Mayor for a New America (28 page)

The gamble is paying off. Growth on the waterfront has surged. Using tax incentives, in a slow recovery, and with no help from Washington, we attracted several hundred new businesses with five thousand employees to move there. We asked entrepreneurs to help us start something new and they accepted our invitation.

The key: landing MassChallenge, Inc., “the world's largest startup accelerator.” This one-of-a-kind nonprofit runs a competition for new businesses, connecting entrepreneurs with mentors, offering free office space and help with finding investors. MassChallenge sowed a culture of collaboration in the district that, more than tax breaks, has brought in new ventures in biotech and green tech. MassChallenge changed people's ideas about the waterfront, and the waterfront is changing people's ideas about Boston.

The city mobilized private funding to build the twelve-thousand-square-foot Innovation Center, where tech workers and “bio-entrepreneurs” can exchange ideas and incubate new businesses. And Babson College, a leader in teaching entrepreneurship, is furnishing “hatchery space” for start-ups founded by its MBA students.

The culture of the Innovation District is also attractive to established knowledge industry companies like Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which sited its new global headquarters there. Its 1.1 million square feet of office space includes a three-thousand-square-foot laboratory where local students can conduct experiments beside Vertex scientists.

The Innovation District tries to live up to its name in housing, parking, and commuting.

“Everybody expects us to build high-rise condominiums, offices, and retail in the South Boston Waterfront; but that's Anywhere America,” I said when calling for bids on vacant city-owned industrial buildings at the tip of the Innovation District. Instead, the idea is to promote live-work spaces, micro-apartments, and co-housing for professionals in the life sciences who expect turnkey Internet but are willing to share a kitchen. Developers must devote 15 percent of residential projects to living spaces modeled on “executive learning facilities” at Harvard and Babson that stimulate collaboration.

Work has begun on Seaport Square, a $3 billion project that will carve twenty new city blocks out of a wilderness of parking lots. A decade from now, five thousand people will live there, worship there, shop and dine there, stroll in two public parks there, go to the movies or the theater or a concert there.

On parking, the city has installed “smart parking sensors” along the neighborhood streets. Using a free mobile app, the sensors point motorists to open spaces. Information technology also eases the drive home:
TIME TO DESTINATION
signs wired to “real-time traffic data” help drivers find the quickest commute.

The Innovation District is “not the next Beacon Hill,” says Mitch Weiss, a Harvard Business School grad and my last chief of staff. “It's linked to job clusters and a different kind of living” for highly educated young people living on modest budgets. Mitch sees the district, which he named, following a model in Barcelona, Spain, where scientists live within walking distance of their labs, so if the spirit moves them, they can return to work in the middle of the night.

“Geekville” rising on the South Boston peninsula: Who would have guessed it when I began my first term?

 

The question for the future is whether people living on modest budgets can afford to live in Boston, not just in the Innovation District.

“Prosperity brings its own challenges . . . and none is more acute than the region's severe housing crisis,” notes a Boston Foundation study. Only New York and San Francisco have higher rents than Boston: $2.1 million is the median price of a single-family residence on Beacon Hill, in the Back Bay, and the South End, the city's skid row as recently as the 60s.

The average household income in Boston is $49,000. But in 2012–13 a couple earning $75,000 could afford only 5 percent of houses sold in Charlestown, 7 percent in South Boston, and 15 percent in Jamaica Plain. In 2005 the Economic Policy Institute found Greater Boston “the most expensive place to live in the country.” It hasn't got any cheaper since.

Alan Ehrenhalt, a leading urban affairs journalist, sees a “Great Inversion” in American living patterns. After decades when families moved out of the city as they moved up the class ladder, “people who possessed money and choice were increasingly living in the center, while newcomers and the poor were settling in the suburbs, often in the outer reaches of suburban territory.” And as suburban empty nesters move into the city, they bid up housing prices beyond anything longtime residents can pay. Rich foreigners are doing the same thing to luxury housing.

I sometimes ask myself: Did the mayors who transformed Boston from “a hopeless backwater, a tumbled-down has-been among cities”—Hynes, Collins, White, Flynn, Menino—succeed too well? Is Boston too attractive to the well heeled and the well educated? On Boston's four-hundredth birthday in 2030, will the city have a place for an ambitious worker like Carl Menino? For a plugger good with numbers like me? Or will Boston then look like Paris now, a city for the elite ringed by suburbs for those who cater to them?

Cities can recharge their own economies. We proved that in Boston. But what can cities do to reverse the greatest threat to social hope in America, economic inequality? Today, you want to live the American Dream? Go to Canada. Upward mobility is greater there (and in class-ridden Great Britain) than in the USA.

Against inequality, cities do what can be done—pass living wage ordinances, for example—not all that
needs
to be done. Legislation to address inequality must come from Washington. The first New Deal built a foundation of economic security for the industrial age. It's time for a second New Deal for the information age.

We are not moving back to a future of good jobs for people of good character at the Westinghouse plant. “Dependable” won't take you very far in a global economy. The values I learned from Carl and Susan Menino don't predict success in life in today's knowledge society nearly as well as getting the right grades from the right schools. And neither counts for as much as “winning the ovarian lottery,” to quote Warren Buffett. By age four, a child born into an affluent family has heard 15 million more words than a child from a poor family. How can we reconcile that gap with the American ideal of “equal opportunity”?

The good news is that in the New America of hardening class inequality, city government can redistribute tax revenue from the affluent to the struggling, from neighborhoods where people own to neighborhoods where they rent.

