When New Balance CEO Jim Davis looked out of his eighth-floor office in what was then the company’s headquarters at 20 Guest St. in Brighton and imagined the development now known as Boston Landing, did he realize just how much he would reshape Greater Boston?
Sixteen years on, not only has the decrepit desert of low-rise ex-factories been transformed into a bright, new mixed-use campus but it and the $20 million MBTA station Davis insisted on and paid for has reinvigorated multifamily development in the area and helped prove the value of transit-oriented projects elsewhere.
News in recent weeks that yet another developer is seeking to jump into the area with a multifamily project just blocks from the station and last month’s $72 million sale of the 229,000-square-foot 20 Guest St. building to two major investors demonstrates the value Davis’ vision created.
And it’s not just the odd apartment building or commercial sale. Brighton and Allston, its northern neighbor just across the Mass. Pike, are set to see an explosion of growth in the coming years as a series of commercial and multifamily projects take shape. As many as 3,000 homes and millions of square feet of office/lab space could grow in the area in the coming years as Davis’ vision of a transit-connected neighborhood meets Harvard University’s planned expansion south of the Charles River.
It’s this vitality and opportunity that even committed suburban developers talk about when you mention the name of the station at the neighborhood’s heart. “Boston Landing” has, in some corners, become shorthand for the latent potential of areas around Massachusetts’ public transport networks in the 21st century. Scaled to a station’s location, it’s showed the real estate community that transit-oriented development is possible beyond core neighborhoods.
But that vision and the future it represents is, at present, under threat. Thanks to a lack of vision on Beacon Hill, gridlock in Congress and incompetence in the White House, the MBTA is being forced into hard discussions about service cuts that would begin in the middle of next year. It’s akin to trying to decide which limb you should saw off.
Cuts to the T – the bones on which Massachusetts’ economic muscles rely – could not only harm both current future development opportunities, but also damage and delay the key initiatives like a bus and commuter rail revamp needed to decarbonize our economy in the years ahead. Real estate industry leaders should be on their guard against such an outcome.
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