"BRA cuts deals at expense of affordable housing" by Sean P. Murphy | Globe Staff, December 22, 2013
Boston Redevelopment Authority board members “didn’t have a clue” that they were giving a secret benefit to a friend of Mayor Thomas M. Menino when they approved construction of luxury housing near Boston Common, admits board member Paul Foster.
Foster and his colleagues, who oversee the most powerful government agency in the city, simply did what they almost always do: They unanimously approved the BRA staff recommendation. Their 2011 vote for the upscale residences at Millennium Place was one in a string of 1,492 consecutive board votes unanimously supporting whatever the staff said — almost always with no discussion or questions.
In the three minutes they took to approve Millennium Place, board members didn’t discover that the staff had quietly tucked a potential $5.9 million discount on development fees into the deal with Anthony Pangaro, the longtime Menino campaign contributor who represented Millennium. The fees are earmarked to help build affordable housing in a city that sorely needs it.
“It was not shown to anyone on the board to my knowledge,” Foster said after a reporter pointed out to him the fine print in BRA documents outlining the break for Millennium. “I never got a briefing.”
No government agency outside of the Menino administration has been watching the Boston Redevelopment Authority for years — not the state, not the City Council, not even the BRA’s own board — leaving agency staffers free to cut deals with certain developers while charging others extra, and to spend the fees collected from developers as they see fit.
A four-month Boston Globe investigation has found that the BRA has allowed at least four other developers breaks on affordable housing fees valued at a combined $3.4 million without disclosing them publicly — and without offering similar discounts to other developers.
Meanwhile, the BRA has diverted at least $6 million from housing fees it has already collected for unrelated purposes such as a new health clinic. The staff approved diverting another $4.5 million for a community facility and a new public street.
It's what we call a $lu$h fund.
So far, the BRA has spent just $18 million on affordable housing since Menino established the housing program in 2000, less than a quarter of the $75 million the agency should have collected if the BRA had consistently followed the rules, the Globe found. The rest either has not been collected, was diverted to other purposes, or languishes in a BRA account.
“It looks like they left a lot of money on the table,” said Ezra Glenn, an urban studies lecturer at Masschusetts Institute of Technology, after reviewing a Globe analysis of the BRA fee discounts for certain developers.
“They may want to reconsider the way they do it,” added MIT professor Albert Saiz.
BRA officials say they charged Millennium the lower fee because they were initially unsure whether the project would consist of condos or apartments, which are charged at a lower rate. But they didn’t say why the deal did not include standard language requiring Pangaro to pay more when he decided to build 265 condos averaging $1 million each — or why the staff didn’t point out the potential discount in their report to the board.
Is that affordable for you?
BRA officials also struggled to explain how they decide who gets the money from the housing fund, acknowledging that at least $6 million has gone toward BRA salaries, a conference, and purposes other than affordable housing.
“It’s not like we’re taking money and putting it in some kitty, one of our funds or something,” said Peter Meade, a Menino loyalist who came out of retirement in 2011 to run the BRA. He argued that even the money spent on BRA salaries was housing-related.
Frikkin' $hamele$$!
That’s little help to housing advocates who say they’ve struggled for years to get information out of the BRA on how to tap into the fund to build inexpensive homes.
“There is no open, public bidding process for getting that money for affordable housing projects,” said Lydia Lowe of the Chinese Progressive Association. “You have to be on the inside to even know about it.”
Meaning you have to have connections.
Menino, who declined to be interviewed for this article, apparently has had concerns about the BRA’s performance as well....
Well, he's out, Walsh in. So what took so long, Tom? You been there 20 years!
“We used every nickel and dime of that money to leverage new affordable housing units,” said Evelyn Friedman, who oversaw the Neighborhood Development housing program until last year. “The mayor was adamant that he wanted affordable housing units mixed in the downtown high-rises because he wanted diversity of income, not a downtown with only all high-income people.”
