To the Editor:

We feel obligated to comment on a counterproductive letter sent recently to Mayor Michelle Wu by a group of neighborhood association leaders. In it, they admonish the mayor for allowing “continued off-kilter real estate development,” characterize city officials administering development reform efforts as “the city autocracy,” and suggest that the mayor’s new “Squares+Streets” zoning initiative favors “bureaucratic centralized authoritarian rulemaking.”

We at Abundant Housing Massachusetts (AHMA) envision a future where housing is plentiful for people of all incomes; where we stop the relentlessly increasing housing costs that drive de facto segregation in our neighborhoods; and where land-use policy facilitates the creation of safe, walkable, and low-carbon communities. The sentiments expressed by Boston renters’ direct experiences speak to the urgency of this that can’t afford to wait any longer. The sentiments expressed by these leaders run sharply counter to all of these goals and express a pessimism about tackling our city’s housing crisis that we do not share.

We do agree with the letter’s authors that real estate development in Boston has been “off-kilter,” but for starkly different reasons than the ones they offer. As of 2022, the city’s rental vacancy stood at 3.4 percent while homeowner vacancy hit 1.2 percent citywide. This paradigm of scarcity has fueled a pitiless bidding war in the Boston housing market. Over half of the city’s renters paid more than 30 percent of their income to landlords in 2022. Critically, the brunt of the cost of this situation has been borne by those with the least, with poorer households paying out greater percentages of their income at higher rates.

They attack the mayor’s “Squares+Streets” initiative—a measured attempt to increase zoning flexibility in select areas served by transit—as “centralized authoritarian rulemaking.” They unfairly label city staff advancing “Squares+Streets” through a robust Phase I of community engagement—24 pop-up events, 2 youth engagement workshops, 29 community planning meetings and 4 public zoning meetings—as part of a “city autocracy.” They complain in one breath that Boston’s affordable housing program is underproducing units, then, in another, lambaste the commercial development needed to finance it.

At some level we see this letter from these neighborhood association leaders as typical of the misguided attitudes and tactics that have contributed to our housing crisis for so long. The authors offer no objective principles for evaluating neighborhood change in the City of Boston, nor any principled alternatives to the mayor’s plans. Instead, and unfortunately, they cast the deliberate attempts of an elected mayor to respond to the housing shortage as illegitimate and wrongheaded.

By placing the prerogatives of neighborhood incumbents above the causes and human consequences of our housing crisis, the authors—like too many before them—propose to continue sacrificing the housing stability of Boston’s citizens to perpetuate a failing status quo that too often grants them personal vetoes over change. A world in which these kinds of attitudes continue to stifle change is one in which the housing shortage grinds on unabated and Boston becomes even more unaffordable.

AHMA and its members stand unapologetically for increased housing production for residents of all income levels. We applaud Mayor Wu’s efforts to legalize ADUs citywide and we support the “Squares+Streets” initiative as a constructive first step in increasing zoning flexibility across the city. Most importantly, we reject the attempts of any group to prop up a failed status quo at Boston residents’ expense, given the scale of the housing crisis we face.

Jesse Kanson-Benanav

The writer is the executive director of Abundant Housing MA. He writes on behalf of the group’s board of directors and the Boston Committee, WalkUp Roslindale, Dorchester Growing Together, Boston Artist Impact, and JP YIMBY.