Well, there are 1,200 Harvard faculty, average effective annual salary $274,005. 600 MIT faculty, average effective annual salary $249,509. 900 Google employe

Well, there are 1,200 Harvard faculty, average effective annual salary $274,005. 600 MIT faculty, average effective annual salary $249,509. 900 Google employees, of which quite a few are at least Staff Software Engineers, which average $200,418 based on Glassdoor's estimates. Then you also have Microsoft, Akamai, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, all of which have pay grades for individual contributor software engineers that go over $200k, and staffs in the hundreds of engineers. We can thrown in many hundred MD PhDs at the world-class research hospitals: MGH, Brigham and Women's, Tufts Medical, etc. My point is that the Boston/Camberville economy has many institutions that compete globally. They bring revenue from around the entire world and concentrate it here, and they compete vigorously with each other over the most qualified people. People from elsewhere don't often appreciate the way that this city punches above its weight. Only New York and San Francisco are really in this league, and they are both much larger cities. So yes, a few hundred new luxury condos are hardly a blip. The median home price in Cambridge is now $1.6 million. During the 2008 crisis when real estate was falling nearly everywhere, it merely leveled off here. It's not hard to see why, when you consider the value of having neighbors with endowments of $37 billion and $13 billion who form a global skill vortex.