The largest private development project in Boston’s history won key approval in the wee hours of Friday morning — and now the next step is to raise the whopping $8 billion to fund it, the developer says.
“That’s the next big step for us,” Tom O’Brien of developer HYM Investment Group told the Herald on Friday, the day after a marathon seven-hour Boston Planning & Development Agency culminated in a 12:30 a.m. unanimous vote for approval.
That $8 billion — yes, with a B — will make it the most expensive private development in state history by a couple of orders of magnitude. The current most expensive was the Encore Boston Harbor resort and casino, at a comparatively meager $2.3 billion.
O’Brien said to raise such an amount, he’ll look to pension funds, life-insurance groups and “high-net-worth families” who all are willing to put in big bucks for a largely guaranteed return.
The Suffolk Downs redevelopment ultimately will put 10,000 housing units on the 161-acre former racetrack, turning the large, vacant space straddling the East Boston-Revere line into a new neighborhood, with 3 million square feet of commercial and retail space. The tallest of the nearly four dozen buildings will cap out north of 200 feet high.
The huge Suffolk Downs project still needs final approval from Boston’s zoning board — which is not known for saying “no” very often.
Construction already is underway on the Revere side, which accounts for a third of the total project space and was approved to go by the smaller city months ago.
O’Brien said that crews have been at work demolishing horse barns on the Revere side near the Beachmont Blue Line MBTA stop, and are preparing what will be the start of a network of streets.
“That site has been cleared and ready for development,” O’Brien said — and potentially for outdoor concerts, beer gardens and the like starting next year.
He said the workers — of which there will be more than 14,000 throughout the life of the 20-year buildout, all union — have piled large heaps of dirt along the routes the streets will take. Those piles will sit there into the spring to tamp down the soil before the roads are created, a strategy necessary because of the high water bed in the area. Then the first buildings will begin next year, due to finish in 2023.
The project is spaced out across the two decades, and the next phase likely would start at the Suffolk Downs Blue Line stop on the other side of the site.
The meeting Thursday night took so long because of the huge number of people who tuned into the virtual session to weigh in. Largely, the comments broke down into two camps: business, political and labor leaders in favor of the project because of the huge number of jobs it will bring to the area, and locals — often speaking Spanish in the heavily Hispanic Eastie — along with environmental activists demanding the vote be pushed off and the number of income-restricted units increased and aimed toward poorer people.
O’Brien defended the number of income-restricted “affordable” housing units in his project as “the largest number that anyone’s ever done” in the area. The project will include 13% of its units being “affordable, with the equivalent of 7% more being created off-site.
