Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods
Meeting October 10, 2002
Guest speaker: Mark Yessian (Back Bay)
"THE BIRTH, TRANSFORMATION, DEATH AND AFTERLIFE OF THE FEDERAL URBAN RENEWAL PROGRAM"
Introduction
The ABN's core mission is to advocate for proper public process in planning and development, in terms of both genuine public participation in decision-making, and lawful procedure that provides fair and predictable treatment of project proponents and of neighborhoods. ABN has written and provided to the Mayor, City Council, and Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) a position paper on the issue of planning in Boston.
Boston's planning, zoning, development review, and redevelopment project implementation have been in the BRA's hands since 1960, when the City Planning Board was abolished and its powers taken over by the urban renewal authority.
This combined power makes the BRA more efficient by removing interference by a separate planning agency, but creates a conflict of interest in combining economic development and renewal with comprehensive city planning. Further, the BRA is not a City agency, but an independent authority, and is accountable almost exclusively to the the Mayor of Boston, who appoints the BRA Board and Director; City Council has only a marginal role in planning.
The BRA has perpetuated itself in two ways: first, the State enabling legislation allows the BRA is to be dissolved only by its own decision; second, it has become part of the general-purpose government function (but not structure) by becoming the city's planning agency.
However, the 24 Urban Renewal Plans for Urban Renewal Areas in the city, on which its legal powers rely, were 40-year plans, and will be expiring in the next few years, as follows:
| Urban Renewal Project | Original Anticipated Completion |
| New York Streets | November 1994 |
| Whitney Street | September 1999 |
| Tremont-Mason Street | December 2002 |
| North Harvard | December 2002 |
| Washington Park | February 2003 |
| Government Center | May 2004 |
| Waterfront | June 2004 |
| South Cove | July 2005 |
| Charlestown | June 2005 |
| South End | December 2005 |
| CBD Central Business District | December 2005 |
| Fenway | April 2007 |
| West End | July 2007* |
| Campus High School | June 2012 |
| CBD Boylston-Essex | October 2008 |
| CBD School-Franklin | October 2008 |
| CBD South Station | February 2009 |
| St. Botolph Street | August 2009 |
| Sumner Street, East Boston | September 2011 |
| Park Plaza | December 2011 |
| Brunswick-King | March 2013 |
| Kittredge Square | March 2013 |
| CBD Bedford-West | April 2013 |
| North Station | July 2020 |
*Original anticipated completion date is 50 years from the date of adoption of the Plan by the City Council, subject to automatic extensions of successive ten-year (10-year) periods.
The forthcoming expiration of these UR Plans provides a decision point on the future of the BRA and the urban redevelopment program. And in view of the need for comprehensive, long-term planning independent of the redevelopment mission, this is an opportunity to decide whether to reestablish a Planning, structured to be more broadly accountable.
This year, the ABN's monthly meetings will feature guest speakers and discussion on the BRA and planning in Boston. The October 10 guest speaker, Mark Yessian, is a resident of Back Bay, who prepared a Ph.D. thesis in l970 on the Federal Urban Renewal program:
- its original mission as a housing program,
- its transformation to a program for commercial development and institutional expansion, and
- its devolution from a Federal to a local program.
The following is a condensed transcript of the presentation and discussion. The speaker's comments and those of audience members are edited together; audience questions and comments are bulleted.
The Urban Renewal program was started more than a half a century ago, in 1949, to clear slums and provide replacement housing. It was transformed in the course of 20 years to one primarily serving downtown business interests. And it died in the early years of the Nixon administration, in the movement toward decentralization and devolution of power to state and local government. In the last 30 years, redevelopment has still been happening, but it happens in a different context, without the federal push, the federal rules, regulations and mandates that characterized the federal renewal program. There are differences of opinion on whether it's better or worse since the change.
THE BIRTH
The Housing Act of '49 started the federal urban renewal program. After World War II, there was a great federal focus on unemployment, and a lot of federal activism in American social life. There was a severe housing crisis around the country, after the Great Depression and the war, and there was a need felt at the national level to do something. The federal public housing program was established in the late '30's, so there was a history of public housing subsidy, and also of slum clearance.
