The outlook for the downtown Boston tower market has been fairly gloomy.

But while it would be a stretch to say the sun is shining across the Charles River in Kendall Square, it’s worth taking note of a couple trends.

First, in contrast to the downtown tower market, the biotech, lab space driven East Cambridge market is showing some key signs of life.

Boston Properties recently reported a pair of leases totaling more than 80,000 square feet for its Cambridge Center addresses.

And while the biotech industry has had its share of turmoil over the last several months, lab vacancy rates nationally have risen only slightly, to 14.5 percent, according to one recent report.

CresaPartners, in the firm’s recent second quarter report, highlights the contrast between the struggling downtown office market and Cambridge’s still thriving biotech sector.

“While the vacancy rate is slowly rising, average asking rents for Cambridge office and laboratory space have remained steady since the beginning of the year,’’ CresaPartners notes.  “Unlike Cambridge, Boston rents have been decreasing, as demand for commercial real estate remains sluggish throughout Greater Boston during the continued economic slowdown.”

Could it just be that the battered office market is showing some early signs of life?

That’s the impression I came away with after reading through a transcript of Boston Properties top executives discussing the Hub-based real estate giant’s second quarter earnings.

Clearly no one is popping the champagne yet over at the firm’s headquarters over in the Prudential tower. Some big challenges remain out there.

But after hitting a real low in the first few months of the year, leasing activity is picking up across the company’s office tower portfolio, noted top BP executive Doug Linde.

The company signed leases for 600,000 square feet of office space in the second quarter. That was more than double the 250,000 square feet in deals inked in the first three months of the year. And Boston Properties has signed an additional four leases, for another 152,000 square feet, in the last two weeks alone.
“The momentum in activity continues,’’ Linde told analysts.

Positive signs in the greater Boston and Cambridge market according to Boston Properties include:
•    A 62,000 square foot deal with an expanding life sciences company for all the remaining space at 3 Cambridge Center
•    A lease renewal with a tech firm in Waltham that saw the company expand its footprint from 80,000 square feet to 130,000.
•    Another lease for 20,000 square feet at One Cambridge Center.

Poor John Hynes.

The once star Boston developer certainly has his hands full.

The meltdown of the Filene’s project, which was to have been the crown jewel of a reborn Downtown Crossing, is bad enough. Instead of a gleaming new tower and retail complex we are left with a bombed out block, circa Berlin, 1945.

But now Hynes is facing serious challenge on this other ventures as well.

It wasn’t long ago that Hynes was talking about building a new neighborhood, complete with its own school and arts complex, on a swath of windswept parking lots next to Fan Pier and South Boston’s waterfront.

But that project looks increasingly tenuous, with one of his top investment partners, Morgan Stanley, slammed with big losses from big bets in the now unraveling commercial real estate sector. The bank recently reported a $700 million write-down on the value of its once prized commercial property portfolio.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in South Korea, Hynes and Gale International are scrambling to avoid a potentially embarrassing meltdown of the epic New Songdo City project.

Construction has stopped mid-stream on a 68-story tower that is the centerpiece of the vastly ambitious, $68 billion planned city. A number of investors have pulled out, citing fears that new government rules regulating the sale of condos would dampen sales interest in the skyscrapers top floors.

I guess it’s the downside of having sky-high ambitions – when things go wrong they really go wrong in a big way.

The next couple of months could be huge for Bay State developers.
In August, state environmental officials will release a proposal for tough new rules on storm-water runoff.
The idea is to prevent rainwater from washing across parking lots and into nearby, ponds, streets and rivers, polluting local waterways
But early versions of the proposal by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection appeared to take a carpet bombing approach to the problem, one that would require expensive retrofitting of parking lots across the state by everyone from hospitals to developers of office buildings.
Massachusetts NAIOP, which represents the local development community, has estimated the cost to comply with the new rules could be in the billions.
David Begelfer, the organization’s chief executive, says he just hopes state environmental officials were paying close attention to the hundreds of comments received from local developers and executives weighing in against these draconian new regs.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts NAIOP is hoping to get another crack this fall at passing a bill that would give hard-pressed developers as breather as they struggle to survive amid the worst downturn in generations.
The bill would extend all permits granted on projects out two years. The aim is to prevent a situation where permits expire on stalled projects, requiring builders to go through months if not years of additional paperwork after the economy recovers.
While nothing’s been passed yet, Begelfer said lawmakers are at least receptive to the idea.
“That is still looking like it’s getting a very good hearing,’’ he said.

That’s the question I have reading about Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s push to boost Boston’s already high hotel room tax even higher.

These are desperate times and there may simply be no other way to raise the kind of cash needed to spare the city from massive cuts.

The mayor has proposed a 2 percent bump in the tax rate on city hotel rooms, up to 14.45 percent.

But in doing so, city officials are also tapping a financing mechanism, one that some in the local hotel and convention industry have come to view as the property of the city’s sprawling meeting complex in South Boston.

An earlier increase to the hotel tax played a key role in helping finance the new, $800 million-plus Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

And with talk about a major expansion of the hall brewing, some in the local convention industry were clearly hoping to go back to that well again when the time came for adding onto the center.

But that idea just got a lot harder. It is one thing to boost the hotel tax to 14.45 percent, but it will surely be that much harder to boost it again to 16 or 17 percent to pay for a grand new addition to Boston’s new meeting hub.

