How's it go? You can't put lipstick on a pig?

Boston needs a Mayor.

What are the prices of these new units? Who's buying them? Will we create a downtown of pied-a-terres for wealthy people who are not really residents and have no vested interest in making a neighborhood, as other downtowns have done? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117098643581503178.html# Wall Street Journal HOMESFebruary 9, 2007 Nobody's Home A growing number of Manhattan's choicest apartments are being bought by people who rarely use them. Our reporter on the $25 million pied-à-terre. By TROY MCMULLEN Five-Fifteen Park Avenue has everything one could want in a Manhattan home: sprawling floor-through apartments, unobstructed views, and concierge and maid services. But on most days, the limestone and beige-brick tower at the elegant Upper East Side address lacks one thing: many of its residents. More than half of the building's 35 units belong to absentee owners, whose main residences stretch from Tokyo to Wichita, Kan., city deeds and mortgage documents show. Some spend little more than a few weeks a year at their apartments, say other owners and building staff. But the occasional occupants are troubling to some full-time residents, who say their buildings are left depressingly hollow. And the popularity of the costly apartments helps boost Manhattan prices for everyone, draining away developers' interest in erecting middle-class buildings on the city's few available parcels and making one of the world's most expensive real-estate markets even more forbidding to average buyers. To have so many apartments sitting empty when there is an affordable-housing crisis in New York City raises a "political question," says Mitchell Duneier, a professor of urban sociology at Princeton University.....