Scott Van Voorhis
Boston’s disjointed approach to vetting new towers and other major projects, the bane of generations of developers, is finally poised for a long-needed reboot.
Brian Golden, director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, will unveil in the next few weeks the results of a long-awaited audit of the authority’s planning department, which oversees the permitting of new projects.
The report comes as Golden begins to take some key steps that could significantly ease some long-standing bottlenecks in the city’s review process, while simultaneously wringing out some of more notorious inconsistencies.
The focus on how Boston goes about vetting new development project is decades overdue, with a long and often contentious permitting process blamed for killing or stalling more than a few ambitious proposals over the years.
(One needs to look no farther than the Seaport, which, while finally booming, could have been built out a decade or two ago if Boston’s development review process hadn’t been so politicized and mayor-centric.)
In my book, Golden’s effort to fix the city’s permitting problems is yet another encouraging sign that his boss, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, is determined to do things differently.
That’s a step forward in Boston after years of the city’s permitting process being hampered by various mayoral/Menino-driven political machinations, with some projects speeding through even as others ran a never-ending gauntlet of demands, objections and death by a thousand paper cuts.
“We are trying to set clear standards that the development community can look to,” Golden said.
Overseeing Design
As anyone who has dealt with the BRA over the years knows, the agency’s biggest problem isn’t generally its staff, and especially not its planners, who, like the recently squeezed out Kairos Shen, were a talented and well-meaning bunch.
Golden’s focus on fixing the system, rather than moving bodies around, makes sense given the nature of the challenges facing Boston’s powerful, but dysfunctional, development arm.
Along those lines, Golden recently took a promising first step to reign in the BRA’s free-ranging design and review process.
The BRA is often lambasted for being slow to approve new development projects. But some of the more serious delays happen long after the agency’s board has given a green light to a project.
That’s when the design review process kicks in, and developers and city planners get down to brass tacks over a range of issues, from what material the new tower or high-rise will be clad in to various design flourishes.
The problem is, design is somewhat subjective. And the review process, depending on a mix of factors, can range from several weeks to several years.
The agency’s planners are now required to go before the BRA board, with Golden in attendance, and give updates on the various projects in design review, including how long the process has gone on for.
Amazingly, the agency’s board, which theoretically has final say over what does and doesn’t get built in Boston, had previously exercised no oversight of the design process. Once a project was “approved,” that was it – even though the amount of time agency planners spent after the fact hammering out design issues might have been equal to the amount of time the development was officially being reviewed by the board.
Cleaning Up The PDAs
Golden has also moved to lay out a clear set of rules for when a planned design area (PDA), can be used. City zoning rules are antiquated, with ridiculous height requirements – 150 feet or so – in stretches of the downtown where various towers now stand.
City planners during the Menino years were often criticized – and more often than not quite fairly – for using the PDA designation to give a favored developer permission to build big and tall depending on whatever backroom deal was cooked up in the mayor’s office.
That’s great if you managed to worm your way into the mayor’s good graces, but not so great, if, for example, you carelessly told an unflattering joke that got back to one of the mayor’s henchmen or had the gall to promote your project in the press. Imagine the nerve!
And in third significant move, Golden has tightened up the rules related to requirements that apartment and condo developers include up to 20 percent subsidized units in their projects.
Again, during the Menino years, developers often tried to buy their way out of this requirement by pledging money towards building those affordable units somewhere else – a commitment that more than once failed to materialize.
The new rules puts the onus on the developer to make the case that including 10 or 20 condos at say, $200,000 each, will somehow make the project unfinanceable, with the clear preference towards having those units built on-site.
The upcoming audit of the BRA’s planning department by McKinsey should further fuel debate over what needs to be done to fix the long-standing problems with the city’s review process. Golden wasn’t saying anything when I spoke to him about what the audit would find, but clearly common sense dictates the permitting process will be one of the issues examined.
But let’s get real – it’s not likely that Golden will be giving away the candy shop anytime soon.
For every developer fed up with the Boston permitting process, there are several dozen neighborhood activists and groups pressing for more intense vetting of major projects.
And Golden notes that the BRA under the Walsh Administration has put the brakes on some big but controversial developments to allow for more review.
But both builders and community activists have shared a common complaint over the years, and that’s been the lack of transparency and clear rules coming from City Hall over new development and what’s acceptable and what’s not.
Too often, crony capitalism, and the degree to which one was favored or not by the mayor, seemed to be the only determinant over what got built and what didn’t in one of the world’s most beautiful cities.
The new BRA chief and Boston’s new mayor are off to a good start.
Here’s hoping we are truly turning a new page in the sometimes tortured history of how big projects get built – or don’t – in Boston.