It all came together in 1949 with this Housing Act, the goal of which was "a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American." The Housing Act did three things:
- It expanded the public housing program -- a controversial aspect of the program and one that conservatives hated; it called for 800,000 units of affordable housing.
- It expanded the mortgage subsidy program that fueled suburban growth throughout the country.
- And it established Title I, which provided federal money for designing and carrying out slum clearance. It gave federal money to localities that were granted eminent domain powers by their states with the intent of clearing "blighted" areas, to build urgently needed housing.
Conservatives didn't see this as general aid to cities to rebuild in more attractive and economical patterns, but as support for clearing slums and providing housing. Each project had to be "predominantly residential" -- either before or after clearance, not necessarily both. That's key.
There were strict legal requirements for relocation of people displaced by clearance. But those requirements were not often met. Boston City Council notes show the Council asking the BRA for a report on relocation activities, and the BRA response shows that a very small fraction of displaced people were in fact relocated by the Authority.
Clearance areas very often targeted neighborhoods of racial minorities and low-income working people; the program was often referred to as "Negro Removal." And the areas declared "blighted" were often those of mixed uses, with homes, work, schools and shopping all together; this was a development pattern rejected in the new suburban styles of development, which were concerned with separating income levels, land uses -- and races.
While the goals of the urban renewal program were not always clear, the means were always clear: it was intended to be carried out by localities, within the framework of private real estate market interests. Local Public Agencies (LPA) were to be designated, semi-autonomous bodies with a lot of discretionary power, responding to federal mandates as much as to general purpose government. The LPA had the authority to take land by eminent domain, do the clearance, assemble land, and resell it to private developers; the federal subsidy was the difference between the cost of that seizure and clearance, and the proceeds from the resale of the land. How housing was to be accomplished in this program was always meant to be a matter of local initiative and private market enterprise, except for the public housing projects.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Title I goals, then, were eliminating blight, providing "decent, safe, and sanitary housing," and contributing to planned urban development. Over the next couple of decades, two other goals were explicitly added, one of uplifting the economic position of cities, and the other of assembling land for land for public and semipublic uses. There was great pressure to accommodate institutional expansion of hospitals and universities, museums, new city halls, etc., and renewal became a vehicle for accommodating those interests. Over the years there was a series of laws that incrementally changed the focus from housing to this kind of development. The proportion of project expenditure required for housing, for example, dropped from 90% to 65%. There were changes in the rules by which localities had to meet their local non-cash contribution requirements, changes that facilitated more nonresidential uses, and cities that learned how to play the game ended up paying very little of their own money for these urban renewal projects.
- Were there specific criteria to define blight?
It was always controversial; although there were federal guidelines, it was pretty elastic. There are many gray areas in defining blight; of course, there were never any blighted areas and Wellesley or Newton, but in cities it wasn't always that clear. In Boston, the West End was one of the most controversial areas; the West End was a functioning neighborhood, with some 6,000 families of low- to moderate-income residents on about 40 acres of land. Was it blighted? There are different ways to look at it: Is blight a physical thing? Is it a social thing? Books have been written on this neighborhood. (see Herbert Gans on reading list)
What happened to these goals over first 20 years, in terms of the transformation?
Slum clearance did happen; it was successful - depending on how you define slums - in wiping out large areas of cities that were economically marginal or physically deteriorating. There were court battles about the "public purpose" of renewal, and the one public purpose that the courts always upheld was slum clearance. The lack of replacement housing was never a consideration for the courts. The letter of the law was upheld if housing was involved, even if it was just demolition of housing that was never replaced or replaced by commercial use.
- Was that deliberate? Was the requirement that it be housing either on the tear-down side or on the redevelopment side of the project, but it didn't matter which -- was that a strategy to get housing demolished and the land reused for commercial purposes? And all those BRA parking lots, on which some people made lots of money, were they also used as an excuse to tear down housing?
Well, the legislation wasn't written by analysts; it was a product of compromise and the battles of the times. Many of the people who signed on to the Housing Act of 1949 had no intention of doing anything to create more housing; they hated public housing; but it was part of the deal, to get the urban renewal efforts they wanted.
And some housing did get built over those years, it did happen, in Boston probably more than another cities. But there was only so much funding made available by Congress for public housing for replacement use, and the rest had to depend on private developers, who weren't eager to build inexpensive housing in Boston when they could go out and build high-end housing in the suburbs.
