Boston's skyline was transformed over the last 15 years by a wave of high-rise apartment and condo towers, but that type of development has disappeared.

As construction costs have risen and rents have flattened across Greater Boston, multifamily developers have moved away from building downtown towers and are instead looking toward low-rise projects outside of the urban core. Developers who spoke Thursday at Bisnow's Multifamily Annual Conference New England, held at the Artists For Humanity venue in South Boston, said they don't plan on building new high-rise towers anytime soon.

"We may have built all the high-rise apartment buildings in the last 10 years that we're going to build in the next 10," said David Gillespie, senior vice president of development at Vivmark Residential – the largest publicly traded landlord that was formed last month by the merger of AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential.

"We had a generational moment in the high-rise business in Boston," he added 

Gillespie recalled building Avalon Exeter, a 28-story apartment tower at 77 Exeter St. that AvalonBay started construction on in 2011. He said when the developer was planning the project, there hadn't been any recent multifamily towers to use as comparables, but by the time the apartment building opened its doors in 2014, there were around a dozen similar high-rise apartments advancing throughout the city. 

Last decade, 55% of new apartment projects built in Boston were in high-rise buildings — at least 12 floors — the highest portion of any U.S. city according to a 2019 Rent Cafe report.

But in recent years, that trend has flipped.

New Rent Cafe data provided to Bisnow shows only five high-rise multifamily buildings have been completed in Greater Boston since the start of 2024, compared to 47 garden-style and 88 mid-rise developments in the same time period.

"High-rise is off the table without a question," The Procopio Cos. CEO Michael Procopio said at the event. "You're not going to see substantive high-rise development in the residential space for five years. It just doesn't pencil. There's no trend line that gets it to pencil at the current costs."

Overall multifamily development has slowed dramatically over the last couple of years as high interest rates and construction costs have made the financing math more difficult.

Permits were issued for 432 housing units in Boston in the first quarter of 2026, down from 549 in the same quarter last year and 642 in the same quarter in 2024, The Boston Globe reported.

Developers attribute the slowdown to the high costs of building. Inputs for multifamily construction have increased 52.8% since February 2020 and 7.3% over the 12 months ending in June, according to an Associated Builders and Contractors analysis.

Carmel Partners partner Lee Bloch said the costs of developing high-rises in Boston are far more expensive than the average project, reaching up to $1M per unit.

"That's a tremendous hill to climb trying to get there," Bloch said.

At the same time, landlords have struggled to grow their income as Greater Boston rents have flattened: They averaged $3,162 in Q2, a 0.05% decrease year-over-year, according to Matthews.

For some developers, the only way to make these projects work right now is with generous incentive packages.

While Boston and surrounding cities have offered some incentives, Procopio said they typically "don't move the needle" on making new projects pencil unless they are heavily negotiated.

"They're not going to overcome any of the issues we're talking about," he said. "That's the bottom line. They're not going to take a site that doesn't pencil and suddenly make it."

Procopio said cost hurdles also come from state regulations, including Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act review.

State and local officials have been trying in recent years to make homebuilding easier. The Healey-Driscoll administration has said it plans to shorten and streamline MEPA review and cut some of the red tape that has been adding costs to developing housing. 

In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu has been pushing new incentives to jump-start housing, most recently proposing $31.5M in tax breaks for developers of four market-rate housing projects totaling more than 1,400 units. 

The projects include two high-rise developments: Fulcrum Global Investor's 22-story One Mystic Ave. in Charlestown and Hines' 22-24 Pratt St. project, which at its tallest point would be 16 stories.

The caveat is that all of the projects need to start construction within the next year to qualify. Stantec Architecture principal Aeron Hodges said at the event she is working on three of the four projects that were selected for the tax abatements.

She said she has talked to the development teams about whether the funding would move the needle on breaking ground, and the verdict was “pretty uncertain.”

“It helps on the operations down the road, but the immediate [financing] needs for putting the project in ground is still fundamentally challenging,” she said.

The economics play out much better for development in suburban markets, where more land is available at a lower cost basis. Developers also benefit from having space to provide surface parking, which costs less than building parking garages.

The state has helped pave the way for more suburban development with the MBTA Communities Act, which was enacted in 2021 and spurred local rezonings to allow by right multifamily projects near MBTA transit stops.

Procopio said while many communities didn't act in good faith when picking sites to rezone for multifamily, the ones that did are the ones experiencing a surge of development. Nearly 7,000 units had been proposed in MBTA Communities zones as of the beginning of this year, according to The Boston Foundation.

"Those are the ones that have actually unlocked development, and you've seen that happening in places like Lexington," Procopio said.

In Lexington, more than 1,600 units of housing have been approved under its MBTA Communities Zoning. Notable projects include BXP's five-story, 312-unit 17 Hartwell Ave. and Dinosaur Capital's five-story, 130-unit 7 Hartwell Ave.

The Dinosaur Capital project earlier this month secured a $45.8M construction loan from Affinius Capital LLC and Axonic Capital LLC.

Last month, Atlanta-based Wood Partners began construction on its five-story, two-building apartment project in Concord called Alta Thoreau. The 237-unit project includes surface parking.

Hodges said her firm has worked on a pair of high-rise developments in recent years: Toll Brothers' 34-story Lyra project at 260 Huntington Ave., which was completed over the summer, and BXP’s 37-story Cambridge apartment tower, which began construction in 2024. But when analyzing new projects, she said the ones that are penciling now aren’t high-rise towers; they are either adaptive reuse or suburban low-rise projects. 

“There are a lot of Class-B suburban office park buildings that come with parking, are easy to access, the cost basis is not as high,” she said. “People will go to those for rent because it is more affordable, work from home is a trend, they’re willing to look outside the urban core. There are a lot of opportunities outside downtown.”

Jon Banister contributed reporting.