We recently spent a couple days in Boston’s shiny new ‘Seaport’ district, and it was lots of fun. Walking the piers, eating soft serve and lobster (not together), going to museums and beer gardens, watching the tourists and hipster knowledge workers… it felt like a Mediterranean escape meets The High Line.
I grew up in Boston and remember this area as it was before: empty parking lots, disused fish piers, old-school seafood places from the 1960s, and maybe (probably) a few mobsters.
But then the money bomb hit Boston. More specifically, the city’s biotech and financial services boom, low interest rates, and the massive federal investment in infrastructure projects like The Big Dig.
Today, the Seaport’s prime waterfront property has gone upscale: complete with starchitect-designed buildings, art museums, high-tech companies (Chewy, Amazon, Anthropic, Vertex Pharmaceuticals), law and consulting firms, condos and restaurants, promenades and bike paths, hotels and a convention center.
It’s the heart of the new, affluent Boston.
But there’s a problem. Actually two of them.
One, the Seaport isn’t very diverse. But that’s always been an issue for Boston, and the Seaport is no different. There’s almost no working-class neighborhoods left in central Boston anymore… even Southie, a stones throw from Seaport (and featured in Goodwill Hunting and The Departed), is gentrifying. Instead, you get people mooring yachts with names like ‘Trust Fun’ and buying $7 croissants at Tatte.
And two… the whole Seaport may be underwater in the near future. Oops.
Boston already has more high tide flooding than any other American city, and the Seaport – which was built on landfill in the 1880s – routinely floods several times a year.
Here’s a picture I took in July at the Seaport’s Fan Pier:
Now here’s that same spot, flooded during a storm six months earlier.
The flooding threat is so bad that climate protesters have continued to try to stop or slow the Seaport’s development, even after it became a fait accompli.
There’s even a documentary about it called ‘Inundation District’ (a play on the Seaport’s marketing nickname, ‘Innovation District’).
Whatever assumptions you use for the effects of sea level rise, the Seaport’s clearly on the front lines, especially since most of its gleaming new buildings weren’t designed to withstand flooding, a phenomenon that’s happening with increasing regularity.
According to Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu, “…we have basically created almost a future Atlantis.”
Who’ll take the financial bath?
The Seaport definitely created a lot of construction jobs, and has cemented the city’s status as a go-to hub for companies and talent. But who’ll take the financial hit if these buildings become unusable, or require billions in resiliency retrofits to remain usable?
It won’t be the developers who built and flipped these projects, the banks who financed them, or the blue-chip tenants who’ve signed leases on them. The buildings are all parts of portfolios, where risk is divvied up and spread across lots of equity and debt holders, banks and insurance companies.
Rather, it will be the federal, state and local taxpayer who financed $22 billion in public investment to get the Seaport built. In other words, all of us. The politicians who greenlighted this massive investment are now dead or retired, and today’s politicians can just point a finger back at them while enjoying the short term benefits of this gleaming new district.
Maybe denial is just easier?
It’s not like people don’t see what’s coming. But maybe we just don’t want to see. Hidden away in a corner of the Seaport is a park with a pretty great educational display describing of climate change and its implications for Boston:
There’s also a set of ‘climate stripes,’ that color progression which has been embraced by activists globally as a way to display rising temperatures visually.
The Seaport version of the stripes starts in 1865:
And ends in 2023:
There’s no room to add any stripes after 2023. That’s optimism for you!