Given some of the anonymous grumbling about Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s supposedly sluggish start overseeing new development in Boston, the number of projects approved during his first five months in office is rather eye-opening.

The Boston Redevelopment Authority gave a green light to more than $2 billion in new development since January, almost double the $1.15 billion approved under former Mayor Tom Menino during the same period last year, says the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

Hardly sounds like a portrait of a newbie mayor sitting on his hands, letting Boston’s development boom stall as he finds his way around City Hall; not that Walsh, a former state rep and top local trade union official, needed a guided tour.

And it certainly makes one wonder whether the grumbling isn’t so much about what Walsh is doing, but the change he represents from the Menino years, when Boston’s longest-serving mayor effectively crowned himself the Hub’s builder-in-chief as well, fiddling with tower designs and deciding which projects made it and which didn’t.

By contrast, Walsh is determined to take a somewhat more hands-off approach, relying on his two big development guys: Brian Golden, the BRA’s acting director, and former rival mayor candidate John Barros, now the city’s economic development chief.

“I don’t have my hands in every single project and I don’t want to,” Walsh said. “I don’t need to know what types of windows are in there or the color of the awnings, as long it works.”

All told, the city’s development agency has given approval to projects totaling more than 5.5 million square feet of space, including 2,785 new residential units. That’s compared to just under 3 million square feet – and 2,136 units – during the first five months of 2013.

“We are running double in the value of permitted projects this year compared to last year,” Golden said. “At the end of the day, the numbers tell a big part of the story.”

Taking Advantage Of The Market

The $650 million expansion of the office and retail-packed Landmark Center in the Fenway and hundreds of new apartments planned for the gritty industrial borderland where the South End meets Chinatown – and where the Boston Herald once stood – are among the projects approved in recent months by Walsh’s City Hall. The new mayor is also now supporting efforts by developer John Rosenthal to obtain a $4.6 million tax break needed to get his $550 million, Turnpike-spanning Fenway Center complex next to Fenway Park off the ground as well. That’s notable given Rosenthal got a cold shoulder from City Hall under Menino when he earlier sought a tax deal.

“There is a good market out there right now,” Walsh said. “[Projects] are not just getting approved, they are getting funding as well, and I think that is the key here … I want to take advantage of the market while we have it.”

Not quite a slacker, it would seem. Of course, if the numbers sound jarring based on what you’ve been reading some of the local business pages, you are not to blame.

During his final months in office last year, Menino grabbed headlines turning the BRA into the Indy 500 of development permitting, waving through billions in new projects in one last attempt to solidify his legacy.

It certainly forced Walsh into having to play from behind right from the start, with no way to match the massive volume of development Menino pushed through the BRA on its way out during the waning days of 2013.

Then, of course, comparing Walsh’s first five months in office with Menino’s final five months would not exactly be a fair, apple-to-apples comparison. Which of course why it makes much more sense to compare what Walsh has done in his first five months to the same period last year, before Menino surprised everyone and announced his fifth term would be his final one.

Short Memories

The fact is, memories are short, sometimes intentionally so, when it comes to coverage of development in Boston. Menino’s frenzy of development decisions in his final months in office were an aberration, not the norm, during his many years in office. For much of his time in office, Menino did more than his share of sitting on big projects and endlessly mulling the myriad ins and outs.

Fan Pier, the centerpiece of development on South Boston’s waterfront, took a quarter century to get off the ground, much of that inaction taking place on Menino’s watch. And some well-known developers found themselves stuck in regulatory limbo at City Hall, sometimes for years, after angering the notoriously thin-skinned Menino with an errant comment or some other perceived slight.

Rosenthal was one, but so was International Place developer Don Chiofaro and downtown tower builder John Hynes, grandson of one of Boston’s better mayors and son of newscaster Jack Hynes.

Still, to be fair, some of the criticism of Walsh’s approach to development has been related to builders with new projects, apparently lambs in the wood unsure of how to go about making their case at City Hall these days. But Walsh, in an interview last week, was having none of it, noting that he has been fielding calls and meeting with developers practically on a daily basis.

“Every single day someone calls my office looking for a meeting to talk about a potential development,” he said. “I have met a lot of people in the early stages.”

And that doesn’t mean an endless series of meetings with big players. The BRA’s Golden said he is making time to sit down with builders with more modest plans as well. “We are meeting with everybody, big and small,” Golden said, noting he recently met with the would-be builder of a two-family home.

Well, some developers had it pretty good under the Menino regime and definitely better than the run-of-the-mill builder. These were the guys who spent years cultivating relationships with Boston’s development czar, robotically chanting the mayor’s praises and above all, never, ever attracting media attention to themselves.

Now that personal concierge service at City Hall is over for that small group of politically-connected developers, and, predictably, they don’t like it.

You have to really work at it to twist this around as some sort of big negative. That is unless you think cronyism is the way to go in determining the fate of billions of dollars in new development in one of the world’s greatest cities. 

Email: sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com