The city’s Planning Department has released more feedback on its proposed zoning reform, in line with Mayor Wu’s goal of making development process more proactive and inclusive.

Drawn from community workshops in May and June, as well as an online survey, the feedback would directly apply to the mayor’s proposed “modernization” of Article 80 in the Boston zoning code. Unchanged since 1996, Article 80 applies to larger projects, and to some smaller projects with at least 20,000 square feet of floor space or 15 dwelling units.

The modernization is part of a larger shift that would front-load community engagement at an earlier stage. That would take place before individual projects are advanced, by creating land use guidelines with city planners, or by starting to engage with developers before a project is planned in detail. According to city officials, the new emphasis on planning would allow more clarity in advance about how a project could align with the city’s goals, while options for mitigation or community benefits would be more standardized.

RELATED: BPDA survey shows strong support for broader development review process

As Nupoor Monani, the Planning Department’s senior deputy director of development review, explained, “This is really the mandate that we have from the mayor: to change the way we're doing business, where planning leads the way and development follows and delivers on those outcomes.”

Under the current form of Article 80, the review process includes “impact advisory groups” (IAGs), each addressing mitigation for individual projects. Under the proposed modernization, these would be replaced with trained “community advisory teams” (CATs) that would take part in reviewing multiple projects in a designated part of the city.

“We are making a very intentional investment in growing these groups and training these groups and making sure that they feel a sense of ownership over the development that is happening in the city and the outcomes of that development,” said Monani. “We're hoping that through the sort of recruitment that we do for people to participate in these groups, once they roll off, they can then become ambassadors into their own communities, too.”

To help make CATs more broadly representative, the workshops and surveys recommended training, childcare, food, and stipends. They also favored new methods of engagement to increase participation by renters, people of different economic backgrounds, multilingual residents, and people with disabilities, as well as more definition for the roles and responsibilities of CAT members.

The feedback on CATs at a City Council hearing in July from District 3 (Dorchester) member John FitzGerald combined skepticism and support for changes.

“Whether it's picked at random or not, however we choose to do this, will these people show, will they participate?” FitzGerald wondered. “I think you will find yourself back to a familiar group of people that consistently show up, and you don't get the diversity that you want. I think that's why the focus on the engagement piece is good.”

But the greater standardization of advisory groups, with more training and wider range, prompted FitzGerald to wonder about whose agenda the groups would serve – and their credibility.

Above, Councillor John FitzGerald speaks at a council hearing in Aug. 2024. Chris Lovett photo

“What is the training the community advisory team gets?” he asked. “And how does that look? And who is training them? Because that's also an opportunity to be influenced one way or another. You have to look who's training you, right? And then you'll just get accused: ‘Oh, well, of course you want the project to happen; the BPDA trained you and they brainwashed you to do that.’”

In the workshops and surveys, residents also chose from options for engagement in connection with development projects. Civic association meetings were not listed as a separate option, but the largest number of residents favored learning about projects through an in-person exchange, whether at an open house, or a pop-up at a community location or event. The highest single preferences were for mailers, followed by social media posts.

For sharing thoughts and feedback about proposals, the highest single preference was for comment at a public meeting, followed by email, a project site walk, with the next highest scores being for a long or short survey. Response by public meeting, email, and site walk had the strongest appeal to homeowners. For renters, the strongest preferences –in order – were for email and site walk, followed by public meeting.

There was also a difference in feedback preference by age. Among those ages 18-35, the highest scores were for email or a brief survey. For those ages 35-55, the highest scores were for a public meeting or a site walk, followed by email. For learning about project updates, the strongest preferences were for a website page or email.

When asked about the preferred role for city staff in early engagement led by developers, 49 percent favored “neutral facilitator,” and 40 percent favored “advocate for city plans and priorities.”

On standardizing of community benefits from development projects, the leading priority was housing, with the next highest scores for open space and transportation. When residents were asked about a way to help set priorities, their strongest preference was for a needs assessment, followed by community requests and the needs of city departments.

In response to a question about which elements of a development project residents were interested in shaping, the leading choices were building use, height and density, then mitigation. There was not a separate choice for parking – often a topic of intense debate in project review, which could be related to “building use.” But, according to a Planning Department official, the preferences affirm the “importance of planning and updating zoning.”

On mitigation funds, residents called for more transparency and scrutiny, as well as legally binding agreements with consequences for non-compliance.

At the City Council hearing, FitzGerald cautioned that standards for community benefits could limit possibilities, and that the switch from single-project IAGs to advisory teams for multiple projects could be viewed as less clout for residents living closer to project sites.

At the same hearing, District 2 (South Boston, South End, Chinatown) Councillor Ed Flynn argued that including the views of community members who don’t attend public meetings was not just a task for the Planning Department. “I really think it's the role of the elected official to bring those voices together to ensure that those voices that haven't been heard during the development process are heard,” he said. “I honestly think [the modernization] gives too much power to the planners.”

