White Stadium Is Not About Legacy — It’s About Trust
Rodney Singleton
White Stadium Is Not About Legacy — It’s About Trust
Joan Vennochi’s recent February 12th opinion column frames White Stadium as the defining gamble of Mayor Michelle Wu’s legacy. For many in Roxbury and across Black Boston, that framing misses the point. White Stadium is not about political risk. It is about trust — whether equity in Boston is a governing principle or simply a narrative.
White Stadium did not fall into disrepair because Franklin Park lacked priority. It deteriorated because marginalized neighborhoods like Roxbury have historically received deferred maintenance while wealthier, whiter parts of Boston were preserved and restored. When statues in the Public Garden weather, they are restored. When historic buildings in Back Bay age, they are rehabilitated. Demolition is rarely the first instinct.
Yet in Roxbury, a 1949 stadium that once stood as a civic jewel was allowed to decay and ultimately gutted. We are now told that a $325 million reconstruction — $135 million borne by Boston taxpayers — represents transformative investment. But investment for whom, and under what process?
Boston Public Schools face a deep budget crisis. Teachers are being laid off. Schools are closing. A massive backlog of aging buildings remains unresolved. Student athletes have already been displaced from White Stadium for months. High school football will not even be played there until November because of professional field requirements. Transportation plans for accommodating 11,000 fans in the middle of a park nearly a mile from rapid transit remain unsettled.
The issue, however, runs deeper than stadium usage or cost overruns.
The White Stadium process signaled a departure from long standing community-first development norms in Roxbury. As documented by The Flipside, the administration engaged for months with investors behind the Boston Unity Soccer Partners before broader community deliberation, then crafted an RFP to which that team was the sole bidder. Community meetings followed, but only after the structure of the deal was largely set.
That departure is particularly jarring given what happened at Parcel P3.
Parcel P3, located in Lower Roxbury, is governed by a written and signed agreement between city and state officials and representatives of the Black community mandating community control over the land disposition process. The Roxbury Strategic Master Plan Oversight Committee selected a development team in which Black developers held a 50% equity stake — a project centered on housing, Black wealth creation, and Black culture.
That designation was allowed to lapse under the explanation that the economic assumptions underpinning it — life sciences as an engine — were no longer viable.
Yet within days, the BPDA granted a six-month extension to the Blair Lot development team in Nubian Square Ascends — a project similarly dependent on life sciences, similarly not under construction, and geographically less than a mile from P3. The Blair Lot team includes Bill Kerivuori of Able Company, the same development partner working with the city on White Stadium. Kerivuori is married to Jennifer Epstein, managing owner of the professional soccer team that will lease White Stadium.
These facts alone do not prove wrongdoing. But governance is not judged solely by legality. It is judged by consistency.
When Black-led projects centered on community wealth building face expiration while projects tied to politically connected partners receive flexibility, perception becomes reality. The community sees unequal application of standards.
The fractures described in The Flipside are not imagined. The absence of several Black elected officials from the mayor’s Feb. 6 White Stadium announcement was notable. Their presence days later at a heated P3 community meeting underscored the tension. Anger in that sanctuary was not about nostalgia for a stadium. It was about institutional memory.
Roxbury residents remember land clearance under Urban Renewal. They remember promises of revitalization paired with displacement. They remember that Washington Park’s transformation came at enormous community cost.
Equity language cannot erase that history.
White Stadium may ultimately succeed economically. The women’s professional team may thrive. Construction jobs and minority contracts may deliver benefits. But the governing question remains: were the rules applied evenly?
Mayor Wu has said Boston “always has to be the example.” Indeed it does. The example Boston sets here is not about whether professional soccer can coexist with high school athletics. It is about whether Black communities retain meaningful control over land use decisions promised in signed agreements.
Trust erodes when processes appear tailored for some while strictly enforced for others.
During Black History Month, we quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. But King’s vision was not about ceremonial representation. It was about structural justice — equal protection under law and equal opportunity in practice.
White Stadium is not merely a construction project. It is a test of whether Boston has learned from its own history. Are we willing to restore civic assets in Black neighborhoods with the same reflex we apply elsewhere? Are we willing to protect written agreements guaranteeing community control? Are development standards applied consistently, regardless of proximity to power?
This is not a personal indictment of the mayor. It is a civic challenge.
