ABN Town Meeting III: "Boom for Whom? Is Urban Revitalization Revitalizing All of Us?"
June 6, 2002


Summary of Participant Comments

OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION BY MODERATOR
PANEL AND GROUP DISCUSSION

OVERVIEW

This discussion was unusual for a community meeting in Boston, as it sought to go to the underlying causes of the specific issues that are the usual topics of community concern, including the subjects of the previous two Town Meetings.

By focusing attention on the way the City invests its resources, we hoped to shed light on the perspective of the City administrations of the last few decades, the decades that promised "urban renewal" as the remedy for suburbanization and urban decline.

The importance of the resident neighborhoods, versus that of commercial and institutional development, is a key theme in current struggles between the community and our government agencies. The distribution of resources and power, and social and economic equity for Boston's residents, was recognized as the underlying theme of the discussion, and the urban renewal assumption that the City must pour our public resources and public powers into the most influential corporations and developers in order to bring "economic development" to a fragile "inner city" was questioned.

Top-down and. bottom-up, capitalism and democracy, development of land and development of people -- these were recognized as major issues for those who cared about sustainable communities. This was a significant breakthrough in public discourse among community residents; public meetings rarely if ever plumb these depths of thought, and City/BRA-led meetings do not encourage this kind of discussion.

INTRODUCTION BY MODERATOR

All the major issues that we as neighborhood activists and advocates confront today have very deep roots in the way the city has been developed in the last 50 years. To understand this, we have to go back to the post-World War two era, the late 40's early 50's, when urban renewal came to the City of Boston. The process, strategy and vision for the City of Boston that is being carried out today began then.

At the end of World War II, the City of Boston was in very bad straits. There been no significant development for 25 years; the mayor was at war with the business community and with the State officials on Beacon Hill. There was ethnic conflict in the city. The Roosevelt administration had stopped giving federal money to Boston, and there was a serious concern among most economists about another depression after the war. People wanted not just to jump-start the economy but to make a smooth transition from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy.

Suburbanization and increased automobile use and highway construction played a role in smoothing the transition. The core of Boston was obviously eroding. Manufacturing was leaving Boston, blue collar jobs were down and we were beginning to see the flight of the middle class to the suburbs; so a strategy was sought to turn the situation around. Mayor John Hynes was elected and "The Vault" (a group of Boston's most powerful corporate chiefs) was formed; the business community was brought on line. By that time, in 1949, the federal government had already passed legislation to create urban renewal in the cities. In 1957 the Boston Redevelopment Authority was created to implement urban renewal. Urban Renewal Plans were made to redevelop many of Boston's neighborhoods all over the City.

The driving force behind Boston's urban renewal was the office tower economy. The City was convinced that if we built huge office towers -- and the first one built was the Prudential Center in l960 -- if we could get this kind of investment to come back to Boston, we could attract the white-collar labor force back into the City. This was the first time in American history when white-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar workers. The City was asking, "what kind of industries can we attract back to the City to put our people back to work?" The information age started in the 1950's and officials were convinced that if you bring the middle class employment base back into the city, some of the workers would want to live in Boston and would begin to buy property in those urban renewal areas. What we now know as gentrification and displacement is not a by-product or an oversight; it was a conscious policy, a strategy to get different kinds of people to move into those communities than had lived there before. If the property values could be raised, the tax base would rise as well.

The Prudential Center was the first commercial project to get a Chapter 121A tax break for building in the city. This was the beginning of a strategy to shift the City's tax burden onto homeowners and small businesses and away from the large downtown developers.

This was also the period of road-building in Boston. The Central Artery was built in 1947. It was part of a notion that increased road capacity could solve our traffic and congestion problems. The same concerns were raised then as now about dividing neighborhoods, chopping up the city, and bringing in traffic and congestion.

These are the concepts, the visions of the city, that have been passed down to us over the years. Urban renewal is not just a program; it's a process, and the process has continued, although funding and administration has gone to the local level.

We need to ask ourselves: After 50 years of this kind of development, has this urban renewal process really lived up to all its claims? It was promised that urban renewal would create a new Boston, that the middle-class return into the city would improve our school system, solve the housing crisis, and increase the tax base to solve the fiscal crisis. But we still have all these problems. Is this kind of development appropriate for our needs? What are we the people, the residents, getting in return for devoting our land to the office tower economy?

PANEL AND GROUP DISCUSSION

Boston's development pattern

  • The U.S. economy has been heading in the wrong direction for many years. Boston is on the forefront of a very bad national trend: to hollow out the economy, to replace manufacturing and commerce with an empire of paper assets.