In an earlier survey, the response sample about experience with development process was skewed toward homeowners and disproportionately white. But the survey about barriers to participation, drawing more heavily from renters and people of color, showed that more residents wanted to engage.

“As we heard in our first round of engagement, there are a lot of barriers to taking part in our city processes,” said Kristiana Lachiusa, the Planning Department’s deputy director of community engagement. “So we heard that this time renters and people under the age of 35 prefer more direct low-time-commitment methods of engagement, like completing a survey.”

For contentious projects in Boston, development process sometimes plays out as a power struggle between area residents, business owners, developers, elected officials, even trade unions. Though stakeholder pressure can affect final decisions, these would still be made on Article 80 projects by the city.

And, as Lachiusa defined it: “The purpose of community participation in the Article 80 process is to ensure that the residents, people who work, visit, and spend time in the community can share their local knowledge and expertise.”

Under the current Article 80 process, developers file a sometimes lengthy “project notification form” at an early stage. For community members who want to engage, that means digesting the bulk of documentation, whether as a text or a presentation. Though Monani agreed that the modernization of process should still include in-person events, she maintained there was a need to rethink their character, function, and setting.

“I don't think anybody misses being in a community center, in front of a giant projector screen looking at a presentation, because you can do that just as well on Zoom,” she said. “But people miss the ability to walk the site to sort of see the neighborhood context to experience development from the ground up.”

And Lachiusa noted the time devoted to meetings can also add up to fatigue.

“How we've been doing engagement so far requires people to just show up to a lot of meetings in order to help shape your neighborhood and be an active community member,” she said. “I hear constantly that people are showing up to two, three, four nights of meetings per week, every week for months and months throughout the year. And even the people who can spend the time doing that don't always want to spend all their time doing this.”

According to Monani, there would also be a change in the texture of engagement, at times approaching the granular mode of crowdsourcing, with more reliance on smaller groups and surveys – not unlike the ongoing process for the Article 80 modernization plan.

“So I think the first thing we want people to sort of do is really engage robustly in the planning process because that's where a lot of the decision-making is happening,” she explained, “and we want to make sure that we get their voices in upstream.”

Monani said the Planning Department will issue draft recommendations for the modernization later this month, followed by 60 days for public comment, with final recommendations expected in 2025.

“We will have to continue to think about what are the CATs, how are they composed, who gets to nominate people into them,” she noted. “We'll have to think about what does standardizing mitigation actually mean, what is the right number for transportation, for open space, who gets to be part of making these decisions, and when in the process are they made?”

Planning Department officials have also called for ways to make sure that community benefits in areas with the most projects can be shared with other parts of the city. This would extend the principle of linkage, adopted more than forty years ago to fund affordable housing and job training, and already reflected in the city’s “inclusionary development policy.” Under the new interaction between the community and city planners, the tie between a particular project and broad policy objectives – whether regarding displacement or climate change – would be more explicit.

When the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was established in 1957, the fusion of planning and development regulation was confined to selected areas, mostly in or close to downtown Boston. In later decades, the planning role would be extended to other parts of the city, at times with involvement of the BRA or its successor, usually in areas with expectations for more transformative development.

City agencies shaped “community development” in other ways, such as planning the use of federal block grants or drafting strategic proposal requests when disposing of city-owned property. Neighborhood feedback was also used to guide projects by the city’s nonprofit community development corporations. In contrast with the give-and-take over a project at a community meeting, engagement over planning was more exploratory.

Though Wu’s reform effort draws on work under previous mayors, it differs in how it casts planning – for the whole city – -as a centralized mission. In an interview after the latest feedback report, Monani agreed that converting a targeted specialty of the quasi-independent BRA into a citywide job for a line department amounted to a paradigm shift.

“It's a very symbolic shift,” she said, “but it's also a meaningful one because the work that's being done within our planning department now is reflective of that change at all levels. We are tackling zoning reform across a number of different neighborhoods, in a way that is unprecedented throughout the history of this agency.”

In “Constructing Community,” a book published three years ago about development and community engagement along the Fairmount Indigo Corridor, Jeremy Levine described how outcomes could be adversely affected by a lack of advance planning and transparency on the part of the city. In the case of the long path to development of the Indigo Block near Uphams Corner Station, completed in 2021, the book shows the power of grassroots sentiment when unified in opposition to a particular property use, as well as the difficulty of reaching consensus about what a community actually favored.

Levine also described how what formally registers as the community can hinge on engagement by stakeholders pursuing agendas that rely on support from the public, private, or nonprofit sector. Thanks to the federal “War on Poverty” and the later requirements for community reinvestment by lenders, the partnership realm — and its mixed motives — has come to play a larger role in development. And, as the recent survey shows, neighborhood residents have their own mixed expectations for the city’s role, whether as a neutral process facilitator or advocate for a planning agenda.

Though Levine favored having more community input, even conflicting input, he acknowledged there would still be questions about what qualified as “authentic” community and how legitimately it could be formalized through organizations. His conclusion: “Community development is as much about the political construction of legitimacy and authenticity as it is about the physical construction of buildings.”