MAYOR WU’S PLAN FOR DOWNTOWN BOSTON FAILS OUR CITY
An Open Letter to Mayor Wu
Dear Honorable Mayor Wu,
PLAN: Downtown was meant to reimagine the heart of Boston. Instead, your proposed plan reveals a striking lack of creativity, perspective, and vision and will not work.
Your campaign promised to give a greater voice to communities in determining the planning and zoning that would impact their neighborhoods. Yet in the end, the zoning proposal for Downtown that you and Planning Chief Kairos Shen have proposed ignores nearly all feedback and input from community leaders, residents, and an Advisory Group appointed to help guide a process that began 7 years ago. The proposed zoning amendment your administration is rushing to seek BPDA Board approval for on September 18th severely fails in accomplishing at least three key goals stated in PLAN: Downtown: enhancing access to more affordable housing to address a growing crisis, preserving historic fabric and cultural histories of Boston’s Downtown neighborhood, and fostering an improved environment for Boston’s legacy small businesses to thrive. In squandering this multi-generational opportunity, the uncompromising approach you and Chief Shen are taking caters to a handful of developers at the expense of the broader community.
Downtown is not monolithic but is comprised of two areas that are distinct in character. The Financial District east of Washington Street has a large concentration of high-rise office buildings, and we have enthusiastically supported zoning that encourages more ambitious, taller development there. Our concern is with the increasingly residential Ladder Blocks and Park Plaza neighborhoods west of Washington and adjacent to Boston Common. In particular, the historically striking Ladder Blocks between Washington Street and Tremont Street boasts no fewer than 29 local and national landmark buildings and the greatest concentration of 18th century national treasures (e.g., Old State House, Old South Meeting House, King’s Chapel, Old Corner Bookstore) in all of Boston. This area is synonymous with the birth of our nation, and it is our city’s responsibility to be the ultimate caretaker of that history.
Chief Shen’s rush to implement an untested and unproven zoning scheme begins with a gerrymandered map in the aforementioned neighborhoods that radically departs from customary and critical uniform height and density controls. He cherry picks the sites of favored developers and offers excessive zoning relief to 500 feet in height – more than 200% above the current zoning of 155 feet. Some of these same sites have been left to decay, and coupled with unreasonable lease terms have led to many storefronts being vacant for years. The transfer of value from this upzoning also comes with minimal requirements of those developers. There is no strict on-site requirement for affordable housing, nor protection for adjacent historic buildings. Moreover, Chief Shen appears not to have done or shared with the community any detailed renderings or rigorous analysis of the proposed zoning’s dramatic impact on housing, traffic, shadow, and infrastructure. Curiously, Chief Shen has stated in our meetings that this zoning plan may not even work, and that further incentives for developers may have to be given, casting self-doubt on a plan he seems all too eager to adopt prematurely.
Once this untested zoning is put in place, there will be no way to recapture the value given away to developers for the benefit of the city’s finances, livability, or history. What will likely result is wanton building demolition, unpredictable development timelines, and unknown housing productivity. History suggests it will most likely lead to vertical, gated condominiums for the wealthy rather than the on-site affordable, workforce, or middle-income housing the city truly needs.
Moreover, your plan will irreparably change this area, producing additional negative ripple effects to tourism throughout the neighborhood, including the Freedom Trail, which experiences 4 million visitors per year that are responsible for $1 billion in annual spending. The Downtown area draws a comparison to Back Bay, which Bostonians have come to understand is not monolithic, but accommodates healthy development growth throughout one area (south of Boylston Street, where the John Hancock Tower is) while preserving the uniform, historic fabric that still exists north of Boylston (e.g., Newbury Street). Downtown Boston is much the same.
Aiming for a more agreeable solution, leaders from numerous civic associations and other concerned organizations presented the City with a set of creative approaches that would more successfully accomplish all of PLAN: Downtown’s goals, including setting the table for future development across Downtown. They included additional tax incentives and financing support in transferring economic value within Downtown so that projects that perform in achieving your goals are economically viable. All of these policies have either been deployed successfully in other cities around the country or are already implemented in Boston itself. Yet, our ideas were dismissed with minimal consideration to accommodate an inexplicable giveaway of height and value.
Our asks are simple, reasonable, and feasible:
Set clean, common-sense, full-block boundaries for the historically sensitive SKY-LOW zone that offers a natural, rational distinction between the Financial District east of Washington Street (i.e., the SKY zone) and the Ladder Blocks and Park Plaza to the west (SKY-LOW).
Maintain a baseline height limit in SKY-LOW of 155 feet, with a generous additional allowance of nearly 100% (up to a maximum of 300 feet) for certain development sites.
Develop local shadow regulations that prevent future projects from violating the intent of the state shadow law to protect the parks.
This current planning effort was offered by the city as a conciliatory response to the gross exception to the state shadow laws protecting Boston Common and the Public Garden made in 2017 to accommodate a single towering project (Winthrop Center) by a single developer. We find it ironic that this plan, intended to codify future protection in the more historically sensitive area of Downtown, does just the opposite now.
Even more perplexing is that you’ve abandoned the principled stance you expressed then in a Boston Globe editorial on April 24, 2017: “Amid pressures facing each generation to grow our tax base and our constricted housing stock, the protection of open space for future residents rests on the government’s willingness to take stewardship seriously and to consider more than short-term financial gain. History tells us that developers will be back with big projects arguing that just one more lifting of height restrictions won’t make that much difference. We don’t have enough information to know if this proposed compromise is the best solution; we have to get the process right first. Let’s understand the true trade-offs between height and civic benefit with an open process in which stakeholders can engage in meaningful discussions on the future of an evolving residential neighborhood and city.”
We could not agree more, Mayor. Boston would be better off without this destructive plan. You committed to us at our January meeting that we would take the necessary time to get this plan right and that the Downtown zoning effort should be a model for planning for the rest of the city, and that if we cannot get this right for Downtown, it does not bode well. On behalf of current and future generations of Bostonians, we implore you to make the straightforward changes that we have suggested. There is a better outcome to be had - please, let’s work together to make that happen.
Sincerely,
Coalition of Stakeholders
Bay Village Neighborhood Association | Beacon Hill Civic Association | Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association | Freedom Trail Foundation | Friends of the Public Garden | Individual Community Stakeholders & Leaders | Neighborhood Association of Back Bay | Revolutionary Spaces | 45 Province Residents | Millennium Place Residents | Millennium Tower Residents | One Charles Residents
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