Under-Utilized – The East Boston waterfront is ripe for development — and good ideas

With the positive exception of a few developments on Sumner Street during the past five years, the East Boston waterfront remains as it has been, as it might always be – relatively empty and under-utilized and awaiting a great new day.

The great years of the real estate expansion have come and gone.

The local real estate market-place remains robust by comparison to years past, but larger projects have been abandoned, put off, or postponed, an inevitable result of the recession and changed banking practices.

Banks, it seems, have not much interest in larger projects or developments these days.

The East Boston Waterfront remains prepared for development but with not many takers in the real estate market place willing or able to move forward with entrepreneurial developments of residential housing.

What to do?

There is not very much that can be done.

It takes a healthy free market place for developments to be spawned and right now, we have a static market place, high unemployment and a spate of vacancies in residential properties.

There is precious little demand for new properties. Without demand, prices cannot rise upward.

The short term future for the waterfront here is uncertain, except to say that not much is going to dramatically change in the year or two to come.

However, the time will arrive when the economy will once again rise, and with it the possibilities once again for the East Boston waterfront rising with it.

In a real estate market place that has been turned upside down by the recession, local property owners should be rejoicing that East Boston residential properties of all kind have held their value so well.

The wait for the East Boston waterfront to be developed has gone on for 75 years.

It appears as though that fight will continue without a conclusion for a while longer.

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