A buyer's attorney flags it during the title search, usually with a pause before the phrase comes out: there's a Notice of Activity and Use Limitation recorded against this parcel. For a lot of buyers looking at new construction in Woburn's New Boston Street corridor, that's the first time they've heard the word Superfund attached to a listing they're actually excited about. The instinct is to treat it like a warning label. In this specific corridor, it's closer to the opposite. It means someone has already done the work most buyers never get to see.
What New Boston Street Actually Sits On
The land north of the MBTA and Amtrak tracks in Woburn spent a century as an industrial site. From 1853 to 1931, the property that would become the Industri-Plex Superfund Site manufactured chemicals including lead-arsenic insecticides, acetic acid, and sulfuric acid. From 1934 to 1969, a glue operation on the same ground processed raw animal hide and chrome-tanned hide waste. The byproducts left arsenic, lead, and chromium in the soil across roughly 245 acres, and the site landed on the federal National Priorities List in 1983.
A few miles south, the city's two municipal drinking water wells, known as Wells G and H, were shut down in 1979 after industrial contamination was discovered. That case became the basis for Jonathan Harr's book "A Civil Action" and the film that followed. The 1986 trial found W.R. Grace liable and cleared Beatrice Foods, and Grace settled for $8 million. Woburn stopped drawing water from those wells decades ago and now sources its supply from Horn Pond, where a PFAS filtration upgrade is currently under construction with completion expected later this year.
That history is real, and cleanup at the Industri-Plex site is still ongoing under EPA oversight. For a buyer, the practical question is what the cleanup produced on the specific parcel in front of you, and the answer is written in the paperwork that came out of it.
The Words on the Deed, Translated
A NAUL restricts specific things on a specific parcel, usually related to disturbing capped soil, extracting groundwater, or building below a certain depth without notifying the state. A Grant of Environmental Easement and Restriction, or GERE, does similar work with a stronger legal instrument attached to the land itself. Neither one means the house on top of it is unsafe to live in. Both mean the EPA and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection reviewed the specific ground you're standing on and decided what future owners are and aren't allowed to do to it.
Across the Industri-Plex site, regulators and the responsible parties have recorded 46 of these instruments since 2009: three GEREs from 2009 through 2016, and 42 NAULs recorded between 2017 and 2024, plus a city roadway ordinance covering shared infrastructure. That's not a sign the area is unusually dangerous. It's a sign the area has an unusually complete paper trail, one most ordinary residential sales in older parts of Woburn simply don't generate.
Not Every Parcel Gets the Same Answer
The Industri-Plex site isn't one blanket designation. It's a patchwork of individual determinations, and where your specific parcel falls on that patchwork is the only question that matters.
| Parcel | Status | What changed and when |
|---|---|---|
| 120 Commerce Way & 200 Presidential Way | Residential approved with conditions, 2018 | A 2018 Explanation of Significant Difference allowed residential use |
| 200 Presidential Way (10.7 acres) | Fully deleted from the Superfund list | EPA later determined no restrictions were necessary on this portion at all |
| Zero New Boston Street (3.42 acres) | Residential approved, December 2023 | Cleared the way for the Cabot, Cabot & Forbes apartment build |
| 216 New Boston Street (3.8 acres) | Cap expanded, reclassified, December 2024 | Medical and lab reuse construction anticipated to start in 2025 or 2026 |
| Remaining OU-1 acreage | Commercial and industrial use only | No residential clearance has been issued |
Notice that 200 Presidential Way didn't just get a conditional green light. It graduated. What started as residential use "with conditions" eventually became a full deletion from the federal list, with EPA stating no human and environmental health concerns remained on the parcel. That's the direction this corridor has been moving for years: toward less restriction, not more, as each piece gets individually cleared.
What the Developer Had to Do Before Anyone Could Move In
The clearest illustration of how this actually works on the ground is the Cabot, Cabot & Forbes project at Zero New Boston Street, a 12-acre parcel that had been used by a paint and epoxy distributor. Before the EPA would sign off, the developer's environmental firm, Haley Aldrich, laid out a remediation plan: excavate the top six inches of soil across the site and haul it offsite, truck in clean fill for all landscaped areas, and install an air quality monitoring system inside the new multi-story building itself, specifically to confirm residents aren't exposed to vapor intrusion from anything left underground. The EPA's own language on the approval was direct: based on sampling and a baseline risk assessment, "residential use could be permitted on the property."
