Mayor Wu’s reforms on planning fall far short of campaign promises
Rodney Singleton
Mayor Wu’s reforms on planning fall far short of campaign promises
April 10, 2024
The recent City Council vote on an ordinance to create a Planning Department within the city of Boston, with a proclaimed intent to sunset the powerful Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), recently known as the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA), falls horribly short of delivering what Boston residents deserve. Allegedly part of the legislation promised by then-City Councillor Michelle Wu to rid the city of the agency responsible for flattening Boston’s Black, Brown, immigrant, poor and working-class neighborhoods, this ordinance is in fact a cynical rebranding of the BRA.
For all the harm the BRA has caused, Wu’s new agency is not weaker than it was; in fact, it is stronger. Given critical decision making that remains intact by keeping the BRA Board as our planning board, this agency can now exercise its powers beyond established urban renewal zones to the entire city.
While not part of the newly created Planning Department, the BRA/BPDA’s relationship with planning is compromised and conflicted because leadership of the intact BRA and the new Planning Department are the same person – Arthur Jemison, who is answerable only to Mayor Wu. Agency processes are less transparent, with no real City Council oversight and annual financial reviews done only after the fact.
Most telling, there is now no formal component for community engagement and input, making new development ripe for the very same abuse that laid waste to vast parts of Roxbury and the West End. With this new ordinance, moreover, the new agency is not sunsetting any time soon.
Most offensively, all of this “reform” was trumpeted under the patronizing, opportunistic but false branding of equity, affordability, and resilience.
If equity is so key to this ordinance – something Wu suggested in her 2019 white paper to sunset the BRA while pointing to the wealth gap – why are unchecked urban renewal powers that took what little equity Black, Brown, immigrant, poor, and working-class families had in their homes being kept?
This flaw in the new ordinance is either entirely missed or never adequately explained. In fact, it’s no different than the administration’s flawed plan to move the centrally located John D. O’Bryant school from Roxbury, where it meets students from very diverse backgrounds where they are and provides transformational STEM educational experiences, to West Roxbury. The lack of substantive community engagement, tone-deafness to real harm to the future equity of young people, and disrespect to a community is astonishing.
The disrespect and tunnel vision to pass this ordinance, and failure to be sensitive to obvious inequity playing out at White Stadium, helps make the case. Wu aims to give White Stadium to a private for-profit sports team in order to rehab and maintain a neglected city resource, displacing Boston Public School programming. Her plan raises the question: Would the city give Boston Common or the Public Garden over to private hands? No! But apparently, it’s okay to give White Stadium away because it’s in Boston’s neighborhoods of color and we can’t find the funding (the same funding, by the way, the Common and Public Garden receive).
The BPDA has carried out an extensive window dressing effort at community engagement and participation to create the illusion that there is a plan for Boston’s future that we have all bought into. Pop-in open houses, “Pint with a Planner,” surveys and endless talks with BPDA consultants every day of the week across Boston allow individuals an experience of sharing individual opinions, but without being heard.
As a community, through our neighborhood associations and organizations, we have not been engaged at the planning level. All the while, Mayor Wu’s clock is ticking, and still, there’s no commitment to substantively engage and learn from a constituency that bears the scars of past harms from flawed plans.
Two days after the official ordinance signing, April 4, marked 56 years since the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated while advocating for sanitation workers in Memphis, where he believed the struggle exposed the need for economic equality and social justice.
Giants in Boston like Mel King and Chuck Turner stopped a highway from being built through Roxbury. But in Boston recently, a voting bloc of four city councillors of color, Ruthzee Louijeune, Henry Santana, Brian Worrell, and Enrique Pepen, sided with the mayor and voted against their interests as Black and Brown folks of this city, and not protecting other Black and Brown folks from harm. History and future elections will be judge and jury.
