Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  A journalist once marveled that I get excited about supermarkets. You bet your life I do! Like no other businesses, supermarkets tap local spending power. The eighteen-thousand-square-foot Village Market pulls customers into Roslindale Village. Landing it took years of work by the Main Street volunteers. Yours truly did his part, too, shooing away a national chain that wanted to fill the space it occupies. Years passed, and the gap on Corinth Street remained. It closed when the Village Market opened in 1998, starting a new chapter in the Roslindale story.

  One of my tenets is that revival has to include not just the worst neighborhoods or the high-voting neighborhoods. That doesn’t work: It doesn’t make the city complete. So the Roslindale story is now playing out in eighteen other Main Street districts from Dorchester to East Boston. A city investment of $5.7 million in these commercial centers stimulated more than $40 million in private investment. The districts added 300 new businesses and 2,300 new jobs by 2000. Twelve years later, almost 1,000 businesses had been started up or expanded, 800 storefronts improved, and 6,000 jobs created.

  Two quick examples:

  In the South End, the Washington Gateway Main Street organization received the Great American Main Street award in 2005 and the American Planning Association’s Great Places in America award in 2008 for revitalizing urban blocks pocked for decades by unoccupied storefronts.

  Allston Village Main Streets is organized around an international theme, with sixty restaurants and markets featuring Greek, Brazilian, Russian, Korean, and Vietnamese food. On weekends new Americans share the crowded sidewalks with students from Boston University and Boston College. The district’s website boasts: “Whether you’re looking for pho or faux, suds or spuds, fish or Phish, carpets or car parts, you’ll find it all in Allston Village.” I can’t get over the fact that this cool multicultural neighborhood emerged while a guy from Hyde Park was mayor.

  At a 2000 conference sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Boston’s Main Streets program was singled out as a beacon of social innovation. “Boston is at the top,” said Kennedy Smith, director of the Trust’s Main Street Center. “It was the first city in the country to create a citywide, multidistrict approach, and now it’s a model for other cities looking for solutions. We feel that it’s one of the most dynamic and innovative new solutions for urban development to come along for several decades.”

  Commerce-led neighborhood revival breaks from the formula followed by community development corporations (CDCs) since the 60s—build subsidized housing first and retail will follow. It rarely did. I maintained that if small business districts didn’t do well, neighborhoods wouldn’t thrive. I was vice president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which ensured that Boston’s record with retail first got the attention of my colleagues. “Neighborhoods are hot right now, both in urban government and in politics,” the editor of Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt, wrote in 2001. “Although not everyone realizes it, the phenomenon can be traced straight back to Boston.”

  Governing named me a Public Official of the Year, writing, “Menino is emerging as one of Boston’s most influential chief executives, as his ideas begin to transform policy in cities far way.” I was afraid it might be hard living up to the title the magazine gave me, “Main Street Maestro.”

  In the 60s cities turned to Washington to fund “urban renewal.” Now Washington is broken. Given the destruction left behind by the federal bulldozer, perhaps it’s just as well that the cavalry isn’t coming and cities have to renew themselves. Boston Main Streets shows how.

  It was really almost a wasteland. What Menino accomplished there is not only a rebirth, but the complete refashioning of the entire area into what amounts to a new city.

  —Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute, describing Boston’s new Innovation District

  Still, the question remained: Why build in Boston? Why build where building was so difficult? Where new projects had to submit cultural impact studies and run a gauntlet of fourteen review boards? Where, once they cleared the regulatory hurdles, developers were shaken down for multimillion-dollar “impact” and “linkage” fees to fund low-cost housing or job training?

  In the booming 1980s Boston’s reputation as a “place hostile to development” did not matter. “There was plenty of money on the table for all the deals,” said Paul Barrett, a BRA director under Ray Flynn. For example, in the mid-80s the developer of an office tower on State Street paid for brick sidewalks around Faneuil Hall. But in the down economy of the early 90s, a $10 million renovation of a Downtown Crossing hotel was nixed because the “giveback” sought by the BRA was too steep.

  A 1993 report prepared by Robert Walsh, BRA director in the late 70s, said Boston needed a developer-friendly approach to development. I endorsed the report as a candidate and implemented it as mayor.

  Boston was “open for business,” I declared in my first inaugural. “City government has acted as a gatekeeper to slow business down. . . . That will exist no more.” The BRA taking four years to green-light a project downtown? No more. City Hall taking six weeks to grant a permit to rebuild a porch in the neighborhoods? No more.

  In the first ten years of the century, according to figures published in the Globe, “Boston built more commercial space per square mile of land . . . than any of the nation’s 10 most populous cities.”

  Besides guiding this building boom, my BRA updated the city’s 1950s zoning code, rewrote the city’s real estate development code to ease the regulatory burden on new projects, and designated sites where more development was wanted. All this was following Walsh, who spoke of the value for “both business and residents” of a streamlined, “predictable” review process.

