A conceptual rendering shows the park and some of the 7.5 million square feet of new development that Proctor & Gambel hopes will rise in place of Gillette’s World Shaving Headquarters factory in South Boston. Image courtesy of CBT Architects
Dead on arrival.
That about sums up the prospects of two major, would-be mega developments in Boston, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if you’d read the Boston Globe’s coverage of either.
Last week, Procter & Gamble unveiled plans for a “new neighborhood” for its acreage on the Fort Point Channel near South Station as it prepares to shift manufacturing from the old Gillette factory site to the suburbs.
There was no mention in the paper’s coverage that market demand right now for the project’s 3.5 million square feet of offices and labs – by far the largest piece of the proposal – is all but nonexistent.
Ditto for the Globe’s story back in January on Swedish construction giant Skanska’s decision to start the city approval process for 1 million square feet of offices, labs and residential space in the Fenway.
“Labs, housing could soon rise where Simmons dorms now stand,” the headline reads.
Pray tell, how is that going to happen when lab vacancy rates are at recession-like levels and with the Trump administration threatening billions in local research funding?
A quarter of all lab space in the Boston area is now empty, according to CBRE, higher than even the hard-hit office market, as Banker & Tradesman reported.
And you can forget about any plans for new office space. Who in their right mind would build a new tower when remote work has destroyed demand. When One Lincoln, the former State Street headquarters, recently sold at a foreclosure auction it fetched less than half the $1 billion it had been worth only a few years before because it was so empty.
Lack of Cranes Deserves Attention
These multibillion-dollar proposals are going nowhere fast and, if covered, deserve a more critical approach.
Here’s the thing: The ugly reality is that new residential and commercial construction has fallen off a cliff over the last two years.
Yes, it’s been down across the nation, but the decline has been particularly precipitous in Boston.
City Hall issued just building permits for just 72 new housing units in March, according to city records.
And it capped a dismal, seven-month run in which housing starts in Boston have fallen to their lowest levels since at least 2018.
Overall, developers started work on just a little over 665 new homes from the beginning of September 2024 through the end of March.
That compares to the 2,169 housing starts during the same period in late 2019 and early 2020, according to city building permit stats.
The number of cranes on the Boston skyline has also plunged, from 20 in 2023 down to 6 in the first quarter of 2025, according to the RLB Crane Index.
Scott Van Voorhis
Coverage Creates Illusion of Progress
I suspect that City Hall staffers and Wu administration operatives, like their predecessors, love these stories in our local mainstream media about what amount to pie-in-the-sky development ideas.
It creates the illusion of progress and activity where there is none, at least as far as shovels in the ground go.
The fact is, Boston is already a graveyard for all sorts of ambitious development plans that appear to be going nowhere fast.
Think of HYM Investment Group’s Suffolk Downs project and its plans for labs, offices and thousands of housing units, but where nothing is getting built right now. Or look to Dorchester Bay City, first unveiled in 2020 and still struggling to get through the state permitting process.
Too often, stories on these ambitious plans focus on the city or state approval process. While not unimportant, these are just a couple of elements in a much more complex picture of what can make or break a project. The availability of financing and market trends are huge factors that are rarely addressed.
Yet the real and much more important story right now? Why it is so hard to build in Boston, and who is to blame for so little progress on all these splashy plans?
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and publisher of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
