Downtown Crossing/Financial District | Discussion

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A summit on the safety of downtown Boston happened Thursday. Here’s what came of it. - The Boston Globe

More than 90 people packed a room in a downtown condo building Thursday night for a summit to discuss the drug-dealing, shoplifting, and other quality-of-life issues plaguing the area.
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Boston police officials have said they will step up patrols in the area. Other short-term solutions that were discussed include: fixing busted sidewalks and handicapped ramps; improvements to lighting in the area; more outreach from the city’s homeless shelters; and more programming on the Common and around Downtown Crossing such as music, food trucks, or art exhibits.
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Excuse me if this has been posted elsewhere.

Marlboro Building at 399 Washington Street in Downtown Crossing sold for $13,000,000 on March 5, 2025. It's a 76,000 square foot five story building. Previously sold for $63.25 million in 2017.

This is where Barnes & Noble used to be until circa 2006 and has been vacant since. Two levels of retail and three stories of offices above that. The entire front of the building has been redone in the past few years to remove the (heinous) first-two storeys facade.

The building dates back to 1881, Bradlee & Winslow architects, and rose in the ashes of the Great Fire of 1872 that was extinguished practically at its front door. (I just read it is called the "Marlboro Building" because it used to be on what was called Marlborough Street and no I'm not kidding.) In the 1950s it was the WT Grant department store.

Seller is Redus Properties Inc, which is affiliated with Wells Fargo, which took over ownership of the property in 2023. Buyer is Hudson 399 Washington LLC. This is Ori & Noam Ron's company. He built Radian facing the "Greenway" and holds other parcels in the DTX and Chinatown neighborhoods.

(Image courtesy of Historic New England)

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Another downtown Boston office tower is hitting the market - The Boston Globe

A growing roster of towers is going up for sale for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic shook up demand for office space.
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In the latest test for Boston’s beleaguered office market, Rockpoint Group is preparing to put the two interconnected offices at 75-101 Federal St. in downtown Boston on the market in partnership with Wells Fargo, and is tapping brokerage Newmark to market the buildings for sale in the coming weeks, The Boston Globe has learned.
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This Downtown Crossing building just sold for one-fifth of its pre-pandemic price. Here’s why that may be a good thing. - The Boston Globe

Lower prices on buildings mean lower prices for tenants, which could bring a wave of activity and energy to long-dormant buildings.
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Now, 399 Washington has new life, in the form of new owners, who bought it at a bargain-basement price.
Earlier this month, Boston-based Hudson Group and Assembly Investments of New York closed on their purchase of the retail and office building for $13 million — 80 percent less than its prior sale in 2017. That sort of discount portends a difficult future ahead for Boston’s budget, which is largely reliant on property taxes. But, as new owners Noam Ron and Evan Oscar Papanastasiou expect, it also means they can lower rents to the point where they can actually attract a tenant to a building where the ground floor has been empty since 2006.
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Another major downtown tower sells at a steep discount as office market finds its post-COVID footing - The Boston Globe

A new owner is taking over the mortgage on 99 High Street at a substantial discount from its previous sale price.
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In what has widely been viewed as a bellwether transaction for the beleaguered downtown office market, Boston real estate firm Synergy has closed on its long-anticipated acquisition of the 32-story tower at 99 High St. on Thursday for $227 million.
Synergy is assuming the mortgage from MetLife Real Estate Lending LLC, according to Suffolk County property records. It’s acquiring the 730,000-square-foot tower for 17 percent less than the $273 million the building’s prior owner, Nuveen — the real estate arm of teachers’ retirement behemoth TIAA — paid two decades years ago, and for $100 million less than the tower’s assessed value of $327.7 million.
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What was the occupancy rate of the buildings that were just sold at a steep discount?
 
People on reddit/twitter…etc who work in biotech are sounding the alarm about what they are seeing transpiring in the biotech sector in boston/cambridge as far as occupancy, hiring, layoffs…etc. Theres been a few articles popping up here and there saying that the sector is possibly entering a slump as well. It seems that the whispers are starting to become a chorus. This combined with bad post pandemic occupancy rates in office like mentioned above along with office buildings selling at s steep discount is definitely something to keep an eye on.

A couple articles

Unleased lab space. Plunging valuations. Layoffs. In Massachusetts, the biotech slump is taking its toll.​


“This was supposed to be the year of biotech’s comeback.

At least that was the hope of many in the sector who started 2025 pointing to scientific advances and falling interest rates. Some foresaw a pickup in buyouts and initial public offerings, rewarding investors in the highly risky and cyclical business of bringing drugs to market.

But three months into the new year, the mood has soured and the outlook has clouded as a cyclone of threats and unknowns gathers speed. Despite some notable successes, including US approval in January of a nonopioid painkiller by Boston biotech Vertex, there are few signs the industry — responsible for more than 115,000 Massachusetts jobs — is pulling out of its four-year slump.