I recently saw an ad for a Federal-era mansion for sale on Beacon Hill. Price: $10 million. Besides trimming their trees and collecting their rubbish, Beacon Hill residents ask little from City Hall. So with the $60,000 collected yearly in property taxes on that house, the city can pay for public goods like parks and playgrounds for kids in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. Also housing, libraries, cultural programs, mass transportation, a clean environment, and health care. Boston ranks just behind New York as the most unequal city in the country, but by providing the money for these goods, Boston's growing wealth can benefit the whole community.
^*
The city can leverage economic inequality to strengthen social equality. To make it so that, in Boston, you don't have to be rich to have a rich life.

 

“
HEYHOWAYA
?”

 

The critiques of Menino—that he gets too much credit just for showing up, that his administration is too secretive and insular, that his record of improving life in the neighborhoods is exaggerated—have begun to resonate, thanks to constant repetition, and a steady drip of bad news emanating from the mayor's suite.

 

—from a Boston Globe editorial during the 2009 campaign

 

I've tried to keep the brag down in this book, citing facts or others' opinions. But for once take my word for it: I was not a crook. I ran a clean government. The city's lawyers cautioned me to proceed carefully against employees under a cloud: They might sue. I spurned that advice. At the first hint of corruption, appointees were out the door. Employees with civil service protection were harder to fire, but I made life miserable for them.

A reporter preparing a story on my temper once asked if it was true that I ran City Hall like “a drill sergeant.” I didn't deny it. “I expect the best out of my people,” I said. “I demand it sometimes. The public demands it of me all the time.”

People believed I'd do the right thing for the city. Abuse their trust, and I'd spend my time trying to regain what I'd lost. I'd get nothing done. Keeping the public trust applied in spades to my own conduct. The only check on Boston's emperor/mayor was the emperor/mayor. It was up to me to keep me in line.

Mostly I succeeded. In 2000 I pledged not to take political contributions from developers with business before the city: “What you're talking about is my integrity, and there is absolutely no price on that.” Partly because aides were competing to see who could raise the most money, that promise was broken, and I wound up accepting donations from a few such developers, some of which we returned. The amount came to a paltry $10,000 out of more than $5 million raised from other sources. When an investigative reporter told me that six “pet” developers with no pending business before the city had contributed $61,000 over four years, I commented: “That's all? Cheap bums.”

The issue of public ethics involved is this: Did I practice “pay for play” by favoring developers who made donations over those who didn't? Donations did not determine my decisions. They were one among many factors. My “pet” developers had track records of outstanding performance. Norman Leventhal, a Dorchester paperboy who became a great Boston benefactor, once came into my office and began to describe a new project. “Don't tell me where it is, Norman,” I interrupted. “Just build it.” That's how much I trusted him.

Contributions aside, what about personal connections? Suppose you had to choose between a proposal from a friend and one from a stranger. Other things being equal, you'd do what I did. You'd favor the friend. Voters are human too. They cut you more slack over friends than over money. (I make no apologies for a 2001 decision that combined them: stopping a chain drugstore from opening near a pharmacy owned by a friend and contributor.)

Corruption is one of two reasons voters fire incumbents. I was safe on that front. The other reason is they want change. There I was vulnerable. In 2009 I had been mayor for sixteen years. Maybe I was kidding myself, but I wanted another term to improve people's lives.

This is the story of my closest election.

 

I knew it would be a tough year in January, when, in my State of the City speech, I addressed the hard times brought on by the Wall Street crash: “We are confronting a great economic crisis. Boston did not create it. But Boston must deal with it. . . . Whether it's at your kitchen table, or my desk, the numbers are not pretty.” To make up a $140 million budget shortfall, I said, unions representing city employees had to choose: a wage freeze or layoffs. “The mayor is popular now, but will he be popular after he lays off hundreds of teachers, cops, and firefighters?” asked the Globe. New initiatives? Forget about it. Holding the line on existing services would be a miracle.

One observer called the speech “the most dour assessment of the state of the city since British troops roamed Roxbury.”

In my two earlier contested races, 2001 and 2005, I did not run TV ads until the last week in October, and they were jokey productions. In 2009 I started running ads in April, and they were serious.

A second hurdle to my reelection was “Menino fatigue.” People had to be tired of seeing me on TV. The financial crisis ruled out running on a bold vision for my precedent-shattering fifth term. I always want to look ahead, to talk about tomorrow. But reality would force me to look back, reminding voters of what I'd done in the past. In the run-up to the preliminary election in September, that would play into the strategy of my two challengers: to style me as yesterday's mayor.

“He works hard but this race will not be about the past 16 years but about the next four years,” declared one challenger. His campaign slogan was “A New Season for Boston.” I was an “old school Sony Walkman” mayor. He'd be an “iPod” mayor. He was forty.

The other challenger hit the same note: “It's time to bring in a new generation of leadership.” His slogan was “A New Way of Politics.” Appearing “so boyish he looks like he needed to get a parent's permission slip for a field trip,” he was thirty-nine.

I ran on the slogan “Moving Boston Forward.” But my vow to reach out to the “generation that gave us Facebook” looked silly when the press reported that I resisted voice mail.
^*
I was sixty-six.

I couldn't hide how sour I was over the Gramps treatment:

 

REPORTER:
Which candidate poses the greater threat to you?

ME:
I'm not going to pick one over the other.

REPORTER:
Which would you rather grab a beer with?

ME:
I don't drink.

 

Challenger One was City Councilor at-Large Michael Flaherty of South Boston. The top vote-getter in three straight council elections and council president for five years. I'd backed him for the job. I'd hoped for loyalty but counted on patience, figuring Mike was young enough to wait out one more Menino term.

“I'd been advised to wait,” Mike said in one speech. “I said, ‘The city can't wait.' For . . . mothers I've met over the course of this campaign who have lost their sons to senseless violence, I say, we can't wait. For children across the city who dropped out of the Boston public schools or who currently are in underperforming schools, I say we can't wait.”