04.15.2022/Special Edition

Meet Boston’s new development czar: Mayor Wu

Out with the Walsh Era and in with the Wu.

When it comes to everything from the height of downtown tower projects to the affordability of neighborhood housing, there’s a new boss in town, and her name is Michelle Wu.

The departure of Brian Golden, the well-respected and long-time head of the Boston Planning and Development Authority, removes a prominent holdover from the administration of former Mayor Marty Walsh.

Sure, Wu is moving ahead with plans to hire a chief planner, and maybe she’ll even find a replacement for Golden at the BPDA, an agency she has criticized as a vestige of urban renewal and spent years as a city councilor calling for its demolition.

But at the end of the day, it will be Wu calling the shots on development. And that new chief planner, who could very well be named any day now, will very clearly be Wu’s pick.

In the Wu Era, we can expect a much more critical eye when it comes to approval of major development projects. There’ll be much more talk of equity, and much less chest beating about square feet of new development.

Whether we will see a significant drop off in projects getting permitted or moving forward in Boston remains to be seen, with the economy key on that one, though in time, that more skeptical view, combined with proposed transfer fees on luxury real estate sales and potentially even some form of rent control, could start to take a toll.

But either way, the era of hyper development that began with the inauguration of former union building trades chief Marty Walsh as mayor way back in 2014 is now officially over.

As Walsh’s right-hand man on development, and then for more than a year after that under interim Mayor Kim Janey and then Wu, Golden oversaw the permitting of 90 million square feet of new office, residential, retail and lab space.

That’s an average of 10 or 11 million square feet getting the nod every year from city planners – or enough to fill that many new Prudential towers every 12 months.

Golden also helped put a dent in the city’s housing shortage, overseeing the development of 46,000 new housing units, nearly 11,000 of which are income restricted and sold or rented out at below market rates.

“It’s the biggest period of building permitting in (Boston) history,” Golden noted in a previous interview. “There has never been a seven-year period where that much has been permitted.”

Nor will there probably ever be a period like that again.

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 Monday, Wednesday and Friday. 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.