So, while the slum clearance did happen, the focus on housing never got going. Even the 800,000 units that were authorized by the Act to be built over the next six years (135,000/year nationally) did not get built. In 1952, Congress allowed, by statute, only 50,000 units, 35,000 units in 1953, and 25,000 units in 1954 (This is the time of Columbia Point in Boston and Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis, big high-rises.) The constituency just wasn't there.
- There were some cultural currents involved here, too.
Americans loved the modernist architecture and urban
design ideas coming over from Europe. In fact Americans
envied Europe because the war-time bombing wiped
everything out and created a clean slate for development,
so they had their own slum clearance without having to
mandate it. And Americans have never trusted or loved
cities, starting with Thomas Jefferson. During urban
renewal, nobody was sitting around thinking in any
comprehensive, integrated way a about building the city
-- where where's the shopping, where's the factory, who
would work where.... Drawings of a renewed Philadelphia
were all about white middle-class couples just strolling
around with children holding balloons... New York,
Chicago, New Haven, Philadelphia, Boston were all going
through the same thing.
- This is the way the BRA is going about rezoning the downtown the Interim Planning Overlay District--without any thought for what it really takes to build a community.
Urban renewal was never about integrating jobs and housing and transportation and so on, it was much narrower thinking.
- It seems to me the BRA is still only planning for the top economic level of the city; nobody is worrying about the secretaries or the clerks or middle managers who can't afford to live here. We're talking about making cities that have things within walking distance for people, but we're driving them way out to Brockton.
That's a function of the city having to become more desirable, attractive, to a lot of people.
- In view of the suburban flight of the times, was the replacement of housing with commercial uses a strategy to keep the city viable?
Yes, as it evolved, it was all about the revival of the urban core, from which residents and workers and shoppers were fleeing. People were shopping in suburban malls and working in suburban industrial parks. Cities, especially the bigger ones, were trying to imitate the European cities, trying to use some subsidies to make the city more desirable. There was no sinister cabal or conspiracy; there were some decent intentions, a lot of compromise, a program that evolved toward politically palatable uses.
Public housing evolved largely to house the elderly, because they were more politically powerful and less controversial than lower-income non-elderly, especially minorities in those days. There was no sustained advocacy to keep urban renewal about housing, or about low moderate-income housing. There was some, but mostly the program was responding to political pressures involving economic revitalization. Where was U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities? They weren't pushing for housing; they were pushing for dollars for institutional expansion to revive their urban cores. The home builders were looking for FHA-subsidized suburban housing jobs, not to build housing in the urban core, so it was a logical accommodation to the realities of the times.
Through the mid 60's as the program evolved, by 1966 only 41% of the urban renewal projects had predominantly housing as their new use, less than half in the first 17 years of the program, and only a small proportion of those were low-income housing. On cleared land, high-end housing was being built. They figured it would filter down, it would help everybody, if wealthier people came to live in the urban core; there'd be jobs created, everyone would be better off.
- But those development patterns of the office economy also created many low-wage service jobs, in place of well-paying manufacturing jobs.
Another politically palatable direction was an increased focus on rehabilitation, in the late 50's; more and more urban renewal dollars came to be allowed for use in rehabilitation rather than demolition and clearance. That was good. Although it didn't do much for lower-income people, or even moderate income people, there was more constituency for it; by the mid 60's the notion of slum clearance had become very controversial. So until the mid-'60's, slum clearance went full speed ahead, but housing numbers dropped, and never got anywhere near what was envisioned by the 1949 Act.
What about the urban planning goals? There were many trained planners working in the urban renewal program. There was always a tension between people who viewed renewal as a series of projects, and others -- a minority -- who wanted to plan for the whole urban structure - even the metropolitan structure. Americans don't like large-scale, top-down planning, especially in Massachusetts with its home rule pattern, and so nearly all of it was project-focused.
