Boston spent the past decade stacking glassy towers along its waterfront and downtown skyline, betting that a global class of wealthy buyers would snap up every last penthouse. Instead, a growing share of those units now sit dark at night, their marble kitchens and concierge desks waiting on demand that never fully materialized. The city’s luxury experiment has become a cautionary tale about what happens when speculative finance outruns the real housing needs of the people who actually live and work there.
Developers, lenders and city officials are now wrestling with a basic mismatch: thousands of high priced homes built for a narrow slice of the market, and a broader population that is either priced out or simply uninterested. As I trace how Boston arrived at this point, the story that emerges is not just about empty condos, but about a planning model that treated luxury as a shortcut to prosperity and is now colliding with economic reality.
The mid‑2010s luxury boom that set the stage
In the middle of the last decade, Boston’s development playbook revolved around one idea, that if the city built enough high end condos, global capital and affluent buyers would follow. From 2013 through 2018, roughly 1,500 luxury condos hit the market, a wave that reshaped the skyline and reset expectations for what downtown living could cost. I see that period as the psychological turning point, when luxury stopped being a niche and became the default template for large scale residential projects in the urban core.
That initial surge did not stay contained. After those first 1,500 units, Nearly 2,500 more high end condos followed in the years after, as developers doubled down on the assumption that demand would keep rising. That decision locked Boston into a pipeline of expensive projects that would take years to deliver, even as economic conditions and buyer preferences began to shift. By the time many of those towers opened their doors, the market they were built for had already started to thin out.
How Boston’s skyline became a luxury sales machine
Once the luxury formula appeared to work, it spread quickly from one neighborhood to another. I watched as the logic of the early downtown towers migrated into the Seaport, Back Bay and beyond, with each new project promising more amenities, higher finishes and record setting price tags. The city’s planning approvals and zoning variances often leaned into this pattern, treating high end condos as a reliable way to unlock private investment in infrastructure and public spaces, even when that meant sidelining more modest housing types…