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In Boston, Big Cranes From the New York Times (NYT)
and a Couth Comeback
of November 3, 1998
By CAREY GOLDBERGBOSTON -- Boston, of course, would never do anything so utterly uncouth as to boom.
But consider: Big cranes are in such demand here that builders have been looking for them as far west as the Mississippi. Architects are in short supply. Downtown commercial real estate has the lowest vacancy rate in the country, local monitors say, and the highest average rental rates, topping even San Francisco's and New York City's. Hotel rooms are often so difficult to get that reservation clerks might as well be Cabots or Lodges, for all the airs they put on.
Consider, too, that for the first time in more than five years new office towers are going up in downtown Boston, with one planned to rise higher than the landmark Prudential Center. Warnings of the dreaded "Manhattanization" of downtown can again be heard.
And this: Boston, its face already changing with the $11 billion highway project known as the "Big Dig" is embarking on a new project so grandiose it has been compared to the creation of the graceful Back Bay section a century ago: development of the 1,000-acre Seaport district in South Boston, the last great chunk of convenient empty land on the water. (Water that was once the filthiest urban harbor in the country and is now, thanks to a nearly complete $4billion clean-up, possibly the cleanest.)
The city, said the Boston Redevelopment Authority director, Thomas O'Brien, using the local vernacular, "is wicked hot."
For some, it is already too hot. In legendary working-class neighborhoods like the Italian North End and traditionally Irish South Boston, apartment rental and sale prices have nearly doubled in the last two years, as white-collar-wearers have invaded and some blue collars have been squeezed out. And advocates for the poorest Bostonians worry about still-greater crowding and displacement.
But overall, Boston's resurgence is seen by many urban experts as spearheading a hopeful trend among aging northern cities emerging from decades of decay. Planners talk about an "urban surge" or "comeback cities," spurred by factors as varied as plummeting crime rates, the st rong national economy, the return of empty-nesters to walkable lives and the disdain that many young, educated professionals feel for the suburbs they grew up in.
They qualify carefully. The greatest population and employment growth is still occurring in the suburbs and "exurbs," farther out, and many urban cores continue to crumble, losing people and jobs. Many parents still spurn urban school systems. And of course it is sunny cities like Atlanta, Phoenix and Las Vegas that have been booming loudest.
But from Chicago to Cleveland to Pittsburgh to Baltimore, urban scholars also note mounting signs of a popular willingness -- even eagerness -- to live and work and play in once-shunned downtowns and centers, and of both public and private willingness to invest there.
"I think the traditional downtowns of older cities are now being kind of re-imagined by people," said Alex Krieger, chairman of Harvard's department of urban planning and design. "Instead of places where you get blue-collar jobs, which is the mid-century view of the city, they're being re-assimilated in the consciousness of Americans as places of culture, leisure, entertainment, bar-hopping and service-sector jobs."
"This is one of the most interesting changes in turn-of-the-century American society," he said. "There's this amazing shift from the city as a place where you live because you can't afford to live anywhere else, to a place where you go to have fun."
And among resurging eastern and midwestern cities, some urban scholars say, Boston seems to be coming back the best, helped by huge public projects but also by a right-place-right-time position in the strong economy.
After a Hard Fall, a Welcome Bounce
n a way, such a high-stepping comeback seems only fair. The 20th-biggest city in the United States, with nearly 600,000 people, Boston suffered disproportionately in the last recession. As New England hit the worst economic times of any region since the Depression, the Boston-area overbuilding of the mid-1980's turned, by the end of the decade, to speculative despair.
It took until last year to regain all the recession jobs lost and sop up the extra office space. But now, history seems to be smiling again on the intellectual and cultural peacock of a town that calls itself The Hub and the Athens of America. In a traditional toast, Boston is also called "The Home of the Bean and the Cod"; but now at just the right time, it is more of a home to the bit and the doc -- a capital of financial services, medicine and high technology, all fields that have particularly thrived in this thriving economy.
That economic diversity should help cushion Boston from financial shocks like this summer's stock market "correction," said Thomas Menino, Boston 's first Italian-American mayor and a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy whose business-friendly approach has helped fuel the city's growth.
"Boston depends on four different economies -- academia, health care, mutual funds and tourism," he said, speaking in the cavernous, concrete-beamed City Hall office that he unhappily compares to a racquetball court. "Most cities depend on one segment of the economy."
Of late, economic uncertainty has led to tighter credit for commercial real estate deals here, and economists predict a slowing in the city's growth rate. They also warn of an impending labor shortage, particularly of skilled workers. But at the same time, they point to the flip side of prosperity.
In the Italian North End, for example, Nancy Caruso, a pillar of the dense, sauce-scented neighborhood who has lived there for 50 years, said she got cards and letters almost every day asking whether she might not like to sell her small building. Buildings bought by speculators in the 1980's for $200,000 would now bring perhaps $600,000, she said.
"Within the last two years, it's started to boom again, and last year it was very booming, and this year, it's just gone crazy," she said -- to the point that Italian families who had moved to the suburbs and now want to come back find they cannot afford it.
The North End situation, though nice for owners, also illustrates the great downside of the city's current vigor. Boston housing has long been some of the most expensive in the nation, but the soaring prices lately have been squeezing poorer residents ever harder, particularly new immigrants.