  • This region produces thousands of highly trained graduates every year but most leave the state; the demand for scarce housing raises the cost of construction labor, but over-all, wages make housing unaffordable to most workers. Even the high-end service economy workers are leaving.

  • We don't have the public transportation or other infrastructure to support the housing density we need.

  • Our city's economy is not diverse, so it is vulnerable to sector downturns. And it supports fewer kinds of workers and skills.

  • Our city services are starved largely by misuse of corporate tax breaks.

  • Our housing market is failing to provide the amount and kinds of housing that is needed by the workforce and by family households. Instead of intervening to meet the need, the City is giving away our assets, and development opportunities, to institutions and well-connected for-profit real-estate operators.

  • City livability depends on the balance between housing supply and demand; the extremes have been urban abandonment and depression, vs over-demand and price pressures leading to gentrification that forces people out. It's a narrow band between those two extremes.

  • Gentrification is not a bad thing. Jamaica Plain in the early '50's was a scary place. I'm glad there has been so much "improvement." We were told at that time that it was impossible to rehabilitate a South End row house; fortunately that was proven wrong before they were all torn down.

  • It is important for this city to be an engine of economic development for the whole region. The role that Boston plays here is not played by cities like Detroit Pittsburgh or Cleveland, and there the city is in trouble. We need to have what drives the economy in the city, but that's no longer manufacturing. We may be nostalgic for factories in the city, but manufacturing doesn't drive our economy any more. The kinds of factories built now are horizontal; if you do that here you won't have a city anymore, just a series of big-box factories. So we need to have that office economy here; it helps draw funds and people to the city.

  • Has anybody figured out how to design manufacturing that's vertical? We have to imagine how factories and businesses can work at urban configurations.

  • Let's not romanticize factory jobs; they were the same dead-end, low-salary work as service jobs are now, until the unions fought for decent working conditions and wages for manufacturing employees. Rather than figuring out how to get factories vertical, as if physical manufacturing were inherently the only route to livable pay, we should think again about getting people fair pay no matter what they do. Rather than to resign ourselves to impoverished workers because we don't have factories (just what corporations want us to believe), we have to see how we can get workers to share in the value they help to create, no matter what kind of work they're doing in the process.

  • It's good that people want to live in Boston and want to live around the downtown; that's one of the things that makes this city an exciting and viable place. It's become too expensive and that has driven out diversity, but it's better that it's desirable than if were undesirable. In the '60's, you needed subsidies to get someone to live here -- that's something that we've forgotten.

  • A city needs diversity; gentrification does bring vitality but I don't want to live just among the wealthy; I want to live with people of different interests, incomes and races. This is not only a personal preference; progress and civilization benefit when different kinds of people live together, and not walled off in their own homogeneous enclaves.

  • Gentrification is driving people to the suburbs, far from jobs, schools and transit; it's creating another kind of sprawl, but this time of people who can't really afford that life style.

  • Urban renewal made a wasteland of entire communities, and began a process of gentrification that is now spreading.

  • The City focuses public resources on large-scale downtown development, when there is so much more need for financial support for neighborhood small businesses.

The Boston Redevelopment Authority and "economic development"

  • From a strategy of disinvestment we have come to a time when globalization is the economic engine. What is our economy really built on? In 1976 we had many neighborhoods where people walked to work in manufacturing. After that, jobs were shipped away, and for many neighborhoods we have become largely a government-subsidy economy.

  • The suburban dream is still driving development patterns regionally -- housing supply and jobs are growing outside the city -- but not to the extent happening in other cities. Therefore, the City is obligated to take land - land that doesn't displace residents -- to create jobs within the city and also to create activities that draw people to live here. I believe the BRA is doing a good job in bargaining with people who have access to capital and can create jobs, and in balancing construction with demand and absorption capability. The BRA has done a reasonable job of encouraging development in empty areas, and in reducing extremes of boom and bust. We have an excellent linkage program of $7 per square foot that has made millions of dollars available for affordable housing. We have done well in balancing carrots and sticks, and developed many more places for people to work, stimulating demand for housing. That is now leading to gentrification in some places, but we still have areas of dis-investment. The South End, for example, which people complain is being gentrified, still has 3,000 of Boston's 25,000 subsidized units. The distribution of affordable housing is a legacy of the BRA's early good urban renewal work as well as intelligent work done by the BRA in the early '80's .

Community participation in planning

  • In the '60's and early '70's, citizen participation was tremendous in Boston. It is terribly important that we continue to have opportunities to question governmental policy at all levels.

