Re: Columbus Center
Future of Columbus Center site up in air
By Casey Ross
Globe Staff / March 14, 2010
On the death of Boston?s Columbus Center project, architect M. David Lee said there is a simple lesson to learn from the tortured effort to build over the Massachusetts Turnpike: ?Sometimes,?? he said, ?you just can?t make a racehorse out of a mule.??
Straddling eight highway lanes and wedged between two Boston neighborhoods with persnickety residents, the location of the now-abandoned Columbus Center project has seemingly fatal flaws. A deck required to support the complex of condominiums, a hotel, shops, and parks proved prohibitively expensive, and drawn-out battles to get city and state approvals caused costs to mount over time.
And so public officials now confront dwindling options as they consider the future of the air-rights property: build in small chunks, with single buildings instead of entire blocks, or else be prepared to cough up hefty subsidies to pay for a multiple-block development like Columbus Center.
On Wednesday, the project?s main financial backer, the California State Pension Fund, or Calpers, said the $800 million complex was not economically feasible. The grand vision was first proposed 13 years ago by developer Arthur Winn, but by the end he had been relegated to the role of silent, minority partner. The state is now trying to get Calpers to pay for a $4 million to $5 million cleanup of the site, while also considering how to find new developers for the property, or whether it?s even worth doing so in the near term.
Peter O?Connor, head of real estate for the Massachusetts Transportation Department, wants to begin discussing the property?s future with neighbors and city officials right away. But there seems to be little support for another massive development in the mold of Columbus Center. So, he said, the state may consider dividing the site, which covers four separate parcels, and soliciting proposals for each plot.
Lee, who chaired a city committee in the 1990s that crafted a vision for developing air rights over the turnpike, said the only party that might be able to take advantage of them now is a hospital or university whose goal is being at a prominent location, instead of making a profit.
Otherwise, he said, the best option now would be to run a design competition in which architects and urban planners brainstorm ideas for improving the property?s appearance in the short term.
?Until the real estate market returns, you could try to do something creative with landscaping or art to mitigate the stark, utilitarian fencing along that part of the highway,?? Lee said, adding: ?For a private developer, the only way to make a project work there is either to have subsidy or density.??
The other major turnpike air-rights development underway in Boston is a similarly large complex of buildings near Fenway Park by developer John Rosenthal. Fenway Center, as it?s known, is different from its defunct counterpart in many ways, with one particularly critical difference: 55 percent of the project will be built on land, compared with just 5 percent for Columbus Center. Moreover, drawing a lesson from Columbus Center, state officials devised a financial mechanism to help pay the added cost of building a deck for Rosenthal.
Rosenthal expects to break ground on the first part of his five-building project this summer. As for the future of the Columbus Center site, he said, it doesn?t look promising, especially after a 13-year process that ended so horribly for its backers, who dumped about $130 million into the failed effort.
?Pioneers often end up with arrows in their backs,?? he said. ?Everyone learned a lot from Columbus Center going first. But in the end, I think very few air-rights projects will ever get built.??
Rosenthal believes breaking the parcel into smaller chunks may work, as developers would face less expensive decks. ?A combination of retail and apartments could be possible,?? Rosenthal said. ?But it?s so unpredictable because of the swings in the markets. It really just comes down to luck and timing.??
According to most people who followed Columbus Center, those are two things the project never had. The turnpike parcels themselves may have missed their one moment in time, when the exuberance of a building boom gave rise to an impossibly costly and complicated project, only to have it fall to the earth with the crashing economy.
One lesson Columbus Center taught developers and state officials is that the air rights ? once thought to be worth millions of dollars because of their location in the city ? actually have negative worth because of the exorbitant building costs.
If anything, Columbus Center, at 1.4 million square feet, was too small to justify the $200 million deck required for its buildings, said Bill McCall, founder of McCall & Almy, a Boston firm that advises commercial developers. At that price, the developments above the deck need to be much larger if builders are to recover their investment and make a profit.
?If you have got that added cost, it really requires a bigger project to cover the extra expense,?? said McCall. ?You need a strong economy to be able to tackle an air-rights project like that.??
But McCall, Lee, and others argued that the demise of Columbus Center signals the end ? for now ? of the mega-project.
?Architecture and design as well as development in Boston has been on drunken binge for a while,?? said Lee. ?We have been building exorbitant projects that are quite fanciful. It?s time to pull back and be more thoughtful ? celebrate the prosaic a little more. Not every building has to be an object building.??
Link
