Is Lyme Soured on Building $100 Million Houston Life Science Project?

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Reported by Annette Kreuger, Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). The cities of Boston and Cambridge are firmly established as major life science hubs. Both are filled with offices and labs of the majority of the world’s life science companies, populated by industry majors as well as fledgling start-ups. So, when one of that region’s largest developers, Lyme Properties, LLC (Cambridge, Massachusetts), quietly opened an office in Houston, it was viewed as an essential step in the Bayou city’s quest to raise its industry profile. Now, Lyme’s plans to build a $100 million Center for Life Science have apparently ground to a halt and a construction start is nowhere on the horizon.

As reported by Industrial Info Resources (reference: Pharmaceutical Tracker - Online Database), Lyme purchased a two-acre site at 1911 Holcombe Boulevard and subsequently opened a local office, staffed by one. The company, which has developed more than 3 million square feet of research space, then went on to retain the services of prestigious architectural firm Tsoi/Kobus & Associates (Cambridge, Massachusetts) to design the project. Local industry boosters, including BioHouston (see: BioHouston Taps Former Rice University President Malcolm Gillis for Top Job), looked to the Center as the first wave of major of commercial development in the rapidly expanding Med Center area (see: Texas Round-Up: Lone Star State Ropes in Over $1.1 Billion in Capital Projects from Pharmaceutical-Biotech Sector). Local contractor Tellepsen Corporation (Houston, Texas) was brought on board and roughly 24 months after setting up shop, it appeared Lyme would break ground last fall. It never happened.

While Lyme has not officially announced that the project has been scrapped, any mention of the project has disappeared from Lyme’s website, where it previously had been included along with information regarding the company’s other similar projects in New England. There is a small glimmer of hope of the project someday being resurrected in that the Houston office is still listed, albeit calls to the office are answered by a recorder. Lyme Properties, LLC was formed in 1993 for life science property development by David Clem, the founder of the Lyme Timber Company, a New Hampshire Limited Partnership organized in 1976 to invest in timberland and rural real estate.

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