  • Gentrification seems to go hand in hand with community inertia, with lack of interest in community. We don't have a contest for mayor in the city anymore, and that's why the mayor can do as he pleases. He's not under kind of competition or pressure to be accountable. The decrease in citizen participation is directly traceable to gentrification. We saw passionate community efforts here in past years, blocking the Park Plaza project in the back Bay, resistance to urban renewal in Charlestown, the busing demonstrations in South Boston. The only community in Boston that still produces that kind of community response is in South Boston, and that surely will fade out as South Boston becomes gentrified. It's very troubling that we don't have more genuine citizen arousal about things that really aren't good for neighborhoods; we need to get people involved again in the decisions that shape their lives.

  • The people that moved into Back Bay before the '80's were much more likely to be active in civic affairs than the people who moved in afterwards. In the pioneering state, when access was much cheaper, residents felt that they have to fight for their neighborhood. When people are paying a quarter of a million and more for apartments, they expect to be served. Wealthy people don't expect to have to fight for their neighborhood.

  • People feel that residents don't have much of a voice in what goes on in the City and the neighborhoods, and that power is here is centralized in the City administration and BRA.

  • Usually, we are in a position of reacting to developers' proposals. We in the city should no longer think of ourselves as begging for businesses to come in. The businesses now need us. Now, some of us have tried to set some standards for business in the community to be pro-active (Egleston Square Business Principles, Appendix __). We want them to come in a way that provides us with more than just a place to buy things.

  • Citizens' participation in planning and zoning in Boston is a farcical sham worthy of a first-class banana republic. The mayor hand-picks all the participants, including businesses and institutional interests who don't live in the neighborhood. After all the so-called "community process" is done, some self-proclaimed "community representative" -- often a Community Development Corporation -- is given enough favors or benefits to approve -- i.e., to legitimize -- the zoning plan that the mayor wants. Our tax dollars are being used as a bribery and slush fund for buying off community groups in return for accepting development projects the mayor wants to promote. The area on Boylston Street was rezoned for a stadium and the mayor's task force refused to allow a public discussion. That's citizens participation in Boston, and its leads to very harmful results.

  • Citizen participation in Boston is the worst of both worlds. There's a lot of backdoor maneuvering when there are large economic interests at stake, in order to put a good public face on decisions that really don't respond to citizen participation. On the other hand, in neighborhoods where the economic incentives for development are still unsure, any serious debate among factions in the community becomes an excuse for paralysis, so if there isn't a very strong economic engine pushing, it is easy for a politician to withdraw support and postpone decisions. Dissenting elements in a poor community can easily stop a project, whereas opposition to development in a community with high real estate values is likely to be ignored.

  • Dissent or controversy doesn't have the same effect in every community; some have more political access and protection than others. In West Roxbury the community can stop anything it doesn't like, while in Roxbury or Jamaica Plain, protest won't make any difference.

  • Dissent isn't always about NIMBYism. In Fenway, the CDC did propose an excellent mixed use urban village plan, but in the end, the City zoned for a big new stadium.

Improving Boston's planning and decision-making

  • We should make a "power chart" of all important decisions in the City, and the points of control, including all appointments to official commissions and citizen advisory committees. This will show where there are checks and balances, and where authority for decisions lies. We can then decide where interventions are needed to redistribute authority to provide checks and balances and assure open access and accountability.

  • Chapter 121A is State legislation; it can be repealed to take some of the urban-renewal powers of tax and zoning relief away from the BRA. ð We don't need to focus on stopping gentrification or downtown office development, as long as there's a market for it. The problem is rather that we don't put enough effort into the other things -- building neighborhoods, building affordable housing, tasks which are much harder, and need better resources and skills than the City has invested. The way to deal with this problem is to figure out what to do about the people who aren't getting what they need, not to stop the changes that are going on in the city. State budgets for the needy are about to be cut, due to a shortfall in taxes. Part of the problem is that the federal government does not care the way it used to about serving the needy of this country, with public transportation and so on, and is spending our resources on military hardware instead.

    Our current way of spending public resources -- tax breaks, land give-aways and regulatory exemptions -- never have really distributed prosperity. Will the system ever work to do that?

  • Trickling down is not going to do it. We have to put something in directly at the bottom, and it has to come from the federal government. One of the reasons that urban renewal plans flourished in the 1960's and this country was that the federal government was pouring money into them. Activity and ingenuity follows money. When the government poured huge amounts of money into highways, we got highways. We will get what we're willing to pay for, and we haven't been willing to pay for services for needy people.