There were a few areas of the country that had a metropolitan structure, for example Nashville and Minneapolis, that looked at housing, utilities, transportation in a comprehensive way. The 1954 "Workable Program" requirement sought this broader perspective, with social as well as physical dimensions of planning. Money became available for something called General Neighborhood renewal plans, which would program the stages in which urban renewal plans would be carried out in neighborhoods. In 1959, money was provided for Community Renewal Programs, to schedule these projects in accord with City wide needs. So people were thinking about these things, the rhetoric was there, but for all kinds of reasons there was little movement toward comprehensive integrated structure. Federal money in one program went to counties or metropolitan districts to be used for planning on a regional scale; Boston did not have the political structure for that.
In any case, by the mid '60's, urban renewal became an economic revival program for central cities. Mayor Collins was elected in the late '50's and brought in Ed Logue, the famous development czar of New Haven. His attitude was, "Forget public process, this is too complicated for that, just trust me and let me charge ahead."
So: why the transformation? The program was accommodating local politics and local development interests. It was operationally about constituency politics, while the ideal of decent, safe, sanitary housing was more a statement of national aspiration. Robert Moses, New York's development czar, said it all: The public objective is met by the clearance itself, and the elimination of the slum." And that's how the courts saw it too.
And there was a debate -- mostly academic -- about whether a public investment, a governmental subsidy, for housing, is really the critical leverage point to deal with poverty and low income; is housing the right way to intervene. There are jobs, and other ways, to help this situation, and there was no real consensus on that.
THE DEATH
In the late '60's, with all the activism, there was a renewed interest in housing. The 1968 Housing Act, in the Johnson administration, called for a substantial investment in subsidized housing, 26 million housing units, an initiative entitled "A decent home." The theory was that if you increase the supply enough of any housing, it will filter down to low-income people. But this was a last gasp. Then Richard Nixon came in, and with him the movement of devolution toward local power and a revolt by the Cities against federal regulations and bureaucracy. Model cities, the last gasp of urban renewal, had brought this more directly under the ambit of general-purpose government. By the early 70's, as Nixon's new federalism took off, and the urban renewal program was done away with altogether in favor of general revenue sharing for development purposes. The feds would just give the money to the local and state general-purpose government and let them do what they think is best. There was little protest by even the liberals. That was the death of the original urban renewal program, by 1973. For the last 30 years governmental investment in development and redevelopment has been a local and state initiative, with relatively little federal involvement.
AFTERLIFE
What difference did the demise of the federal urban renewal program make for the cities like Boston? Clearly, there was less of a planning focus -- not that urban renewal was ever so great on this, but there were a lot of planning requirements; how much impact it had was another thing. It wasn't just that the Boston redevelopment agency absorbed the planning board. Other cities kept separate planning boards that were supposed to articulate the comprehensive planning vision, and the project-focused urban renewal plans had to be in accord with the visions of the planning boards; the federal program supported that kind of thing. But over the course of the last 30 years, not just in Boston, planning has become ever more subservient to development pressures. The notion of integrated planning has receded all over the country. As an indicator, you can see fewer professional planners involved.
But more important, it is more of a business model than ever, and for a very fundamental reason: The devolution of power is inherently conservative strategy. The decrease of federal oversight and the federal perspective in favor of local power emphasized the business aspect of development, emphasized "economic development," because cities and states compete for businesses. They are trying to lure businesses into their jurisdictions with big subsidies, they want tourists to come in find their cities desirable and pump money into the economy, they want conventions to come to the city and find it a nice place to be -- and there are only so many jobs and tourists and conventioneers, so cities are competing for this and businesses and will give tax breaks and all kinds of deals -- outrageous deals -- to create some jobs. And Boston's tax rate was always very high in the '60's, more than double than in New York and Chicago, so part of this was about bringing in economic development to reduce the tax rate, to become more appealing to business. It's not inherently sinister; but it is inherently conservative and business oriented. It's happening now on a global scale where the countries compete in the same way, cutting deals not to lose business to our country's.
And It wasn't in the city's interest to become well known as a place hospitable to low-income people, because that would attract people who need a lot of tax-funded services.
Also, development and housing links became even more tenuous, especially low and moderate income became less of a part of the whole development/redevelopment picture. Linkage seems to be sort of a payoff to neighborhood groups to give them something, but it's not the kind of commitment that would be a sustained support for housing development.
Finally, it has reinforced -- not necessarily for the worse -- mayoral, that is, chief executive, control. Before, the urban renewal agency had to follow a lot of federal requirements. Now it's all driven by the mayor.
