Boston Needs to Learn, Not Teach, When it Comes to Urban Growth

“People say to me: ‘Oh, you’ve got a hole there (in Downtown Crossing)’ — so what!” - Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, in an article published in the Boston Herald, last week.

This is an amazing comment by the mayor. And, by amazing, I mean, disturbing.

“The hole is going to be there until those folks from New York understand we in Boston know how to do development. And just because they can’t get development done, that’s not my fault.”

Yeah, we sure showed them! <sarcasm>

Apparently, the mayor thinks we’re proving something by leaving a development project unfinished, (by which I mean, unstarted).

Statements such as his make me wonder if there’s any real plan to bring Boston forward into the 21st-century, going beyond a couple of clever marketing initiatives (Innovation District, anyone?).

This city’s leadership has missed many opportunities and failed to take full advantage of all it’s been offered. Over the past 10 years, an incredible decade of growth and prosperity, should have left us in a better spot than we're in. Obviously, we did have lots of luck. But, we’re still stuck with bunch of empty and underutilized lots, not just where Filene’s was located, but at Hayward Place, Kensington Place, around the Ferdinand Building, in Allston, along the Rose Kennedy “Greenway” (I call it a “Raceway”). Hundreds of acres of land are lying fallow. Schemes for the Seaport District have come and gone since I was wearing short pants. It hasn’t been the bad economy that kept these projects from going forward - they've been barren for years. And only now are we seeing new proposals.

Boston is in no position to “teach” anyone anything. Instead, the city needs to learn.

New York City has done very well in a bad economy. It lost fewer jobs during the recession than many other cities, and has recovered more quickly. This, despite being the center of the financial world that was in turmoil, remember?. Meanwhile, companies are abandoning Boston, with nary a response (except tax giveaways … which from what Fidelity has shown us, are penny-wise but pound foolish). Bank of America has decreased its Massachusetts' workforce by 22 percent in just the past four years.

If you want to understand the definition of “good urban  planning”, visit Vancouver. In fact, Vancouver is considered such a success that there’s even an urban planning philosophy called “Vancouverism”

A poster child for city growth, during the past decade, this city has recreated itself as a 21st-century boomtown full of life and excitement. (A direct comparison is fair, given that the city of Vancouver has around 600,000 residents. Its metropolitan area is made up of between 2.1 and 2.5 million people; Boston’s is quite larger.)

With a healthy economy, anyone could have found a way for Boston to grow. Just about every city in America did. And, we can learn from the ones that didn't, such as Detroit. In bad times, however, it takes knowledge, ambition, and vision to make things work.

Pie in the sky proposals for towers in the sky (towers that, with city backing, do nothing more than discourage investment by private developers), for relocating the center of government literally to its edge (moving City Hall), and rebranding the same neighborhood over and over again (Fort Point Channel, Seaport District, South Boston Waterfront, Innovation District) hoping something sticks, these things don’t move our city forward. They pull it back.

Mayor Menino told the Herald that, “I’m not going to let Vornado stop us from growing in Boston.”

Mr. Mayor, They’re not the ones stopping us!