First in an ongoing series on income inequality in Boston.
On a May morning, Boston is alive. Taxis are darting here and there, deliveries are being made, and Boston Common is filled with a crossroads of diversity: folks in spring dresses, shirts and ties, blue and brown collar uniforms, t-shirts and light jackets- all heading to destinations connecting this downtown park pathway- from the State House to Emerson and Fisher to Charles Street, to the Arlington Street Church.
But instead of zigzagging back and forth, today we’re heading up- to the other side of the the Boston Common. I pull up to the entrance of a luxury condominium tower on a bicycle. A well-dressed doorman politely instructs me where to park it.
Twelve flights up an elevator, I arrive at the apartment of Christiane DeLessert and John Shields. She’s a financial planner. He’s an architect. Baby Boomers who moved here from Newton for the same reasons cited by other newly minted urbanites making the transition from the suburbs to the city.
"What propels me is what the city has to offer. The minute you step out, it’s life. It’s all kinds of people that you see. You’re surrounded by people and there’s an energy that comes from that," she said. "And then you walk. You walk, walk, walk everywhere. You walk to this wonderful esplanade along the river. You have culture. We went to an opera the other night at the Majestic and paid $15. It’s like living again."
And this roomy two bedroom sun-drenched condo at One Charles Street comes with a view of the State House and Beacon Hill.
"This apartment here. It’s like a cliff dwelling. This little shelf where you can look out on the plains," Shields said.
And see a city in rapid transition from a parochial bastion of insulated neighborhoods since they arrived here in 1969, to something entirely different.
"Boston has improved every single year. Now what’s behind it? Is it private citizens? Is it a combination of public and private? All I can say is a sense of improvement. This city is doing something right," DeLessert said. "I now see articles that put Boston almost in the same plain as other cities like Geneva, Munich, some slight comparisons but not quite there to London, Paris and New York. Boston is really catching up and you sense it."
DeLessert, originally from Switzerland, says she and her husband are eager to be a part of that renaissance, aptly captured by the modern art and sculpture that fills this spacious, sun–drenched condominium.
"I’m an architect and have always been interested in cities," Shields. "And as an architect I never had a great desire to build my own house but I did hare a desire to make what I live in as pleasant as I possibly could."
A two bedroom here at One Charles Boston starts at $950,000; put it another way –$50,000 short of a million, or a $6,000 per month mortgage and condo fee. That is the average cost of similar luxury condo and apartment towers that have ben constructed downtown and in the Seaport, with over 5,000 new units on the way. The prices are considerably below that of Manhattan's with some loming above $30 million, but some in Boston fear that the symbolism of pricey gleaming residential towers scraping Boston’s skyline is pushing people we’ve always thought of as in the middle out of the middle class.
Barry Bluestone is director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University:
"It's not just a symbol; the luxury high rises. What is happening in Boston, almost more than any other city with maybe the exception of San Francisco and New York, is that housing is becoming the kind of determining factor in the polarizing of the city," Bluestone said.
Bluestone, a political economist , is the author of the The Great U-turn, which examines income inequality.
"You have wealthy people, many of them empty-nesters who were able to sell a big home in the suburbs who made money in financial services or in high-tech or whatever and saying ‘I’d like to live downtown’ and they're able to buy $5 million condos," Bluestone said. "You also have some poorer people in the city who are able to be in public housing or they get Section 8 vouchers. What we’re losing is the whole workforce, the middle income and working income families."
The Occupy movement raised the issue of middle class and working class desperation more than any similar movement in years with its chant about the "one and the 99 percent".
William Wheaton, the director of MIT's Center for Real Estate, said he prescribes to a different view: development that offsets what some call income inequality. He says the surge in high-rise rentals and condos are precisely what Boston needs to compete with other cities.
"First, it is economically impractical to try and build higher density new residential development for lower income households without very significant subsidies, so it won't happen," Wheaton said. "Higher end developments on vacant urban land certainly brings higher income residents into central cities, but these historically have had heavy concentrations of lower income residents. But new high income developments actually bring greater income balance to central cities, increasing the tax base and in the process helping to finance service improvements in the lower income neighborhoods."
Many owners of expensive condos, like Shields and DeLessert at One Charles, have worked hard to reach the heights of their careers and to be able purchase homes above a city that is fast becoming world class. Almost no one I interviewed for this series expressed any bitterness toward hardworking people who happen to be successful. After all, they’re also looking to succeed, and some work two shifts- from 9 to 5 and then 6 to midnight as janitors, taxi-drivers, adjunct professors, and waitresses to try make it.
But Barry Bluestone says middle class workers, or those aspiring to become middle class, who are putting in those extra shifts are swimming against the tide of an ever shifting American dream.
"I have a lot of friends who get paid very poorly and working a lot harder than I am," Bluestone said.
Bluestone said hard work, that all-American ethos we’ve come to embrace as the key to entering the middle class, is only a small part of the formula for who gets ahead in America, who reaches the heights and who stays in place on the ground.
DeLessert, a successful financial planner for high income individuals, is well aware of income inequality, and the social effects nag at her sense of well-being—even in a $1 million condo high above the city, but she concedes that the symbolic sounds of inequality- police sirens, loud arguments over the rent; public protests over the minimum wage- are blocked out by a thick pane of glass.
Back on the elevator and 12 flights down, I reach the ground floor, past the doorman, past the mailman, past men and women on the street where the divide between what Bluestone calls smart work and work that gets us by is growing; and where many Bostonians are hoping to rediscover the American ideal known as the middle class.
