Then what the hell is Harbor Towers board thinking?
I caution you to not think of any condo board, especially this one, as something with the capacity to think in a unified fashion. Search under “Harbor Towers internal dispute” and have fun spending three days reading all the internal squabbling over there.
So the answer here is “all sorts of things, many internally contradictory, and many stupid.” But I’d also guess there are some real smart folks who have some good clues.
In the end: This is what you get:
A: The garage will stay with a 400ft plus tower on top: Which will never add real potential value or open up the waterfront to the Greenway:
I have my doubts either the state or city would approve that. I can’t prove it, I’m tossing out gut reaction, but I bet the state and city would reject that and play a waiting game.
B; They update the garage (keep it as is and their easement expire and they are all out of parking space). Then the developer and Pru are laughing all the way to the bank.
This I see as a real option. The HT people would then have to compete for monthly spaces in the garage instead of having an easement or a lease, whichever it is they have. Here’s a question: is their current monthly payment greater than or less than what a monthly spot goes for in the garage? I don’t know. But the answer to that leads to the answer of how much market value hit they take when the lease expires (or phrasing it differently how much their monthly parking budget gets hit).
If their monthly payments today are not so far below monthly market rents on garage space, then the garage owners get a bump in income but maybe not a lot. If their monthly payments are way below market rents, then yes, the garage owners get a cash flow boost along with a negotiating leverage boost.
Given how internally riven the HT owners’ association has been over the years (not just the board, the whole lot of them), I could easily imagine them ending up in this option by stumbling backwards over the finish line, rather than positively opting for it.
And note that in this option B, if they update to protect the concrete before it gets too far gone, the cost of that would not preclude a major redevelopment five or ten years later or whenever suits them.
C. Another Developer proposes the same thing as Chiofaro: And also explains he can't bury the garage without the height & mass or tax percs. So the garage will continue to stay blocking that Greenway from the Waterfront.
I suppose that’s a possibility, but if Prudential and Chiofaro decide they’ve had enough and sell, I don’t know why the next buyer would just follow in their shoes. That assumption would be based on all buyers assuming that Chiofaro’s / Prudential’s failures were purely personality based and not a case of hitting hard immovable political realities. Would YOU bid on the property assuming you could get what they failed to get? I wouldn’t.
If the current owners decide to sell, I think that we’d more likely see:
D. The next owner talks a whole lot with the state and city before buying to have some clue on the political possibilities, and the price is adjusted for that (I am looping back to my earlier speculation that the current owners overpaid due to their assumptions on being able to go so tall). The new owners land-bank it until the HT parking easement runs out, during which time they work with the state quietly. Then they do something taller than Rowe’s Wharf but not as tall as HT; I have no clue how the parking for Aquarium or the new building or HT sorts itself out, and I don’t much care (I understand others do care, especially the Aquarium). In this scenario there is much gnashing of teeth on archBoston about how pathetically short it is. We all get over it someday: not everything needs to be supertall everywhere is my opinion (and I like lots of tall in lots of places, for the record).
Also West on your claim that the Salt Water is eating away at the concrete wouldn't that mean Harbor Towers are going to collapse also?
I never said the garage is going to collapse. I said steel reinforced concrete structures of that vintage are performing way worse than originally projected. So the garage is going to need pretty big bucks in one way or another sooner than the circa 2040-2050 range that I bet they originally projected. When exactly I don’t know. I bet Prudential has had specialists look at it from that perspective.
But to answer the gist of your question: yes, the Harbor Towers are also going to age poorly, since they are of similar vintage and have concrete façade panels and (maybe?) concrete structures (or are they steel?). If you do that web search I suggested up above, you’ll see a litany of problems at the heart of most of the internal squabbling: HVAC, plumbing, windows, you name it, it has all performed badly. Those buildings are of shit quality in many known ways, and I assume the concrete in them and on them is the same. So yeah, they’re going to struggle badly at some point. I will shed no tears of sympathy.
If we were really going to fantasize here, we’d be talking about someone new buying up the garage, and sitting down with Aquarium, HT board, state and city and saying: “Let’s wipe this whole slate clean and start over. Get rid of these shitty ugly towers and this shitty ugly garage, end up with way better urban landscape and better dwelling units (and more of them and some more retail) and a way better aquarium and a way better waterfront along here. You current residents get first dibs on the new units, and the same Aquarium organization of course retains control of new Aquarium.”
That has zero chance of happening in the near term, it's pure fantasy. But if some garage owner decides to land-bank the garage another twenty or twenty-five years, and the concrete façade panels on the HT start failing along with everything else in those crappy buildings ….? And the HT residents lose their parking and then their HVAC easement death date starts looming ….? And the aquarium keeps struggling in its current manifestation and that board starts thinking more radically about solutions ….?
C’mon, I can dream, can’t I?
