Taking A Crack At Creative Development 

Well, it’s only taken years of staring at a hole in the ground in Boston’s Downtown Crossing and months of reading doom in the headlines, but it looks like somebody’s started to apply a little creative thinking to Boston development.

Three young Stanford alums have been shopping a proposal to stick an indoor-put-put-golf-course into one of the vacant storefronts in Downtown Crossing. The Teller hopes you investors out there are listening — the boys are only a quarter of the way toward their goal of $200,000 in start-up capital. So, you can still get in on the ground floor, or perhaps better say, the first hole. Though in their case it might be how long they can make their sponsors linger on the 19th that manages to get them the necessary funds.

Meanwhile, over on the residential side of the ledger, there’s real room for creativity when it come to housing solutions. Avalon Bay’s CEOs argued this week that with all the foreclosures and uncertainty out there, landlords across the country could expect to see 700,000 new customers over the next few years, and right about now is an excellent time to think about starting to jack up rents. If only The Teller could get the twisted geniuses behind the previous proposals to think up a way that the worst housing crisis in years didn’t somehow end up with Bostonians paying even more for housing, we’d really be getting somewhere.