Efforts to streamline development reviews in Boston go back at least to the tenure of former Mayor Ray Flynn, pictured here with Chief of Staff Robert Consalvo (left) and campaign supporters in 1987. Photo courtesy of the City of Boston Archives

After so many different “reforms” over so many years, you’d think Boston City Hall’s process for vetting new real estate projects would be as efficient as this year’s Celtics are at scoring. 

So it was with bemusement that I listened to Mayor Michelle Wu tick off plans during her grand State of the City address to streamline the way the Boston Planning & Development Agency approves new projects. 

“Bemusement,” because Wu’s pledge is a familiar one for anyone tracking Boston’s development scene, with mayoral pledges to “streamline” the approval process stretching back more than three decades. 

Back in the early 1990s, then-Mayor Ray Flynn apparently catching grief from developers and neighborhood residents about the inner workings of the then-Boston Redevelopment Authority. 

So, he appointed a panel in 1992 to study the issue before resigning the next year to become ambassador to the Vatican. 

The whole point of the exercise was to make the review process more efficient, if not speedier. 

But no matter. It then took another four years before Flynn’s successor, the late, great Thomas M. Menino, signed the panel’s recommendations into law. 

The aim of the new regulations was to “to provide clear, predictable, and unified requirements” for reviewing development projects, according to a writeup by city officials. 

Yet the project approval process remained byzantine, with the agency’s communications staff stumped as to how to explain the process in clear English, let alone what had changed. 

The years rolled on and as the city began to undergo a building boom in the first decade and a half of the new millennium, the same complaints about a cumbersome, unpredictable process began cropping up again, if they had never really gone away in the first place. 

Mayor Marty Walsh, a former to building trades union official, took up the mantle of permitting reform anew. 

Taking office in 2014, Walsh ordered an overhaul of the BRA, one that included a top-to-bottom study of its operations and a name change to the BPDA. 

Walsh also created a new position – senior advisor for regulatory reform – that he pledged would “streamline” the zoning and permitting process. 

Whatever magic Walsh’s reforms worked, the agency remained unable show or explain how all this supposed cutting of red tape was actually getting development projects through the approval process faster. 

 Will Anything Change? 

Fast forward to 2023. Nearly a decade after Walsh’s apparent streamlining of the BPDA and how it reviews projects, the same complaints about an unpredictable, slow moving review process are back – that is if they ever went away in the process. 

And a new mayor is making a familiar pledge. 

“I’ve also charged our team with improving the uneven and unpredictable approval process … so that good projects get shovels in the ground faster,” Wu the crowd at The MGM Music Hall during her big speech on Wednesday. 

Wu’s press staff followed that up the next day with a press release that dribbled out a few more details. 

Scott Van Voorhis

A “stakeholder advisory group” – presumably including a few developers – is planned, with the mayor slated to announce her picks for the new panel in the coming weeks. 

This hopefully-select group will be in charge of creating a “scorecard” to ensure projects measure up to the latest buzzwords of “resilience, affordability and equity.” 

City Hall will then try and speed the high-scoring projects through the review process with “tools and assistance to help them begin construction more quickly.” 

OK, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. That said, I am not sure that the way to unclog a backed-up bureaucracy is to get rid of red tape in one area and replace it with more in another. 

We’ll just have to wait and see. But I’m not holding my breath on this one. 

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist and the author of the Contrarian Boston newsletter; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.