Scape’s lender for its proposed 2 Charlesgate West tower, approved last year for 400 furnished apartments across 28 stories, plans to sell the site at a foreclosure auction next month. Image courtesy of Utile Architecture & Planning
Scape entered the Boston market with a big splash.
The British developer of student housing announced plans to build as many as 2,000 dorm rooms in the Hub, along with making the city its U.S. headquarters.
Now, seven years later, Scape’s dreams are dust in the wind.
The developer ended up building just one project – an apartment building – and its plans to build student housing have long since evaporated amid neighborhood opposition in the Fenway.
Meanwhile, the Charlesgate West site in the Fenway on which Scape had hoped to build its next big project has been taken back by its lender and will now be sold at a foreclosure auction next month, as Banker & Tradesman was first to report.
Scape’s efforts to build housing also fizzled in Somerville’s Davis Square as well, with the developer shifting plans to lab space, only to see the bottom fall out of that market.
Grand Plans for Big Investment
Scape certainly had grand plans for the Boston area, with talk of investing $1 billion in projects that would house thousands of students way back in 2018.
In a press release, Scape got a little ahead of itself, taking credit for “solving” the student housing problem before it had even proposed its first dorm or apartment project
“Scape is solving a student housing problem in Boston where an immense off-campus student population is exerting enormous pressure on the supply-constrained housing market, displacing workers and families and driving up rental costs,” the company said in a press release announcing its arrival in Boston.
Clearly, the developer did not grasp the challenges in getting anything approved and built in Boston, a city where NIMBYism is a way of life.
How much of Scape’s failure to launch, besides building a single apartment building on Boylston Street, is due to this naivete or something else an open question.
But this much is clear: The unraveling of Scape’s plans to become a major local developer of student housing represents a major loss for Boston, a city in the grips of one of the nation’s worst housing crises, where college students play a major role in driving up rents.
The Bon, so far the only building student housing developer Scape has completed in Boston. But the project was forced into becoming apartments, not the student housing Boston needs. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman Staff
Pandemic Proved Student Housing’s Power
Boston colleges and universities saw enrollment rise by more than 12 percent in the in the decade ending in 2024, for increase of more than 17,666 students, according to a city report.
More than 40 percent of all college students in Boston – more than 65,000 – live in apartments and other off-campus housing in Boston.
And if any proof was needed that all those students play a major role in driving rents up, year after year, the pandemic delivered it in spades.
As thousands of students left the city in 2020 amid the COVID restrictions, guess what happened?
For the first time in years if not decades, rents fell. And not by just as little, but by a lot: Apartment List pegged the decline at a stunning 17.2 percent between February, just before the pandemic hit, and November 2020.
NIMBYs Upend Beacon Street Project
But neighborhood activists in the Fenway were having none of it and successfully pushed City Hall to force Scape to jettison its plans to focus on student housing in 2021 and instead build market-rate and affordable apartments.
One of the main objections? That universities should be building dorms on their campuses and that Scape’s proposed student housing projects would simply bring more students into a neighborhood that already had too many, per stories in the Boston Globe and other outlets.
A third iteration of Scape’s project at 819 Beacon St. was finally approved by the Boston Planning & Development Agency board in October 2021, only after being completely redesigned.
The Boston Zoning Board of Appeal approved the project in July 2022 – just in time to miss the market as the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates to levels that have helped styme most new housing construction in Boston.
In June, the project got yet another one-year extension on its ZBA approval – a longevity granted possibly thanks to Scape’s deal with Boston Children’s Hospital to dedicate a chunk of 819 Beacon’s 393 apartments to short-term housing for patients’ families.
Scott Van Voorhis
Dead Dorms Are Boston’s Loss
Simply fuming that colleges and universities in the city should be building more on-campus dorms wasn’t a viable strategy to generate student housing then, and it certainly isn’t now given the financial challenges higher ed faces.
And all those student rentals that Scape wanted to build would also have likely taken students out of apartments in nearby neighborhoods like Mission Hill, reducing competition for family-sized units and even bringing down rents.
Yet even after Scape threw in the towel and agreed to build apartments, neighborhood groups still weren’t happy, claiming that the developer was attempting to build units that would be attractive to students, even if they weren’t marketed as dorm rooms.
All of which dragged out the city permitting and review process and likely did wonders for Scape’s bottom line – and the rents it will have to charge if 819 Beacon St. ever gets built.
Now, Scape and its grand plans to solve Boston’s student housing problem are history.
It’s a loss for Scape, certainly, but it’s an even bigger loss for Boston and its legions of hard-pressed renters.
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.
