Columnists :: City Streets
The Greenway’s shadow governments by Shirley Kressel
contributing writerWednesday Apr 8, 2009 Code Green: the Greenway, that expensive shred of "common ground" cut from the tattered cloth of the Big Dig, is in grave danger. First, it was leased to the private Greenway Conservancy. Now it is in the crosshairs of the quasi-public Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). Between the two, the park’s social and environmental potential will be lost, and it will become, simply, real estate.
A few months ago, Mayor Tom Menino announced that he wanted to protect the Greenway from development that would overshadow and "canyonize" it, and that the BRA had already begun planning for a new "Greenway District." The first public meeting, on Feb. 17, was a vague discussion about criteria and principles by Kairos Shen, the BRA’s Planning Director, appointed by the mayor. But the March 18 meeting was more revealing.
Someone asked about "activation" of the park. Mr. Shen answered that the BRA may have to make "trade-offs," allowing bigger buildings along the Greenway to bring people to the open space. The reality is that corporate towers and occasionally occupied seventh-home sky-condos, urban renewal’s failed recipe for 24/7 vibrancy, are not going to make a more lively street life. The BRA is using the public’s yearning for a rich, diverse urban social environment as an excuse for a real estate coup.
The BRA discussed the huge increase in private property values that would result from the newly landscaped corridor, and how we might capture it for the benefit of the park. This typically leads to an argument that we have to let developers build taller towers so that they can afford to make some contributions to our amenities. The "value capture" model is what eventually led the state to lease the Greenway, for free, to the private group of business interests called the Greenway Conservancy, and, as it turns out, to pay them millions of public dollars to take care of it with private dollars.
One suspicious resident asked point-blank, "What about the zoning already existing in this area?" Mr. Shen stated that the consultants would not be bound by such an obstacle, and that their mandate is to "start from the asset," the park, and to recommend what we should do now, as if there were no existing zoning laws. He stated that he could not predict if that would mean an increase in height or a decrease. I think we can guess.
Another citizen asked how this plan would deal with the state law recently proposed by state Representatives Marty Walz and Byron Rushing to limit shadows on the Greenway, as the Boston Common and Public Garden were protected. Mr. Shen took the position that the state should not be making our city planning decisions, which belong right here in the hands of...well, of his quasi-private Redevelopment Authority.
Mr. Shen also assured us that the private developers and the BRA would be "partners," not adversaries, in this endeavor. This is not comforting. The BRA is already likely to partner, financially, with Raymond Properties, which plans to build its 700-foot tower on a land near the Greenway that is, or will be, under BRA control. A partnership with the BRA, the city’s development regulator, guarantees permitting for maximum profit.
One audience member asked for a sense of the vision that would be guiding the district development. Mr. Shen informed the group that "vision" was beyond the consultant’s scope and budget. I think the questioner was wondering if it was within the Planning Director’s job description.
In my remarks, I summarized what I had learned in 15 years of participating in BRA planning processes: #1) the only purpose for any BRA planning endeavor is to create a rationale allowing developers to build even higher towers than they could using existing BRA zoning loopholes; and #2) the only purpose for these public meetings was to use innocent citizens, thinking they are providing "input," to legitimize #1. My message - to the citizens, not to the BRA, which already knows - was that the outcome would be to capture public value for private parties and not the reverse, rewarding with higher investment returns those skygrabbers who turn the Greenway into a canyon.
And I asserted that the Greenway Conservancy, which lauded the BRA’s undertaking at the public meeting, is effectively an arm of the Artery Business Committee. It is chaired by the managing director of a public relations firm representing Raymond Properties, as well as the New Center for Arts & Culture proposed for a Greenway road-ramp parcel. The Conservancy welcomed the tower replacing the historic Dainty Dot building at the Chinatown section of the Greenway, and the developer’s promised contribution for park maintenance. A Conservancy member who was working for the nearby Russia Wharf tower developer at the time of the project’s Zoning Commission hearing won approval by testifying that it would have no environmental impacts; the commissioners dismissed my comment (reflected also in the record of written comments by others) about the tower’s park shadows, saying that if the park were threatened, the Conservancy would have been there to defend it.
The Rose Kennedy Greenway: Sunny open space or shadowy canyon? We’ll have a pretty good idea at the May public meeting.
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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