Five years ago, then-Mayor Thomas M. Menino dubbed 1,000 windblown acres on the edge of the South Boston waterfront as the city’s “Innovation District.”
Today, it is one of the hottest corners in Boston’s red-hot real estate market, with well-heeled tech and creative firms filling the old brick warehouses of Fort Point while giants of law, accounting, and pharma fill the new glass boxes lining Seaport Boulevard. There are million-dollar condos with harbor views, and some of the city’s best restaurants. And soon will come the global headquarters of General Electric, which is moving here in a corporate push to become more, well, innovative.
“We want to be at the center of an ecosystem that shares our aspirations,” said chief executive Jeff Immelt.
It’s almost like Menino’s vision for the place is coming true, observers say, even if — with its sky-high rents and increasingly corporate denizens — it can be hard to distinguish the Innovation District from much of the rest of Boston these days.
In explaining its move to Boston, GE touted the city’s research and development infrastructure and its 55 universities — none of which are anywhere near Seaport Boulevard. Most of the brains GE plans to tap are a T ride away, in Kendall Square — whose backers called it “the most innovative square mile on the planet” — at labs affiliated with Harvard and Boston University, along Route 128, and in the cheap old downtown office buildings that today’s generation of bootstrapped startups can afford.
While Menino’s marketing helped put the Seaport on the innovation map, Tim Rowe, chief executive of the Cambridge Innovation Center and a veteran of the region’s startup community, said it’s one of several hubs in Boston.
“That’s how the healthiest innovation cities work,” Rowe said. “They tend to have clusters, but really the whole city is an innovation district.”
It’s perhaps telling that almost no one calls the Seaport the “Innovation District” anymore. Neither Immelt nor Mayor Martin J. Walsh used the term in their announcements this week. The website the city built for the Innovation District hasn’t been updated in more than two years.
Yet the results of what Menino was trying to do there are clear. Acres of vacant land have become prime office space. Once-empty buildings thrive with activity. There are thousands of well-paying jobs. And the neighborhood just landed GE, to go along with the headquarters of Vertex Pharmaceuticals and new outposts for the likes of PricewaterhouseCoopers and law firm Goodwin Procter.
For some companies, moving to an “innovative” neighborhood can be a shot in the arm, said Steve Purpura, head of the Boston office of real estate firm Transwestern. It sends a message to employees and customers that they’re trying to do business in a new way.
“The Seaport is the next evolution for these guys,” Purpura said. “It’s old-economy companies trying to be cool and new-economy companies trying to expand.”
Yet at the same those deep-pocketed new arrivals wind up displacing some of the innovative companies that gave the neighborhood its original cachet.
Mike Baker remembers when he moved his firm, DataXu, to two floors of an old wool warehouse on Summer Street in 2010. There was an abandoned restaurant on the ground floor and only one other tenant in a six-story building. But rent was cheap, and he bought the previous occupant’s furniture for a dollar. It was perfect for an ambitious startup that wanted to spend money on research and development, not real estate.
“It was really the low, low cost that was attractive,” he said. “That’s the way it goes for a lot of startups. We’re like bottom-feeders in a pond.”
But rents have soared. The Seaport’s vacancy rate is at its lowest point in 15 years, according to Transwestern. And while DataXu has a few years left on its lease, Baker doesn’t see many companies like his moving in any more.
That’s a familiar cycle, said Rudina Seseri, partner at Fairhaven Capital, a venture capital firm in Boston. Startups cluster in a particular neighborhood. Restaurants follow. Then come retailers and bigger companies with deeper pockets.
“All of a sudden that drives rents and prices too high” for startups, she said. “Then we see the center of gravity shift to a different location.”
These days, it’s downtown Boston.
Two years ago, when Rowe launched an expansion of his Kendall Square startup hub into Boston, he looked at space in the Seaport.
“We couldn’t afford it,” he said.
So CIC Boston wound up in the Financial District, in a building at 50 Milk Street that has room to expand. Growing numbers of tech firms are moving to Downtown Crossing, Chinatown, North Station, even Back Bay, in search of more affordable rents than they can find in Kendall or the Seaport.
That cycle is healthy thing for both the city and for its tech and its startup culture, said Seseri. The economy doesn’t become overly reliant on one place, and a variety of neighborhoods benefit.
“We should look at this all as one ecosystem,” Seseri said. “And good for GE that it’s taking that approach.”
Tim Logan can be reached at tim.logan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @bytimlogan.