"Every neighborhood in Boston has very strong pressures in its residential market," said O'Brien, of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Real estate brokers say that in South Boston, the heavily Irish enclave that gained ill-fame for its opposition to busing in the 1970's, rents have shot up perhaps 70 percent in the last 18 months; and in the traditional triple-deckers that have usually housed a family on each floor, the population is changing.
"What's happening is that the families that have lived here for so long are really becoming displaced," said Mike Foley, regional vice president for Jack Conway and Co. Realtors. "We're renting to three or four individuals who can pay $500a piece. Two years ago, you might have been getting $800 for those same apartments. The marketplace has increased so drastically that South Boston families can't afford these rents."
Among Boston's poorest, the economic energy has helped. Marc Germain, a social worker in the Dorchester section, said, "It's easier to get a lot of young people, who are traditionally unable to get into the labor market, jobs."
But it has also hurt, said Charlotte Kahn, director of the Boston Foundation's Persistent Poverty Project. With the city's high cost of living, she said, "for people on fixed incomes or minimum wage, it has always been tough, and in this kind of boom environment, it becomes that much tougher. And when you factor in welfare reform, which is due to start in December, nobody knows what that's really going to mean for people -- because in this environment, with costs rising and job opportunities contracting, it could be very tragic for a lot of families. We're already seeing an increase in homelessness."
Boston's growth also creates problems for those in the path of development -- like George Hagerty, an artist with a studio in the historic Fenway Studios building near the chichi boutiques of Newbury Street. He protests that his light will be ruined if plans go forward for a neighboring skyscraper over the Massachusetts Turnpike, and that in these times of bullish building, sometimes, "People get squished."
"We could either succeed or fail very badly at changing the face of Boston," he warned.
Economic Changes, Yes, but Social, Too
he burst in Boston's civic energy, some city leaders say, seems to come not only from economic forces but from social changes as well, changes in a city so known for paralyzing political fights that former Governor William Weld said not long ago it had boomed "in spite of itself."
For well over three decades, for example, an elite, rather secretive group called The Vault, founded in 1959 by mainly Yankee bankers and businessmen to help create a "New Boston" in the dismal post-war years, was seen as a leading force in shaping the city. That group imploded nearly two years ago, and is officially defunct.
Now, said Ira Jackson, an executive vice president at BankBoston, a broader, more open, more inclusive group of business, labor, neighborhood and political leaders has been coalescing, with more of a tendency to consult each other, collaborate, and even be friends, and more of a "getting-it-done" approach to everything from crime reduction to education.
Take Boston's push to host the Democratic National Convention in 2000. Boston has never hosted the convention, Jackson noted, in part because it could not get its act together compete for it. This time, when Democratic scouts came around and visited everything from the city's tallest building, the blue-mirrored John Hancock tower, to its popular new amphibious-vehicle tours through the Charles River and around town, it was different.
"The notion you could get business guys to sit down with labor and community leaders and the Republican governor and the Democratic Speaker and everybody at a big lovefest at the top of the Hancock or at 7:00 in the morning at Filene's Basement!" Jackson exclaimed. "Or taking a Duck Tour with delegates and driving the thing onto the floor of the Fleet Center! All those things happened. It couldn't have happened in Boston ever before."
The new model for city development, said Thomas Piper, an urban-planning research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the way Boston is approaching the gargantuan project of developing the new Seaport district, which is expected to take a good 20 years to complete.
The area, which already includes the World Trade Center exhibition complex, the just-opened $220-million Federal courthouse and the just-opened Seaport Hotel, was the subject of a special town meeting-like conference in May, and the city's plan for it is now absorbing widespread comment from groups ranging from neighborhood defenders to the Boston Society of Architects. Interested residents can even check out a 3-dimensional Seaport plan on the Internet.
"It's a challenge to the imagination," Piper said, comparing the project's scale to the development of Battery Park City in Manhattan. The Seaport can also be seen, Piper said, as the shape of the urban future: a mega-project, made possible by an environmental clean-up, that will offer enticing recreational spots, serve pedestrians well, and embody broad public input.
Lively debate is also already under way about what to do with the 27-acre empty swath that will be left over when the Big Dig has succeeded in sinking the unsightly main highway known as the Central Artery.
Building From Ground, and Beneath, Up
oston has recovered and then some, but not all by itself, all acknowledge. It has been blessed by $17 billion in infrastructure investments, including a $1 billion renovation of Logan Airport, brought home by long-serving and powerful congressmen and contributed by a wealthy state that makes its capital here. The seaport district will have a subway line and turnpike exits courtesy of the Big Dig, for example, and the North End is red-hot in part because soon, it will no longer be cut off from the rest of the city by the Central Artery.
"Boston is exceptional" in its comeback, said Alan Altshuler, a professor of urban planning at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a skeptic about the talk of urban resurgence. "There's been massive infrastructure investment focused here."
Other skeptics would agree, pointing out that the concentration of poverty in many cities has continued to rise. They also note that, while there are many projections of a coming urban population influx, in fact, not even fashionable centers like Denver and Portland have seen much population growth in the 90s compared to the suburbs. That cities are doing better is undeniable, they say, but at best that means a new stability, not a full-fledged renaissance.
Krieger of Harvard reflects the optimistic outlook: "The point is that, thought about most broadly, there is substantial reinvestment in the cores of our cities," he said, "and that is quite different from a generation or two ago in America, or even a decade ago."
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