Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is trying to wean the city off of a neighborhood-centric planning system to rapidly rezone transit nodes and community hubs for more growth. iStock photo

Come March, Tom Brady will have come out of retirement and led the Patriots to their seventh Super Bowl victory. 

Two new Cape bridges will be open for traffic, having been approved, paid for and built in record time. 

And, oh yeah – if we are to believe Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, the city be on its way towards an entirely new zoning code, with city officials trying to whittle down the current 4,000-page tome to a nifty, albeit still-500-page handbook that will usher in a progressive golden age, where all development spontaneously emerges from Boston’s collective imagination. 

Ok, overhauling city’s entire zoning code may not be as insanely ambitious as building a pair of multibillion-dollar and yet to be financed bridges in six months, but it is up there. (And yes, I am being facetious here – Brady is not coming back and we will be waiting for years before we see any work on those new Cape bridges.) 

Wu, who has been talking about a zoning overhaul for at least a couple years now, last week formally rolled out her plans to remake the rules that guide what can and what can’t built in nook, cranny and lot in Boston, from new towers to building a two or three family where a single-family once stood. 

And in her speech to city business leaders, Wu made some claims that don’t really stand up all that well when examined closely.  

It’s Been Tried Before 

First off, in her big speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Wu touted her rewrite of the city’s development playbook as the first comprehensive city-wide rezoning in 60 years, which is true, but also misleading at the same time. 

Each of the city’s last three mayors – Ray Flynn, the late, great Thomas M. Menino and Marty Walsh – also rolled out their own rezoning initiatives that, even if they were not city-wide, were both extensive and ambitious. 

In fact, past efforts to rezone parts or large tracts of Boston have often dragged on for years before wrapping up or simply petering out.  

That, in turn, leads to the second major claim by Wu, that by focusing on development hot spots her administration can eat this elephant in chunks as small as six months. 

The “Squares and Streets” initiative, she said, will focus on transit hubs and other areas with potential for denser, mixed-use development. 

On the side of speed, one advantage would appear to be the approval process, with the Wu administration only having to get the approval of the Boston Planning & Development Agency, which she controls, and the city’s Zoning Board. 

Yet that does not account for the City Council, a major potential barrier. 

Beware Fifth-Floor Spoilers 

Sure, the council may not have a formal role in rezoning. But that doesn’t mean council members will simply sit on the sidelines and do nothing, especially if their constituents start complaining about changes that will potentially bring more development to the neighborhoods they live in. 

After all, these squares and these streets will still be in one neighborhood or another, and the local community groups and boards that currently have such sway over what gets built Boston – and more often what does not – are surely not going down without a fight. 

In fact, it’s a neighborhood-centric system that has been in place since Flynn was mayor back in the 1980s and various neighborhoods were effectively downzoned – as in rezoned, but with an eye towards limiting the size of projects keeping out larger-scale development, said Larry DiCara, one of the city’s top real estate lawyers, a former president of the Boston City Council and a walking fount of knowledge about city politics. 

“The bottom line is there are a whole bunch of people who don’t want to go back to where we were 40 years ago” before Flynn, DiCara noted. 

Is There Enough Local Knowledge? 

Second, Aimee Chambers, the Boston Planning & Development Agency’s director of planning, told Banker & Tradesman that the short timelines Wu promised are being enabled in part by extra staff the agency has hired in recent months as well as the much narrower geographic focus. 

Scott Van Voorhis

Yet many of the BPDA’s new planners are less experienced than the veterans they are replacing, with the agency having seen exodus of talent over the past couple of years as Wu has attempted to push ahead with another big piece of her agenda, demolishing the agency. 

A number of planners are also new to Boston, with Chambers herself the former director of planning in Hartford before she was hired to head the BPDA’s planning shop. Ditto for the author of the report on Boston’s voluminous zoning code, Sara Bronin, a Cornell University professor and former chair of the Hartford Planning and Zoning Commission. 

Let’s just say Hartford and Ithaca, where Cornell is located, are each, in their own, unique ways very different from bustling, dynamic and much bigger Boston. 

“I have been to Ithaca,” DiCara said, adding wryly that “there is not a lot going on there.” 

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.