Fed up city planners | Media finally getting it on housing? | Wu’s first big setback | About Contrarian Boston |
News tips? Story ideas? Email us at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
A remarkable rebuke: Wu’s plans for neutering key Boston development agency hits the rocks
Since her days as a lowly city councilor, Mayor Michelle Wu has called for sweeping “reforms” in how development is done in Boston.
Wu spent years campaigning for the demolition of the City Hall’s development authority, long hated by neighborhood activists and NIMBY types, while insisting that new projects be vetted through the unbending lens of progressive rhetoric and belief.
And on Thursday, Wu appeared poised to take a big first step towards achieving her long-standing dream.
Instead, Wu got her head handed to her - and by the board of the Boston Planning & Development Agency, which rarely if ever bucks the city’s chief executive, no less.
The BPDA’s board put a cold stop to the Boston mayor’s plans to gut the agency and transfer its planners to a new department.
In tabling Wu’s plan, members of the board, a top-notch group of professionals that includes Chair Priscilla Rojas, a tech company auditor, top union official Mike Monahan, and respected architect, academic leader and local civil rights icon Ted Landsmark, were pointed in their remarks.
Sure, the local media, including the Globe, duly reported on the board’s actions. But they completely missed the significance of the pushback to the mayor’s plans, and the intensity of the opposition as well.
It probably didn’t help matters that the city “transformation manager” appointed to present Wu’s proposed agency revamp breezily touted how it would advance nebulous “reforms” needed to usher in a golden age of “inclusive designing, planning and development in our city today, in way that reflects our people.”
Certainly someone of Landsmark’s stature and background, on the board for nearly a decade, would be unlikely to embrace such a veiled critique of the BPDA and, by extension, its board.
“Let me be clear, I think everyone on this board agrees with the basic principles … of resiliency, affordability and equity in planning and development,” Landsmark said deliberately, clearly and forcefully. “I don’t think there is any one of us who disagrees in principle with those goals.”
Wants more details on Wu’s plans: Ted Landsmark, BPDA board member and director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.
Landsmark then zeroed in on the use of the word “reforms,” noting that with all the discussion of the need for improved planning, the agency, in its presentation, was unable to produce specific examples of the actual reforms that are allegedly needed.
“We have the cart before the horse in asking us to engage in planning towards reform without having the evidence and data that indicates specifically what the reforms are,” said Landsmark, director of the Kitty and Michael Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.
“That is what we are entitled to as a board with members who have served the city well for years,” he said.
Landsmark’s remarks were greeted by a stunned silence, forcing BPDA chief Arthur Jemison, there to help shepherd the proposal through, to quickly backtrack and diplomatically talk of “improvements” rather than reforms.
Maybe the BPDA board members have hit their limit with Wu’s rhetoric and a reorganization plan that looks to be a bureaucratic nightmare of limited practical utility.
Wu has long cast the agency in the role of the villain, blaming it for, in her eyes, approving too much development, and harkening back to the now ancient bulldozing of the West End in the late 1950s during “urban renewal.”
Can Wu get her BPDA demolition plans back on track? Probably, but the rebellion by the agency’s board doesn’t look good for the mayor.
Uncertain outlook: City Hall turmoil can’t bode well for new development in Boston
Another thing has also become increasingly clear in the past few days: There are a lot of unhappy campers right now at the Boston Planning & Development Agency.
And given the agency, already chronically understaffed, is the gatekeeper for new projects, this is definitely not good news for developers hoping to get things built in Boston.
The big source of concern right now is Mayor Michelle Wu’s plans to split the agency, transferring the BPDA’s planners to a new city planning and design department.
BPDA board members Brian Miller and Ted Landsmark (see above), along with tabling Wu’s plans for revamping the agency, raised concerns about the impact of the looming upheaval on the agency’s staff.
“There are professional, hard working staff who have been at the agency producing, in some respects, really astounding planning and development outcomes … now they are in a situation where there is no specificity in how they will be impacted and how their work will be impacted,” Landsmark said.
There is a high degree of anxiety and uncertainty among the planners and other staff at the agency about their futures, probably not helped by a ham-handed memo, sent out by the BPDA’s HR director and reported here, assuring staffers that no one will “lose employment.”
Great, but neither does anyone want to end up at the DPW filling potholes or picking up trash.
Wu’s planned revamp of the BPDA and the creation of a new department could take anywhere from a year to two years, the memo noted.
That’s a lot of upheaval at a key agency, all at a time when housing construction and approvals have fallen off a cliff.
About time: Here’s hoping the local media is finally waking up to the housing crisis
When it comes to the housing crisis, it has truly been remarkable the culture of complacency that has existed for decades now both on Beacon Hill and in the local media.
New residential construction in Massachusetts has been stuck at historically low levels for at least a quarter century, sending prices spiraling relentlessly upward, year after year.
The issue has been a major focus of Contrarian Boston’s coverage since we launched in November 2021.
Yet coverage by the local media of this slow-motion train wreck has been spotty, with at best sporadic features on home buyers complaining about high prices.
So we were encouraged to see this excellent story by the Globe’s Janelle Nanos that breaks the sobering news that Massachusetts lost 110,000 residents to other states since the pandemic.
Nanos also interviews some of the former Massachusetts residents, catching up with them in their new, far less expensive, and much bigger homes in other states.
Needless to say, their stress levels also seem to have gone down as well.
What is Contrarian Boston?
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.