Scott Van Voorhis
I’m not sure what they’re smoking over there at the Boston 2024 headquarters, but it must be some really good stuff.
The supposedly new and improved proposal unveiled this week by Olympic boosters calls for the construction of not just one new Hub neighborhood, but two – yes, that’s right, two new neighborhoods, in less than a decade – to accommodate a week-long media and sports spectacle.
Forget about common sense, and forget about the painful decades it has taken to get the Seaport District/Innovation District to finally shift into takeoff mode. Let’s be real; none of that seems to matter to Boston’s Olympic cheerleading team, which has officially entered lala land, with big-time venture capitalist and Celtics owner Steve Pagliuca leading this fools’ escapade.
But wait, that’s not all! While insisting it is sticking to its pledge, Boston 2024 and its wealthy business backers have laid out plans for spending hundreds of millions in scarce state transportation funds, as well as hundreds of millions more in city and likely state tax breaks as well.
You don’t have to be an Einstein to figure out that things aren’t adding up here.
Still, if there is any method to the madness being displayed Pagliuca and our other multimillionaire Olympic cheerleaders, it’s to hook city and state leaders with a glitzy proposal and get their buy-in now, hoping that by the time the smoke clears, it will be too late to pull out.
While that may be cynical, frankly it is a page out of how the Big Dig, and for that matter many other big projects with potentially unpopular price tags, have been sold to the public over the years.
Half-Baked Development Schemes
Boston’s would-be Olympic hosts peg Widett Circle and Columbia Point, home to UMass Boston, as ripe for new development. But that’s about the only thing they got right in their new 2.0 plan, which is a misnomer anyway since it suggests this version is an improvement.
Yes, Widett Circle is near downtown, which in theory makes it valuable, though to get at the land Olympic boosters will have to relocate a host of small businesses, a big detail in and of itself.
Columbia Point and the sprawling former Bayside Exposition Center along the harbor also have tremendous long-term potential. But in order to get the stadium land and thousands of Olympic Village housing units it needs, Boston 2024 proposes a massive acceleration of the natural development process in both neighborhoods.
Simply put, Boston’s starry-eyed Olympic boosters want to jam decades of development into a few short years, turning Widett Circle a giant stadium and commercial and retail district while spurring the construction of 8,000 new apartments and condos in and around Columbia Point.
(The glossy renderings Olympic boosters are handing out show a constellation of new high-rises that would dwarf the billions of dollars of new towers and hotels currently taking shape in the Seaport.)
Maybe this kind of accelerated development would work in mega cities like Beijing, London and New York, but the pace of development in Boston is far slower and far more contentious. We are a much smaller city, packed with history and tradition, with a lot to lose or gain with every major development proposal and much to consider.
It took a quarter of a century and the work of two Boston mayors to finally push the Seaport District into a self-sustaining development boom. Along the way, Boston city planners threw every tax break available into the pot and devised a couple of new ones as well, while also spurring the construction of the aircraft carrier-sized Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
Development plans for the East Boston waterfront have taken almost as long to come to fruition, while developers have spent years, to no avail, trying to bridge over the Turnpike with a series of grand air-rights proposals. Recall, if you will, the years-long debate over the ultimately unsuccessful Columbus Center.
But no worries, for Olympic boosters have apparently discovered the secret sauce for building successful air-rights projects, with their 2.0 proposal calling for a massive deck over railway tracks at Widett Circle where the new stadium is planned.
Massive Opportunity Costs
It’s not just the utter unreality of the pie-in-the-sky development plans Olympic hucksters are trying to sell to reluctant and wary Massachusetts taxpayers. If Boston 2024 managers to get state and city leaders to buy into their fanciful plans, there will be a huge opportunity cost that will drain needed tax incentives and transportation money from deserving projects across the state.
To get its Widett Circle stadium and neighborhood plans off the ground, Olympic boosters want to dole out hundreds of millions in tax breaks at unprecedentedly generous terms to developers who answer the call. To put that in perspective, it’s equivalent to all the money state and city officials have spent over the last several years to promote job creation and new development projects involving more than 1,300 different companies.
Developers with plans for projects in a myriad of other sites across Boston can all but forget about getting any tax deals from the city amid this massive transfer of public resources and incentives to a single project.
Boston 2024 is also hoping to force a similar massive misdirection of state transportation money in order to satisfy the needs of its extravagant international pageant.
Olympic boosters are relying on $775 million in future subway and highway upgrades, most in the areas being targeted for construction of Olympic venues. The argument is the money is already dedicated at some point for these projects, so it really no sweat off the backs of taxpayers.
Yet this is misleadingly simplistic view of state funding, for as anyone with half a brain knows, just having a project on a budget or timetable somewhere in the Massachusetts transportation bureaucracy doesn’t guarantee it is going to be built on time – or at all. There are continual fights over which projects get priority, and all Boston 2024 would accomplish is forcing through improvements needed for the games at the expense of other needs, such as fixing our laughingstock of a commuter rail system or traffic clogged 128.
Frankly, either the powers that be at Boston 2024 are out of their minds, or this is the most ambitious bait-and-switch play in Hub history, and that’s saying something. Either way, it’s not good.
