Mayor for a New America (27 page)

One piece of advice the consultants give: Lose the heavy metal grates, especially the pull-down kind that seal off the shop from the sidewalk. According to police, thieves who know they can't be seen from the front break in through the roof or from the back.

Signage is also critical. It's what people judge you by. Doors matter too. And rooflines. And the sides of buildings. The Main Street do-over focuses on aesthetics.

Revival happens slowly, one sign, one door, one new shop at a time. “You have to be patient because it's not going to turn around in just a year or two,” said the president of the board of Roslindale Main Street. That piece of city wisdom echoes Tom Payzant on school reform: “It's painfully slow and very few urban school systems have been given the time.”

I've been labeled “an incrementalist.” A step-by-step mayor who resisted “bold dramatic change.” But I didn't resist it. The city did. Cities do. Cities are complex social systems. Whether in the schools, public safety, housing, or neighborhood renewal, change is possible but in small pieces and in slow time.

Working for my degree in community planning at UMass Boston, one of my class projects was to estimate the benefits of implementing Main Streets in all city neighborhoods. By 1995, when I was mayor, the Roslindale experiment was so encouraging that realizing that project seemed possible. Boston Main Streets extended the model citywide.

Helping Roslindale fulfill its promise was my first priority. Four million dollars and untold volunteer hours were put into the renamed “Roslindale Village.” By 2000, fifteen years after the first Main Street grant, these investments were paying off:

• The storefront vacancy rate had fallen from 20.7 percent to 3.5 percent.
  
• Forty-three commercial buildings were rehabbed, and the facades of seventy-three others renovated.
  
• Forty-four new businesses had opened, with two hundred employees.
  
• Sixty cents of every dollar spent in the village had stayed in the neighborhood.
  

In 2008, Roslindale Village became Boston's first commercial center to be rezoned as a twenty-first-century walkable business district. The new zoning discourages suburban big boxes separated from the street by parking lots. It bans drive-in businesses and stand-alone neon signs and, because they are unfriendly to pedestrians, limits curb cuts in the sidewalks for cars. Not zoning but self-interest has effectively banned “the ugly metal grates that made [the shops] look like five-and-dime fortresses.” Merchants who refused to remove their grates forfeited Main Street grants.

If your taste runs that way, truffle cheese at $29 a pound can be had at one of the village's one-hundred-plus businesses. Or with three thousand other shoppers you can buy produce at the Saturday farmers' market held on the green. As a commercial hub, Roslindale Square was hollowed out in the 60s when local shoppers began driving to suburban malls. Today, suburbanites drive into Roslindale Village to dine at one of its trendy restaurants. The commuter rail “T” station, twelve minutes from downtown, is behind the village, steps from the stores. The Japanese man getting off the train may be a visiting mayor, scouting the future.

A journalist once marveled that I get excited about supermarkets. You bet your life I do! Like no other businesses, supermarkets tap local spending power. The eighteen-thousand-square-foot Village Market pulls customers into Roslindale Village. Landing it took years of work by the Main Street volunteers. Yours truly did his part, too, shooing away a national chain that wanted to fill the space it occupies. Years passed, and the gap on Corinth Street remained. It closed when the Village Market opened in 1998, starting a new chapter in the Roslindale story.

One of my tenets is that revival has to include not just the worst neighborhoods or the high-voting neighborhoods. That doesn't work: It doesn't make the city complete. So the Roslindale story is now playing out in eighteen other Main Street districts from Dorchester to East Boston. A city investment of $5.7 million in these commercial centers stimulated more than $40 million in private investment. The districts added 300 new businesses and 2,300 new jobs by 2000. Twelve years later, almost 1,000 businesses had been started up or expanded, 800 storefronts improved, and 6,000 jobs created.

Two quick examples:

• In the South End, the Washington Gateway Main Street organization received the Great American Main Street award in 2005 and the American Planning Association's Great Places in America award in 2008 for revitalizing urban blocks pocked for decades by unoccupied storefronts.
  
