So many dark windows at night in our new luxury towers

Potential for money laundering???? This sounds like Fox news. No evidence to support it.

FTA:

The study points out that Boston is not among the cities monitored for illicit real estate dealings by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, a Treasury Department program designed to combat money laundering.

How gratuitous of you.

No one is better than ferreting out money being hid from us than women

I know this is satire, but I'll NEVER marry.

But, if you want me to go ahead and make such purchase, please direct me to the nearest money tree where I can magically make a real estate purchase of that size.

Many hundreds of thee units are owner occupied. Hundreds more are rented. Even if you have a few hundred units empty, there are still that many more people housed. These are people who have the money to buy anything, anywhere they want. Which means that by stacking them in luxury towers, we're keeping them out of the neighborhoods.

Will towers alone solve our housing shortage? No. Should we be penalizing absentee owners who aren't contributing to making things better? Probably, although we're getting their tax money for services they don't use already. Should we stop building in the hopes that these people will just go away and we can go back to 1980s pricing? Absolutely not.

I prefer an outright ban on foreign purchasing of US properties. It's not hard to figure out which properties are being purchased by foreign investors and their shell corporations, laziness keeps this from happening. People will flame this idea and call in "non-American" and I don't care. We have a greater need for housing now than we did several decades ago, salaries have been stagnant for far too long and many of our elected officials are neglecting our gross economic wealth gap. Concentrate on building housing for locals, not foreign interests.

are residents too.

Even with a residential exemption I think all property owners ought to pay at least a token amount of property tax annually. I think that would lead to better accountability with respect to taxation and spending; it's really, really easy to vote for things that don't cost you anything.

They mentioned this on the radio yesterday and the Feds track purchases in places like NY and Miami pretty closely - so they do find problems there. They haven't focused on Boston - yet.

I applaud Sen. Rubio for working to get the Federal government to pay more attention to this. But if we don't think state and local governments should be involved in enforcement of federal immigration laws, why do we think they should be involved in enforcing federal tax laws -- or even the tax/finance laws of other countries?

Do I care if Russian oligarchs are hiding money from the Russian government? Perhaps that's a benefit if it gives Putin less money to spend on poisoning ex-spies or influencing foreign elections or cyber-warfare. There's certainly a benefit to me if they're paying local property taxes without a residential exemption and consuming virtually zero city services.

Thanks to the preposterous new tax law - if you rent it out and make money under an LLC - you get a 20% tax exemption on that income right off the top. Mostly just "because" and also because they Bob Corker one of maybe 2 swing votes on the issue, owns millions of dollars in real estate organized as (you guessed it) LLCs.

We are being run by a kleptocracy - and not just in the White House.

The money's not in decrepit Boston Latin School, which according to Boston Magazine is now the forty-sixth best public high school inside 495.

These projects aren't why so little middle-class housing gets built in Boston in spite of the need for it. Very few middle-class housing units get built because the cost of construction in Boston is sky-high (and even higher in the downtown core) and there's no conceivable way to make a profit by selling or renting at prices or rents which are affordable to the middle of the market. When it costs about half a million per unit to build affordable housing in Mattapan Square on land that the developer is getting for free from the City, how do you think more middle-class housing gets built here?

Not everyone that buys in luxury developments is doing so to park cash; there are many people who do live in those fancy towers. And those folks would otherwise be competing to rent or buy in the existing housing stock.

The reason all these things are going up as "value stores" is that it's the lowest-risk value store with something resembling liquidity right now. Time was that various financial instruments filled that role.

Between a decade of near-zero or below zero (ie in Japan) interest rates, Wall Street consolidation, and back-door money printing by way of near-trillion-dollar deficits here, combined with Chinese currency "collapse" and Eurozone instability, assets denominated in currency aren't as safe a bet as they were before the crash. Both at the low end of "rich" that might be inclined to keep some of their wealth as cash in the bank and at the higher end of rich. So it's either shiny rocks or shiny skyscrapers. If you ban the skyscrapers, it'll be shiny something else that'll piss off someone else.

Incidentally, shiny skyscrapers are better than shiny rocks. The construction and operation of skyscrapers employs people and spreads the wealth around a whole heck of a lot more than shiny rocks sitting in a vault somewhere do.

That's why it's not a local problem. The non local solution would entail incentives for investment. It'd be good for all concerned if those LLCs invested in shiny factories or revenue-generating infrastructure projects than shiny skyscrapers. The way to encourage that is lower taxes on business and manufacturing, deregulation, and tariff and non-tariff encouragement for investment here. It worked for the Chinese. They have shiny skyscrapers and shiny factories.