Recent reports around Greater Boston have continued to focus on the negative, with media and real estate trade reports indicating that the real estate market around the region remains in a slump and indeed may not have hit bottom yet.

However, according to real estate brokers in some of Boston’s best neighborhoods, that is not the case in the downtown area. In fact, several brokers and agencies have reported that the first quarter of 2007 has been much better than expected and they see signs the improvement will continue.

Tim Marsh of Marsh Properties said this week that the market has changed downtown.

“I don’t want this to sound self-serving, but I’m much busier than I have been in a couple of years,” said Marsh. “And it’s not just in the Back Bay or on Beacon Hill, where I do a lot of my business. I’m getting calls from the South End, West End and Waterfront areas as well. All of the downtown area seems to be bordering on feverish.”

“All I can say is that I’ve been very, very busy around here,” added Sally Brewster of Brewster and Berkowitz Real Estate. “Things have been hopping.”

Brewster, like other real estate agents on Beacon Hill and in the Back Bay, said that as far as she can tell, the upturn in the local market is centered in the downtown areas.

“I was at a real estate conference over the weekend and all the suburban brokers were complaining that it is very slow in their communities,” said Brewster.

David Thomas, executive vice president of ERA Boston Real Estate group, said that his company has noticed a similar turnaround in the downtown areas and the rebound is not limited to just Back Bay and Beacon Hill.

“We’ve noticed that business is picking up across the downtown area,” said Thomas. “Our experience has been that at least the downtown real estate market is much busier than it was a year ago, and prices seem to be going up on a per square foot basis as well.”

Thomas noted that internal statistics compiled by ERA Boston agent Brian Rugg prove what agencies are saying.

“The preliminary data that we have shows that, on Beacon Hill for instance, the number of units sold and closed is up about 17 percent over first quarter sales a year ago,” explained Rugg.
“As a practical matter in neighborhoods like Back Bay and Beacon Hill, most of those sales would be condominiums, but there would be some single-family homes and townhomes mixed in with those results as well.”

Thomas credits the turnaround to the uniqueness of the downtown Boston real estate market.

“With the exception of a few new, larger buildings in some neighborhoods, what you have with the downtown market is a finite number of units that can be bought and sold, while there is still a great demand for downtown living in Boston,” said Thomas. “My experience selling real estate in the city is that downturns in the market are shorter lived in the downtown than elsewhere, and that seems to be the case this time as well.”

Marsh, like Thomas, noted that downtown living has its own virtues that attract buyers, even when other areas of the market seem to be slowing or staying flat.

“I think that people are buying into the notion that the market, at least in Boston, has bottomed out and now we’re going to push it up the other side of that valley,” said Marsh. “I’m very optimistic about the rebound in these neighborhoods and for the rest of the year.”

CAPTION: There were plenty of empty seats at the Boston marathon finish line Monday.
CREDIT: Penny Cherubino



When Caryn King and her partner Daniel Aguilar opened Bostone Pizza on Newbury Street early this year, Lee DiMascio and Angelo Palermo, who had owned the Newbury Pizza at the site for 30 years, told them the Boston Marathon weekend was one of the largest grossing weekends all year.

“So we stocked up on food and brought in extra staff — and did horribly,” said King. “Sunday we did the lowest sales since we opened in January, and Monday was just an average day.”

It was a sentiment shared by many small business owners on Boylston and Newbury streets where there was little foot traffic due to the heavy winds and rain. King sent an employee over to Boylston Street to hand out flyers about her pizza, she said, but it was to little avail. She speculated that family members of runners were at home, watching the road race on television and tracking their loved ones online by the chips in their shoes. “Oh, it happens in this business,” said King, who added she hoped the malls did better.

Not necessarily so, said Amy Daniels, marketing director for the Shops at Prudential Center. “Historically, marathon day is not a big shopping day anyway. Usually people stay outside and come in only to buy small things or to eat.” This year the shops saw even fewer shoppers and suspect that few people made the drive into the city.

However, sales were good in the days preceding the marathon, Daniels said. Some shops did report doing twice as well as usual on the rainy Sunday.

The Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau had projected that the Boston Marathon and activities related to it throughout the weekend would generate approximately $97.7 million in direct and indirect economic impact to greater Boston. But after the damp and wind-driven weekend, they dropped their estimate by $15 million, according to Joanna Blasi, media relations and tourism sales coordinator.

While more than 23,800 official runners had registered to run, 20,348 actually finished the race, and there were fewer spectators than usual. The bureau based their original estimate on four Red Sox games, Patriots’ Day activities in Boston and around the region — some of which was cancelled — as well as the John Hancock Sports & Fitness Expo at the Hynes Convention Center and the start of the spring tourism season in Boston — which was pretty soggy.

One shop that did well was Marathon Sports on Boylston Street, located directly across from the finish line. “The weekend was awesome,” said manager Shane O’Hara, despite there being very few people at the finish line all day.

The store always does well selling the official Addidas Boston Athletic Association marathon shirts and jackets. But this year the bad weather drove runners and spectators into the store for warm clothing and rain gear as well.

