After years of delays, construction on a large real estate development on Somerville's doorstep is expected to get going early in 2013, according to the Boston Globe.

The Globe reports the NorthPoint development in Cambridge, near the Lechmere Green Line station, is expected to cost $2 billion and take a decade to complete.

Once done, it will have 2,900 residences, 2 million square feet of office and laboratory facilities, retail space and a food market, according to the Globe.

Read the article here.

Somerville, which is home to another large development not too far away—Assembly Row, which is also building office, restaurant and retail space—will no doubt be interested to see how NorthPoint progresses.

Somerville's mayor is supportive of the NorthPoint development and sees it as an important regional project because its development is intertwined with the Green Line Extension and the extension of the Community Path, according to the mayor's office.

NorthPoint will be adjacent to the planned new Lechmere Station on the Green Line. The new Lechmere Station, which would be built across Monsignor O'Brien Highway from the current station, is in many ways a lynchpin project for the proposed Green Line Extension into Somerville—the station needs to move before the rest of the extension can be built.

Meanwhile, Somerville has long-term plans to develop the Inner Belt and Brickbottom neighborhoods of the city, which are a proverbial stone's throw away from NorthPoint.

As with NorthPoint, Somerville hopes to attract developers of office, laboratory and research space to those neighborhoods.

A maintenance facility for the Green Line Extension would be built in the Inner Belt neighborhood.