Officials at the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) are stepping up their efforts to accommodate growth in a changing city as it is dealing with rapid growth, the threats of climate change, and long-overlooked neighborhoods being eyed by developers and prospective residents alike seeking affordable harbors.

Last week, agency leaders met with Reporter editors and laid out how the past few years have been an evolution of soliciting public input and rolling out neighborhood studies to shape areas on the cusp of reinvention or revitalization.

Along Morrissey Boulevard, over at Glover’s Corner and Uphams Corner and down to Mattapan, “we’re doing really robust planning, not only downtown but in the neighborhoods over there, as well,” said BDPA head Brian Golden.

This influx of projects, planners said, offers new lines of funding for local groups and initiatives, and the administration wants to keep a seat at the table when major state land deals come down the pike.

“From a planning standpoint, from an Article 80 standpoint, from a resiliency standpoint, there’s a lot going on,” Golden added. “And, obviously, the fundamental thing, I think to all of us, is a positive: that our goal remains doing community-focused planning that yields projects that reflect the community input that went into the planning. And we think, by and large, not with mathematical certainty, but where we do good quality planning and give people a meaningful voice, that it results in projects that the community has fundamentally signed up for.”

The rising tide

The Morrissey Boulevard corridor along Dorchester’s coast and its Day Boulevard counterpart along the water’s edge in South Boston are increasingly more vulnerable to flooding from storms and tidal shifts.

UMass Boston’s Bayside site, a “mammoth parcel” with “tremendous potential,” Golden said, sits on a prime waterfront land with environmental vulnerabilities. With talk of a new bustling business district by the harbor, interim chancellor Katherine Newman said earlier this month that she hoped any Bayside development would lead to investment in nearby transit.

“I think it’s a given that, look, whether it’s resiliency and the key node of Day Boulevard, Morrissey Boulevard,” Golden said, “those are really important terrains with regard to the mayor’s goals, with regard to resiliency and addressing sea level rise. So, we would certainly expect, and it’s certainly in UMass Boston’s interest, to help us address those concerns. And that will be the case for anybody who seeks to develop along, in, or around Morrissey Boulevard. And again, we would accept that doing the right thing and being a good neighbor is important to UMass Boston and they will cooperate on these broader goals beyond Bayside.”

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Bayside sits near a corridor in flux — two tall towers have been floated for the old Channel 56 space next to the former Boston Globe site on Morrissey; the Globe site itself is poised to become a bustling high tech space, and plans for the Santander bank building off Mt. Vernon Street remain a mystery. These projects sit within the focus of the former Columbia Point Master Plan, a years-long city-led planning effort that led to proposed guidelines for the area in 2011.

The master plan “used to be a living document that highlighted key priorities of the future evolution of the area,” said Sara Myerson, the BPDA’s director of planning. “Certainly, there will be elements of that that will change over time. It hadn’t fully contemplated the resiliency needs and sea level rise, and I think we have acknowledged that there needs to be additional planning work, particularly around mobility and transportation in the area.”

Nordblom Co., which purchased the Globe site for $81 million in 2017, will give $500,000 in mitigation funds to the city, which would go in part to local nonprofits and community groups. About half is expected to help fund an infrastructure study around JFK/UMass station.

“Part of the mitigation from the Globe site approval is for a study specifically looking at this one, looking at access to and public realm around the station” Myerson said. “That’s mainly pedestrian cycling and transit connections to JFK. But hopefully that will set up a framework for future mitigation as these projects come through.”

Center Court properties came in with a pre-file concept of two tall towers for the sites between the Hub 25 building and the Globe site.“Since they’ve acquired everything, we’ve asked them to really look at the whole entire [block],” said Michael Christopher, deputy director of development review.

Because of different leases on the assembled parcels, he said, “it’s a little more complicated than just being able to master plan the whole thing, but we are taking a holistic approach to the entire area. It’d be not just parcel by parcel.”

Planning for growth

Outside of site-specific projects, the city is engaged in a number of planning studies within neighborhoods to reassess zoning and highlight opportunities for preservation as well as new development.

The planning initiative at Glover’s Corner is ongoing and complex, poised to transform what are now mainly industrial uses along Dorchester Avenue and Freeport Street. An Uphams Corner revitalization area will lead to a new library for the village, new life for the century-old Strand Theatre, and new uses for several city- and land trust-owned parcels.

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Golden’s team is now looking to Mattapan, too; it launched an open house last week for a study that loosely conforms to the bounds of the neighborhood as it is now. It will likely reduce in size and increase in specificity as the public digs in, planners said, with a “holistic” eye to what the neighborhood needs.

“It will extend beyond just Mattapan Square,” Myerson said. “This is a comprehensive neighborhood plan... So in many ways this is a little bit of an evolution in our planning approach, where some of our previous plans were very corridor-area specific and were focused on areas that were kind of where we were experiencing or thought that there would be a large pressure to change from perhaps an industrial area to more of a mixed use area.”

A feedback loop

The Dorchester and Mattapan civic network is vast and intricate, with scores of neighborhood associations, Main Street groups, neighborhood development corporations, and smaller local collectives scattered across the neighborhoods. So any given development project works its way through a gauntlet of engaged residents. And a staple part of the BPDA Article 80 process involves Impact Advisory Groups, or IAGs, locals appointed by the mayor from elected official and representative nominations.

These are small groups, though their meetings are public, and Golden said the planning agency has worked to determine what other avenues for input residents might have.

“We’re still living with IAGs because, after multiple runs at this,” he said, “we find that the IAG is, albeit imperfect, still a worthwhile mechanism for seeking more formal community input. So, we fundamentally stuck with it. And the reality is, even though there are frustrations, sometimes people in neighborhoods just plain don’t like the fact that there is the, you know, in, in their eyes, a star chamber of select activists who get to vet. And sometimes it’s not so much the mechanism. They object to the fact that it might be a recurring role for many people and the same people end up on the IAGs.”

Those objections are noted, Golden said, but across projects the teams have found them to be “a healthy mechanism that is generally accepted that are populated by folks who are interested in constructive input and in significant important outcomes for the neighborhood. So, we can feel good about what IAGs have done and what they’ve allowed us to accomplish in Dorchester. “

Projects across the neighborhood should have multiple avenues for offering feedback, the BPDA group said. This could mean attending scheduled meetings or charettes, through petitions, emailing or calling project managers, or commenting through the website.

“We’re also hosting office hours, going to other meetings, trying to find other ways,” Myerson said. “There’s a whole portion of the population that doesn’t really like to come to meetings from six to eight no matter how that meeting’s structured. And, so, we’re constantly trying to come up with a variety of different ways to get people involved in the planning process thing.

“One of the things we’re really actively focused on right now is also making sure we have a variety of ages that are represented in our planning processes,” added Myerson, “because if you’re thinking about future planning and you want to make sure you’re having youth involvement and engagement as much as you’re having a engagement of those who are kind of in the young professional stage and those who are in post-professional and more becoming the senior leaders of their community. And, so, we want to make sure you have all of those at the table.”