- Are urban redevelopment authorities the agencies that
remain as urban renewal agencies?
Yes, they still have eminent domain, which is granted by the state. - Who extends or stops the 40-year urban renewal plans?
The DHCD and City Council have to approve extensions of
the urban renewal plans, since the State charters the BRA
and Council approved the original plans. Without urban
renewal plans the BRA has no legal authority to exercise
their urban renewal functions. There were a total of 24
urban renewal plans created in Boston, and they're on
file with the BRA and available for public review.
They've been modified over the years, about 300 times,
for the most part without the oversight that's required
by state Department of Housing and Community Development
and City Council.
- The West End is covered by a set of urban renewal
plans; they have an evergreen provision rather than a
sunset, so they survive until the end of the original 50
a master lease unless they're terminated. They
automatically renew themselves unless they are
terminated.
- The transformation included a focus on institutional expansion, which affects many neighborhoods. There's a document on file in the Boston Public Library titled, "Municipal and Institutional Relations within Boston: The benefits of Section 112." It describes how institutional expansion became a tool for the cities to get their matching urban renewal money by encouraging institutional expansion without suffering a shrinking of the City's tax base.
Yes, influential lobbyists from the institutions in 1959 and then again in 1961 got Congress to waive the "predominantly residential" requirement for projects in or near universities and hospitals, and lifted the ceiling on urban renewal grant funds that could be devoted to urban renewal in such areas. So Congress made it increasingly attractive to cities to accommodate university and hospital expansion, and those institutions had real expansion needs. It was part of this vision of enhancing the urban core, creating more jobs, nicer facilities -- and many times they were in slum or semi-slum areas so it all fit together, and no one wanted their hospitals leaving the city. Politically it was easy. The only opponents were the people to be displaced the periphery of the institutions -- and they were supposed to be relocated to nicer housing. Renewal benefits became more generous over the years. Relocation Services bureaucracy's grew up to help small businesses and residents find new locations, and in some cases it was a positive experience.
- Cities were also having trouble getting commercial
developers to take the cleared land so these
institutional expansion plans were a good to take up the
land with middle- class job generators. So it was an
accommodation to the slow commercial development market.
Look how many decades passed in so many cities without
development on much of that cleared land. Per Section
112, the federal government would give the cities
double-credit for "renewal expenditures" for matching
development money that was actually invested in expansion
by institutions. So the federal money was used to make up
lost tax base -- at least for awhile. So by these
strategies for substitute "local contributions," the city
could carry out their urban renewal at almost no local
cost. It became a way to transform the city, re-envision
the city and redefine who and what go into it, to make up
for the loss of the middle class using federal money.
Bringing the middle class back into the city was how
urban renewal was really defined. But the market was so
against it, everything was moving out, the federal
subsidy couldn't make up for the forces pushing everyone
out.
- What was driven out by urban renewal was not
middle-class housing, but mixed used neighborhoods where
zoning did not prohibit residential commercial
manufacturing, institutional and religious uses together
and walkable neighborhoods. Urban renewal prohibited this
kind of mixed use development to imitate suburban
development. Jane Jacobs was one of the big opponents of
this kind of urban renewal in the 60's. She said in the
joy of building housing for rich folks was that a
generation later it would be housing for poor folks, and
that's how people figured poor people would get housing.
- The power of eminent domain was granted to the BRA by the State; did the absorption of the Planning Board come from the State or was that a City action? It was State legislation, but apparently a home rule petition to apply only to Boston. The Mayor obviously promoted that. It wasn't part of the federal requirements.
And once the federal system and all its regulations collapsed, we were left with a system where the mayor is the only driving force: he appoints the BRA board, the zoning board, the zoning Commission. The mayor drives everything without any rules from the federal government although there is still federal money coming in. All the controls are at the local level, where the body politic wants it. So the challenge now is how to influence the mayor to get planning that articulates some kind of balance--not some big gentrified city with only high-end people. How do we get a balance of housing, commercial other interests in the city? What kind of city do want to be -- do we want to be like New York, or like Topeka? The big question is, how do we get a discussion of this to be part of the body politic, something is actually addressed in a mayoral or city council campaigns (if we had campaigns!). Maybe we need marketing people to make the issue sexy. We need leadership, especially by City Councilors that have a City-wide mandate; they and the Mayor see the city as a whole. We should demand some articulation about the vision of the city, to get people excited about "planning." How does a group like the Alliance get people marching? We need a substantive banner; we can't just excite people with the idea that you can solve the problems of the city with a separate planning agency. We could have a separate planning agency and it might still not do what you want it to do. We need to generate discussion on these issues, even if we don't have the exact answers, but just the openness of the debate will give developers less sway in the process. We have evolved into a reactive mode of just responding to development pressures. How can we be more on the leading edge of that?
