by John Osborn ·
Friday, August 14, 2026
Vacant for three decades, the buildings of Vicksburg Square show signs of decay, including Allen Hall. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
MassDevelopment’s presentation to the Devens Committee last week confirmed what officials had signaled for months: Stabilizing and clearing hazardous materials from eight vacant buildings in the Innovation and Technology Center district will cost close to $44 million. Demolishing them instead would run about $24.4 million.
Erikk Hokenson, MassDevelopment’s senior vice president of real estate development, made the presentation to nearly three dozen people, in the room and online, at the committee’s Aug. 5 monthly meeting. He was joined by Michael Sweeney, MassDevelopment’s executive vice president for Devens, and Sandi Silk, the agency’s recently appointed executive vice president for real estate.
The assessment was conducted by Icon Architecture, with cost estimates from Miyakoda Consulting and hazardous materials analysis by Fuss & O’Neill. It covers four historic structures at Vicksburg Square: Allen, Knox, Revere, and Hale halls, and four more buildings on Sherman Avenue: the three bachelor officers’ quarters buildings and Washington Hall.
The buildings have been vacant since the mid-1990s except Revere Hall, used as MassDevelopment office space until 2006. Allen Hall, rated in poor condition, accounts for nearly 40% of the total cost, an estimated $17.4 million. MassDevelopment officials described it as being in “imminent danger” of further deterioration. For further details, see the table on page 9.
Housing is currently prohibited in the roughly 90-acre Innovation and Technology Center district, which includes both Vicksburg Square and the Sherman Avenue buildings. Existing zoning allows office, industrial, civic, and academic uses only.
The governor’s Devens Housing Working Group’s final report, issued in May 2025, recommended changing that. It also identified three studies the group considered necessary before voters could be asked to approve the change: building conditions, traffic impacts, and school impacts. Last week’s presentation was the first of the three to be completed.
Devens Committee Chair Laura Scott reminded MassDevelopment officials that residents want buildings reused wherever feasible, rather than new construction on undeveloped land. She noted that “adaptive reuse” was a priority that residents had insisted be included in the working group’s final report.
But Silk gave a blunter assessment—of Allen Hall specifically, and other buildings by implication. “It’s really hard for a rational person to look at those numbers and think that Allen Hall would be possible to save, given its current condition,” she said.
The numbers themselves came as a surprise to MassDevelopment, as well. Silk told the committee the scale of the costs prompted an internal reckoning once the assessment was complete. She said conversations about funding for abatement were “elevated” within the agency as soon as the findings came in, though she cautioned nothing has been awarded or finalized.
That urgency was underscored by Sweeney, who warned that a partial structural collapse at Allen Hall, before it’s stabilized, would make the problem worse, not just costlier: debris from a collapse would have to be handled as hazardous material rather than ordinary demolition waste. If the situation was that dangerous, one resident asked, why was parking allowed within the quadrangle for athletic events on Rogers Field? Sweeney promised to look into it.
Hazardous materials have to come out of the buildings regardless of what happens to them afterward, officials said. That cost, about $9.5 million of the $44 million total, doesn’t depend on whether the buildings are eventually reused or torn down. MassDevelopment officials said abatement funding is now their most urgent priority, separate from, and not contingent on, the rezoning super town meeting vote that would be needed before any redevelopment could proceed.
The vote itself, which MassDevelopment says it hopes to hold next spring, would allow housing in the district for the first time. It wouldn’t guarantee any building actually gets redeveloped. It’s also, for now, the only route available. State lawmakers this summer rejected a competing proposal that would have let MassDevelopment bypass the three-town super town meeting process entirely, leaving the traditional vote as the sole legal path to rezoning the district.
MassDevelopment officials told attendees that a successful vote to allow housing would send an encouraging signal to developers who might otherwise be wary after a 2012 rezoning attempt failed in Harvard, derailing a housing proposal from Trinity Financial.
“It’s sort of like the classic chicken and egg,” Sweeney said. Silk, a former developer, put it more directly. Someone who watched Trinity Financial spend a million dollars and have to walk away following the 2012 vote has little reason to try again, she said.“That’s not a million dollars today. It’s probably two.”
She pointed to a recent wave of responses to unrelated MassDevelopment requests for proposals at Devens as evidence of “real deep interest in housing” that a successful vote could unlock. “If the super town meeting vote had gone differently in 2012 ... that project would have gone forward, and all of those buildings would have been saved,” she said.
Not everyone on the committee was convinced that Vicksburg Square’s fate and the rest of the district’s need to move together. Devens resident and community organizer Regina Todd asked whether MassDevelopment would consider decoupling Vicksburg Square from the broader vote.
She warned that uncertainty over “what’s going to survive out of Vicksburg Square,” and how long that will take, could hold up progress on the district’s other, far less costly buildings and undeveloped parcels. “That was our focus,” she said, referring to the working group, “trying to get the other parcels and the reuse of the other buildings while a comprehensive plan is developed for Vicksburg Square.”
Sweeney said MassDevelopment is currently contemplating a single zoning request covering the entire ITC area, Vicksburg Square included. Silk added that what’s under consideration is narrower than a full rezoning: it would simply add housing as a permitted use, not rewrite the district’s zoning wholesale.
Under Chapter 498, the 1993 law that created the Devens Regional Enterprise Zone, the rezoning must be approved separately by all three towns: Harvard, Ayer, and Shirley. A single “no” vote defeats it for the entire district. That’s the outcome Trinity Financial ran into in 2012. A $5.1 million state earmark tied to the new vote remains before a legislative conference committee and is not yet law.
Hokenson said that MassDevelopment plans to return to the Devens Committee in September, with the consultants who conducted the assessment, to hear directly from residents about their priorities for the buildings.