A little over a year ago, the two apartment towers planned for Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester looked like that rare Boston project that moves quickly. Now they're tied up in court.
Universal Hub reported that Boston-based developer Copper Mill sued POB Capital of Chicago last week, filing in both state Land Court and Suffolk Superior Court. The fight is over the land where Channel 56 used to be, and over two 18-story towers with 754 apartments that the Boston Planning Department approved on Aug. 14, 2025.
Copper Mill wants the courts to make POB accept the original $67.5 million price for the land, and to pay damages for the way Copper Mill says POB tried to derail the deal. The claims are Copper Mill's side of the story, as laid out in its filings, and none has been proven.
How the deal came together
According to the suits, POB had owned the parcel since 2018, when it paid $56 million, and had done nothing with it. So when Copper Mill offered $67.5 million, POB jumped. The offer was contingent on Copper Mill winning planning department approval for both the buildings and the overall site plan, which also called for two new roads and a public park.
Copper Mill says POB was amazed at how quickly that approval came through. After that, POB sought to change the arrangement into a partnership, with Copper Mill handling the construction and POB handling the financing.
The alleged stall
Here's where it went sideways, according to Copper Mill. Once the two companies were partners, the suit charges, POB began deliberately dragging its feet on lining up money for the work, hoping to run out the clock on the purchase-and-sale agreement. That way, Copper Mill alleges, POB could take back control of the parcel and sell it, city approvals and all, to another developer for more money.
As one example, Copper Mill says POB claimed to have hired a broker to find financial backers, but the broker was based in Ohio, had no knowledge of the Boston real estate market and never produced any money. Copper Mill also charges that POB began shopping the property and its approvals to other Boston-area real estate companies at prices well above what it had agreed to take from Copper Mill.
In one of the more colorful lines in the filings, Copper Mill quotes a POB executive as allegedly saying, in saltier language than we'll print here, that there was no way he was going to buy his own dirt.
The purchase-and-sale agreement expired on June 30 of this year. The Superior Court suit alleges fraud, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, tortious interference with a contract, undue enrichment, civil conspiracy and violation of the state's trade-practices law.
What's riding on it
According to the City of Boston's announcement when the project was approved, the towers are the first of three phases planned for the 35-75 Morrissey Boulevard site. One building would hold 391 homes and the other 363, a mix of studios and one-, two- and three-bedroom units, with 151 of the 754 apartments income-restricted.
The ground floors would include retail, community and civic space, and the project includes a new community park. Phase 1 also carries new on- and off-site roadway work, including an entirely new off-site road with room for city utilities. The city listed contributions of $209,755 toward the bikeshare system, plus a Bluebikes station, and about $600,000 for upkeep at Moakley Park. The buildings are designed to LEED Gold and Passive House standards. ## Why it matters for Contractors
The city estimated the project would support about 710 construction jobs. That's real work for a lot of crews in and around Boston, from site and utility contractors on the new roads to the concrete, framing, envelope and mechanical trades that a pair of 18-story Passive House towers would need. Right now, all of that is on hold while two companies fight over who controls the dirt.
There's a lesson in this one, too. A city approval can be worth a lot of money, and when it attaches to land the builder doesn't yet own, the purchase-and-sale terms and deadlines matter as much as the permits. If you're bidding or pricing work on a big project like this, it pays to know whether the developer actually holds title or is still working against a closing deadline. Until the courts sort this out, Morrissey Boulevard is a wait-and-see job.