It’s not Kendall Square. Not yet.
But two years after Mayor Thomas M. Menino branded a swath of the South Boston Waterfront as the Innovation District - a bid to lure big Web companies and start-ups alike - a healthy crop of technology companies is moving in.
Office rents are low, at least for Boston, and the neighborhood is catching on; any company looking for space in the city is looking there, real estate brokers say.
As Menino mentioned in his State of the City address last week, 100 companies and 3,000 jobs have come in, bringing a laptop-toting crowd to an area long known for its gritty working seaport and artist studios.
Those who work there say it still lacks some essentials, like a grocery store, and it has yet to attract technology mega-companies like Google Inc. or Microsoft Corp., as Cambridge has. But there is a real scene sprouting in the Innovation District.
“When I first got down here, you wouldn’t see anybody else,’’ said Ted Morgan, founder of Skyhook Inc., a navigation software company that opened there in 2005. Back then, he couldn’t get a good Internet connection, he said, but “now, there are too many people, and not enough places for lunch.’’
The Innovation District umbrella covers a disparate collection of smaller neighborhoods and development clusters, including Fort Point, which is a dense section of industrial buildings developed in the 1830s, parts of the Financial and Leather districts, Channel Center, Fan Pier, and Liberty Wharf.
Within that urban landscape - home to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, Marine Industrial Park, and the Bank of America Pavilion, as well as numerous vast parking lots - there are plans to add more than one million square feet of new construction. About a dozen development projects are under consideration or have been approved by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, including such office towers as the $800 million Fan Pier project for Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.
“The challenge is providing more continuity among the many pockets of the district,’’ said David Beisel, a partner at NextView Ventures , an early-stage investment firm that opened on the edge of the Innovation District in 2010.
Beisel was drawn there when he started noticing a growing number of young companies locating in the area’s converted warehouses and lofts.
Two start-ups Beisel’s firm has funded, TurningArt and Boundless Learning, have joined the wave of new tenants, including the electronics reseller Gazelle, the French firm Aldebaran Robotics, and collaborative work spaces like Bocoup Loft and Greentown Labs. Brightcove Inc., a Cambridge digital media company with about 300 employees, is expected to arrive this spring.