Boston is capable of transformative investment. It is also capable of repeating old patterns under new rhetoric. The choice before us is whether equity is operational — embedded in process, consistent in application, transparent in reasoning — or whether it remains aspirational.
Joan Vennochi asks whether White Stadium will define Michelle Wu’s legacy. Perhaps it will. But legacy is less about boldness than about fairness.
For Black Boston, the question is simple: when land, capital, and public trust intersect, are we partners in decision-making — or afterthoughts?
That answer will define more than a mayor’s tenure.
It will define whether equity in Boston is real.
For better or worse, Wu’s bet on White Stadium will define her legacy
With costs at $135 million and a lawsuit pending, the mayor is staking her legacy on a pro-soccer partnership in Franklin Park.
Mayor Michelle Wu walked past people wearing shirts saying "Keep Franklin Park Public" at a press conference about the White Stadium renovation project at William J. Devine Golf Course on Feb. 6.David L. Ryan/ Globe StaffDespite the increased cost, ongoing legal battle, and continuing pockets of neighborhood resistance, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is sticking with her plan to rebuild White Stadium, in partnership with a new professional women’s soccer team.
It will now cost taxpayers $135 million, up from the $91 million estimate of a year ago, which was up from the $50 million estimate of two years ago. But Wu appears to have no second thoughts or regrets, saying in a recent interview on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio” that “Boston kids deserve nothing but the best.”
That, of course, depends on her opinion of “the best” and whether a grand stadium complex built to showcase professional athletes is really what’s best for student athletes.
What about building a more modest alternative for the exclusive use of Boston schoolchildren and opposing teams — one that includes a regulation track, a field for high school football and soccer games, and a field house with lockers and showers? Opponents say that can be done for $29 million. But the Wu administration dismisses that option, saying the cost would be much higher than that, while producing no formal bids or cost estimates to back up such a conclusion.
It’s Wu’s way or the highway — and dare I say there’s something slightly Trumpian about that attitude?
Ignoring the critics, the cost, and legal arguments against it, President Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House in order to build a ballroom. After adding his name onto the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Trump recently announced plans to rebuild it, no matter what detractors have to say about it.
Unlike the East Wing or the Kennedy Center, there’s no question White Stadium warranted demolishment. Built in 1949, it was once an urban jewel. After falling into extreme disrepair, it stood as a sad commentary on city priorities about Franklin Park and school sports.
Rebuilding it is now a legacy project that will define Wu’s mayoralty, and she appears to be willing to take the heat and risks that go with it.
The women’s soccer team could fail to gain a following, collapse financially, or exit Boston. Or it could be such a success that it needs a larger venue, like the professional soccer stadium planned for the New England Revolution in Everett. Either way, the Wu administration insists the city is protected.
As for cost, Wu now insists that it’s “locked.” However, in the Contrarian Boston, Scott Van Voorhis suggested that’s not accurate because guaranteed maximum price agreements don’t preclude or stop contractors from billing for change orders that would increase the cost. In the end, the public will eventually find out who is right about that, just like it did with the Big Dig.
To be fair, great vision often requires a great leap of faith. Past Boston mayors have taken on legacy projects that proved the skeptics wrong. Kevin White turned crumbling warehouses into Quincy Market, a popular tourist destination that revitalized downtown Boston, which is again in need of creative revitalization. Tom Menino championed a convention center in South Boston that spurred development of a new luxury neighborhood and entertainment district, known as the Seaport.
With White Stadium, Wu is looking beyond downtown, to a part of the city that could greatly benefit from attention and investment. According to Wu, the newly renovated stadium “will deliver the largest community benefits deal in Boston’s history.” With the city committed to $135 million, Boston Legacy, which will lease the stadium from the city, is putting in $190 million.
Construction is slated to begin at the end of March, and the project is expected to create more than 500 construction jobs. There are promises to share the work with local businesses in the neighborhoods surrounding Franklin Park, including Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, and Roxbury. Some $43 million in contracts are also allocated to minority and women-run businesses. It all sounds great.
The city still faces a legal challenge from the Franklin Park Defenders, who have joined the Emerald Necklace Conservancy to sue the city over the stadium plan, arguing that it’s an illegal use of park land. The case is now before the Supreme Judicial Court. For the plaintiffs, it is the last stand.
If the city wins, it will be Wu’s way, for better or worse.
Will it be all that she promised, from an investment in the future of Boston Public Schools to an economic boom for a long-neglected part of the city? Most of all, will it be what Boston student athletes need and deserve?