- What role should a planning department take -- what
should it do and not do -- and how should we weight the
planning and development functions? Separation between
planning and development agencies is important; it draws
more attention to the need for plans that have some
professionalism. If they are both strong, with planning
as strong as development, that provides some creative
tension that leads to better results.
- How does one accomplish this institutionally? What
are proper the duties of a planning agency? And would the
separation solve everything?
- What can we do when the BRA is abusive of its powers, and forces a project into a neighborhood despite community expression? How do we get the BRA to be accountable since is not a City agency? It's a State-chartered autonomous authority. It has power over the city even outside its original urban renewal areas because it became the planning agency. So there are no checks and balances, and the planning department of the city is not accountable to anyone but the mayor. The mayor appoints four of the five board members and the director. With its planning powers, the BRA controls zoning, and it has created many zoning code loopholes that don't give the public the legal recourse that a simple zoning variance appeal decision, further decreasing accountability to the public.
Maybe we can look for alternative structures in other, similar cities.
- According to the BRA, every other city has a planning
agency separate from the redevelopment authority. If
accountability is the issue, the planning agency can be
made more accountable than the BRA, by including
everybody we want the planning function to be accountable
to. Professionalism is a lesser problem; there are
trained good professional planners in the BRA already.
The problem lies in what they are employed to do. We have
to just split the functions as to get each accountable to
whomever we want.
- To split the functions requires a home rule petition
because it affects only Boston; the mayor must sign a
home rule petition -- and what mayor would give away this
tremendous power? We have to either get the mayor to see
that this makes sense, or get another mayor that does.
- City Council voted to create the Redevelopment
Authority in 1957 subject to state enabling legislation;
it approved every urban renewal Plan, and has to approve
modifications and extensions. But the question is, can
the City Council terminate the BRA itself? Only with a
home rule petition to the State legislature, which must
be approved by the Mayor as well. The dissolution
language of the enabling legislation, Chapter 121B, says
the BRA can only be dissolved by its own hand. The
Council can prevent the extension of the UR Plans, but
this does not prevent the BRA from creating more Urban
Renewal areas, or from granting 121A redevelopment zoning
and tax relief.
- Is the ABN agenda an administrative agenda or a
substantive one, a vision of life in the city and its
physical expression? As a confederation of neighborhoods,
it's difficult to have one single vision. Our purpose is
to promote civic engagement and to make it possible for
all the neighborhood people who already do have a vision
to get their voice heard. There are already many
neighborhood associations who have been working on
visions of the city; we started ABN because their visions
have no way to be connected to the decision-making
process.
- Is it possible to put down some simple principles, to
generate a platform or a vision that the ABN could
promote as part of the process goal? This is a discussion
we should be having on an ongoing basis. For now, we have
to focus on getting a responsive process into place.
- If we had the statutory power to get what we want,
what would we ask for? Well, we don't, and that's the
point, that's exactly why we're here.
- The lack of political will to create housing is still
continuing. To get the mayor to listen to the
neighborhoods on specific issues, we have to show there
is political will for that to happen, and that's what we
should be doing while we're working on these
administrative structures. When we see something we're
concerned about, all of us have to get active, write
letters and make our voices heard.
- Maybe this home rule petition could be a rallying
point, and a vehicle for explaining why this issue is
important, make it a community petition. ABN stands for
more than just a bureaucratic change, the structure of
the separate planning entity -- it's about accountability
and process and openness. Maybe we should start a
movement around this petition that would get the mayor
thinking about this. But then you have to explain why
it's important, how it will make our lives different.
