Living in Framingham, MA

About Framingham

Framingham never had a single village at its heart. John Stone settled near the Sudbury River falls in 1647 and built a gristmill there, the start of what became the mill village of Saxonville. The town was incorporated in 1700, and Framingham Centre grew up as the civic focus on the old Boston turnpike. When the Boston and Worcester railroad reached South Framingham in 1834, that area became the industrial center. Voters approved a city charter in 2017, and Framingham became a city on January 1, 2018.

Those separate centers still shape the map. Saxonville keeps mid-1800s mill housing near the falls, and the Framingham Centre Common Historic District holds 28 buildings around the old common, including the Village Hall and First Parish Church. The Danforth Art Museum and School is now part of Framingham State University. Green space comes in several forms: Callahan State Park has more than 800 acres and seven miles of marked trails, Garden in the Woods shows New England native plants on 45 acres, and the Cochituate Rail Trail runs from Concord Street toward Natick.

Downtown, around the Concord Street common and the rail station, is where the city has zoned for denser housing. Town Meeting approved a Central Business (CB) district there in 2015, and in December 2024 the mayor submitted it to the state as Framingham's district under the MBTA Communities law. The state granted conditional compliance on January 22, 2025, and the city announced full compliance in July 2025; the state's compliance list, as of October 21, 2026, includes Framingham. Projects downtown include Alta Union House, 196 apartments across Concord Street from the Downtown Common, which was scheduled to open to tenants on July 24, 2019, and 181 homes at 358 Waverly Street, about 500 feet from the commuter rail station, where ground was broken in late 2025. The city's 2026 to 2030 Consolidated Plan records a call from stakeholders for more "missing middle" housing types.

Homes in Framingham

The Massachusetts Historical Commission's survey of Framingham records central-chimney double houses built for mill workers at Saxonville around 1825 to 1835, wood-frame tenements and row houses in South Framingham and Coburnville, and two-family houses that were widely built there from about 1915 to 1940, a period with relatively few three-deckers. Larger suburban houses were built around Framingham Centre on Park Street, Prospect Street and Salem Road. The city's 2026 to 2030 Consolidated Plan counts 15,318 owner-occupied homes and 12,492 rental units, and 93 percent of the owner-occupied homes are single-unit houses. Seventy-seven percent of the housing stock was built before 1980, and the largest share, 21 percent, dates from 1950 to 1959 (American Community Survey, 2018 to 2022).