use. Like China Moon, competition from online retail eventually caught up with it, and the Rounds announced the store's closure.

In November 2025, Wilmington developer James Castellano bought the three-quarter-acre site for a reported $3.125 million. By January 2026, he had filed plans with Stoneham's Zoning Board of Appeals to gut the interior and build a four-story, 24-unit condominium complex, three of those units designated affordable under Chapter 40B, plus a new 1,819-square-foot commercial suite facing Main Street. William Round, watching from the sidelines, gave the plan his blessing publicly: "It will be good to see my old hardware haunt brought up to date and repurposed."

Here's what the two projects have in common, and why that matters more than either one individually:

Both sites sit on the same commercial corridor. Both involved a legacy, family-run business that had already announced it was closing before a developer stepped in. Neither touched a residential street.

What This Means If You're Comparing Stoneham to Other Towns

The state's January 2026 accounting put 133 of the 177 MBTA Communities in full compliance, with 12 still non-compliant and facing enforcement action from the Attorney General's office. Stoneham isn't on that non-compliant list. It settled its zoning fight back in 2022, well ahead of most of its Middlesex East neighbors, which means buyers here aren't stepping into an unresolved legal dispute the way they might in a town still negotiating with the state.

But compliance status alone tells a buyer almost nothing about their own street. Stoneham's own draft 2026 Open Space and Recreation Plan shows the Building Department approved 514 dwelling units within developments of five or more units in 2023 alone, evidence that the zoning isn't just sitting on paper. That production is real. It is also concentrated exactly where the overlay districts put it: Main Street and Route 28, not the leafy side streets around the Middlesex Fells or Spot Pond.

For a homeowner in one of Stoneham's classic residential neighborhoods, that's the reassurance the compliance headlines don't spell out. The mandate didn't rezone your block. It rezoned two commercial parcels whose owners had already decided to sell.

For an investor or small developer looking at Stoneham, the lesson points the other direction. The next opportunity almost certainly won't come from a random residential lot. It will look like China Moon and Rounds Hardware: an aging, family-owned commercial property on the Route 28 corridor, likely with an owner nearing retirement, sitting on enough land, typically a half acre to three acres, to support a four-story building under the existing overlay. Watching which Main Street storefronts change hands, and to whom, is a far better signal than watching the town's compliance filings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will multi-family housing come to my residential street in Stoneham? Based on how the town has implemented the law so far, no. Stoneham met its MBTA Communities obligation through two targeted overlay districts on Route 28 and Main Street rather than by opening residential zoning townwide.

Is Stoneham in compliance with the MBTA Communities Act? Yes. Stoneham passed zoning intended to meet the mandate back in 2022, well ahead of many neighboring towns, and was not among the 12 communities the state listed as non-compliant as of January 2026.

Why does Chapter 40B come up in these projects? Chapter 40B is a separate, older state law that lets developers bypass certain local zoning restrictions if a project includes affordable units, in towns that haven't hit specific affordable-housing thresholds. It's part of why officials like Wortman noted that some multi-family development in Stoneham's commercial district was already possible even before the MBTA Communities overlay passed.

If you're weighing a purchase in Stoneham, whether you want the reassurance of a settled residential street or you're hunting for the next Main Street parcel with redevelopment potential, the zoning history here does the talking better than any listing description will. Covelle & Company pairs that kind of hyperlocal read on a market with a full design and brokerage team built to move quickly once the right property surfaces. Schedule a Consultation to talk through what a Stoneham purchase, sale, or small-scale redevelopment could look like from here.