By Tiana Woodard Globe Staff,Updated April 16, 2024, 7:23 a.m.
As Wu moves BPDA power to Boston City Hall, distrust over agency’s history bubbles up
By Tiana Woodard Globe Staff,Updated April 16, 2024, 7:23 a.m.
When Mayor Michelle Wu earlier this month moved the city’s planning department into City Hall, she saw it as a new chapter in Boston’s history, where any changes to each of the city’s neighborhoods would be informed by its own residents. But some community advocates, pointing to the damage inflicted by the Boston Planning and Development Agency over the years, are skeptical the move will fix the problems that plague city development or allow their voices to be heard.
“It’s really hard to see how we can move past” the distrust people have over theagency’s role in overseeing development and razing neighborhoods in the last mid-century, said Steve Hollinger, a Fort Point resident who has closely followed the city’s development process. “They need people they can believe in, people that they believe will do the right thing.”
Many residents agree that the city’s approach to planning and development is flawed and has wounded communities more than it has lifted them up. But city officials and neighborhood residents are divided on what is the best path forward. How can the city createa planning process that meets residents where they are? How can it guide development that is in each neighborhood’s best interest?
The recent realignment, which helps push forward Wu’s campaign promise to overhaul the BPDA, moves the staff, property, and power of the agency under the city’s control. While the quasi-governmental BPDA for years has voluntarily briefed the City Council on its budget, it will now be mandatory, and employees will be required to weigh a project’s community impact. A separate measure to dissolve the legal structures creating the BPDA and wind down some of itsurban renewal powers is before the Legislature.
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In the 1950s, the BPDA was formed to provide a road map for the future of development and has shaped much of the city’s landscape. But it has also ravaged entire neighborhoods in a process that benefited the rich and powerful and ignored residents. It razed the West End and demolished Scollay Square to make way for City Hall; it forced people from their homes in Roxbury; and it created vacant parcels that developers still squabble over.
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For Roxbury neighborhood activist Rodney Singleton, the agency’s harm to his family rings heavy as he considers Wu’s changes. The Boston Redevelopment Authority demolished his family home on Munroe Street in 1963 after the agency labeled the home and surrounding land blighted, Singleton said. The area remained vacant for several years, until part of it was granted to the Roxbury YMCA decades later.
“There’s lots of real mistrust, angst, and, frankly, pent-up anger over what the BRA did,” he said.
The loss still propelsSingleton’s involvement in community development 60 years later and makes him eye the ordinance with intensified scrutiny. To him, moving the planning agency’s powers under the city’s purview means repeating history, just under the Wu administration’s language of equity and transparency. Instead, Singleton said Wu should, among other things, start to phase the BPDA out and create a process that allows frequent community inputrather than learning about its work through an “after-the-fact” annual report.
“We’re justifying the bad things that we did in the ‘60s differently,” Singleton said.
Armani White, who cofounded Reclaim Roxbury in 2015 to increase community input in developments, has also seen his surroundings change with little to no say. It is why he supports Wu’s decision to take over the BPDA, because it could help make the process more accountable to the community’s desires.
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“It felt like often that decisions were made before they came to the community,” White said of the old BPDA process, at Wu’s ordinance signing. “It was more about checking a box to say that there was a community conversation, as opposed to really listening to what community members want.”
White added: “This actually will give us more oversight.”
What oversight will look like is unclear. Steve Fox, chair of the South End Forum, an umbrella group for civic and business organizations throughout the neighborhood, argues oversight is not possible without creating a“community advisory council”of neighborhood organizations within the new agency.
“We’ve had no voice,” Fox said, referring to his group’s involvement in the city’s crafting of the ordinance. “We want to sit at the table before you decide that you’re going to announce a decision to us.”
The closest any legislation came to encapsulating the opponents’ desires was an amendment by Councilor at Large Julia Mejia. It proposed creating a Commission on Accountability and Transparency in City Planning, with three to five appointees that would field and address complaints submitted to the city about forthcoming planning and development. (Her amendment failed in a 9-2 vote, with two councilors voting present.)
Hollinger,the Fort Point resident, said it’s hard to get everything you want when the City Council is so divided. (The ordinance passed 8-3, with two councilors voting present.) To him, their vote proved that residents must accept some “incremental steps” in the right direction, rather than dismiss it because it didn’t go far enough.
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He pointed to the other steps the Wu administration is taking in tandem with the new planning department, such as reforming the city’s process for reviewing community projects, and herinitiative to simplify the zoning code and give residents a list of choices onhow their neighborhood’s main corridors should look.
“The economics of city life, the BPDA itself — they’re all titanic entities that take a lot to change the trajectory of,” he said. “If we don’t [start making some changes now], we’re going to be worse off.”
When asked about how the agency is incorporating community feedback, and if it is considering a formalized role for civic associations, Lacey Rose, acity spokesperson, said in a statement that community engagement standards haven’t been codified yet because “we are in the midst of a community dialogue about how to reshape the development review process.”
Giving neighborhood and civic associations an official role in the new planning ordinance, as several neighborhood advocates have recommended, would elevate perspectives that are already incorporated in Boston’s engagement process, the agency said.
“We also think it’s important to spend time and capacity reaching people whose voices have historically been left out of conversations about planning and development,” Rosesaid.
For some people who are new to the tug-of-war between neighborhood associations and city officials, weighing in on the planning and development process can feel defeating.
Related: Wu pushes plan to streamline Boston’s complex zoning
Ruth Whitney, a retired ballerina, said the contentious development battle at the Shawmut T station near her home propelled her to get more involved in the neighborhood’s affairs. From there, she learned about Wu’s proposal to revampthe city’s approach to development and wanted to throw her opinions into the mix.
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“I’m not a politician — I have kids, and I’m apoplectic about the climate,” she said.
Whitney has tried to hop into the community engagement and stakeholder groups. She’s written letters of opposition and recommendations that went unanswered. Now, the stress of staying informed has made her tap out indefinitely, because she said she doesn’t feel like her concerns are incorporated into the city’s decision-making process. Whitney thinks the burden of engaging in the city’s planning process is too heavy.
“Everything I’m hearing is, ‘We’re trying to find the right way to tell you guys what’s about to happen to you,’ ” she said. “ ‘We’ll just find the right way, and then you’re gonna feel engaged.’ ”
“I’m completely worn out,” Whitney said.
Lavette Coney, president of the Mt. Pleasant, Forest, and Vine Neighborhood Association in Roxbury, said that the chaosWhitney described is intentional, and that even seasoned neighborhood activists have struggled all the same.
“They want us to be in confusion,” Coney said. “They want us to be in silos.”
White, the Reclaim Roxbury executive director, understands the skeptics’ concerns. Still, he said, the best thing residents can do is work in tandem with city officials to create a planning department that meets everyone’s needs.
“This is something that advocates have been pushing for for decades,” he said. “It’s something we need to be excited about, and partner with the city to make sure it’s better now.”
Tiana Woodard can be reached at tiana.woodard@globe.com. Follow her @tianarochon.
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