• Allston Village Main Streets is organized around an international theme, with sixty restaurants and markets featuring Greek, Brazilian, Russian, Korean, and Vietnamese food. On weekends new Americans share the crowded sidewalks with students from Boston University and Boston College. The district's website boasts: “Whether you're looking for pho or faux, suds or spuds, fish or Phish, carpets or car parts, you'll find it all in Allston Village.” I can't get over the fact that this cool multicultural neighborhood emerged while a guy from Hyde Park was mayor.
  

At a 2000 conference sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Boston's Main Streets program was singled out as a beacon of social innovation. “Boston is at the top,” said Kennedy Smith, director of the Trust's Main Street Center. “It was the first city in the country to create a citywide, multidistrict approach, and now it's a model for other cities looking for solutions. We feel that it's one of the most dynamic and innovative new solutions for urban development to come along for several decades.”

Commerce-led neighborhood revival breaks from the formula followed by community development corporations (CDCs) since the 60s—build subsidized housing first and retail will follow. It rarely did. I maintained that if small business districts didn't do well, neighborhoods wouldn't thrive. I was vice president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which ensured that Boston's record with retail first got the attention of my colleagues. “Neighborhoods are hot right now, both in urban government and in politics,” the editor of
Governing
, Alan Ehrenhalt, wrote in 2001. “Although not everyone realizes it, the phenomenon can be traced straight back to Boston.”

Governing
named me a Public Official of the Year, writing, “Menino is emerging as one of Boston's most influential chief executives, as his ideas begin to transform policy in cities far way.” I was afraid it might be hard living up to the title the magazine gave me, “Main Street Maestro.”

In the 60s cities turned to Washington to fund “urban renewal.” Now Washington is broken. Given the destruction left behind by the federal bulldozer, perhaps it's just as well that the cavalry isn't coming and cities have to renew themselves. Boston Main Streets shows how.

 

It was really almost a wasteland. What Menino accomplished there is not only a rebirth, but the complete refashioning of the entire area into what amounts to a new city.

 

—Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute, describing Boston's new Innovation District

 

Still, the question remained: Why build in Boston? Why build where building was so difficult? Where new projects had to submit cultural impact studies and run a gauntlet of fourteen review boards? Where, once they cleared the regulatory hurdles, developers were shaken down for multimillion-dollar “impact” and “linkage” fees to fund low-cost housing or job training?

In the booming 1980s Boston's reputation as a “place hostile to development” did not matter. “There was plenty of money on the table for all the deals,” said Paul Barrett, a BRA director under Ray Flynn. For example, in the mid-80s the developer of an office tower on State Street paid for brick sidewalks around Faneuil Hall. But in the down economy of the early 90s, a $10 million renovation of a Downtown Crossing hotel was nixed because the “giveback” sought by the BRA was too steep.

A 1993 report prepared by Robert Walsh, BRA director in the late 70s, said Boston needed a developer-friendly approach to development. I endorsed the report as a candidate and implemented it as mayor.

Boston was “open for business,” I declared in my first inaugural. “City government has acted as a gatekeeper to slow business down. . . . That will exist no more.” The BRA taking four years to green-light a project downtown? No more. City Hall taking six weeks to grant a permit to rebuild a porch in the neighborhoods? No more.

In the first ten years of the century, according to figures published in the
Globe
, “Boston built more commercial space per square mile of land . . . than any of the nation's 10 most populous cities.”

Besides guiding this building boom, my BRA updated the city's 1950s zoning code, rewrote the city's real estate development code to ease the regulatory burden on new projects, and designated sites where more development was wanted. All this was following Walsh, who spoke of the value for “both business and residents” of a streamlined, “predictable” review process.

But “predictable” is the last word my critics would apply to development in the Menino years. Kevin White, the downtown mayor, kept a “white-knuckled grip” on development. Ray Flynn, the “neighborhood mayor,” left the big calls to his first BRA director, Steve Coyle. BRA directors can get lulled into thinking they head an independent agency. But if the mayor gives the nod, the board that rubber-stamped their hiring will rubber-stamp their firing. I had good directors, so-so ones, and a few flops. But I never relaxed my grip.

