4 ms·

Lowell and Fitchburg aren't that far away, and have plenty of cheap commercial real estate, unless by "facilities" you mean a fully dressed laboratory/shop; and

• neltnerb 10y ago
  Yes, I meant places easily accessible via public transit, so Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Alston, etc. And yes, I mean a place that you can use chemicals without dealing with permitting for 6+ months. I did actually try to do this, and the Fire Marshall was fantastic to work with, and I looked at both Somerville near Sullivan Square and down near BU. It wasn't hard to find industrial space for cheap enough to manage. I ended up finding a space in Beverly as the closest that was remotely okay, and that only worked because I owned a car (which isn't terribly common in the city, at least among the people I know). But even if you get as far as pursuing permitting it's enormously expensive to outfit your own lab, and impossible without VC backing. Just having access to the equipment at MIT for free/cheap would be a lifesaver. A lot of it is things like "I need a <foo> for a test." but <foo> is a $600k piece of equipment and you need to use it exactly once. You can often get user access (for instance at UMass, MIT or Harvard's user facilities) but those are also not all that quick. Really, Boston just needs something akin to Cyclotron Road.