Legacy MattersIt's not just residential real estate that's going through the roof, so are burial plots, especially at prestigious cemeteries like Mt. Auburn in Cambridge. I lived in both Back Bay and Beacon Hill in Boston before the 80's before prices went crazy. I laughed at a parking condo that offered parking spaces inside for $20,000. Today, they go for about $200,000. It never entered my mind that you could invest in and speculate on burial plots.
Mary Fifield didn't have investment on her mind when she bought a plot a few years ago, she writes in the Boston Globe.
Mt. Auburn isn't just any cemetery. Self-dubbed ''America's First Garden Cemetery," its 175 acres feature more species of native and nonnative plants than most arboretums. It boasts a score of architectural follies, including a 13-foot-tall granite sphinx, the gift in 1872 of an enthusiastic board member. A score of triple-name luminaries, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mary Baker Eddy, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Charles Dana Gibson, and James Russell Lowell call it home, in a manner of speaking. Its motto, ''Still a Unique Choice for Burial," strikes the only downscale note in its otherwise upscale identity campaign.
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while the housing market in Boston has been soaring over the past few years, the post-life housing market, as it were, has been keeping pace. While residential real estate prices are up by triple digits, so is the real estate at Mt. Auburn.
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The spot on Willow Pond, my post-mortal-coil co-op, represents something more: a comforting constant in a world that seems to grow more complex and challenging with each passing month. It also confirms that the time-honored first maxim of real estate, ''Location, location, location," applies to the hereafter as much as it does to here and now.