The FBI’s never ending real estate hunt
Maybe Boston will land that giant new FBI regional headquarters after all.
The federal agency has been in the real estate market now for almost as long as it is has been chasing Whitey Bulger, looking at sites in Boston and nearby suburbs on which to build a new, $100 million-plus regional headquarters/fortress.
But there are a couple of factors that could make the FBI’s dream home finally become reality.
The first is the flood of hundreds of billions of cash under President Obama’s freshly signed stimulus bill. The FBI has been in the market for a couple years now, but had been hobbled by some pretty tight financial constraints on the amount of money it could shell out for a new home.
I doubt any federal agency is going to go begging for cash now to spend, especially on building projects.
Meanwhile, Hub insiders are making moves that would seem to suggest they are betting the FBI project may be poised to move from the realm of wishful thinking to reality.
Robert Walsh, a long-time friend of Mayor Thomas Menino, and developer Dick Galvin are poised to make a run at a key Hub tract that could give them a fighting chance to build the agency’s long-planned Boston headquarters, B&T’s Paul McMorrow reports.
The pair is angling for a five acre site near Fort Point Channel that the cash strapped U.S. Postal Service just put on the market. Land, apparently, the developers hope will become the next home of the FBI’s new local headquarters.