Scott Van Voorhis

The mayor’s job in Boston is up for grabs this fall and once again the politics of development will take center stage.

And once again opponents of a popular mayor determined to squeeze as much housing out of the real estate boom while it lasts are barking up the wrong tree, pushing proposals that would make Boston’s already crazed prices even more insane.

Erstwhile candidate and former Boston police officer Robert Cappucci spent his short time on the campaign trail calling for a moratorium on all new development before he was knocked out in last week’s preliminary round, leaving City Councilor Tito Jackson to face off against Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.

As he pushes ahead with his underdog bid for mayor, Jackson is blasting the mayor and former construction union chief for supposedly caring more about all the new towers going up across the city than the people who elected him.

Jackson is certainly on point when he describes the increasing desperation many feel in a Boston housing market that doesn’t work for far too many in a city where half of the population earns $35,000 or less annually.

But Jackson’s solution is no solution at all, but rather a rehash of what failed mayoral candidates and neighborhood activists, too often with NIMBY agendas, have pushed for decades .

Jackson wants to scuttle the city’s revamped development authority, now called the Boston Planning and Development Agency, and give more power to neighborhood residents as to what gets built and what doesn’t.

That all sounds wonderfully democratic – who can be against letting the people decide, after all?

In the rough and tumble world of Boston development, though, power to the people too often means the opposite of reasoned, democratic debate and deliberation, but rather power to the loudest NIMBY group on the block.

And any honest appraisal of the idea of giving already empowered neighborhoods even more sway would come to the conclusion that it would make an already challenging development vetting process even longer and more uncertain.

Clearly new luxury housing would be in the crosshairs – Jackson and other critics of the mayor’s development policies have made clear there is much too much of it already.

Solving Housing Woes

How do fewer apartments and condos, even if many of them are targeted at the wealthy, solve Boston’s housing woes?

And the answer is that it far from solving the city’s housing crisis, cracking down on luxury housing and development in general would make things even worse.

Yes, it would be great if developers would build more housing targeted at middle- and working-class families.

But in Boston, where land costs are sky high and developers of major projects can expect to spend millions maneuvering through the city’s thorough review process, only very high-end apartment and condo projects make sense.

The strategy of Walsh, and the late, great Thomas Menino before him, is one of build, build, build in the belief that more supply, even if it is heavily skewed towards the high end, will start to bring down prices across the whole market.

There’s evidence this is already happening, with a recent city survey showing rents in older units falling or stabilizing in neighborhoods that have seen lots of new development.

And it would be grossly unfair to suggest that Walsh has become some fat-cat luxury tower cheerleader. Developers in Boston are already required to set subsidize a certain percentage of affordable condos and apartments in the towers they build, or, failing that, pay into a city fund.

There’s no evidence that Walsh has been anything but aggressive in enforcing the city’s affordable housing requirements and pushing for as many reasonably priced apartments and condos as he can get.

But it’s not enough for Jackson.

Even as he wants to give neighborhood activists more power in shooting down projects, at the same time he wants to force developers to increase to 20 percent the number of affordable units in each new tower they build.

He is also talking about raiding a city funding for affordable housing to build a thousand units of low-cost housing.

It’s not clear how all those pieces fit together into a coherent whole, but to be fair to Jackson, it’s the same theme critics of City Hall’s development policies have been banging away at for years, whether it was Menino in charge, or, as is now the case, Walsh.

Basically, it’s the idea that the way to solve Boston housing problems is for the city to beat up on developers. The neighborhoods will decide what gets built, if anything, as well as exactly how many stories, square feet and what it will look like. Then City Hall will step in to require large amounts of subsidized units, profits and investors be damned.

Of course, this fantasy of development critics past and present skips over a crucial element – the fact that we live in a market economy. If investors and developers don’t like a deal, they’ll walk.

But at least gentrification would no longer be a problem. After all, no one in their right mind would take the chance of building in Boston under such conditions.