The City of Boston is on the cusp of significant changes to its planning and development processes. In her January State of the City speech, Mayor Michelle Wu outlined plans to align development with Boston resident needs and enable it to address historical racial disparities. She will bring the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) under the control of the mayor and City Council, a move which is long overdue.
The mayor also committed to ending the BPDA’s redevelopment powers, shifting the agency’s planning functions to a new city department with an updated charge: “to end the decades-old urban renewal mission of eradicating so-called ‘blight and decay,’ and rededicate our resources toward Boston’s urgent needs: resiliency, affordability, and equity.”
If implemented, these proposed changes should, in theory, bring an end to a development model that has long fractured Boston neighborhoods and driven out working people who can no longer afford to rent or buy housing in Boston.
But what about the projects already in the BPDA pipeline? There are currently eighty-six projects in the development review process, plus three huge projects under Planned Development Area (PDA) review. Ten of these projects are in Dorchester. Most of them fail to address the mayor’s priorities and, in fact, move our city in the opposite direction, creating entire neighborhoods where only the wealthy can live and play. What happened to the promise of “No More Seaports”?
To realign Boston development with the vision and goals Mayor Wu has set out, the city must start now, before there are no places left in Boston for working people to live. The city must put a moratorium on allowing the BPDA to approve projects that don’t meet the new standards until those projects can be reviewed with these priorities in mind.
Most concerning for Dorchester are the three mega-projects that are each over 1.5 million square feet, with two of the three on Morrissey Boulevard. One of these, Dorchester Bay City, is a whopping 6.8 million square feet and it envisions a whole new neighborhood/city on a small ocean-side part of Harbor Point. It is emblematic of all that is wrong with the outgoing development model – and speaks to why the mayor’s priorities need to be implemented now.
For starters, it is just too big for the 36-acre plot of land. It will add almost 2,000 housing units and over 4 million square feet of offices, labs, and retail space to an area that already faces some of the region’s worst transit issues.
The most glaring problem, however, is that Dorchester Bay City will drive up rents and further gentrify the area, pushing residents out of Dorchester, one of the few remaining parts of Boston with large working-class communities of color and ethnic neighborhoods. It includes far too few affordable units and at levels that are twice or more the average Dorchester household income. The so-called “affordable” housing is not really affordable, and there isn’t enough of it.
A project of this size should also do far more to create and fund good jobs for residents, to help keep our families and neighborhoods intact. This failure is especially tragic since Dorchester Bay City is being built on University of Massachusetts land – public land where the commitment to building truly affordable housing should be stronger.
The Dorchester Bay City project, like others in the BDPA pipeline, reflects an outdated model of development where developer profits were prioritized over resident needs. It does not align with Mayor Wu’s vision of recommitting resources to boost city’s resiliency, affordability, and equity – a vision that implements campaign promises that earned her such a strong mandate in the last mayoral election.
Boston residents have been demanding development without displacement for years. The BPDA and Mayor Wu should halt approvals for mega-projects such as DBC until they meet or exceed the new requirements for truly affordable housing and pathways to good jobs. Allowing BPDA to continue with business as usual will crush our hopes for development that creates opportunity for all before it can even take root.
Mary Jo Connelly is a resident of the Jones Hill neighborhood of Dorchester. Steve Striffler is a professor of Labor Studies at UMass Boston and a resident of Dorchester.