Because of the need to maintain pristine field conditions for the pro soccer team, high school football won’t be played there until November, the end of the season. Wu officials say high school soccer games can be played on the field. But questions are still being raised about how long high school games can coexist with professional games before field quality becomes an issue. As with the final cost, the truth about shared usage will eventually be known, too.
In the end, that truth will be Wu’s legacy.
An alternative plan for White Stadium
A drone image of the construction being done on the former White Stadium site in Franklin Park on Aug. 12, 2025. Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe StaffFully public, and for BPS students
In response to the Feb. 7 coverage of White Stadium (“Wu: City’s share of stadium is $135m,” Page A1):
Everyone in Boston desires a new White Stadium for the kids. While the proposed cost of the professional sports and entertainment complex in Franklin Park has risen to at least $325 million, 32 local organizations and surrounding neighborhood organizations and more than 800 individuals have asked for a fully public stadium. And as the Globe recently editorialized, “it’s not too late to think about a more modest way to rebuild White Stadium, strictly for the use of Boston Public Schools students.”
The Emerald Necklace Conservancy worked with Boston residents, designers, cost estimators, and others to develop an alternative plan for a fully public high school stadium that includes a new grass field, a much-needed 8-lane track, high-quality student athletic facilities, and public amenities like restrooms and multipurpose space. An independent cost estimate determined that this state-of-the-art public facility for BPS and the community could be built for $64.6 million.
The Conservancy and others continue to be interested in supporting the renovation of White Stadium, the Elma Lewis Playhouse, and the many other priorities identified in the Franklin Park Action Plan.
We can do it and do it together.
Karen Mauney-Brodek
Lower Roxbury
The writer is the president of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy.
Cost, equity, and transparency at White Stadium
Mayor Wu’s recent White Stadium press conference was framed as a celebration of “community benefits.” Many of us left feeling something else: that neighbors and children were being used as stage props while serious questions about cost, school equity, and transparency were dismissed.
In two years, the taxpayer share has nearly tripled from $50 million to $135 million, with total project costs now projected at $325 million. The mayor cited inflation and tariffs but also suggested the increase was because her team “heard from community members” and is making the project “better.”
Residents did not ask for basic public stewardship to be treated as a luxury add-on. Nor did we ask to be pitted against Boston Public Schools families. We would rather see a fully public, BPS-focused stadium at far lower cost and sustained investment in school buildings that are in desperate need.
The administration also touts $43 million in minority and women-run business commitments, or 44 percent of contracts awarded. If so, release a disaggregated contract list with firm names, ownership, dollar amounts, and locations. Transparency should be routine, not optional.
We support student athletics. We also support equity, fiscal responsibility, strong public schools, and a truly public White Stadium.
We are asking for accountability, disclosure, and direct engagement with impacted residents.
Pamela Jones
Mattapan
Kate Phelps
Roxbury
Reggie Stewart
Dorchester
The writers are all affiliated with the Franklin Park Defenders.
Fractures seen in mayor's relationship with Black community
While the White Stadium deal signaled a departure from best practices, in the case of Parcel P3, the city’s violation was against an actual written and signed agreement between city and state officials and representatives of the Black community.
James Hills appeared to struggle to formulate a question for Mayor Michelle Wu, who appeared on his Feb. 6 “Java with Jimmy” segment streamed on social media platforms — a forum where she has in the past faced a reliably convivial atmosphere.
Hills wanted to know how the mayor would respond to the anger in the Black community from the preceding two weeks — the de-designation of a team of developers chosen by community members to redevelop Parcel P3, the last-minute maneuvering that unraveled Brian Worrell’s bid for the City Council presidency that was widely seen as engineered by the mayor, the abrupt resignation of Segun Idowu, the city’s chief of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion.
Wu’s response to Hill’s barrage of questions speaks to the fractures now showing in her relationship with Boston’s Black community.
“So, what I’m saying is that there is a larger context that puts Boston in a place where we always have to be the example,” she said. “And that can feel, like, sometimes there’s a tension between wanting to actually just move forward and do things that have been needed for a very long time and making sure that every single community and every single person who has the stake in it, and also the historic connection to it, is part of the process.”
The tension Wu alludes to between process — the inclusion of community members in decision-making over major questions of land use — and “wanting to actually just move forward” has come to the fore as her administration has announced with no warning major decisions affecting the city’s Black community.
