01.26.2023/Special Edition

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No cheerleader for business here: As Boston’s building boom sputters, Wu is shedding few tears

In fact, Mayor Michelle Wu offered up a positively scornful take on the city’s epic building boom in her first State of the City address.

There are lots of mayors around the country who would die for the more than 45,000 new condos, apartments and homes built in Boston over the past decade, not to mention the 140,000 new jobs and the billions in tax revenue generated by new development.

Not Wu. The mayor chastised City Hall’s long-time development arm, the Boston Planning & Development Authority, in her speech Wednesday evening. And while she never named him, Wu also threw some shade at her predecessor, Marty Walsh - no love lost there - for a supposedly heartless approach to growth.

“The focus on building buildings rather than communities has held back the talent of its (the BPDA’s) staff and deepened the disparities in our city,” Wu told a crowd of local politicos, city workers, activists and others gathered for her speech at MGM Music Hall at Fenway.

“That growth wasn’t harnessed for the benefit of all our communities,” Wu said, with an emphasis on “all.”

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu

If he bothered to tune in from Washington, Walsh, now federal labor secretary, would surely be astounded. As mayor, Walsh championed his own set of diversity and inclusion initiatives, as well as successfully pushing developers to build thousands of units of subsidized housing.

But while Walsh tried, he clearly couldn’t speak Woke like Wu, who is a natural.

For decades now, Boston mayors have been cheerleaders for economic growth, seeing new office towers, labs and apartment buildings, yes even expensive ones for the wealthy, as vital for the city’s future.

But if nothing else, Wu signaled pretty clearly those days are over.

Poor timing? As real estate cools and developers struggle, Wu pushes plans to rip apart City Hall’s permitting agency

Well now you can add a dash of regulatory chaos to the bitter brew of economic turmoil slowing down housing development in Boston.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu unveiled plans during her big speech Wednesday evening for a sweeping overhaul of how City Hall reviews and permits new development projects.

The Boston Planning & Development Agency, for decades the key player in channeling the city’s economic growth, would be reduced to a rump of its former self under Wu’s blueprint.

Wu has been railing for years now against the BPDA, the government agency uber progressives love to hate for leveling the old West End, and she took up precious time in her speech dutifully recounting the agency’s mid-20th century misdeeds.

Wu says she plans to file state legislation that would strip the agency of its urban renewal era powers to seize property, while the BPDA’s planning powers would be shuffled off to a new agency.

Wu recently began upping demands on the real estate industry, even as an uncertain economy, rising interest rates, and a big runup in construction costs began to stall plans for new housing, developers have complained.

In recent weeks, Wu has increased the amount of affordable housing developers are required to include in their projects, while renewing her controversial push for rent control.

Given these challenges, the prospect of dueling regulatory agencies at City Hall battling for oversight of new development projects can’t be inspiring for real estate types looking to build housing, or for that matter anything, in Boston.

Wu wants a complete overhaul of how development projects are approved at City Hall. (Photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash)

But anyone expecting Wu to make any serious concessions - or even acknowledge changing market conditions - surely came away disappointed with the mayor’s showcase speech.

Wu touted the 3,800 building permits for new housing units city officials issued in 2022.

But here’s what she didn’t mention: The overwhelming majority of these permits were issued in the first half of the year, with a dramatic drop over the last six to seven months.

Wu laid out an ambitious goal for Boston to once again become a city of 800,000 people.

Given the downturn in housing development, that’s just pure fantasy right now.

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.