As we watch the back an forth between dismal demographic news and media pollyannaism in Minneapolis, it’s worth looking at other cities that are having similar post-pandemic problems.

Which is most of Blue Urban America, to be honest – there aren’t many cities outside Florida, Texas, the Carolinas and Tennessee doing well these days – but Boston is a particularly interesting case.

Boston has one advantage – a media where someone, in this case Jon Keller of Boston Magazine – will actually do serious, sober, balanced reporting on the issue, a job that normally falls to Alphanews and the Center of the American Experiment here in the Twin Cities.

Boston had the advantage of not having had a bunch of riots at the height of the pandemic. It has the overcompensating disadvantage of being ruled by a mayor who may be worse than Minneapolis’s mayor and council (so far) put together:

Disaster movies involving skyscrapers are part of America’s cultural canon—and while the situation here isn’t quite as dire as the terrorist attack on the swanky Nakatomi Plaza in the classic Christmas movie Die Hard, neither does there seem to be much hope of a Bruce Willis–style miracle rescue by our elected leaders. After scoffing at the warnings, Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration stunned property owners this spring by proposing the one idea few outside of City Hall seem to think has even a chance of fixing the problem: a tax hike on the beleaguered commercial holdings themselves (which would likely get passed on to tenants, forcing them to downsize their office footprint or flee). It’s a move arguably more intended to curry favor with voters in the upcoming election than keep Boston safe from the doom loop. Coming on top of a string of initiatives deeply unpopular with real estate owners, including an attempt to restore rent control and adopting a surtax on property sales worth more than $2 million, the tensions between Wu and local developers have never been higher.

At the same time, other immediate options for averting catastrophe seem either politically unpalatable or unlikely. Extracting more money from relatively undertaxed residential properties? A politically toxic non-starter in an election year for the mayor, who has said, “I cannot have that happen.” Seeking relief from the state? Given the traditional strain between urban and suburban priorities, good luck with that. And while officials are exploring ideas to deal with the ever-increasing office-building vacancy rate, such as converting empty offices into desperately needed housing, the economic viability of that solution is somewhere between questionable and laughable.

The parallels are seductive – and perhaps a little misleading. And the whole article is worth a read.

But if you read about Mayor Wu’s approach to the collapse of downtown Boston’s commercial real estate market and the hole it leaves in the city’s budget and think “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, you and I think just a little alike.

Oh, yeah – Chicago, too.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, May 31st, 2024 at 11:00 am and is filed under Business, The Economy and The Markets, Democrat Party. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.