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The view from atop The Davis Cos.’ 100 Shawmut is only for the wealthy, but it also helped fund at least 74 affordable units. Photo courtesy of The Davis Cos.
We face an economic cataclysm that rivals the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, it’s like the 1960s all over again on the streets of Boston and cities across the country, even as we face a killer epidemic the likes of which we have not seen in over a century.
It’s like 1918, 1929 and 1968, all rolled into one, with a dash of 2009 thrown in for a nice sadistic twist.
And the last thing we need is another gaudy monument to the superrich: the luxury condominium tower.
Overnight, deluxe high-rises like the 60-story One Dalton and its $34 million, 7,500-square-foot penthouse have become an icon of a soon–to–bygone age.
Ensconced in their Mount Olympus-like penthouses and sprawling apartments high above the skyline in Boston, New York, San Francisco and now in every second-tier city in between, the rich of the early 21st century were not only proud of their wealth, but unabashed in their display of their massive good fortune in an age of mind-boggling inequality.
It does not mean we won’t get more downtown condo development. In fact, construction began not long before the pandemic hit on one of the biggest ever to be built in Boston, the $1.3 billion, 53- story Winthrop Center office-residential tower in the old Financial District.
Millennium Partners has insisted it will be moving ahead with the project, but there are dozens of luxury condo projects across the country in construction or on the drawing boards, and, with unemployment reaching 1930s levels, no one can truly say right now what will get built and what will get cancelled.
But even if the new Winthrop Center tower rises right on schedule, the mojo, the spirit of the age is gone, shattered by a narcissistic buffoon of a president, mass death, mass unemployment and rage over centuries of racial injustice.
Three Trends Raise Questions
Don’t get me wrong. Luxury condo construction downtown was an important part of the boom that enabled Boston’s resumption of its rightful place among the world’s great urban centers.
Yet it has become clearer with each tower completed that this has been a lopsided boom as well, and one that threatens to turn large tracts of downtown Boston into a playground for the rich.
With America’s death toll now well over 100,000 and urban areas among the hot zones for COVID-19 transmission, the pandemic on its own would be enough to raise questions about the longevity of the downtown luxury condo boom.
But the specter of a Great Depression 2.0 complicates the picture. Hard times can quickly change how society views things like ostentatious displays of wealth, which can go from being celebrated – or at least tolerated with a shrug when the economy is on a roll – to suddenly being seen as offensive.
That was certainly the case in the 1930s, when the roaring ’20s gave way to so much mass poverty and hardship that the previously high-flying rich – or at least those who survived stock market crash that kicked things off in 1929 – quickly toned down their act.
In fact, they kept things on the down low for the next half–century, until the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s made conspicuous consumption cool again. The wealthy have grown ever bolder in flaunting their good luck in the decades since.
The third element in this volatile mix, of course, is what has been quaintly called “civil unrest,” the wave of looting and property destruction that erupted in downtown Boston and in cities across the country following peaceful protests over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of a white Minneapolis cop.
Vandals and looters appear to have been kept at bay during more recent demonstrations, so the destruction hopefully will turn out to be an anomaly.
But if it’s a sign of things to come, it could very well be the nail in the coffin for the downtown luxury condo market.
Towers Served a Purpose
However, if this truly is the end of the luxury condo boom – and only time will tell on that – the big question is what will replace it?
We desperately need more housing.
And despite their residents’ obnoxious flaunting of money and power and awful sameness of the the cookie-cutter designs, the luxury condo and apartment towers that got built, both condo and apartment, included hundreds of affordable units, or failing that contributions to affordable housing in others parts of Boston.
Scott Van Voorhis
If the end of the luxury condo boom were to mean the end of the housing boom as well, that would be truly tragic.
Someone, somehow, someway is going to have to figure out a way to build middle-class housing.
And if we can’t, that doesn’t bode well for the future of a country whose middle class was once a model for the world.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