That could very well meet some stiff political resistance.
In percent terms Boston does not have the highest city hotel tax in the country.

However, given our high hotel rates, in pure dollar terms, the amount hotel guests will be paying ranks right up there.

We are now looking at nearly $30 a night in taxes on a $200 room.

That’s real money and it could make raising it higher for a convention center expansion that much harder.

The antics of the colorful International Place developer certainly make entertaining reading.

Faced with staunch opposition from City Hall and influential neighbors, Chiofaro has taken to the streets, literally, to promote his bold plan to build a pair of twin towers overlooking the Greenway.

He’s orchestrated a write-in campaign to flood the Boston Redevelopment Authority with letters of support, put up a banner on the ugly garage he wants to demolish, and has even taken to showing up at various development events starring the mayor to chat up city officials and and neighbors on the merits of his plan.

I’m not one for developers who feel they need to hide in the shadows and shirk the public in order to get things done in Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s Boston.

Yet surely Chiofaro knows the more he squawks, the higher he rises on a certain list, mental or otherwise, of our leading citizens that, let’s just say aren’t exactly in the good graces of City Hall.

I haven’t talked to Don in a year, but let’s just say, based on some subjective, but pretty convincing evidence, that he is pretty high up on that list, if not topping it now.

He’s a pretty sharp guy, so I suspect that he knows that. I suspect he also knows that those generate ill will on the fifth floor of City Hall are going to have a hard time moving their development plans forward.

Given his sky-high approval ratings, the mayor is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Maybe Chiofaro’s decided that if his plan is destined to go down, it won’t be without a fight.

Then again, the guy who managed to build International Place in the teeth of the early 1990s recession has a  few more tricks up his sleeve.

It’s not just office towers that are in trouble now.

The hotel sector, which just a year or two ago looked indestructible, is now showing signs of stress as well.

Just check out this new offering by The Providence Group, a Duxbury-based hotel operator, is launching a Distressed Hotel Management Program.

The Providence Group’s new initiative is aimed at helping bankers and financial institutions who suddenly find themselves playing hotelier.

This certainly looks to be a sign of the times, with business travel down and those executives who are still on the road shunning the luxury brands for less expensive accommodations.

Here’s what Jed Heller, president of the Providence Group, had to say in a statement on the new offering.

“Banks and other financial institutions find themselves in an increasingly poor financial situation dealing with so many failing hotels. Our goal is to quickly assess the situation, develop a strategic action plan, and leverage our network of buyers to assist in the sale of the property and minimize the financial drain on the investors and owners.”

Overall, room revenue is down more than 19 percent at Boston area hotels, with the red ink expected to keep on flowing into next year.

If you are noticing a lot of for rent signs lately in your neighborhood, you are definitely not seeing things.

The apartment market was not long ago seen as a sweep spot as disenchanted homeowners flee, voluntarily or not, to rentals.

But now the apartment market appears to be headed downhill as well.

The national apartment vacancy rate has now risen to 7.5 percent. That is its highest level since 1987, research firm REIS Inc. finds.

We are now quickly closing in on the all-time high of 7.8 percent set in 1986.

The recession is mainly to blame, hitting hard at young people in their late teens and twenties who make up one of the larger segments of the rental market.

And things are likely to get worse – for landlords anyway – with 100,000 new units coming on across the country.  A fair number of those are likely condos that developers could not sell – it’s a trend well underway in the Boston area.

For renters, though, if you have a job and a little extra cash, this just might be your time.

The downtown Boston market has been flooded with new luxury condos over the past few years.

For most people not making Wall Street-sized salaries, there has not been much to look at here.

Now many of these units are sitting on the market, unsold and waiting for better times.

But instead of just letting them sit empty, why not take some of these units into affordable condos for middle and lower income families?

Down in New York City, not exactly a hotbed of affordability, they are talking about doing something like that.

Check out this article from the New York Observer that was forwarded to me by a B&T colleague of mine.

Big Apple officials are preparing to dole out $20 million to help developers on stalled condo projects finish work. In turn, the developers would set aside units for moderate and middle income families.

The initial target is 400 units.

It will be interesting to see how this one turns out.

But it sure shows how the housing market has shifted. Luxury is out and affordable is in.

It’s good to see Mayor Menino try to drum up interest in the ever growing array of empty storefronts along Newbury Street and the Fenway.

The mayor led a tour of some of the city’s top retail strips, pointing out some of the shops available for rent.

City Hall is offering up for free ad space worth $5,000 to tenants who sign leases in the next six months.

All that is well and good, but there also needs to be a frank discussion about retail rental rates in various Boston shopping hot spots as well.

I hit upon this subject a couple months in my B&T column, when I looked at one of the hidden ills of Downtown Crossing.

Some building owners there would rather with empty, unrented space in hopes of eventually landing a tenant ready to shell out sky-high rents.

It’s no secret that a similar problem can be found on Newbury Street, where landlords have been notorious over the years for holding out for big rents.

Still, there are some hopeful signs that this may be changing.

The Herald reports that one of the Newbury Street’s biggest landlords has cut rents 20 percent in a bid to fill storefronts.

That’s a good start.

My bet is that lowering rents, not giving away ad space, is the best way to fill some of those empty storefronts.