  • A progressive income tax would be very helpful; we have lost the progressive income tax. The people at the top used to pay 70% of their income; it's now under 40%. Until we have a progressive income tax again will have no distribution of wealth and opportunity.

  • I'd be happy to fund the BRA or the corporations or anybody that was really thinking about job creation in a way that is not a formula. Now, chains come in with a formula that worked in the suburbs; they roll it out in the city, and they think that's development. That's not development! Development is about creating sustainable lives for people, for their work and their personal growth. And that level of thought has nothing to do with any of the "economic engines" that we're talking about in terms of development here in Boston. What is it that's being developed in all this development, besides real estate? That's what we have to start thinking about.

  • We should stop surrendering our power to politicians, and make them realize they are our employees. Isn't it time to rise up in action? The mayor and the BRA are our employees. We have to understand that they are, and take control of them.

  • After spending 25 years on citizen advisory committees (CAC), I can say that the person in the mayor's office matters a lot. Under Mayor Flynn, people who served on these boards really had something to say about things. The neighborhood people named the chairs of the citizen advisory committees, and community people really drove them; under the current administration, all the members of all the advisory committees and boards are appointed by the mayor, and so are the chairs; and the mayor doesn't want to hear an idea that did not come from him. We elected this mayor. Elections matter. The commitment to neighborhood representation is gone.

  • The structural problem in Boston is not the BRA; the structural problem is that one person has all power. But to have to have leverage on the mayor, you have to have a responsive City Council as a counterbalance; right now, the balance of power by the Charter is so uneven that there are no checks and balances. What we need is to empower the City Council; we have a City Council can't do anything. Because it's so powerless, good people aren't attracted to run for Council. So that's the structure we have to go after. As to the BRA: it is totally responsive to the mayor; if he wanted to listen to the people it would; if he doesn't it won't.

  • We can't look at Boston in a vacuum and think about how to bring balance to this city when Boston functions as part of the country as a whole. Historically, there has never been a concept of economic justice as a basic part of American thinking. When the country was formed, there was only one class of people who had any rights, and that was the white financial oligarchy. People of color and workers were excluded. If we trace the history of this country, we haven't broken away from those the economic inequalities; instead, we have become comfortable with theft, with the fact that workers can't organize without having to fight corporate lawyers figuring out how to keep workers from exercising their democratic rights. Boston's living wage is at $10.74 but the state still has a $7 minimal wage. Neither is really livable in Boston. The minimum wage should be pegged to what it costs to live in this city.

  • We can't solve the city's problem without tackling the causes that start from national issues. Cities compete for economic resources, for corporations to come and bring jobs and taxes. This competition is a "race to the bottom," that generates fewer jobs and less in taxes -and less environmental regulation -- every time a city tries to become more "competitive" and "business-friendly." And globalization is really just the same game, with whole countries competing in the race to the bottom.

  • Land is part of our commonwealth. When land is disposed of in the city, it should be in a way that brings benefits to all economic classes. Today, we are looking at the corporations and how they steal from us in terms of these land deals made within the framework of government, without looking at all the other economic injustice that is going on. We have to think about how we share the wealth of this country. The tinkering with the corporate/city relationships around land projects will not result in a flow of resources that is economically just, in view of our historical inability as a people to use economic justice as a framework. We need a larger framework for a political discussion about equity in distribution of resources. The enormous military resources we spend go to protect corporate resources; we need to get more of those discretionary resources for social needs. Our democracy is a sham until you build a set of principles for economic justice. It costs so much to run for politics that our public officials have to be tied in to those corporate interests, and we won't be able to change the relationship is until we change that. We have a very stratified society in Boston, from very wealthy to those marginally holding on. A group like this, which seems to be in the middle, needs to think within a larger framework of economic justice; otherwise the less privileged communities will look at this as a middle-class exercise unrelated to their day-to-day reality of economic inequality.

  • Money talks. A big developer can come in with a proposal, and planning that has gone on for a year more is blown away. Capitalism and democracy are incompatible in a society where money talks and most people don't have any. In education, housing and other areas, things that people have fought for and won in the '30's through the '70's are been taken away. The tax code at its most progressive was actually in the 90% range. Historically, this is a time that is both dangerous and full of opportunity. In the 30's, candidates were running on promises of balanced budgets, but there were street demonstrations and we ended up with the New Deal. In this century, people have tried to create an alternative to capitalism; it was communism; it was a disaster, and that's why it has vanished from the scene. We are now in a place where our government is waging permanent war, a future of resources going to weapons and warfare; society is moving in a direction that does not hold much promise for most of mankind. We have to figure out how to create a democratic alternative to capitalism, how to create a truly democratic society. It will take a democratic revolution of some kind to overthrow of the power of the corporations, to create a society consistent with the ideals that motivated people 25 years ago, a society for all the people and not just for the rich.