Rodney Singleton is a lifelong resident of Roxbury, whose childhood home was taken by eminent domain during the urban renewal of the 1960s. He is an avid gardener, lover of open spaces, and six-time winner of Boston’s garden competition. A graduate of Boston Technical High (John D. O’Bryant) and Northeastern University, he is an electrical engineer who lives with his wife on Cedar Street.
Rodney Singleton
‘Defenders’ press White Stadium legal challenge
April 24, 2024
Jean Maguire spoke at a Tuesday press conference next to Stacey Welch.
Taking on the title of Franklin Park “Defenders,” 20 citizens and the Emerald Necklace Conservancy (ENC) announced Tuesday they plan to move ahead with a lawsuit challenging the re-development of White Stadium in Franklin Park for part-time use by a women’s professional soccer team.
The lawsuit, which includes long-time activists Louis Elisa and Dr. Jean Maguire, was dealt a defeat in March when Judge Sarah Ellis denied their request for injunction and temporary restraining order to prevent the city of Boston from moving forward or starting construction work at the stadium. However, the Franklin Park Defenders, who gathered in front of the North Gate at White Stadium on Tuesday afternoon, say they will continue with the underlying legal challenge on the grounds it violates the Public Lands Protection Act (Article 97) and the George Robert White Fund Trust.
“This park is a symbol of what is right about Boston,” said Maguire, who was attacked and stabbed by an unknown suspect in 2023 only yards away from the spot where she spoke Tuesday. “We need to keep the things that are right about Boston in place. These trees breathe…This place needs to be kept for all of us forever.”
Elisa, who is president of the Garrison-Trotter Neighborhood Association, noted there is a great deal of distrust of the plan because important details have yet to be shared. In the face of that, he said the community is rallying to defend the park as they did when the city abandoned it in the 1980s.
“I’m a member of the defenders of Franklin Park and not just White Stadium, but the whole park because all of Franklin Park is under siege by them because they want to slip all kinds of things here and there from the west to the north to the east side of this park,” he said.
“We have the city’s word, but we also have 35 years of their willful neglect as well,” he said.
Jamaica Plain activist Renee Stacey Welch said she grew up near the park on Montebello Road and continues to find peace and solace there – something she fears will be taken away by the professional sports franchise and, perhaps, other events.
“Today we fight to preserve our lives and our memories we’ve had here,” she said, leading off the press conference and getting a little emotional. “We are not saying we don’t want an improved Franklin Park and renovated White Stadium. We do. But not with a for-profit professional soccer team…The city has a long history of leaving our children behind and this is another way of doing that.”
Renee Stacy Welch, of Jamaica Plain, said the Franklin Park Defenders will proceed with a lawsuit that seeks to stop the re-development of White Stadium. Seth Daniel photo
Louis Elisa, a co-founder of the Franklin Park Coalition, said the city has given them their word, but that word isn’t worth much after 35 years of willful neglect of Franklin Park and White Stadium.
Roxbury’s Derrick Evans, also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said they are standing up for schoolchildren, residents, and those who have tried to review the project – including the Boston Landmarks Commission (BLC) whose concerns about White Stadium were made public this week by the Reporter through an letter to the mayor about not following the state laws governing the commission.
“I’m here to stand up against Wu tyranny,” he said. “I’m here to stand up for the Boston Landmarks Commission and their director who just on Friday was fired as the director.”
ENC President Karen Mauney-Brodek said the next steps in the lawsuit will probably be discovery and fact-finding.
“There still isn’t information about whether there are events in addition to the soccer games that would take place and even how profits would be shared,” she said. “In the end, though, this case is about self-determination and the community being able to decide what they want.”
She added that a key part of the suit revolves around Article 97, which she maintained applies to the project since the beginning of review meetings in January – something the city disagrees with. She also said they believe the city needs to go through state environmental reviews, known as MEPA. She also said she believes a full BLC process needs to be followed. The suit is pending in Suffolk Superior Court’s civil division.