- What about the press and what about our city
councilors? Maura Hennigan has filed to have a City
Council hearing on the extension of the urban renewal
plans and the future of the BRA. The question is, what to
do next, and it's in the council's interest to recapture
its power, lost to the BRA in the last 40 years. We
should prepare for this hearing and get it scheduled and
get people to testify. We need to broaden the decision
making base in the city, and the first people that are
going to be broadened into it will be the City Council,
which has been marginalized from planning for over 40
years. We should bring the Councilors into this
discussion, suggest a hearing date, and mobilize to
testify.
- We can't just file a petition saying that we want a
planning department; we have to define its duties and
responsibilities, what we want, how it should be set up,
what it should do. States like Vermont have good planning
and development legislation. We should look at how it is
set up in other states and cities.
- How do we deal with all the deal-cutting at the
zoning Board of Appeals and the BRA and everywhere else?
The system of government here is so corrupt.
- The problem is not corruption, which happens
everywhere. The problems are that there are no checks and
balances; that we don't have any agency for planning that
has a broader, comprehensive vision than the BRA's
project-by-project mindset, and because urban renewal is
not only a program, but a vision of the city, of how it
should look and function. There is a link between the
administrative structure and the substantive vision for
the city; a redevelopment authority comes with a certain
vision of the city, it's created to implement a certain
vision of the city. The BRA does have an agenda, a
certain kind of economic development agenda, a vision
about who should live here and what they should do, and
what powers the community should have in civic life.
Changing that administrative structure is necessary for
us to change the vision. It's not all we need to do to
change the vision, but the vision won't be changed
without that.
- It doesn't make sense to talk about a unified vision
for the city where many people in many groups have all
sorts of visions. And it doesn't matter what those are,
because as long as you have all the lines of power
leading back to one single person, all points of power
concentrated in the hands of one person -- the mayor --
that's the vision that will be carried out. If we get a
mayor that agrees with us, we might be happy for four
years, but it's not a structure that guarantees
self-determination by the community. The mayor appoints
every commission, every Civic Advisory Committee, every
chair of every committee, every Advisory Panel, everyone
in every group involved in decision making.
- But that's also reflecting this vision of the city as
a place designed for other people, a government that's
responsive not to the people who live here, but people
live outside and use the city.
- Do City Councilors have any power? They have bits and
pieces of power, which they use rarely and only if many
people pressure them. For example, they had to approve or
disapprove the issue of City bonds to pay for the eminent
domain the Mayor proposed to take land for the new Red
Sox stadium. Theoretically, they are supposed to review
major modifications to Urban Renewal Plans; this seldom
happens, and they have never disapproved in the few cases
when a modification has come before them. They are
supposed to oversee disposition of City-owned land, but
they routinely let the BRA take City land without
intervening, without even being aware of it.
Occasionally, the BRA comes to City Council for funds, as
it did in 2000 for planning staff salaries; theoretically
this should give them some oversight power over that
money, but the Council never followed up. One power the
Council has is to hold hearings about the BRA; that is
very important in getting information out to the public,
and it has had a few of those -- on budgets, on the
Hayward Parcel, on the Ames building taking.
- In terms of separating at the planning function, is
the City Council our ally? It's not clear that the City
Council understands the BRA and its relationship to it;
and it's hard to get clarification from the BRA on that
relationship. It seems that Council is as frustrated
about it as we are.
- All of that framework of federal regulations that
started the Urban Renewal program has now, through
devolution, ended up in the hands of one single person;
and that person has no incentives to give up power. So we
have to do two things. While we're figuring out the
procedural things, what a planning agency should do and
how it's structured and how to make it happen, we have to
be creating the political will to get these changes
pushed through, because the mayor has no incentive to do
that, unless there is an overwhelming organized pressure.
And we have to get the City Council on board to show them
we're clamoring for planning; we have to lead them to the
issue.
- One big problem is that most people think they
wouldn't don't know what to do without the BRA -- how
would anything get built? It's been so institutionalized
over 40 years, people can't imagine life without it, and
a viable alternative has to be proposed
- We don't have to reinvent the wheel. If we could show
a few examples of how planning works in a different
relationship with development. We need those examples to
engage the press.
- Development is all about making deals. It's all very
complicated. So obviously mayors and BRA directors want
to have very strong powers, and freedom to cut deals.
