The Shaper of the City: Kairos Shen
Aug 04, 2008 12:19
Here
is my full letter on the Globe's piece on
the BRA's planning director, Kairos Shen, of which
the Globe Magazine Editor published
excerpts in
the August 3 issue.
Your glowing tribute to the BRA’s Kairos Shen omitted his most important innovation: his outright substitution of his own opinions for the rule of even the BRA’s infinitely flexible laws. Small wonder that Mayor Menino, after years without a Chief Planner, has elevated Mr. Shen to uber-control; he simply instructs developers to break the law, apparently telling them they can fly, even when they can’t use one of the BRA’s many legal parachutes.
One of his guiding theories of city planning is “transitional zoning” – that is, heights of new buildings should be graduated between towers; imagine a clothesline loosely strung between the tops of the city’s tallest towers, setting the heights for new buildings irrespective of the zoning code. The non-diagrammatic purposes of zoning – to provide air and light, maintain human scale, safeguard historic fabric, retain affordable building stock, protect existing investments, stabilize vulnerable neighborhoods, prevent wildcat land speculation, etc. – are too mundane for such a visionary. Despite Shen’s compassionate defense of that triple-the-zoning-height, historic-Dainty-Dot-replacing tower in Chinatown as an engine of affordable housing, he surely knows, as every planner knows, that the real-estate speculation and subsequent gentrification such a tower spurs will do far more damage to the poor Chinatown residents than the help they’ll get from the handful of below-market units the developer’s local business partners will build on their land. He should have been educating the residents, not seducing them on the developer’s behalf.
In a hypnotic performance that demonstrated his iron-fist-in-velvet-glove technique, he got the BRA’s advisory “guardian of the public realm,” the Boston Civic Design Commission, to approve that tower on his transitional zoning theory. As he politely intimidated them into a vote, the Commissioners, squirming with embarrassment before an astounded public, insisted that as a condition, the vote be specified as non-precedent-setting; he told them that he would continue to handle every project this way on a case-by-case basis; they approved anyway. They actually voted, not for the project, as one Commissioner put it, but for Karios Shen. “The rule of Shen, not of laws,” so to speak. It was unprecedented, but almost certainly not unprecedential.
The article makes numerous errors: Linkage is unrelated to negotiated community benefits. Height is not necessary for financial viability (many lawful developments were recently built or are in the pipeline, while the 400’ Columbus Center project founders). PDA’s do not necessarily wipe out all zoning, although the BRA pretends they do. The Dainty Dot tower height was unrelated to the developer’s affordable housing “donation” – in fact, as he admitted to a confused Zoning Board of Appeal, he had offered far fewer affordable units when the tower design had been even taller.
But you got one thing very right: Mr. Shen has the ability to make people think he said yes, when he really said no.
Your glowing tribute to the BRA’s Kairos Shen omitted his most important innovation: his outright substitution of his own opinions for the rule of even the BRA’s infinitely flexible laws. Small wonder that Mayor Menino, after years without a Chief Planner, has elevated Mr. Shen to uber-control; he simply instructs developers to break the law, apparently telling them they can fly, even when they can’t use one of the BRA’s many legal parachutes.
One of his guiding theories of city planning is “transitional zoning” – that is, heights of new buildings should be graduated between towers; imagine a clothesline loosely strung between the tops of the city’s tallest towers, setting the heights for new buildings irrespective of the zoning code. The non-diagrammatic purposes of zoning – to provide air and light, maintain human scale, safeguard historic fabric, retain affordable building stock, protect existing investments, stabilize vulnerable neighborhoods, prevent wildcat land speculation, etc. – are too mundane for such a visionary. Despite Shen’s compassionate defense of that triple-the-zoning-height, historic-Dainty-Dot-replacing tower in Chinatown as an engine of affordable housing, he surely knows, as every planner knows, that the real-estate speculation and subsequent gentrification such a tower spurs will do far more damage to the poor Chinatown residents than the help they’ll get from the handful of below-market units the developer’s local business partners will build on their land. He should have been educating the residents, not seducing them on the developer’s behalf.
In a hypnotic performance that demonstrated his iron-fist-in-velvet-glove technique, he got the BRA’s advisory “guardian of the public realm,” the Boston Civic Design Commission, to approve that tower on his transitional zoning theory. As he politely intimidated them into a vote, the Commissioners, squirming with embarrassment before an astounded public, insisted that as a condition, the vote be specified as non-precedent-setting; he told them that he would continue to handle every project this way on a case-by-case basis; they approved anyway. They actually voted, not for the project, as one Commissioner put it, but for Karios Shen. “The rule of Shen, not of laws,” so to speak. It was unprecedented, but almost certainly not unprecedential.
The article makes numerous errors: Linkage is unrelated to negotiated community benefits. Height is not necessary for financial viability (many lawful developments were recently built or are in the pipeline, while the 400’ Columbus Center project founders). PDA’s do not necessarily wipe out all zoning, although the BRA pretends they do. The Dainty Dot tower height was unrelated to the developer’s affordable housing “donation” – in fact, as he admitted to a confused Zoning Board of Appeal, he had offered far fewer affordable units when the tower design had been even taller.
But you got one thing very right: Mr. Shen has the ability to make people think he said yes, when he really said no.
|