Nonprofit, residents continuing with lawsuit over White Stadium redevelopment plan
Renee Stacey Welch was joined by other plaintiffs to discuss next steps in their lawsuit against the the city over plans to redevelop White Stadium and make it the home of a new professional women's soccer team.JOHN TLUMACKI/GLOBE STAFFUndaunted by a judge’s recent ruling denying their request to temporarily pause the city’s plans to renovate White Stadium, a local environmental nonprofit and 20 residents are nonetheless moving forward with their lawsuit to fight the project and try to prevent the stadium from becoming the home of a new, professional women’s soccer team.
“When the judge decided not to support us, I cried, because yet again, people are telling us that we don’t matter,” said Renee Stacey Welch, one of the plaintiffs in the case and a lifelong resident of the Franklin Park area, at a press conference Tuesday. “But we’re gonna keep fighting because that’s the right thing to do.”
Last month, a Suffolk County Superior Court judge rejected the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction to halt progress on the project until the lawsuit could be resolved. While lawyers for the nonprofit and residents argued any demolition or other work on the site would result in considerable harm to the community, attorneys for the city said a significant delay would likely kill the project, which is dependent on the stadium being ready for the new team to participate in the 2026 professional women’s soccer league season.
“As indicated by the judge’s ruling last month, there is no legal basis to challenge this public-private-community partnership to revitalize White Stadium,” Boston Unity Soccer Partners said in a statement to the Globe. “We continue to invite the community at large to offer constructive feedback on the proposed plans and to participate in the many upcoming public meetings.”
Boston Unity Soccer Partners, which received approval from the National Women’s Soccer League to establish the league’s 15th team in Boston, intends to spend more than $50 million on the stadium renovation, in addition to $50 million the city would contribute, according to court records. Boston Globe chief executive Linda Henry is an investor in Boston Unity Soccer Partners.
White Stadium, which is designated for use by Boston Public Schools students and the community, has been in disrepair for decades. Mayor Michelle Wu and Boston Unity Soccer Partners argue the partnership is an opportunity to provide BPS students with a state-of-the-art facility, as well as the more diffuse benefits of having access to a professional female sports team.
But Welch and the 19 other residents, along with the nonprofit Emerald Necklace Conservancy, which serves as a steward of Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1,100 acres of green space, filed the lawsuit this year arguing that the city’s plan to renovate the stadium amounts to an unconstitutional privatization of public land. They worry that use by a professional sports team would limit the public’s access to the site and accuse the city of not adequately addressing community concerns about the project.
In a letter sent to Wu earlier this month, the Landmarks Commission also expressed concern about how city administration has approached the project, listing it as an example of how officials have interfered in the body’s work and oversight role.
A runner ran laps on the track of White Stadium Tuesday. JOHN TLUMACKI/GLOBE STAFFAs a Boston landmark and a site included on the National Register of Historic Places, Franklin Park falls under the commission’s purview, the commissioners wrote, and any alterations to the landmark require the commission’s approval. However, the commissioners wrote that the commission was only allowed to review half the White Stadium project — the Boston Unity Soccer Partners portion — with city officials saying another portion overseen by Boston Public Schools was not under the commission’s jurisdiction.
The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Leonard Brown, a physical education teacher at a nearby private school, also expressed reservations about the project Tuesday, as he watched about a dozen of his teenage students, clad in blue and pink jerseys, play a hybrid basketball-handball game he calls pinball at the public basketball courts next to White Stadium.
He brings his students to the park to use the basketball courts, baseball field, and the stadium’s track multiple days a week, and said while he supports Wu and voted for her, he doesn’t back the redevelopment plan.
“I don’t agree with this at all,” Brown said. “This is my gym; I like the fact that it’s a public space, I like the fact that we can use this when we want.”
“This seems to be [that] the people who would benefit most are not from the community,” he said. “I’m OK with what it is versus what they want it to be.”
On Tue, Apr 23, 2024 at 7:20 AM L F <fowlkes...@gmail.com> wrote:
Chuck and Mel would be proud!!!