SPRINGFIELD — For generations, Massachusetts built its courthouses and owned them. That is about to change — and the change is going to be very good to Conan Harris, the husband of Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

On July 2, the state's Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance picked a private team, Liberty Junction, to build a new Regional Justice Center at 125 Liberty St. — a courthouse pegged at roughly $600 million — and lease it back to the Commonwealth. Not for a few years — for an initial 40, with options stretching it to as long as 60. Rent runs at least $30 million a year. Over the full term that is on the order of $2 billion — more than three times what the building costs to put up — for a courthouse the public pays for and never owns. When the lease finally ends, the landlord keeps it.

One of the people on the landlord's side of that deal is Conan Harris.

The state's defense is that Liberty Junction was the cheapest and fastest bid. The trouble is who was standing in the room.

The ink was barely dry before two losing bidders — USPB JV and Springfield Tower Square LLC — sued in Hampden Superior Court to blow the award up. Their central complaint: Barros was named interim executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority — a state job — in January, while the Commonwealth was still evaluating the very bids his team had entered. He filed a conflict-of-interest disclosure with the State Ethics Commission the day before the award was announced. The suit also questions whether Liberty Junction even controlled the 125 Liberty St. site, which the team is acquiring from Baystate Health.

State Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro had opposed the lease-back structure outright, warning it would chill competition. And Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno, a Democrat, said the quiet part out loud: "Once again, Boston power brokers are telling the city of Springfield what to do."

Here is where a curious deal becomes a pattern. In roughly seven years, Harris has gone from a $93,000-a-year Boston City Hall job to a run of ventures that all move on public money or public approvals.

Now add a piece of a $2 billion courthouse.

Ayanna Pressley has built a national brand on a single message: fighting corporate landlords. Housing is a human right. Stop putting real estate profits over people. It runs through her speeches and her bills.

Her husband is about to become a landlord — to the government — for up to 60 years.

It is a remarkable trajectory. In the space of a few years, Harris has gone from a City Hall salary to a consulting contract to a stake in a public-land megaproject to a slice of a $2 billion courthouse — each step built on public money or a public approval, each one a door that does not open for most people.

Neither Harris nor Pressley's office has publicly addressed his role in the courthouse deal.