Downtown Boston’s One Lincoln tower in 2023, before State Street moved to HYM’s new One Congress tower. The building’s pending auction could be a bellwether for where the neighborhood is headed. iStock photo

These days, there’s an echo of the downright ugly 1970s when it comes to Boston and its beleaguered downtown.

Crime was a big deal back in the 1970s. The Combat Zone was a real thing and Boston had the dubious distinction of being the car theft capital of the country.

The Combat Zone is long gone, car theft isn’t the big issue it once was and the murder rate is at a decade-long low. Yet crime in downtown Boston has spiked to its highest levels in years, and residents are concerned about it

In a survey last fall, 71 percent of downtown residents polled said they felt less safe than they did at the start of 2024.

Almost all of the 320 people surveyed – 92 percent – described public safety in downtown Boston as an issue that is “very urgent” for City Hall to address, according to the survey by the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association.

Downtown residents complained of brazen open-air drug dealing, violent street crime, and rampant shoplifting.

“It was a shocking finding – I didn’t expect it to be that high,” Rishi Shukla, the neighborhood association’s co-founder, told me.

Two Echos in the Office Sector

The downtown Boston office market was also in tough shape back in the 1970s, with businesses bailing for the gleaming new suburban office parks along Route 128.

All of which hammered the value of older office buildings and other commercial properties.

Yet Mayor Kevin White’s administration took a hard line, ignoring the protests of building owners and insisting on effectively over-assessing their value to keep the tax money rolling in.

Eventually, a fed-up office building owner named Norman Tregor took the city to court and forced Boston to cough up millions to compensate for the city’s actions.

To pay the Tregor judgement and deal with the fallout from the then newly passed Proposition 2 1/2, Boston had to borrow $80 million, the equivalent of nearly $320 million today.

“The [class] B buildings are in far worse shape. It reminds me of the 1970s,” said Larry DiCara, a former Boston City Council president and one of the city’s top lawyers, in a previous interview. “Inevitably, just like Mr. Tregor almost 50 years ago, they will seek relief.”

The downtown office market is once again in desperate straits, with sky-high vacancy rates that top 20 percent. The amount of office space that is simply empty, even if it is technically leased, is even higher than that.

Office building owners are once again scrambling to file requests for tax abatements, only to find, once again, that City Hall appears to be in no rush to acknowledge market reality and the potentially devastating impact it would have on Boston’s finances.

The auction of the once-mighty One Lincoln tower feels likely one of the first of a number of such fire sales we’ll be seeing as lenders run out of patience with owners of the district’s older, smaller office buildings – and maybe with the owners of another class A tower or two.

Not a Lot of Building

The ’70s weren’t a great time when it came to new construction, either.

Things were so bad locally that Boston construction workers were traveling as afield as Texas in search for work, recalls DiCara, who was president of the Boston City Council during those dark days.

Given the woes of the office market, it’s anyone’s guess who many years – or even decades – before we see the next office tower rise on the city’s skyline.

There is also a glut of lab space as well, so it will be a while before we see any new research complexes take shape as well, or before lab tenants can underwrite pricey office conversions.

Scott Van Voorhis

And despite urgent and desperate demand for housing of all types, residential construction in the private sector has practically slowed to a stop in Boston and, despite a modest bump, is still down across the state as well.

All that said, there are big differences between the Boston of today and the much poorer, desperate, and troubled city of the 1970s.

Back then, the Hub was coming off of a long losing streak that arguably extended all the way back to the 19th century, having become a dingy backwater known for its then-recent backlash against public school desegregating.

The Boston of the mid-2020s is far richer and more tolerant than it was half a century ago.

The city is also coming off of an historic, two-decade-long building boom as well.

But the Trump administration’s erratic moves are clearly worrying both Beacon Hill’s financial minds and ordinary consumers, with talk rising of a possible recession or massive cuts to the federal funding that supports Boston’s economic bedrock, the eds-and-meds industry. The situation’s still very fluid, but it’s enough to raise the specter of those bad old days.

Maybe we aren’t headed for the same thing all over again – that’s never the case. But while history doesn’t repeat, as Mark Twain noted, it sometimes rhymes.

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.