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Our traffic-clogged highways, stalled trains and loony home prices are taking heat for scaring Amazon away, and for good reason.
Yet as Amazon mulled where to plant its much-touted H2Q, Boston’s well-earned reputation as a place where ambitious, pioneering projects come to die can’t have helped.
The site pushed by Boston City Hall for Amazon’s H2Q, Suffolk Downs, is Boston’s newest development frontier, with hundreds of acres straddling East Boston and Revere next to a pair of hulking oil tanks.
So maybe, just maybe, Jeff Bezos didn’t have the stomach to be a development pioneer in a city that delights in trashing outsiders with monumental building plans. Instead, Amazon will split its H2Q between Queens and Washington, D.C., which raises the question of whether it’s really a true headquarters project and not just a big expansion, but that’s neither here or there at this point.
If Amazon had picked Suffolk Downs for its huge, 1-million-square-foot expansion, it would have immediately faced a number of steep challenges, and likely delays.
First off, it is doubtful development-wary East Boston would have welcomed Amazon with open arms. It’s a neighborhood that has for decades lived under the roar of passing jets from Logan and which is fairly sensitive to being ground zero for huge, landscape-changing projects.
A project of the size Amazon was talking about – large enough for 50,000 employees – would have stoked all sorts of anxieties, including the prospect of thousands of new apartment hunters and condo buyers descending on already housing-challenged Eastie.
Already wigged out by a condo and apartment building boom, East Boston residents and activists urged city officials at a big meeting over the summer to halt all new construction until a new zoning plan for the neighborhood can be drafted.
Scott Van Voorhis
Transportation Woes
Suffolk Downs also faces some significant transportation challenges. If the state of Greater Boston’s road network is wretched, access to Suffolk Downs via narrow and perpetually clogged Route 1A is even worse.
The only saving grace is the Suffolk Downs T station. Former City Hall development chief turned developer Tom O’Brien, whose firm HYM is in charge of redeveloping Suffolk, pegged a site near the T station for Amazon’s expansion.
Yet maybe the biggest red flag for a savvy entrepreneur like Bezos is Boston’s reputation for eating up and spitting out big projects like his H2Q, especially those pitched as leading the way in new development frontiers like hard-scrabble Suffolk Downs.
Demanding city officials and ornery South Boston residents managed to drive off a number of would-be developers for Fan Pier, the keystone project along the Seaport, before veteran Hub developer Joe Fallon managed to get things going there a decade ago.
Among the developers who tried and failed was billionaire Nick Pritzker, whose family’s strong ties to the Democratic Party meant little to neighborhood residents, environmentalists and waterfront activists who turned his proposal for a new harborside community into a punching bag for their various frustrations.
It has taken nearly 30 years for the Seaport to finally take off, with the first two decades mainly filled with all sorts of legal and political battles over the future of the city’s largest development frontier.
Now, that’s not saying it will take 30 years to build out Suffolk Downs. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has worked hard to build consensus, neighborhood by neighborhood, on new development.
But he has also shown a greater willingness than his predecessor, the late, great Thomas M. Menino, to take dissenting opinions in stride and ultimately forge ahead with new development projects.
That said, Bezos is pretty clearly a man in a hurry. And it’s hard to see how a New Economy titan used to getting his way, and then some, would have had the patience for a big, contentious project like pioneering the redevelopment of Suffolk Downs.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@thewarrengroup.com.