Related: Building Boston Up
"Fort Point was once home to hundreds of artists, most of whom moved into abandoned factory buildings in the 1970s and 1980s. But over the past two decades, many artists, along with such cooperative groups as Mobius and The Revolving Museum, were forced to move to less expensive spaces in East Boston or Lowell by rising real estate prices and new developments. The sale, which hinges on some fund-raising by the residents, would mark a rare victory for Boston artists, many of whom have been displaced by climbing real estate prices and rents over the years."
I'll be tearing it down soon.
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Menino in control
The physical transformation of Boston may well be the enduring legacy of Menino’s record 20-year watch, including the birth of an entirely new neighborhood in South Boston’s Seaport District, thousands of new construction jobs, and a population that has reached its highest level since the 1970s.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: Fallon's Friend
I'll give you one gue$$ who it is.
But the BRA may be squandering the opportunity created by the historic boom to channel residential development to where it is needed most — toward middle-income Bostonians who have watched the cost of living rise twice as fast as their earnings since 2005, according to a recent Northeastern University study.
In a city where the average household income is about $49,000, almost 60 percent of the housing units approved by the BRA in 2011 were “luxury” properties far out of reach to the vast majority of residents, based on a review of BRA-approved projects....
I keep telling you and telling you that government serves money, and here it i$ again!
In November, Boston voters chose a BRA critic in Mayor-elect Martin Walsh, who during the campaign proposed overhauling the agency to make it more publicly accountable, giving the City Council oversight of its operations and finances. He has recently said serious reforms of the agency will wait to at least the second half of 2014....
Currently, the BRA is accountable to no one except the mayor....
The five BRA board members are supposed to provide a public check on the BRA, but none have professional expertise in development, and they do little more than rubber-stamp deals that were negotiated privately, records show....
I love unqualified people on an important board, don't you?
A unanimous voice
Led until recently by an 80-year-old community activist, Clarence “Jeep” Jones, board members generally meet once a month in return for a $10,000 annual stipend and a coveted City Hall parking space, swiftly approving one project after another regardless of what people say in opposition.
Pretty good work, huh!?
See: Globe Costs Lisa Saunders a Parking Spot
Too bad she didn't $tuff her bra.
For instance, when Mark Kerwin of the Museum of Fine Arts came before the board in September, alarmed that an office tower proposed by nearby Wentworth Institute of Technology would seasonally cast a shadow over the museum’s main entrance, Jones cut Kerwin off after his allotted two minutes to speak were up.
“Questions?” he then asked fellow board members.
As usual, there were none. Less than a minute later, they voted unanimously to approve the 18-story tower, brushing aside Kerwin’s request for a study of whether it would diminish one of Boston’s iconic sculptures, “Appeal to the Great Spirit,” the Native American on horseback that has greeted museum visitors for generations.
BRA board members appear not to have much of a behind-the-scenes role either: Their official e-mail accounts, reviewed by the Globe, contain almost no discussion of BRA business — or anything else.
Foster, the board’s vice chairman, acknowledges that the board is passive, but he said that is because the BRA staff does its job so well, often working with developers over months or even years to resolve neighborhood concerns....
“By the time it comes to us, it’s all vetted. The community has had its say,” said Foster....
The BRA staff, led by MIT-trained planner Kairos Shen, is respected for its competence, and it follows a policy of not allowing projects to come before the board until all major issues have been addressed, including those raised at community meetings. Meade said it is not uncommon to pull projects off the board agenda at the last minute when new issues crop up.
But the staff works under exceptionally close supervision from Menino, whose aides regularly sit in on meetings with BRA staffers and who in the past has been involved in selecting architectural details such as the design for the top of a skyscraper. And there is little question where BRA staff loyalties lie: 25 of the 44 top-paid employees are Menino campaign contributors, campaign finance records show.
But he's had concerns it isn't transparent enough, right!
Menino has said criticisms about his micromanaging of development “make me crazy,” but he has poked fun at himself for his outsized role. In a memorable 2011 video spoof, Menino played the role of godfather Vito Corleone advising disappointed developer Don Chiofaro how to win approval for a waterfront office tower, something that eluded Chiofaro during years of clashes with the mayor.