  • We need to get a better balance in attention that is focused on development opportunities around the city, to spread more evenly the pressure for development, the costs and benefits of development, and the community's power to shape decisions.

  • We need to hold our public officials accountable to the people of Boston for the way the resources that are garnered from the huge favored developments and from tax payments are made available to foster unsubsidized neighborhood development in the areas along the main corridors of the City. These were the first to collapse in the '50's and they are the last to come back; they are the most obvious sites that would support more commercial and community life. We should look at a few successful examples like parts of Blue Hill Avenue; we should inventory the entire fallow land along all the major axes in the neighborhoods of Boston and set the goal to get all that done.

  • We have to change the City Charter. But the City Council has more power than the Charter actually gives them; they just don't choose to exercise it.

  • The tax code needs to be changed. Hundreds of smaller businesses can provide many jobs in small facilities, artisan facilities, and the tax code is prejudiced against that kind of investment; it's no accident that the city's dominated by glorified paper-pushing. There is a move toward biotech industries but the manufacturing for that is sent overseas; that kind of leakage should be stopped through home rule petitions to the legislature, and development zones for these purposes should be sprinkled around the city. They don't have to be smokestack industries; there are many artisan industries that demand labor, especially less skilled labor, and would generate higher wages and therefore more social justice.

  • Community Development Corporations do economic as well as housing development. They are successful by getting benefits in trade for supporting zoning concessions to other developers, especially institutions that want to do things with their land.

  • CDC's do a lot of their work and get money by trading for concessions given to big developers. But in this way, we end up losing control over big development to fund little development. Maybe we should give the subsidies directly to the small non-profit developers so we don't have to open the gates to big projects that do as much harm as CDC's do good -- projects that may in fact cancel out the benefits of what CDC's do.

  • The question is how to revitalize community for people who actually live here. How can we get the City of Boston to do what the people who live here want it to do, which may not coincide with the mayor's own wishes? The community has to be organized to deal with mayors. I don't know that if that's still possible because there's a complacency in the city; it's hard to arouse people nowadays. The '60's were a more vibrant, optimistic, empowered time. There's no substitute for concerted neighborhood action.

  • Community activism didn't end; the government has figured out how to deal with the community: find people in the community who will stand up as props and can be bought, give them money, and that solves the problem. When millions of dollars are funneled to community-based organizations and individuals to buy them off, it's hard to stay optimistic about activism.

  • The problem is that there's no State planning function, there's no City planning function and no effective regional planning function. Boston's "City Planning" operation is tucked away in a cubby within the BRA. In Vermont, for example, there is progressive legislation for planning and development; the legislature works on planning policy that is then applied on local levels. Massachusetts seems to have no structure for land use policy. We need to build that larger framework

  • We need to make common cause with a broader constituency. For example, organized labor is the biggest enemy of good economic development policy in the city because they are willing to build anything. But in other cities, there are progressive elements of the unions that look at community interests as well as jobs. We need a coalition with labor. Also, renters: most organizations are property owners, but more of the residents are renters. Also, religious organizations like GBIO. We need lots of outreach and constituency building right now; we are too small a group for these big targets.

  • It seems hard to get allies together that are not about narrow issues. There are housing advocates, transit advocates, project opponents -- but it's hard to get people to step back and think about the larger causes behind these things and to stay in it for the long run. This is a matter of very deferred gratification with few short-term specific victories. Can we get people to ally across issues to unite for root causes, like the need for planning agencies?

  • Maybe the reason that we don't have an uprising or a revolution when all these problems seem so obvious is that people actually think this is a system in which they can make good if they just keep trying, hanging on by their credit cards while their real standard of living falls -- that one day they will win some lottery (the numbers game, or maybe in real estate, or the stock market) and be able to enjoy it all, and control it all. Maybe the concept of "the debt economy, the lottery society" is making all this possible and people are willing to risk spending their whole lives in this scramble, rather than to create something with a less exciting individual payoff but more security for everyone.

  • A lot of people do think that they can take advantage of this system; they can sit in the house and wait for property values to go up and win that lottery.

  • People are complacent because they are content. Most people in the city are happy, and development is not a big issue in most areas because there is no threat of building or tear-downs. No one will run against the Mayor; the City Council is stagnant because people are content

  • So maybe people do get the government they deserve.