Columnists :: City Streets
The BRA shapes our city without us by Shirley Kressel
contributing writerThursday Jul 17, 2008 In my last column, I reviewed some of the ways the Boston Redevelopment Authority takes money from all of us. Now, let’s turn to some of the BRA’s impacts on development, planning and public policy.
The BRA, created in 1957, used stealth legislation to eliminate our Planning Board in 1960, elbowing the City Council, our legislative branch, out of its rightful role in planning and land use regulation. It has since taken over many other Council roles, depriving us of essential checks and balances.
The BRA uses its planning/zoning role and its urban renewal powers to make what is illegal, legal. The BRA confers enormous wealth on favored developers with its loophole-laden zoning code, shielding them from lawsuits for violating laws meant to protect the community. Politicians can make private deals with developers, drawing campaign contributions that keep them in office. The BRA conducts the "public process" of review and approval and absorbs the helpless wrath of citizens, while the officials remain insulated from public retribution.
The BRA’s "four finagles," as I call them, are:
- Planned Development Areas (PDA), projects of an acre or more;
- Chapter 121A agreements granting tax breaks, zoning relief, and eminent domain power, for sites the BRA declares "blighted" (in Boston, City Council is cut out of 121A review);
- U-Districts, within the BRA’s 3,000 acres of original Urban Renewal Plan areas and constantly added "Demonstration Project" areas, where the BRA conveys land to a developer; and
- Institutional Master Plans (IMP) of expanding tax-exempt institutions.
In these self-zoning districts, development rules are simply negotiated with the BRA. But such relief is illegal. It violates the Boston Zoning Enabling Act, which gives the power of zoning relief only to the Zoning Board of Appeal, whose process provides legal recourse: aggrieved parties can sue. Thus, the BRA, having disarmed the legislative branch, has also largely deprived us of the judicial branch, leaving the "three-legged stool" of democratic government standing on the executive alone.
No neighborhood is protected from the BRA’s magical self-zoning wand, given its liberal criteria - although the BRA routinely violates even these. Even a project with only a half-acre of land has been made a PDA, by counting nearby streets and sidewalks. Abracadabra!
Even when the zoning code included provisions that the BRA’s own lawyers warned cannot be changed by a PDA, it used a PDA designation (indeed, the half-acre one) to remove the code protection of the historic Gaiety Theatre and destroyed it for an unlawful tower. Hocus pocus!
Even where the code prohibits PDAs altogether, the BRA simply gets the puppet Zoning Commission to delete the prohibition when it approves a PDA. The tower replacing Filene’s in Downtown Crossing was legalized this way. The Columbus Center project was given a PDA, when, as a Turnpike air rights area, it is not even subject to city zoning. The BRA’s project manager on the Columbus Center wrote in a memo in 2003 to the several local neighborhood associations: "PDAs are not permitted in the Bay Village Neighborhood District, the Open Space Urban Plaza subdistrict of the South End Neighborhood District, or the portion of the Downtown IPOD that includes the Site. Text Amendment No. [blank], submitted by the BRA for approval immediately prior to approval of the PDA Plan, would make such provisions inapplicable to the Site." Presto!
The BRA granted a 121A to Two Financial Center, a tower proposed in the booming historic Leather District. Residents sued and lost: the BRA, the court said, may declare blight at its discretion. That developer’s revised proposal for a still over-sized building stated that if the community opposed a variance, he would take the 121A and not only over-build but take the tax exemption as well. Loew’s (now W) Hotel near the Theatre District got a U-District when the BRA seized a few square feet of land near the site and conveyed it to the developer. Shazam!
Coming up: the redevelopment of the Government Center Garage. It’s big enough for a PDA, but the BRA owns the adjacent parcel. By adding it to the project, it can make a U-District, become an equity partner, and profit by approving the biggest possible building. A 121A is also possible, and would leave more money in the developer’s budget for the BRA’s lease fee.
Institutional Master Plans are by used all colleges and health care facilities. With their unfettered expansion, residential buildings become student dorms, neighborhood-serving retail disappears, neighborhoods are destabilized, voting power diminishes, families move out. And the tax burden of their exempted property is shifted to the rest of us.
The BRA owns hundreds of acres of land rights, where it simply writes it own rules, an egregious conflict of interest the Boston Globe editorialized about on April 6, 1999, "On top of South Station?": "The BRA ought to be the watchdog for the project, but it owns the air rights over the station and stands to gain a fortune in lease payments..." It is a profit-seeking - and unfairly advantaged --competitor in the real estate market. It tilts the playing field with cronyism in developer designations (it is exempt from competitive bidding laws), encourages (and engages in) speculation, permits development that hurts our environment and quality of life, causes an artificial land scarcity, and drives up land costs, driving up housing and business costs.
These few examples barely scratch the surface; the BRA’s zoning shenanigans could (and should) fill a book.
Meanwhile, for a half-century, we, in the cradle of democracy, have been without a planning entity that cares about anything besides the profits of big developers (including itself). Its social mission remains to remake Boston for better people. Its political mission as an "ethics laundry" remains as well: to do the dirty work while keeping politicians’ hands clean.
Accountable only to its own board, dissolvable only by its own hand, and apparently out of reach of the ethics commission or any law enforcement agency, the BRA is "da bums" we can’t "t’row out."
Shirley Kressel is a landscape architect and urban designer, and one of the founders of the Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods. She can be reached at Shirley.Kressel@verizon.net.
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