How to get rich

Today's lesson in wealth accumulation comes from Julian Cohen and Stephen Weiner, two of Boston's richest men. Lesson number one: Use other people's money whenever possible.

Cohen and Weiner, along with former Four Seasons boss Robin Brown, want to build a hotel like none Boston has ever seen. Brown, the city's best-known hotelier, has spent years talking about the "six star" hotel he plans, and he and his partners have locked up a prime site on Boylston Street, just in front of the Prudential Center in the very heartland of the Saks Fifth Avenue crowd. The condos above the hotel will start at $2 million. The hotel will fly the elite Mandarin Oriental flag. "We want to do something unique," Brown said last year.

And he and his partners want us to help finance it. Last week the Cohen-Weiner-Brown project was one of three hotel projects to win financing through a city program designed to jump-start stalled hotel construction. They will get a $15 million loan -- federal money available to Boston for economic development -- that should allow the $230 million project to get underway by the spring. Three years ago, I stood up for this project when it appeared the citizens group that oversees Pru planning was about to kill it before even giving it a fair hearing. But using public money to finance a private project no one else will is something else. If two of Boston's richest developers want to build a one-of-a-kind trophy hotel for rich people like themselves, let them write a check.

They certainly can. Cohen, 78, has been building shopping centers in New England for more than 50 years, including the tony Mall at Chestnut Hill. Cohen hired Weiner as a go-fer straight out of Boston University and helped make him rich. Today Weiner, 62, runs a company that owns or manages more than 14 million square feet of Home Depots, Wal-Marts, and the like and is developing millions of square feet more. Both split their time between multimillion-dollar homes near the Boston Public Garden and in Palm Beach, Fla. Both are generous givers to the arts.

The city says the loan will help provide jobs, badly needed hotel rooms, and housing. (The "housing" will offer "the pinnacle of luxury and personal service," according to the Mandarin Oriental website, including private roof gardens for penthouses.) The loans will carry a hefty 12 percent interest rate, the city notes. The fact that Cohen and Weiner are willing to pay 12 percent tells you they expect a better return on their own money. Not long ago, the city used this money to build projects in Roxbury and Grove Hall that wouldn't get built. Now we're jump-starting Boylston Street? Cohen, Weiner, and Brown declined to comment.

Two weeks before Boston revealed its $15 million loan to the Cohen-Weiner hotel, Julie Cohen was in West Palm Beach for the opening of the Cohen Pavilion, a three-story, $31 million performance center in the city's main cultural venue, the Kravis Center. The Cohen, as it is called, houses a giant ballroom, a rehearsal hall, a dance studio, practice rooms, board rooms and offices, and adds 112 critically needed valet parking spots for the patrons' BMWs. Cohen, according to Palm Beach press reports, gave more than $3 million to build The Cohen; Weiner, his partner, contributed another $1 million. A crowd of about 150 gave Cohen a standing ovation at the ribbon cutting.

If their investment in their new hotel works out they will certainly give even more, in Boston and Palm Beach. That's how the rich do it.

Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at 617-929-2902 or at bailey@globe.com.