“”We had to bring in a boatload of jackets, gloves and hats from other stores to keep up,” O’Hara said.

credit: Penny Cherubino
The rain and the wind last Monday were no deterrent for this threesome who watched the marathon intently.

Four general options exist for replacing the crumbling Storrow Drive Tunnel between Arlington and Clarendon streets.

But maybe not for long.

Two of the options back up traffic on Storrow Drive to intolerable levels, according to traffic planners. At the same time, these options push more cars onto Boylston Street and portions of Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue.

“There are lower volumes of traffic [on Storrow Drive], but major bottlenecks,” said transportation planner Tom Lisco about those options.

Beacon Hill traffic increases even more than does Back Bay’s. Lisco said some of the options cause unacceptable levels of traffic as westbound traffic comes off Storrow Drive at Charles Circle.

“This system will overload no matter what we do,” said Tony Pangaro.

The bad news about traffic was discussed at last week’s meeting of the Storrow Drive Tunnel Project’s transportation and landscape advisory committee. The state’s Department of Conservation and Recreation has been holding these meetings for about a year and a half in preparation for dealing with the tunnel problem.

Traffic studies projected out to the year 2030 show that options B and C caused more problems than option A, in which the tunnel would be reconstructed as is, or D, in which roadways in both directions would be buried.

The problems with B and C primarily come down to one thing — traffic signals. In option B, there are signals at both Arlington and Berkeley streets, enabling pedestrians to cross without having to go over a footbridge. This scheme has an additional advantage, in some advocates’ eyes, of making Storrow Drive more like the parkway the original roadway was intended to be.

Option C proposes a tunnel carrying the westbound lanes and traffic signals for traffic in the eastbound direction.

Ironically, while Storrow Drive backups increase at critical hours in B and C, the number of cars actually decreases, since traffic forecasters believe drivers will take other routes — through Back Bay and Beacon Hill — to avoid the traffic lights and backups.

Participants were grim about the situation.

“It’s about quality of life, quality of the parks and how long it’s going to be a mess,” Pangaro complained.

Once again, participants urged DCR officials to explore the possibility of building new ramps at the Mass Pike. “As part of this [solution], can’t we adopt changes to the Mass Pike?” asked Jeannette Herrmann of Beacon Hill. “Ramps would have a huge influence on the options. I can’t imagine proceeding on a further analysis without ramp studies.”

Progress

Almost 40 years ago when this editorial writer moved to the Back Bay, those of us who had chosen the city over the suburbs in which to live and raise children were considered strange. And in some ways we were, because the challenges were considerable.

For example, there was no neighborhood playground. Our children had to go to the Common or the Esplanade to play and, depending on where in the Back Bay you lived, it could be quite a hike. But shortly thereafter a group of parents who were committed to the city created the Clarendon Street Playground. It was centrally located within the neighborhood. It became a place where families met one another. One problem solved.

Another challenge was greenery. The elms had died. Replanting with other varieties had begun, but it was erratic on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. The trees on the Esplanade were still whips. But that made it easy to see the lights across the river, which came from industrial buildings like Carter’s Ink. MIT and residential and office developers had not yet taken them over. After 40 years, however, the trees are large. More have been added. The lights now shine only from windows, not from signs, because the buildings across the river are no longer industrial. Those who have lived here a long time aren’t as fearful of the construction that will take place on the Esplanade when the Storrow Drive Tunnel is fixed since experience has shown them that trees grow fast.

In the late 1960s, Back Bay’s buildings were in sad shape. There were plenty of rentals, since condominiums had not yet come on the scene. But rentals meant scores of absentee landlords whose motives appeared to be to wringing the last dime out of tenants rather than repairing or renovating a problem property. There had always been stalwarts who never left the city and who maintained their homes with pride, but they were the exception.

But in the 1960s, perhaps because every kind of habit was being questioned, a number of people decided to try downtown Boston living. The South End had great attraction, but so did the Back Bay. Some of those 1960s pioneers are still here, especially on Marlborough Street and the cross streets where the houses are a good size for a single family.

In the ’70s, the condominium form of ownership came into being. This was a boon for the preservation of the larger Back Bay buildings. They were perfect for multi-family living. Over a couple of decades owners and developers repaired brownstone, tightened windows, fixed roofs and planted gardens. The results were quarters that were not necessarily large, but a means of keeping these buildings useful into their second hundred years.

Some Bostonians romanticize old Boston. Not us. Of course there were some advantages then — the fact that the Prince School, a public school, lay right in the middle of the neighborhood — was one. Although even that school was largely segregated.

But the Back Bay is in better shape today than it was in the 1960s and ‘70s. Its housing stock has been preserved and enhanced. Families no longer fear they will be among the few pioneers to settle in an unsettled territory. Neighbors of all colors, national origin and sexual orientation are welcomed without reservation. There is a playground for children. While we don’t have a public school within walking distance, we do have several private schools that serve the neighborhood well.