Wu Train to nowhere | Prickly progressives | Bye-bye BPDA? | Quick hits | About Contrarian Boston |
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Next up for Wu: Blowing up City Hall’s development agency
With her plan to slap a cap on city rents, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu grabbed headlines this week.
Now Wu is gearing up for her next act: neutering the Boston Planning & Development Agency, the one branch of city government that activists and neighborhood NIMBY types just love to hate for championing big projects, from condo towers to lab buildings.
As a city councilor, Wu spent years railing against the agency’s alleged misdeeds, some of them increasingly ancient, like the bulldozing of the West End back in the 1950s.
Now Wu is preparing to push ahead with the state legislation needed to meaningfully overhaul the agency.
Word is that she may use the annual State of the City Address, slated for next Wednesday, to outline her plans.
Exactly what those are remain to be seen. Will Wu seek to strip the agency of its old urban renewal powers, which allow the BPDA to declare property “blighted” so it can then seize it for new development projects?
Or will Wu go for less substantive changes that will allow her to declare victory while avoiding the potentially years-long bureaucratic slog needed to transfer the BPDA’s eminent domain powers to another city agency?
Stay tuned.
When it comes to housing, Gov. Healey should think twice before hopping aboard the Wu Train
We can imagine that it would be a tempting ride for a “proud progressive” like Healey, with stops like Rent Control Junction, Developer’s Rebuff, and Potemkin’s Delight, an artisanally-crafted village that few can actually afford to live in but where only Woke is spoken.
But Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s housing agenda is quickly shaping up to be the proverbial train to nowhere.
We expect we’ll hear a lot about her efforts to hike affordable housing requirements for developers, bring back rent control, and put a tax on luxury real estate sales when Wu delivers the annual State of the City Address on Wednesday.
But here’s one thing we can guarantee that we won’t hear anything about: During the mayor’s first year, the number of new apartments and condos getting a green light in Boston has plunged, as we first reported here.
Wu Train: Headed nowhere when it comes to building desperately needed housing in Boston
Wu administration officials have tried to wave off the drops in new housing units being approved and permitted as relatively insignificant, while grudgingly acknowledging the impact of rising rates, surging construction costs and an uncertain economy on new development.
But in no way does the decline in new residential construction have anything at all to do with the mayor upping demands on developers, or proposing to slap a 6 to 10 percent cap on rent increases, administration officials insist.
Oh my, we guess it’s all just one big coincidence.
If Healey is as serious as she says she is about her pledge to boost housing construction across the state to bring down rents and prices - in an interview with the Globe she pounded her fist into her palm to emphasize getting tough with housing resistant suburbs - the direction Wu is taking Boston has to be a concern.
Wu isn’t mayor of Gardner or Holyoke, she’s the mayor Boston, the economic engine not just for the state, but New England.
If housing construction falls off a cliff in Boston, there is going to be fallout throughout the region.
So it’s pretty clear where the Wu Train is headed, Governor. We’d suggest finding an alternative means of transportation.
Progressive fragility? Political consultant who penned critical piece of Dems “activist class” draws wrath of faithful
Given the blowback from uber progressives, you’d think Greg Maynard had truly stunk it up, like professing a secret admiration for Joe Manchin or throwing darts at a photo of The Squad.
We’re sorry, but Democrats, at least here in Massachusetts, are not that interesting, at least by the standards of the MassGOP, where Jim Jones Lyons, the party chair, blew tens of thousands to investigate Gov. Maura Healey’s sex life, and then stiffed the firm that did the research.
No, Maynard appears to have drawn blood in this CommonWealth Magazine piece by stating an obvious fact, that the party’s uber progressive wing has captured the nomination process at the state Democratic convention to push through its favored candidates, only to see them trounced in the statewide primary.
The nominees for attorney general, secretary of state, and auditor at the party’s convention last summer all wound up getting their derrieres kicked in the statewide primary, when average Democratic voters had their say.
Maynard, who has has managed or consulted on two dozen campaigns, including those of former Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, Revere Mayor Brian Arrigo, and Brockton Mayor Robert Sullivan, calls for opening up what has become an insular process with a nonpartisan primary system, with the top two vote getters then going head to head in November.
“The end of both the Massachusetts Republican and Democratic parties as organizations focused on electing people to office demands serious reform to the Commonwealth’s electoral system,” he writes.
The piece, which ran on Jan. 14, immediately triggered grumbling online among the local activist set, characterizing Maynard and other Democratic moderates as pining for Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston. Other remarks are best classified as character assassination.
Martha Karchere, a member of the JP Progressives Steering Committee, pushed back with her own op-ed in CommonWealth Magazine on Jan. 20, effectively damning Maynard’s piece with faint praise.
While acknowledging Maynard’s piece was a “much-needed effort to critique the party’s shortcomings,” she went on to accuse him of taking “gratuitous potshots at the party’s progressive wing.”
Heaven forbid someone should criticize party progressives!
Quick hits:
What a headache: “Justice Dept. search of Biden home in Wilmington turns up more documents” Washington Post via The Boston Globe
Interesting stats we haven’t see before - Foot traffic is still dramatically down in the Financial District and restaurants and shops are getting hammered: “Why ‘how downtown Boston is recovering’ depends on which downtown you’re talking about” Boston Globe
Another day, another crucial delay at the MBTA. This time it’s an anti-collision system that was supposed to have been deployed on the Green Line 13 years ago: “T Explains Latest Delay in Green Line Safety Work” State House News Service
Yikes! Where are the feds when you need them? “Crypto Banks Borrow Billions From Home-Loan Banks to Plug Shortfalls” The Wall Street Journal
What is Contrarian Boston?
I have fielded emails over the past couple weeks asking what Contrarian Boston is about.
Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.
For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.
An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.
Our focus is:
· Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;
· Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;
· The media and why it does what it does;
· Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;
· And whatever else catches our fancy.
Contrarian has raised some important points about unintended consequences of urban policies and reported on key metrics. However, I could do without the gratuitous anti-woke insults.
Contrarian toes the Rental Housing Association's party line against rent control, forgetting the overwhelming support by actual voters to retain it in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline in 1994. The whirlwind of development that followed in Allston and Brighton, engineered by Harvard with the support of the Boston Redevelopment Agency, now renamed, scraped affordable rentals off the map. Yes, that was in my backyard and we said no. Many unaffordable units were created. That sort of a economic engine was driven by big developers et al. And a lot of high-end housing was created for what purpose? Not for affordability.