You know the loop even if you've never thought about it as a loop. In at the Market Basket end of the lot, out past Walgreens, a left into Port Plaza for a haircut at Supercuts or a stop at one of the fitness tenants, back onto Storey Avenue for the light at Low Street. It is not a pretty errand run. It is also not going anywhere, which is exactly why the city has spent most of 2026 asking residents to imagine it differently.
If you've followed any of this, you probably think of it as one conversation: the Storey Ave Reimagined process, three public forums, a plan to make the West End's commercial strip less of a parking lot and more of a place. That conversation is real, and its final forum lands at City Hall on September 23. But there's a second conversation running underneath it that the city has deliberately kept separate, and understanding why matters more than knowing the meeting date.
The village center idea has been on the shelf since 2017
Newburyport's 2017 Master Plan already named this problem. It described the expansive parking lots along Storey Avenue as "somewhat inhospitable" and set a specific goal, LU-7, calling for redevelopment that creates a safe, hospitable environment for pedestrians and cyclists, not just vehicles. Nobody acted on that language for years. The corridor kept doing what it does well: hosting the city's two grocery stores, several banks, two pharmacies, and an urgent care center, all of it reachable only by car.
The numbers explain why walking there never caught on. Storey Avenue carries roughly 20,000 vehicles a day at a posted 35 mph, according to the pedestrian advocacy group Newburyport Livable Streets, with sidewalks that are inconsistent and crossings that are long and unprotected. There are no bike lanes at all east of Low Street. For a city that markets itself on walkability, this is the one stretch where that reputation doesn't apply.
The city finally picked the Master Plan language back up in May. Ward 5 Councilor Lisa Medina Smith, who represents the corridor along with Ward 6 Councilor Mary DeLai, opened the first public forum on May 20 at the Senior/Community Center by saying she was looking forward to hearing directly from the community. An online survey ran through June 3. By the second forum on July 22 at City Hall, the city's planning consultant, Gamble Associates, was presenting schematic renderings built from that public input. The third and final forum is set for September 23 at City Hall, where the zoning updates meant to encourage long-term private redevelopment get their first real airing.
That's the visible track. It's a genuine planning process with real renderings and real public input, and if you shop, bank, or fill a prescription on that stretch, it's worth an hour of your evening.
The second plan doesn't have a meeting. It has a number: 592.
Here's what most coverage of Storey Ave Reimagined leaves out. Massachusetts has separately required Newburyport to zone for a specific amount of multifamily housing under the state's MBTA Communities law. The city's own working math lays it out plainly: the existing 40R Smart Growth District around the MBTA commuter rail station is expected to supply roughly a 700-unit credit toward a total requirement of 1,292 units. That leaves about 592 units of remaining capacity the city still has to place somewhere.
City officials are weighing three ways to close that gap: expand the existing 40R district near the train station, create a new district in the vicinity of Storey Avenue and Low Street, or do some combination of both. Storey Avenue, with its underused parking lots and existing commercial infrastructure, is one of the few stretches of the city with enough contiguous land to absorb hundreds of units without touching a residential neighborhood street by street.
The city has been careful to say, publicly, that the MBTA Communities compliance work and the Storey Ave Mixed Use Village Center rezoning are separate and distinct efforts. That's a legally accurate statement. It's also the reason this is worth explaining rather than just reporting the meeting date. Two planning tracks can be procedurally separate and still land on the same stretch of parking lot.
Why the separation is the part to watch
If the village center visioning and the housing mandate stay on genuinely independent tracks, you could end up with a walkable corridor that never absorbs meaningful new housing capacity, which would push the city back toward expanding the 40R district near the train station instead. If the two tracks converge, and the zoning that comes out of the September 23 forum happens to be the vehicle the city uses to satisfy its 592-unit obligation, then what gets presented as a pedestrian-friendly makeover is also, functionally, the answer to a state housing mandate. The renderings would look similar either way. What gets built afterward would not.
This isn't a warning. Storey Avenue is genuinely underused for what it is, sitting on some of the flattest, most accessible land in the West End, a few minutes from I-95 and the commuter rail. A well-designed mixed-use district there is the kind of change that tends to make a corridor more useful, not less livable. But if you own property nearby, or you're the reason Market Basket's parking lot fills up every Saturday, it's worth knowing which version of "reimagined" you're actually looking at before the zoning language gets finalized.
The other half of the West End already made its decision
It helps to see Storey Avenue against its opposite. A few minutes west, the Common Pasture stretches from Crow Lane and Hale Street down toward Turkey Hill Road and out to Scotland Road in Newbury, land that traces back to the area's original 1635 settlement and still holds large stretches of undeveloped open field. Of the roughly 700 acres that make up the pasture, 293 acres have already been permanently preserved through Community Preservation Act funding and related efforts. The Little River Trail System threads through it for 5.4 miles, built specifically to introduce residents to the Little River Watershed and the pasture's history.
That's the rest of the West End's answer to the same question Storey Avenue is still asking. One half of the neighborhood settled its future years ago, in open fields and trail easements. The other half, the strip mall half, is still deciding whether it becomes a walkable district, a housing solution, both, or neither.
What to actually do with this before September 23
You don't need to become a zoning expert to have a stake in this. Residents off Ferry Road and Moseley Avenue, or anywhere on the Turkey Hill side of the city, already route their week through this corridor whether they think about it that way or not. Attending the September 23 forum, or at minimum reading whatever renderings and zoning language the city posts afterward, tells you something a lot of residents won't bother to find out: whether the plan in front of them is primarily about sidewalks, primarily about housing capacity, or genuinely both. Ward 5 Councilor Lisa Medina Smith and Ward 6 Councilor Mary DeLai have been part of the conversation from the first forum forward and are the two people most likely to be able to answer that distinction directly if you ask.
For a neighborhood built on the idea that its downtown is exceptionally walkable, Storey Avenue has been the exception for a long time. Whether that changes, and what kind of change it turns out to be, is being decided over the next few weeks, not in the abstract.
If you're weighing what a shift like this could mean for a property you own near the corridor, or you're just trying to make sense of what's actually on the table before the next meeting, Douglas Danzey and the team have been tracking Newburyport's zoning and development conversations closely. Schedule a call if you want to talk through what it means for you specifically.