That's not a rubber stamp. It's a site-specific engineering response, reviewed publicly, before a single lease or purchase and sale agreement got signed. A few hundred feet away, Fairfield Residential is building a separate complex of roughly 445 units across three buildings with an attached parking garage, timed to the same infrastructure event. Most older homes in Woburn never went through a site-specific review like this one, so a buyer comparing the two is comparing a property with a detailed public record against one whose history may be less documented.
The Bridge Is the Tell
If you want a read on whether the market believes this remediation is real, look at what capital is doing, not what a headline says. The New Boston Street Bridge, a single-lane wooden span built in the 1880s, was damaged in a 1972 fire and razed a few years later, leaving North Woburn cut off from this side of the city for more than five decades. The city began pushing the state to rebuild it in 2004. Construction is now underway, with steel-raising completed in April 2025 and the city's own project tracker listing an expected opening this year.
Two large residential developers didn't wait for the bridge to be finished before committing hundreds of units to the land it will reconnect. Developers make that commitment after their own environmental consultants and the EPA have reviewed the site, so it tells you the review process was completed for those parcels. It doesn't settle the question for any other parcel, which still needs its own answer. As one North Woburn city councilor put it during a permit extension vote for the Cabot, Cabot & Forbes project, "it's a pretty complicated area with the superfund site, so I'm in favor of this extension." Complicated, in this case, meant paperwork and process. Not danger.
Even the Hotel Money Agrees
The clearest current signal sits at Woburn Landing, the former W.R. Grace tannery parcel that's now home to a dual-branded Homewood Suites and Hampton Inn alongside a restaurant row that includes 110 Grille, Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, and Pressed Cafe. In August 2026, the City Council approved subdividing the 10.5-acre site into two separate lots, splitting the hotel from the restaurants specifically so the hotel's owner could pursue a sale or refinancing. A lender doesn't finance or a buyer doesn't purchase a hospitality asset on formerly contaminated land without underwriting the environmental history first. The fact that this transaction is happening at all, on a site with an active NAUL history, is itself information.
What This Means at Your Closing Table
If you're looking at anything in this corridor, new construction or otherwise, ask your attorney for the specific Explanation of Significant Difference or Record of Decision covering your exact parcel, not the neighborhood in general. Cover Certification Reports for individual Industri-Plex properties are kept at the Woburn Public Library and available through the EPA's site page. If you're buying new construction on formerly capped or remediated ground, ask whether the building includes an air quality or vapor monitoring system like the one required at Zero New Boston Street, and ask to see recent readings. A NAUL restricting groundwater use or excavation depth is a very different animal from a restriction on habitability, and the difference matters for your mortgage, your insurance, and your resale disclosures down the line.
For buyers weighing a New Boston Street listing against something in an established part of Woburn, the condo market comparison is worth a look before you write an offer.
A Few Questions Worth Answering Directly
Does a NAUL mean the property is contaminated? It means a specific environmental condition was identified, addressed, and is now managed under a recorded restriction, most often limiting things like groundwater extraction or deep excavation rather than everyday use of the home.
Can you get a mortgage on a property with a NAUL? Lenders underwriting new construction on these exact parcels, including the Zero New Boston Street development, work from the EPA's residential-use approval as part of the property record, the same document your attorney would pull during a title search.
Is Woburn's current tap water affected by the historical contamination? No. The city stopped using Wells G and H decades ago and now sources water from Horn Pond, where a PFAS treatment upgrade is underway with completion expected this year.
If you're weighing a listing in the New Boston Street corridor against something elsewhere in Woburn, the specific paperwork attached to that parcel is a real variable in how you structure your offer and your financing. Jodi Fitzgerald can walk through what's actually recorded against a specific address before you get to the title search. Schedule a free consultation.