  But “predictable” is the last word my critics would apply to development in the Menino years. Kevin White, the downtown mayor, kept a “white-knuckled grip” on development. Ray Flynn, the “neighborhood mayor,” left the big calls to his first BRA director, Steve Coyle. BRA directors can get lulled into thinking they head an independent agency. But if the mayor gives the nod, the board that rubber-stamped their hiring will rubber-stamp their firing. I had good directors, so-so ones, and a few flops. But I never relaxed my grip.

  The press harped on the theme that I was afraid a powerful BRA chief would run against me for mayor. That wasn’t it. I was hands-on because I thought city planning was too important to be left to the city planners.

  Development was shot through with big issues and big headaches over favoritism, location, cost, height, and, yes, cultural impact. Upscale condos paid into a fund to build more affordable housing. Business projects paid for open space. In boom years we could ask them to pay more, but when the economy was bad we had to accept less. Decisions like these, and decisions on which projects to approve and which to reject, had to be made on a case-by-case basis, not through following a “predictable” one-size-fits-all approval process.

  For example, Boston’s zoning regulations permit flat roofs. But in Boston the mayor is stronger than the regulations, and he decides what gets built, where it gets built, when it gets built, who gets to build it, and how it gets built. And I didn’t like flat roofs. In a widely publicized incident, a developer came to my City Hall conference room to show me a design for a high-rise in the Back Bay. I said no: It had a flat roof. He returned with a scale model and a dozen miniature tops and stuck one after another onto the building until I pointed to one I liked. An architecture critic called my top “a narcissistic crown” and sniffed that it “makes the building look like an ornamental perfume bottle.” He can fix it when he’s mayor.

  I told developers: “I don’t want sticks in the city anymore; sticks that go straight up to heaven. I want buildings with character.” Where’s the character in a flat roof?

  A celebrated architect once compared himself to a whore for going through the motions on a Boston building in the 70s. I never wanted to read that about something built while I was mayor. So I put developers and architects on notice: Show me
you know Boston from Oakland.

  Developers who couldn’t make the cut complained to reporters about the “Petty Thin-Skinned Ruthless S.O.B.” in City Hall (a real headline). I poked fun at my bad rep. Raising money for a nonprofit, I appeared in a video dressed as the Godfather. An actor playing a developer I have no use for asks me, “What have I done that you would treat me with such disrespect?” And, stroking a stuffed cat, I tell him, “If you had come to me in friendship, your new tower would be up this very day.”

  I could laugh at my image as the don of development, but others saw nothing funny about it. “Never before in Boston, and perhaps nowhere else in the nation, has a mayor obsessed so mightily, and wielded power so exhaustively, over the look, feel, and shape of the built city,” the Globe complained. “Routine construction projects on remote streets need City Hall approval; prominent towers that climb the downtown skyline carry his mark; independent city boards bow to his will.” That guy sounds scary.

  And ineffective. A mayor spread so thin would never get big stuff done, like “create a new neighborhood from whole cloth.” That’s how Governing summed up my effort to “reimagine the city’s long disused waterfront as a new hub for high-tech firms and small startups, along with retail, housing, restaurants, and green space.”

  All along I had my eye on the waterfront. It had the potential to be Boston’s first government-made neighborhood since the Back Bay was filled in after the Civil War. I was focused on that future when I opposed the megaplex and Bob Kraft’s stand-alone stadium, both slated to be built in the then Seaport District. And I stayed focused on it while needling the mogul who ran a giant parking lot on the waterfront to develop the land or sell it to someone who would. He hung on year after year until forced to sell by a costly divorce. Then the recession hit. Finally, in my last inaugural in January 2010, I made standing up the Innovation District my top priority. Recession be damned.

  “A new approach is called for on the waterfront,” I declared at Fan­euil Hall. “Together, we should develop these thousand acres into a hub for knowledge workers and creative jobs. . . . There has never been a better time for innovation to occur in urban settings than now, and there should be no better place than Boston.”

  Why Boston? Location, location, location. The Innovation District is just four subway stops away from MIT and Harvard and the Kendall Square biotechnological center billed (for now) as “the densest square mile of innovation on the planet.”* Governing called my commitment to the Innovation District “perhaps the biggest gamble” of my career.

  The gamble is paying off. Growth on the waterfront has surged. Using tax incentives, in a slow recovery, and with no help from Washington, we attracted several hundred new businesses with five thousand employees to move there. We asked entrepreneurs to help us start something new and they accepted our invitation.

  The key: landing MassChallenge, Inc., “the world’s largest startup accelerator.” This one-of-a-kind nonprofit runs a competition for new businesses, connecting entrepreneurs with mentors, offering free office space and help with finding investors. MassChallenge sowed a culture of collaboration in the district that, more than tax breaks, has brought in new ventures in biotech and green tech. MassChallenge changed people’s ideas about the waterfront, and the waterfront is changing people’s ideas about Boston.

  The city mobilized private funding to build the twelve-thousand-square-foot Innovation Center, where tech workers and “bio-entrepreneurs” can exchange ideas and incubate new businesses. And Babson College, a leader in teaching entrepreneurship, is furnishing “hatchery space” for start-ups founded by its MBA students.

  The culture of the Innovation District is also attractive to established knowledge industry companies like Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which sited its new global headquarters there. Its 1.1 million square feet of office space includes a three-thousand-square-foot laboratory where local students can conduct experiments beside Vertex scientists.

