2 Congress St

2 Congress St is a 10-story building in Downtown Boston with 48% of its floor area within daylight reach of a facade. Residential records sit on a parcel it shares with other buildings, so its use is unverified and this screen leaves it out of the conversion counts.

MA-7 & MA-8 · Screened 2026-10-04 · Excluded: residential records on a shared parcel; building use unverified

Also addressed as 50 Sudbury St and 200-210 Sudbury St: Boston’s address records place all 3 on this one footprint.

Where 2 Congress St is

Its block in Downtown Boston, drawn from Boston's own building outlines and street centerlines.

Suitability score

0–29

30–49

50–69

70–100

Already housing, or excluded for residential records on a shared parcel
Not screened
2 Congress St

2 Congress St and the 1,000 ft of Downtown Boston around it. The streets are drawn at the width of the right-of-way they run down, sidewalks included, and named, and every building on these blocks is drawn. What is left open and stippled is neither: a surface lot, a plaza or a vacant parcel. The screened buildings are colored by the ramp above, the same one the district map uses, carry their score, and each is a link to its own page. Each casts a shadow as long as its measured height lets it, so towers stand out from the low buildings around them; the unscreened buildings have no measured height and cast none. 2 Congress St is outlined in its own score color at the outline it covers at ground level. Its windowless core is hatched. The inset places it among every building the screen covers.

Floor plan: 48% of each floor sits within daylight reach of a facade. The shading is daylight, darkest at the windows and gone 35 ft in. The hatched area is windowless core: 57,068 sq ft per floor that must be renovated but can never be rented as an apartment. The dimension marks the deepest interior point, 100 ft from the nearest window. A–A is where the section beside it is cut.

Section A–A: cut across the depth of the plate, through the middle of the core. Daylight reaches 35 ft in from every facade, fading as it goes, and the hatched stripe left between the lit edges is floor that gets converted and can never be rented: 57,068 sq ft on the floor the screen scores, and 513,615 sq ft over 9 residential floors. The shaded ground floor is converted like the rest and counted as no homes.

On the parcel this building shares with other buildings, Boston's assessing records list 55 homes and an apartment building of unknown size; they do not say which building holds those homes, so this site leaves it out of the conversion counts without calling it housing.

Every floor carries 57,068 sq ft of windowless core — area that must be gutted, re-plumbed and sprinklered but can never be rented as an apartment. Across 9 residential floors that is 513,615 sq ft of cost carrying no revenue.

Modeled conversion metrics for 2 Congress St, 2026-10-04.

Suitability scoreUnlikely	29 / 100
Storiesfrom 118 ft aerial-survey height ÷ 12 ft floor-to-floor	10
Floor plateper floor, from the city footprint	109,804 sq ft
Daylight efficiencyshare within 35 ft of a facade	48%
Deepest interior pointviability threshold is 80 ft	100 ft
Windowless coreper floor — renovated but never rentable	57,068 sq ft
BuiltBoston's own record of the construction year	2017
ZoningDowntown Boston	SUDBURY STREET RESTRICTED GROWTH AREA
Opportunity Zonenot in a 2018 designated tract	No

The plan: window line, shape and floor rhythm

31 ft of exterior wall for each home the screen estimates — enough for two- and three-bedroom homes across the plan.

The typical floor has 1,760 ft of exterior wall, and across 9 residential floors the building carries 15,836 ft of it in total, divided among the 506 homes this screen estimates.

Its plate is elongated at 0.45: a slab or an L, which is why so much of the floor lies within reach of a window: the outline buys daylight that a square plan of the same area would not. How window line and plate shape are measured.

At the model’s 750 sq ft average, the plan works out at about 56.2 homes per floor, repeated on every residential floor, since this building's outline does not change as it rises.

Why 2 Congress St scores 29 out of 100

Daylight efficiency 16, Interior depth 0, Scale 100, Finance 43 — each out of 100, then weighted.

Score components for 2 Congress St. Points are the subscore times its weight.

Component	Subscore	Weight	Points
Daylight efficiency48% of the floor area within 35 ft of a facade, scored from 40% up to 90%	16	45%	7.2
Interior depthdeepest interior point 100 ft from a facade, scored from 80 ft down to 40 ft	0	25%	0.0
Scale506 estimated homes, scored from 0 up to 150	100	15%	15.0
Financeremaining gap is 34% of conversion cost, scored from 60% down to 0%	43	15%	6.4

Most of what it earns comes from scale, and what holds it back most is interior depth, at 0 out of 100: deepest interior point 100 ft from a facade, scored from 80 ft down to 40 ft.

Built in 2017

Boston records this building as going up in 2017, which puts it in the modern stock.

As a rule, newer systems and better structure, but usually built deep and sealed for office use, and rarely cheap enough to buy at a price that lets a conversion pencil. That is the era’s general tendency rather than a finding about this building — the model reads an outline and a height, and can see nothing inside — but it is the first thing an architect would want to know, and it colours how much confidence the 48% daylight figure above deserves.

Other buildings screened near 2 Congress St

The 4 closest the screen also covers, from 240 ft away. They are the colored outlines on the plan at the top of this page.

100-110 Sudbury St
46 stories · 90% daylit · excluded: residential records on a shared parcel
about 240 ft away
25 New Chardon St
7 stories · 78% daylit · 87 estimated homes · scores 67/100 (Worth a feasibility study)
about 740 ft away
15 New Chardon St
12 stories · 82% daylit · 154 estimated homes · scores 79/100 (Strong candidate)
about 880 ft away
1-3 Center Plz
11 stories · 84% daylit · 549 estimated homes · scores 90/100 (Strong candidate)
about 1,120 ft away

A screen, not a feasibility study, from outlines and heights rather than plans: the method and how to correct a figure. If you know this building’s interior, you know what this model cannot see.