When it comes to the future of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Director Mark Maloney has a plan: hire a planner.

In an appearance last week billed as his first public speech since assuming the reins of the BRA in January, Maloney said the agency is about to name a chief planner who will be responsible for coordinating and managing all elements of city planning. The effort follows longstanding criticism that the BRA and Mayor Thomas M. Menino suffer from a lack of vision that has made the administration ill-equipped to handle a surge of private development, estimated by Maloney at $1.43 billion during the past year alone.

“A major element of improving the Boston Redevelopment Authority is to enhance the planning capabilities,” acknowledged Maloney in last Wednesday’s speech to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, held at the Wyndham Garden Hotel. The appointment of a chief planner will be bolstered by increasing staff in the BRA’s zoning and planning department, Maloney added, stressing that “this is just the beginning.”

While declining to list any potential candidates for the job, Maloney said the chief planner will be responsible for a range of development oversight, including transportation and environmental issues, and said the person will also be able to tap into city services to accomplish the BRA’s objectives. Among other things, the planner will help guide the just-released East Boston Master Plan through the community review process and will promote similar initiatives in Roxbury and the Fenway.

Not surprisingly, Maloney said the new planner will also be asked to make the Hub’s Municipal Harbor Plan a reality. As accomplished in other Bay State communities, the Boston MHP would customize a state law governing waterfront development to reflect unique aspects of the local shoreline. After months of delays, it was set to be submitted last week for public review and state approval, but the timetable has once again been pushed back, reportedly to mid-June at the earliest. The lack of a Boston Harbor MHP has been seen as one reason that several proposed projects have recently found themselves on the back burner.

For his part, Maloney would only defend the city’s MHP as “a good plan” that he believes will gain backing from the state. He also sided with a controversial proposal by the Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain, to build a 3.1 million-square-foot mixed-use complex on Fan Pier in the city’s Seaport District. Although abutting landowner Frank McCourt and the Conservation Law Foundation have charged that the Fan Pier project is too dense and would wall the city off from the waterfront, Maloney insisted otherwise, telling the audience that “the Pritzker development looks like it should work.”

In a somewhat related matter, Maloney voiced support for a 1998 pact hammered out between Menino and South Boston leaders that could pump as much as $65 million into South Boston from pending commercial development in the Seaport District. Although the issue has drawn a sharp rebuke from other neighborhoods, Maloney pointed to an agreement for a planned office building near South Station to show that South Boston is not receiving preferential treatment. In that deal, the developers of Two Financial Center have agreed to improve transportation access and public infrastructure in the abutting Leather District.

“It’s not an unusual process,” Maloney said of such stipulations.

Leveraging Linkage
Maloney also told the audience that he backs the idea of increasing linkage payments from developers looking to build commercial space in the city. First mandated in the 1980s, linkage requires $5 for every square foot of commercial space above 100,000 square feet to pay for affordable housing, and a $1 per-square-foot charge to promote job training. Citing changes in property values and adjustments for inflation, linkage proponents last month asked the Boston City Council to increase the payments to $7.18.

While an unpopular notion among the development community, the levy is needed to strike a balance between economic prosperity and a diverse population, Maloney said. Since its inception in 1986, linkage has yielded $50 million in funding to generate 5,000 units of new or renovated housing, he said, but even that has not been enough to prevent “a dangerous shift” in the economic structure of the city’s neighborhoods.

“The city faces, as we know, a housing crisis,” Maloney said, citing figures that show double-digit increases in rental rates during the past several years. As a result, Maloney maintained that low- and moderate-income residents are being gentrified out of their neighborhoods at an alarming rate.

“We must act if we are going to avoid stifling our economy,” Maloney said. Given that, his agency has been working with other city departments to create additional affordable housing. The initiative includes upgrading abandoned lots, restoring unused apartments shuttered by the Boston Housing Authority, and requiring that any multifamily project over 10 units have a minimum of 10 percent affordable units. Maloney also said he wants to add a staffer to oversee the linkage program to ensure that worthy projects are funded and to monitor where money is being spent.

“Increasing the supply of housing is a top priority of Mayor Menino,” said Maloney, whose background is well-suited to that challenge. Until his appointment to the BRA, he had served since 1981 as president of Maloney Properties, a firm which managed approximately 5,000 housing units. He has also been active in trying to restore underutilized public housing and in promoting elderly housing.

Maloney is less well-known in the commercial real estate market, so much so that he joked last week that his appointment “met with a resounding ‘Who?'” among downtown developers. Despite that, and his views on linkage, Maloney told the audience last week that he is committed to adding office space in the Hub, which currently has some of the highest office rents in the country and a vacancy rate in the 3 percent range.

“The BRA is working with our city agencies to increase the supply while maintaining demand,” said Maloney. He noted, for example, the groundbreaking last week of 131 Dartmouth St. in the Back Bay as an example of the city’s commitment to new office construction.