Union Point was championed as a futuristic development that would help lure Amazon to Boston. Two lawsuits and countless unfulfilled promises later, the project is a case study in how smart-city hype can outpace reality.

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Most smart city projects in the U.S. involve retrofitting existing cities: setting up an energy-efficient electric grid in Boulder, Colo., or helping drivers find parking spaces in San Francisco. Smart cities built from the ground up tend to be in Asia or the Middle East, and when they are located here, such as the Bill Gates–backed Belmont outside of Phoenix, they tend to involve remote sites in the desert southwest. So it was a welcome surprise to discover that someone was planning to build a 21st-century city, from the ground up, on the stodgy East Coast. Once I got beyond the renderings, however, I soon realized that Union Point was more a case study in smart city hype outpacing reality.

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The Union Point I discovered on the ground doesn’t have much in common with the glittering city depicted in the renderings, which maybe shouldn’t come as a surprise. LStar, since its founding in 2007, has done a solid business building and managing typical, somewhat upscale, planned communities, McMansions adjacent to golf courses. Managing partner Corkum told The Boston Globe that the company had “extensive experience building ‘charming New England villages’ ” in places that were not New England, mostly in the south and southwest. The implication was that they’d be great at building a New England village on a site that was actually in New England.

Initially, things went well. Early news stories were largely positive. Corkum charmed the community by setting up a miniature version of Fenway Park for local children and turned part of the property into a backlot where filmmakers shot the finish line scenes in Patriots Day, the 2017 Peter Berg–directed movie about the Boston Marathon bombings. But then, as Corkum told me, community residents he met with convinced him they didn’t want just another subdivision. They wanted something more like a city. “They were pretty adamant about it,” he said. So the local governments rewrote the enabling legislation to remove zoning restrictions and give LStar a more flexible timetable.

“One day, someone on [Elkus’] team said, ‘What you’re doing is a smart city.’ I had to look it up. I had no clue, and I got super excited. I said, ‘Oh yeah. Technology!’ ”

Soon thereafter, Corkum’s vision for the site began, much like a blimp, to inflate: At a Weymouth town council meeting in August 2015, according to a report published in Boston Business Journal, Corkum touted a “100-acre ‘Discovery District’ dedicated for up to 2 million square feet of office space for life sciences, biotech, technology, pharmaceutical research and R&D companies.” 

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