The biotech index fund XBI is down nearly 5 percent since the start of the year. The biotech cluster based in Cambridge and Boston, the nation’s largest, grapples with a record 16.1 million square feet of unleased lab space. And hiring remains soft, with many biopharma companies continuing to lay off workers — though at a slower pace than last year — and tap part-time “fractional” executives to save money……..”

www.boston.com

Unleased lab space. Plunging valuations. Layoffs. In Massachusetts, the biotech slump is taking its toll.

Local biotechs face a long winter, despite hopes of rebound in 2025.
www.boston.com


‘I think it is actively happening’: Is Boston’s biotech industry doomed?​


What we’re witnessing may be a remaking of biotech — surprising even to those in the industry. After five months of searching, Albert ultimately found a job at a small Boston-based biotech, where he focuses on cancer research. But some in the industry worry that we face the prospect of Kendall Square operating with a fraction of the folks who work there now, leading to knock-on effects on restaurants, retail, and housing.

In Massachusetts, biotech has been an important driver of jobs and wealth for decades, with Kendall Square at the epicenter of that growth. In 2024, the state had more than 140,000 jobs in the life sciences, according to MassBioEd. And the average salary was nearly $200,000. But what if those jobs are in jeopardy?

America has seen entire industries slip away before, notes Sandra Barbosu, associate director of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. Her recent report, “Not Again: Why the United States can’t afford to lose its biopharma industry,” points out that it happened with “telecommunications equipment, semiconductors, television, solar panels, and chemicals.” And, she believes, it could happen with biotech.

“I think it is actively happening,” said Isaac Stoner, chief executive of Boston-based Octagon Therapeutics. “When an industry goes extinct or faces this existential moment, it causes broad economic pain for the region for a while. This happened when we lost our leadership position in computing in the late eighties and early nineties. It was maybe a 15-year period where there wasn’t an industry to step in there and fill the void.”

www.bostonglobe.com

‘I think it is actively happening’: Is Boston’s biotech industry doomed? - The Boston Globe

With a "terrible" job market, empty labs, and mounting competition from China, the lifeblood of Kendall Square is under massive threat.
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Massachusetts biotech company cuts 90% of its workforce​


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The upshot is that this downturn has probably killed the horrible Star Market lab project in Fenway, the really disastrous lab landscraper at Bullfinch Crossing, the heaping pile on East Berkeley in the South End, among others.
 
Jeremi said:
The upshot is that this downturn has probably killed the horrible Star Market lab project in Fenway, the really disastrous lab landscraper at Bullfinch Crossing, the heaping pile on East Berkeley in the South End, among others.
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Would be nice if we built housing in their place then. If the lab/office market is cooling way off, now would be the perfect time to try to catch up on housing. Suffolk downs, dorchester bay city, seaport, cambridge crossing, volpe, allston yards, brighton landing, riverside, fenway, everett, assembly row, dot ave…etc, theres actually an enormous amount of land and space to be built on. If/when the lab or office market picks up in a few years all of those projects wont be completely built out and you can start adding some back in if needed.
 
stick n move said:
Would be nice if we built housing in their place then. If the lab/office market is cooling way off, now would be the perfect time to try to catch up on housing. Suffolk downs, dorchester bay city, seaport, cambridge crossing, volpe, allston yards, brighton landing, riverside, fenway, everett, assembly row, dot ave…etc, theres actually an enormous amount of land and space to be built on. If/when the lab or office market picks up in a few years all of those projects wont be completely built out and you can start adding some back in if needed.
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The problem is those developers need a certain return on their investment, especially if they overpaid for their site in the lab boom. A developer who was counting on ~$120/ft² for lab space for their project to pencil can't accept the $30/ft² a moderately priced residential building would produce. They're willing to sit on it for a while, but they'll never be able to justify construction with that premium weighing down the balance sheet. It's why buildings transacting lower actually can be a good thing - a lower price means the new owner can accept lower returns, which opens the door to more options.

This article is linked above, but it's still a good read. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/03...g-399-washington-office-building-real-estate/
 
themissinglink said:
Remember the Celtics watch parties from 2022 in Copley Square and at Faneuil Hall? There should be a lot more of those watch parties in Boston, considering how intense the sports culture is here. But instead of doing them at Faneuil Hall or in Copley Square, they should be in Downtown Crossing with the screen in front of the steps. The watch parties shouldn't just be for playoff games, there should be watch parties for a lot of regular season games, and there should be watch parties for the Patriots and the Bruins, too (not sure if there would be enough interest in Red Sox games unless it's a big game since there are 162 games per season). I'd go all the time if they did this.
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I think this is a great idea. Who can I contact to make this suggestion? Obviously very little chance it does anything though, but still worth a shot.
 
baseball said:
I think this is a great idea. Who can I contact to make this suggestion? Obviously very little chance it does anything though, but still worth a shot.
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I'm going to suggest that the Downtown Boston Alliance (DBA), fka the Downtown Boston Business Improvement District, wouldn't be a bad place to start! They do the majority of public programming in Downtown Crossing like Winteractive and they do the urban tailgates on Temple - that said, I think that works because of neighboring bars... I wonder if the steps would work with a pop-up?

Downtown Boston | Learn About The Downtown Boston Alliance

Learn about the Downtown Boston Alliance, the neighborhood it represents and takes care of, and contact staff members
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