Her sudden announcement that the O’Bryant School would move to the West Roxbury High School drew immediate blowback that forced her administration to withdraw the proposal, albeit with Wu’s assurance that there would be no other path forward for the O’Bryant — the most heavily Black and Latino of the city’s three exam schools — to secure needed renovations to its current building.
Then in 2024 Wu’s selection of the Boston Unity Soccer Partners (BUSP) to lease and renovate White Stadium in a $325 million deal telegraphed to the city’s Black community a break in the city’s standard operating procedure for major development projects. Rather than coming to the community to determine what should be developed on the land, her administration engaged in months of communications with the investors behind BUSP, crafted a request for proposals tailored to their needs, then held a series of community meetings after the team was the sole bidder in the deal.
Reclaim Roxbury Lead Organizer Armani White speaks during a Feb. 9 meeting at the 12th Baptist Church in Roxbury. (Yawu Miller photo)While the White Stadium deal signaled a departure from best practices, in the case of Parcel P3, the city’s violation was against an actual written and signed agreement between city and state officials and representatives of the Black community that mandated community control over the land disposition process from start to finish (The agreement is on p. 101 of the master plan document. Governor and mayor’s signatures are on p. 117).
The land was designated for housing and economic development. The Roxbury Strategic Master Plan Oversight Committee picked a development team in which Black people had a 50% equity stake in the project.
Public affairs specialist Reggie Stewart says Wu’s decision fits into a longstanding pattern of “racist governance,” citing the land clearance that happened in the Lower Roxbury Neighborhood where Parcel P3 now sits.
“I can’t say what’s in the mayor’s heart, but this is the impact,” he said. “It’s a continuation of that same dispossession of Black people, and that’s why everybody’s so upset.”
Pockets of the city’s Black community chafed at Wu’s earlier one-sided decisions. But the P3 announcement signaled what could be a wider schism with members of the community and Black elected officials.
At a Feb. 6 announcement during which Wu outlined progress on the White Stadium rebuild — and revealed that the city is now on the hook for $135 million for the construction project — the number of Black elected officials missing from the announcement was telling. State Sen. Liz Miranda, Rep. Chris Worrell, and councilors Brian Worrell and Miniard Culpepper, all of whom represent the predominantly Black neighborhoods surrounding Franklin Park, declined to attend.
The following Monday, at a community meeting on Parcel P3 held at the 12th Baptist Church, many of those same elected officials were present. The anger in sanctuary was palpable.
MIT professor Karilyn Crockett and former state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson recounted the history of community struggle against the Boston Redevelopment Authority and state officials that led to the city’s agreement that the community would have decision-making authority over what’s developed on the parcel.
Former District 7 City Councilor Tito Jackson urged the community to push back on what many characterized as a land grab by the Wu administration.
“If we give ground here, we lose power of all of the parcels and all of the give-back that is actually supposed to happen in our communities,” he said.
Veteran community activist Sadiki Kambon, who has never been known as an exemplar of self-restraint, was more pointed in his criticism of Wu.
“There’s too much civility in this room,” Kambon said. “She’s anti-Black. Mayor Wu is an angry Menino with a smile.”
The comparison with the late Mayor Thomas Menino, whose 20 years in the mayor’s office was at times marked by pointed clashes with Black elected officials, is not happenstance. Wu has cited him as an influence. But while Menino’s ham-fisted moves to dispose of public land without community process sparked angry and vociferous reactions from Black elected officials, under the Wu administration, Black electeds have remained mostly silent.
Wu’s relationship with elected officials of color has never been particularly close. During her first campaign for an at-large seat on the Council, she endorsed incumbent South Boston City Councilor Bill Linehan over longtime Chinese community activist Suzanne Lee, then once elected backed Linehan’s bid for the Council presidency over that of then at-large Councilor Ayanna Pressley.
But until this year, Wu’s relationship with most elected officials of color has been cordial. Nearly all of them backed Wu’s bid for reelection in which she ran against philanthropist Josh Kraft. The absence of so many Black officials during the mayors Feb. 6 White Stadium announcement underscored the growing fissure.
Hills, on whose internet-based talk show Wu appeared on Feb. 6, said the mayor’s relationship with the Black community is strained, but not irreparably harmed.
“We’re at a yellow light, looking both ways and recalibrating our GPS,” he said in an interview with The Flipside.