The press harped on the theme that I was afraid a powerful BRA chief would run against me for mayor. That wasn't it. I was hands-on because I thought city planning was too important to be left to the city planners.

Development was shot through with big issues and big headaches over favoritism, location, cost, height, and, yes, cultural impact. Upscale condos paid into a fund to build more affordable housing. Business projects paid for open space. In boom years we could ask them to pay more, but when the economy was bad we had to accept less. Decisions like these, and decisions on which projects to approve and which to reject, had to be made on a case-by-case basis, not through following a “predictable” one-size-fits-all approval process.

For example, Boston's zoning regulations permit flat roofs. But in Boston the mayor is stronger than the regulations, and he decides what gets built, where it gets built, when it gets built, who gets to build it, and how it gets built. And I didn't like flat roofs. In a widely publicized incident, a developer came to my City Hall conference room to show me a design for a high-rise in the Back Bay. I said no: It had a flat roof. He returned with a scale model and a dozen miniature tops and stuck one after another onto the building until I pointed to one I liked. An architecture critic called my top “a narcissistic crown” and sniffed that it “makes the building look like an ornamental perfume bottle.” He can fix it when he's mayor.

I told developers: “I don't want sticks in the city anymore; sticks that go straight up to heaven. I want buildings with character.” Where's the character in a flat roof?

A celebrated architect once compared himself to a whore for going through the motions on a Boston building in the 70s. I never wanted to read that about something built while I was mayor. So I put developers and architects on notice: Show me you know Boston from Oakland.

Developers who couldn't make the cut complained to reporters about the “Petty Thin-Skinned Ruthless S.O.B.” in City Hall (a real headline). I poked fun at my bad rep. Raising money for a nonprofit, I appeared in a video dressed as the Godfather. An actor playing a developer I have no use for asks me, “What have I done that you would treat me with such disrespect?” And, stroking a stuffed cat, I tell him, “If you had come to me in friendship, your new tower would be up this very day.”

I could laugh at my image as the don of development, but others saw nothing funny about it. “Never before in Boston, and perhaps nowhere else in the nation, has a mayor obsessed so mightily, and wielded power so exhaustively, over the look, feel, and shape of the built city,” the
Globe
complained. “Routine construction projects on remote streets need City Hall approval; prominent towers that climb the downtown skyline carry his mark; independent city boards bow to his will.” That guy sounds scary.

And ineffective. A mayor spread so thin would never get big stuff done, like “create a new neighborhood from whole cloth.” That's how
Governing
summed up my effort to “reimagine the city's long disused waterfront as a new hub for high-tech firms and small startups, along with retail, housing, restaurants, and green space.”

 

All along I had my eye on the waterfront. It had the potential to be Boston's first government-made neighborhood since the Back Bay was filled in after the Civil War. I was focused on that future when I opposed the megaplex and Bob Kraft's stand-alone stadium, both slated to be built in the then Seaport District. And I stayed focused on it while needling the mogul who ran a giant parking lot on the waterfront to develop the land or sell it to someone who would. He hung on year after year until forced to sell by a costly divorce. Then the recession hit. Finally, in my last inaugural in January 2010, I made standing up the Innovation District my top priority. Recession be damned.

“A new approach is called for on the waterfront,” I declared at Fan­euil Hall. “Together, we should develop these thousand acres into a hub for knowledge workers and creative jobs. . . . There has never been a better time for innovation to occur in urban settings than now, and there should be no better place than Boston.”

Why Boston? Location, location, location. The Innovation District is just four subway stops away from MIT and Harvard and the Kendall Square biotechnological center billed (for now) as “the densest square mile of innovation on the planet.”
^*
Governing
called my commitment to the Innovation District “perhaps the biggest gamble” of my career.