Developer Don Chiofaro’s proposed towers may never become a reality.

A year ago, Don Chiofaro fretted aloud in this column that his proposed twin-tower waterfront office and condominium palace might miss the current real estate cycle, given the glacially slow pace of the city and state review process.

Well, I’m here to inform him that his fears have come true: The chances he will be able to bulldoze that hideous Aquarium parking garage and start building his towers before the next downturn hits are now in the single digits and dwindling by the day – if he gets the chance at all, that is.

A year ago, Chiofaro held out a glimmer of hope that he could still make it, and that by this time in 2015, there might be a light at the end of the tunnel in a seemingly endless gauntlet of city and state reviews facing his mega project.

But here we are, a year later, and Chiofaro’s proposed $1 billion waterfront development has moved inches, not miles, in the regulatory process, while the office and condo markets appear to be hurtling towards ever-frothier peaks.

These are boom times, but boom times, as we all know, don’t last forever.

“At this point, we just don’t know,” Chiofaro informed me in a statement through his public relations firm, apparently unable to make it to the phone himself. “It would be a shame to miss this current cycle.”

A shame indeed, especially given Chiofaro’s hopes of replacing a prominent downtown Boston eyesore with something special. An ugly concrete pile, the Aquarium garage occupies a prime piece of real estate, perched between the waterfront and the Greenway.

Chiofaro, whose flamboyant talk and bull-in-the-china-shop approach has long made him Boston’s answer to Donald Trump, certainly shares some of the blame. The man can be stubborn, trading insults with the late Boston Mayor Menino, who was no fan of Chiofaro or his waterfront twin-tower proposal.

Harbor Towers Plays Hardball

But it’s certainly not all Chiofaro’s fault; there are other players at work.

Top of the list are Chiofaro’s would-be neighbors at Harbor Towers, who would rather keep the ugly garage rather than have something built that would wreck their million-dollar views.

These aren’t your ordinary NIMBY types by any means; they’ve got the dough to hire their own public relations firm, and presumably top lawyers, as well.

The vehement opposition of the well-heeled residents of Harbor Towers, in turn, has helped ensure a plodding pace – and even that might be too generous – on the part of city and state officials. A year ago, Chiofaro said he hoped by this time he would have started the City Hall review for his project. But a year later, that review – before which not a spoonful of dirt can be moved around the site – looks as far off as ever. In fact, we could be talking another six months to a year before the Boston Redevelopment Authority even starts looking at Chiofaro’s proposal.

And the city review process is hardly a formality – it can easily take another 12 to 18 months, and that’s not counting the BRA’s notoriously time-consuming “design review” afterwards.

And that’s not all: Chiofaro will also at that point have to apply for his Chapter 91 waterfront building license – a state permit that can be easily appealed and dragged on for months if not a year or two more with a “10-taxpayer suit,” which, as it sounds, doesn’t exactly need an army of signatories to launch.

Believe me, those Harbor Tower folks are all over that.

But as it stands now, Chiofaro’s project isn’t going anywhere until a more fundamental disagreement over its size is hashed out with City Hall.

City officials want to give a pretty significant haircut to Chiofaro’s plans, reducing it from 1.3 million to 900,000 square feet and knocking the height down to 600 feet.

Publicly, Chiofaro has he just can’t make the numbers work on the smaller project.

But privately, Chiofaro has indicated he may be willing to play ball – provided he gets city tax breaks to make up for the tens of millions in value lost with the reductions, the Globe has reported.

Something tells me that this issue alone could take months to hash out.

Meanwhile, the real estate clock ticks, with each passing day and week spent haggling chewing up precious time.

And more and more, Chiofaro’s grand plans for a pair of waterfront skyscrapers look like they are destined to die a death of a thousand delays.