Living in Newton, MA

About Newton

Newton sits about eight miles west of downtown Boston and has no single center. Instead it is a patchwork of thirteen villages, from Auburndale and Waban to Nonantum and Chestnut Hill, and many of them have a small downtown of their own. The villages have no legal boundaries, so addresses can puzzle first-time visitors. The city goes by The Garden City. It began as Cambridge Village in 1681, took the name Newton in 1766 and became a city in 1874.

Water and transit shape the map. The Charles River runs along the city's north and west sides, past Newton Lower Falls and Newton Upper Falls, both former small industrial sites, and under Echo Bridge at Hemlock Gorge. The Green Line D branch runs through the middle of the city, with stops including Newton Centre and Riverside, while the Framingham/Worcester Line stops at Newtonville, West Newton and Auburndale. Commonwealth Avenue carries the Boston Marathon over Heartbreak Hill, between Walnut Street and Boston College.

Most of Newton's land is residential: in the city's FY2026 classification hearing packet, residential property made up 92.23 percent of taxable value, and 16,947 of its 26,888 residential parcels were single-family homes, alongside 5,883 condominiums and 2,490 two-family houses. The largest planned housing site is Riverside, the Green Line terminus, where the MBTA approved an 85-year lease of part of the parking lots for mixed-use development in 2009 and the city rezoned the site for a larger project in late 2019. A revised two-phase plan put to the MBTA board in August 2024 calls for about 545 apartments and a garage in the first phase, and an office or lab building of about 150,000 square feet with about 100 more units in the second. Under the state's MBTA Communities law, Newton appears on the state's list of compliant municipalities.

Homes in Newton

A 2003 city survey of mid-20th-century housing reported that, as of the 1960 Census, 70.5 percent of Newton's housing units were single-family dwellings and 20.5 percent were two-family homes. It also noted that, as of the 2000 Census, only 19 percent of the city's dwellings had been built after 1960. The 2020 Census counted 33,320 housing units in the city. In the FY2026 assessment, 16,947 of 26,888 residential parcels were single-family, 5,883 were condominiums, 2,490 two-family, 252 three-family and 159 apartment buildings.