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🥶Schools are back in session after two snow days. Expect highs in the 20s and lows in the single digits. Sunset is at 4:53 p.m.
For a year and a half, GBH’s Liz Neisloss followed the people converting a 19th century office building on Franklin Street in Boston’s Financial District into apartments. Today she’s laid out the process in a video chronicling how the crews demolished the building’s interior, framed new apartments and installed new kitchens, bathrooms and fridges. She even met the first tenants who moved in. Keep reading for more — but first: some news.
Four Things to Know
1. In the five years since the passage of the MBTA Communities Act, which made it legal to build multifamily housing without special permission in cities and towns close to MBTA service, Massachusetts has started the process of adding 7,000 homes in 34 communities, according to a new report from Boston Indicators. Most of those homes are still in the permitting stage, and they represent about 3% of the 220,000 new housing units the Healey administration aims to build by 2035.
“It represents progress that is modest compared to need,” said Amy Dain, a senior fellow at Boston Indicators. “It’s not necessarily transformative gains; it’s more incremental and modest. It’s important to progress, but it’s just one step towards ending the housing shortage and addressing our patterns of development that are very car-dependent and moving toward transit-oriented development.”
2. Massachusetts Auditor Diana DiZoglio said she’s formally told the state attorney general’s office she wants to hire private lawyers to represent her office in a lawsuit over her attempts to audit the state legislature – and that Michael Minogue, a Republican candidate for governor, has offered to pay.
DiZoglio says she’s checked that plan with the state Ethics Commission, but Campbell’s office says she won’t share the guidance given by the commission. “If the attorney general doesn’t believe us and says she disagrees, she’s welcome to file an ethics complaint against our office and see where that goes,” DiZoglio said. Members of the legislature have said the auditor’s office does not have the power to investigate their day-to-day functioning, though about 70% of voters approved a ballot question to give the auditor’s office that power in the 2024 election.
3. The families of two people the U.S. military killed in October in a boat strike off the Venezuelan coast filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Boston federal court yesterday. Their families say the men were not drug traffickers and were trying to get home from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago.
“We’re seeking damages that can go some way towards bringing justice for these really heinous abuses of power,” said ACLU attorney Jeffrey Stein, who is representing them. The White House responded with a statement saying the strike was lawful and targeted what they called “designated narcoterrorists.”
4. The popularity of the HBO show “Heated Rivalry,” which is about two professional men’s hockey players finding love, has led to more real-life interest in Boston Pride Hockey, an LGBTQ+ hockey organization.
“Which is crazy, because 450 members, that sounds like a lot. But that’s established over time,” said Kevin Corsino, communications and PR chair for Boston Pride Hockey. “So a big jump of 10 people inquiring and then physically coming out to skate and getting on the ice with us is, like, huge. That’s a huge increase. And keep in mind that doesn’t include people who are also DMing us on social, asking about our programming, 'Hey ... I’m fairly new to the sport, could I come play? What types of programming do you have?’”
How Boston is turning empty office buildings into modern apartments
By Liz Neisloss, GBH News reporter
For a long time I’ve been interested in the question of how to bring more housing to Greater Boston. The region has many housing and policy experts and a lot of programs to help develop housing, but it remains an urgent and thorny issue. That leads some people, including me, to think about “what ifs — like driving past massive glass towers downtown and in cities around Boston and thinking, “Why can’t we just fill those empty offices with a lot of apartments?”
So when Boston announced its program to convert offices to residences, I was eager to learn more. In 2024, I connected with Adam Burns, head of Boston Pinnacle Properties, the first developer to jump in with a project. We tagged along, checking in over a year and a half as he and his team converted a six-story office building on Franklin Street — built in the late 1800s — into 15 apartments.
I quickly learned that even with a relatively high office vacancy rate in Boston, not every building can be transformed. Those massive glass towers I once eyed, and thought of as ideal, turn out to be the wrong shape for easy and cost-effective conversion. Experts say the best candidates are more like a collection of “unicorn” buildings that meet criteria including design and financing.
Apartments need light and windows. So wide glass towers, for example, are hard to convert because they have a deep core that makes them hard to lay out as apartments. And when it comes to financing, giant office buildings are often really complex financial packages that may have multiple owners and layers of debt, making it tougher to get to a conversion.
The city recently declared the program a success and extended it until the end of this year. Developers get a 29-year, 75% tax abatement along with fast-tracked permitting, and officials point to newly approved major downtown zoning changes that removed outdated restrictions to allow more mixed-use development including coffee shops, fitness studios and entertainment venues to support growing residential neighborhoods and revitalize downtown.
The state also has its own commercial-to-residential program and over the past few years the number of office-to-residence conversions has jumped: last year more than triple the number of conversions were completed than in 2022, according to CBRE.
So far Boston’s program will create 1,500 apartments, and based on developer interest, the city estimates the extended program will add another 1,000 apartments. That’s not a lot when measured against the estimated need: roughly 69,000 units of housing in the city by 2030.
But as Mayor Michelle Wu described it, as she ceremonially swung a sledgehammer at the launch of a new project in July, “Every little bit makes a difference.”
Watch to see how an office building becomes a place to live — step by step.
Dig deeper:
-A new apartment building helps knit a Boston community back together
-Boston strikes deal to stop gentrification of Mattapan housing complex
-To fix Massachusetts’ housing crisis, we need to build. Here’s why that’s hard.
-Once-abandoned mills are now home to thousands of Massachusetts residents
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