At a public hearing Monday afternoon, city councillors heard plans-in-progress for modernizing Boston’s review of development proposals.

The working draft summarized by officials from the Boston Planning Department (BPD)—formerly the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA)—would apply to projects with least 15 units of housing or totaling more than 20,000 square feet. If approved, the update would be the first change to Article 80 of Boston’s zoning code since 1996, but some councillors argued that the modernization would also affect their traditional power to influence decisions as elected neighborhood advocates.

Appearing before the Committee on Planning, Development, and Transportation, BPD officials outlined a plan reflecting aims first outlined in a report issued by Mayor Michelle Wu in 2019, while she was still a member of the City Council. In the report, Wu had called for making the review process more predictable, transparent, and inclusive--and less time-consuming. At the hearing, officials repeatedly stressed a need to influence projects at an earlier and more conceptual stage, with planning goals already defined and options for meeting community benefit requirements more standardized.

Officials also explained how the Article 80 update would change mechanisms and make-up of community participation. The most visible participants at meetings on development plans have usually been members of neighborhood associations—traditionally dominated by property owners likely to be more wary of growth—or representatives of trade unions, more likely to favor growth, as a source of jobs and training opportunities. Though neighborhood associations refrain from group endorsements of political candidates, trade unions and developers have long figured in contributions to campaigns for mayor and City Council, whether with money, visibility, or outreach.

Currently, the project review process also has a more formalized role for appointed task forces and “impact advisory groups” (IAGs), which include community members. The modernization draft calls for replacing these with “community advisory teams” (or CATs) that would receive training, take part in reviewing multiple projects, and be subject to term limits in phases.

The modernization calls for expanding community engagement through new kinds of outreach, especially tied more closely to the site of a proposed project, and through different ways to participate, in addition to in-person meetings or lengthy remote connections.

The BPD’s senior director of development review, Nupoor Monani, told councillors, “the biggest kind of takeaway for us has been how you reach out to people really matters. The methods really matter.”

Council President Ruthzee Louijeune called for a process that would increase the supply of affordable housing, but also include people less likely to attend meetings. “People who are renters,” she said, “immigrants, others who should have a say on what the city looks like: no one group, no one person as a result of your socioeconomic status or where you live in the city should have a stronger or louder voice.”

Though Boston’s largest development projects have been a source of “linkage” money for affordable housing and training programs, benefits from other development are more localized and more particularized, varying from project to project. Monani made the case for less improvisation and even for spreading project benefits more widely.

“One of the things we're going to be thoughtful about is we advance these recommendations,” she told councillors, “is how do we make sure that, in the community benefits we extract, we are being intentional and equitable and distributing them more widely across the city, as opposed to just continuing to keep them concentrated in these high-development neighborhoods.”

According to BPD officials, the changes would replace the early requirement for a sometimes massive “project notification form” with sequential filings from developers. The community role would overlap with planning and the first encounters with developers would focus on concepts rather than details. Developers would also have to provide a disclosure of any displacement that a would result from their projects—which the mayor’s chief of planning, Arthur Jemison, said could head off plans that would stir opposition from the community or the city.

Some councillors questioned whether the modernization would be a gain for community clout or a better way to influence development proposals.
“When I vote up at the BPDA or vote at the ZBA, about 95 percent of the time I vote in line with neighborhood organizations. I call them up before every, every vote I take to see where they're at,” said Disrict 2 (South Boston, South End, Chinatown) Councillor Ed Flynn. “I think it waters down the voices of ne neighborhood organizations in this city.”

“Those voices are always going to continue to be there. but there's other voices that we're not hearing from,” Jemison replied. “And we're going to continue to have those voices there, that have been the bedrock of the dialogue. I can't see how those voices get hurt by having more and different people comment.”

District 3 (Dorchester) Councillor John FitzGerald questioned the move toward more standardization of project benefits and mitigation.
“How do we prevent bad development from occurring?” he asked officials. “But, if you have a formula and a checklist, and they check every box, we lose our leverage to dissuade or stop a bad development from occurring.”

FitzGerald also drew a parallel between the Article 80 changes and the participatory budgeting process announced by the mayor earlier this month, both with structured roles for the community, but not with representatives chosen by popular vote.

“If it's a formulaic, standardized process and it's run with people with term limits, and we've got people voting on the budget in general to decide what to do with city money,” he said, “(it’s) like we're starting to lessen the importance of what this elected body does.”

Monani told councillors that recommendations with more details would be issued as an action plan by early fall, with the goal of attracting more detail and feedback. She said that would be followed by next spring with a draft of new code for Article 80 that would be submitted to the city’s Zoning Commission.

In public testimony, councillors heard support for replacing IAGs, which Fort Point activist Steve Hollinger criticized for including “lifers,” power-brokers and conflicts of interest. There was also a plea for more feedback from planners to comments from the community.

At the end of the hearing, the chair of the Committee on Planning, Development, and Transportation, District 8 (Back Bay, Fenway, Mission Hill, Beacon Hill) Councillor Sharon Durkan observed, “It’s just one thing that, to see almost all of our colleagues here and engaged and caring about this process, but then to also see how empty it is in this chamber when we talk about development--and it's one of the most fraught issues that we deal with in our city. To me, it just shows how disconnected the public is from what mechanisms actually drive development.”