It's appealing to some people because it looks like the
executive is being very effective and efficient. We are
saying in this group that this is not how we would like
it to work. We want a process that's more accountable to
the neighborhoods, allows for more real input, even if
it's more messy. That could mean having a separate
planning board of some sort, either elected or appointed,
but also ways to engage the City Council. The councilors
are elected by the citizenry. How do we get more
attention there? One way is to show, at public hearings,
that there are other ways it's done. Specific examples
are one way for us to make the case.
- It's important to keep in mind that the issue we talked about before, the need to compete for economic development, will still be used to justify keeping the BRA in place and in power and it's going to stop people from making the change. But we can look at other cities to see if doing things a different way works out in terms of economics. There is a study ("Redevelopment: The Unknown Government") comparing California cities with and without redevelopment authorities, showing that those without redevelopment Authority's actually had more economic development, and had more taxes for public services. This kind of evidence addresses the insecurity of cities and their survival in the global economy. We need to learn more about these financial calculations, applied locally. We need to reassure people that economic development can be achieved in other ways there other ways to think about growth and economic development than pouring resources in on the top and hoping some will trickle down some day. We've never gotten housing that way, we never have built enough high-end housing to trickle down to meet the needs of the bottom third of the country. And we will probably never get broad based economic development that way, judging from past experience.
Readings
Chapter 121B
http://www.state.ma.us/legis/laws/mgl/gl-121B-toc.htm
WHAT IS URBAN RENEWAL UNDER MGL CHAPTER 121B.
www.state.ma.us/dhcd/components/dcs/publications/urbrenew.doc
Chapter 121A text
http://www.state.ma.us/legis/laws/mgl/gl-121a-toc.htm
Chapter 121A tax
http://www.state.ma.us/legis/laws/mgl/121a-6a.htm
About the Boston Redevelopment Authority
www.cityofboston.gov/bra/about_us.asp
Chapter 652 of the Acts of l960, "An Act concerning the development or redevelopment of blighted open areas, decadent areas and sub-standard areas by urban redevelopment corporations with special provisions for projects in the City of Boston"
"Municipal and Institutional Relations Within Boston: The Benefits of Section 112 of the Federal Housing Act of l961." Julian Levy, University of Chicago Pres, l962.
1965/1975 General Plan for the City of Boston and the regional core. Boston Redevelopment Authority, l965.
"Ninety Million dollar Development Program for Boston." Boston Redevelopment Authority. Prepared by Ed Logue, approved by Mayor John Collins, 1960.
O'Connor, Thomas. Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal l950 to 1970. Boston: Northeastern University Press, l993.
ABN www.abnboston.org
Planning White Paper
http://www.abnboston.org/newse/1999/1110-whitepaperplanning.html
Gans, Herbert. The Urban Villagers: Group and class in the Life of Italian-Americans. New York, l962. Updated and Expanded Edition, The Free Press, l982
"Who Rules Boston? A Citizen's Guide to Reclaiming the City." The Boston Urban Study Group, 1984
Fried, Marc. The World of the Urban Working Class: Boston's West End. Cambridge, MA, l973.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, Vintage Books, l961.
Frieden, Bernard, and Lynne Sagalyn. Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities. Cambridge, Mass, l989.
"Redevelopment: The Unknown Government: What it is. What can be done. A Report to the People of California." April 2000 (posted on www.abnboston.org)
"Incentive Zoning in New York City: A Cost-Bnefit Analysis." Jerold Kayden. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Land Policy Roundtable, Policy analysis Series Number 201. undated
Anderson, Martin. The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, l949-1962. Sponsored by the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. MIT Press, 1964
Abrahms, Charles. The City is the Frontier. Harper and Row, NY. 1965.
Greer, Scott. Urban Renewal and American Cities. Center for Metropolitan Studies, Northwestern University. Bobbs-Merrill Co, Inc., NY l965
Wilson, James Q., Ed. Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy. Joint Center for Urban Studies , MIT and Harvard University. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1966.
Worthy, William. The Rape of the Neighborhoods: and How Communities are Resisting Take-overs by Colleges, Hospitals, Churches, Businesses, and Public Agencies. William Morrow & Co, Inc., NY, l976
Mollenkopf, John H. The Contested City. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1983