The pace of development in Boston is often laughably slow, but to blame it all on a “few lonely cranks” is just plain wrong.

George Thrush, director of the School of Architecture at Northeastern University in Boston, certainly stirred the pot with his recent Boston Magazine piece suggesting the likes of Back Bay development gadfly Shirley Kressel have all but stopped new development in its tracks.

Certainly rabble rousers like Kressel make easy targets, but it’s a real leap to suggest that neighborhood opposition to ill-conceived mega projects like Columbus Center was just the work of a few trouble makers.

Moreover, this ignores the real source of Boston’s development woes. If you want to know why it’s so hard to get things built in the Hub, look no farther than a slow-moving and politically fickle city and state bureaucracy.

Flawed Examples

Thrush points to the Columbus Center project and the ill-fated, 59-story Millennium tower as examples of good projects allegedly killed by a few loudmouths. But both projects stirred intense neighborhood opposition that went far beyond a few colorful activists.

Concerned about the scale of the $800 million Columbus Center project, neighborhood residents turned out for dozens of meetings over the years with the developers, with halls packed with hundreds in attendance far from an unusual sight.

Their wariness proved well-founded, with developer Arthur Winn eventually winning approval and starting construction only to stop mid-stream, leaving a complete mess. To top things off, he was recently fined $100,000 for making tens of thousands of dollars in improper campaign contributions in a bid to build political support for Columbus Center.

The Millennium tower, for its part, sparked a firestorm of opposition in the Fenway and the Back Bay as well. Here again, there were real concerns that brought out both residents and legitimate neighborhood organizations. And if they were just out to cause trouble, then surely these folks had better things to do than attend endless hearings on development plans that at the time appeared to be destined for city approval.

Both projects were simply out of scale for the neighborhoods their developers wanted to shoehorn them into, in both cases by building over the Massachusetts Turnpike. So the reaction was not surprising – and shame on any city or state planner who did not see it coming.

But the cumbersome review process in the end contributed as much, if not more, to the demise of both projects than irate neighbors.

Both Columbus Center and Millennium’s 59-story Mass Ave. tower had to pass muster not just with Boston officials, but also with the old, bloated and now defunct Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.

That meant literally hundreds of meetings over a period of years.

Red Tape, Backdoor Deals

See, the real problem is not a few outspoken activists, but rather the reams of red tape faced by developers who want to build in Boston.

Nothing gets built in Boston without the blessing of Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who exerts power through the often byzantine Boston Redevelopment Authority. Things move at the speed the mayor wants them to move, and that can depend on any range of factors known only to the mayor and his top advisors, from the depth of neighborhood opposition to whether the developer is on good terms with Menino.

Citizens’ advisory panels, which Thrush singles out as some sort of daunting obstacle, are appointed by the mayor and are often just window dressing for the real decisions, made behind closed doors.

Take Liberty Mutual’s big announcement that it would be building a new headquarters in Boston, which completely surprised the Back Bay residents serving on one of the citizens’ panels ostensibly planning recommendations for the area.

Even as it was coaching the panel, City Hall’s development arm had spent months talking in secret with Liberty, hammering out a deal.

So say what you want about Kressel, founder of the Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods and owner of a take-no-prisoners style that has not exactly endeared her to city and state officials over the years. But Kressel is willing to say what she thinks in public, sometimes voicing concerns others are too timid to discuss out of fear of angering the mayor or some other city or state bigwig.

If nothing else, that’s a valuable contribution in a city where development is tightly controlled by a mayor who tolerates no public criticism from either builders or activists. And occasionally, along with livening an otherwise stilted public debate, the loudmouths even perform a public service.

Peter Catalano of the long-since defunct Fenway Action Committee was practically a caricature of the over-the-top, say anything for effect, neighborhood activist. But a decade ago, Catalano also helped kill the absurd plan by the old Red Sox ownership team to tear down beloved Fenway Park.

And in my book, one Fenway Park is worth a dozen Columbus Centers.