  The Innovation District tries to live up to its name in housing, parking, and commuting.

  “Everybody expects us to build high-rise condominiums, offices, and retail in the South Boston Waterfront; but that’s Anywhere America,” I said when calling for bids on vacant city-owned industrial buildings at the tip of the Innovation District. Instead, the idea is to promote live-work spaces, micro-apartments, and co-housing for professionals in the life sciences who expect turnkey Internet but are willing to share a kitchen. Developers must devote 15 percent of residential projects to living spaces modeled on “executive learning facilities” at Harvard and Babson that stimulate collaboration.

  Work has begun on Seaport Square, a $3 billion project that will carve twenty new city blocks out of a wilderness of parking lots. A decade from now, five thousand people will live there, worship there, shop and dine there, stroll in two public parks there, go to the movies or the theater or a concert there.

  On parking, the city has installed “smart parking sensors” along the neighborhood streets. Using a free mobile app, the sensors point motorists to open spaces. Information technology also eases the drive home: TIME TO DESTINATION signs wired to “real-time traffic data” help drivers find the quickest commute.

  The Innovation District is “not the next Beacon Hill,” says Mitch Weiss, a Harvard Business School grad and my last chief of staff. “It’s linked to job clusters and a different kind of living” for highly educated young people living on modest budgets. Mitch sees the district, which he named, following a model in Barcelona, Spain, where scientists live within walking distance of their labs, so if the spirit moves them, they can return to work in the middle of the night.

  “Geekville” rising on the South Boston peninsula: Who would have guessed it when I began my first term?

  The question for the future is whether people living on modest budgets can afford to live in Boston, not just in the Innovation District.

  “Prosperity brings its own challenges . . . and none is more acute than the region’s severe housing crisis,” notes a Boston Foundation study. Only New York and San Francisco have higher rents than Boston: $2.1 million is the median price of a single-family residence on Beacon Hill, in the Back Bay, and the South End, the city’s skid row as recently as the 60s.

  The average household income in Boston is $49,000. But in 2012–13 a couple earning $75,000 could afford only 5 percent of houses sold in Charlestown, 7 percent in South Boston, and 15 percent in Jamaica Plain. In 2005 the Economic Policy Institute found Greater Boston “the most expensive place to live in the country.” It hasn’t got any cheaper since.

  Alan Ehrenhalt, a leading urban affairs journalist, sees a “Great Inversion” in American living patterns. After decades when families moved out of the city as they moved up the class ladder, “people who possessed money and choice were increasingly living in the center, while newcomers and the poor were settling in the suburbs, often in the outer reaches of suburban territory.” And as suburban empty nesters move into the city, they bid up housing prices beyond anything longtime residents can pay. Rich foreigners are doing the same thing to luxury housing.

  I sometimes ask myself: Did the mayors who transformed Boston from “a hopeless backwater, a tumbled-down has-been among cities”—Hynes, Collins, White, Flynn, Menino—succeed too well? Is Boston too attractive to the well heeled and the well educated? On Boston’s four-hundredth birthday in 2030, will the city have a place for an ambitious worker like Carl Menino? For a plugger good with numbers like me? Or will Boston then look like Paris now, a city for the elite ringed by suburbs for those who cater to them?

  Cities can recharge their own economies. We proved that in Boston. But what can cities do to reverse the greatest threat to social hope in America, economic inequality? Today, you want to live the American Dream? Go to Canada. Upward mobility is greater there (and in class-ridden Great Britain) than in the USA.

  Against inequality, cities do what can be done—pass living wage ordinances, for example—not all tha
t needs to be done. Legislation to address inequality must come from Washington. The first New Deal built a foundation of economic security for the industrial age. It’s time for a second New Deal for the information age.

  We are not moving back to a future of good jobs for people of good character at the Westinghouse plant. “Dependable” won’t take you very far in a global economy. The values I learned from Carl and Susan Menino don’t predict success in life in today’s knowledge society nearly as well as getting the right grades from the right schools. And neither counts for as much as “winning the ovarian lottery,” to quote Warren Buffett. By age four, a child born into an affluent family has heard 15 million more words than a child from a poor family. How can we reconcile that gap with the American ideal of “equal opportunity”?

  The good news is that in the New America of hardening class inequality, city government can redistribute tax revenue from the affluent to the struggling, from neighborhoods where people own to neighborhoods where they rent.

  I recently saw an ad for a Federal-era mansion for sale on Beacon Hill. Price: $10 million. Besides trimming their trees and collecting their rubbish, Beacon Hill residents ask little from City Hall. So with the $60,000 collected yearly in property taxes on that house, the city can pay for public goods like parks and playgrounds for kids in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. Also housing, libraries, cultural programs, mass transportation, a clean environment, and health care. Boston ranks just behind New York as the most unequal city in the country, but by providing the money for these goods, Boston’s growing wealth can benefit the whole community.* The city can leverage economic inequality to strengthen social equality. To make it so that, in Boston, you don’t have to be rich to have a rich life.