“Why did you go to the BRA?” Menino asks Chiofaro, stroking a stuffed cat for effect. “Why didn’t you come to me first?”
It was funny, but it contained an essential truth developers figured out years ago, which is why senior BRA staff would sometimes learn about new projects when they were summoned to Menino’s fifth-floor office at City Hall and found the developer already sitting there. Developers even coined a verb, to be “Chiofaro-ed,” meaning to turn the mayor against your project.
Meanwhile, Menino insiders such as his close friend Henry Kara, his campaign treasurer Harry Collings, and James Greene, whose wife is a paid political consultant to the mayor, all have emerged as major figures representing developers before the BRA during the Menino years....
Maybe it is a good thing he is going.
But by 2011, the affordable housing program had strayed from its original intention in ways Menino himself may not have fully understood. That April, the city issued a press release boasting that the city had created thousands of affordable homes, the result of Menino making housing “a priority within all city agencies.”
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But the project Menino chose to highlight — luxury apartments at 1330 Boylston — actually raises questions about the program’s integrity.
Not with me; my que$tions were an$wered long ago.
The nearly $3 million in fees paid by developer Steven Samuels, another Menino campaign supporter, didn’t go toward housing at all: In 2006, the money went into a gleaming new health center in the Fenway, where Collings once worked.
Collings, now a consultant to developers but then the BRA’s executive director/secretary, acknowledged that the affordable housing fund was specifically set up to provide housing. But he argued that Fenway residents were eager for a state-of-the-art health center.
So who is living there?
“The community brought it up,” said Collings, who prior to joining the BRA had been the long-time development and public relations director at the Fenway Community Health Center, which received the money. “It’s what they wanted.”
In fact, the Community Development Corp. in the Fenway, a group that normally backs affordable housing projects, did go along with the money going to the center, which was the subject of a city zoning commission hearing.
However, some BRA staffers say they suspected the expenditure was probably improper at the time. They surmised that the Fenway funding “came out of the McCann playbook,” a reference to former BRA official Paul McCann, who had a reputation for bending agency rules and eventually got in trouble for collecting a pension and a BRA consulting salary at the same time....
See: How Big is Your BRA, Boston?
The multimillion-dollar fee discount for Millennium Place hinged on an apparent loophole in the housing program....
It's beyond bu$ine$$ as usual
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Also see: Mayor Menino’s two-woman team
His time is over. What about the new guy?
"Martin Walsh says Southie parade should be inclusive" by Wesley Lowery | Globe Staff, December 15, 2013
Mayor-elect Martin J. Walsh’s remarks also included criticism of a front-page story in the Globe on Friday, which said that the mayor-elect, during remarks to business leaders Thursday, had backtracked on a campaign promise to massively overhaul the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
“The Boston Globe didn’t get the story quite accurate,” Walsh said, prompting murmurs from the gathering. “Which leads me to, don’t believe everything that you read in the paper.”
(Blog editor smiles. I don't believe anything I read in the paper)
In an interview later in the day, a Walsh spokeswoman said the incoming mayor objected to the story’s characterization that he was “backpedaling” from a campaign proposal to launch a major overhaul of the BRA in early 2014.
Walsh had said during the Thursday luncheon that he intends to make some immediate adjustments to the BRA, but that he plans to keep the basic agency structure in place for the first six months of his term, to facilitate review of development proposals now in the pipeline.
During the campaign, Walsh was by far the most aggressive candidate in calling for major changes at the BRA, including separating its planning and development functions.
Since the election, he has been more measured in his public comments about the agency.
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I'll let you read it for yourself:
"Walsh eases talk of a BRA overhaul" by Casey Ross and Taryn Luna | Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent, December 13, 2013
Mayor-elect Martin J. Walsh is backpedaling from one of his most prominent campaign promises, telling business leaders Thursday that he is in no hurry to restructure the powerful city agency that has approved a burst of development in recent years.
During his campaign for mayor, Walsh said the Boston Redevelopment Authority needed an urgent overhaul, pledging to “in early 2014” replace it with a new economic development entity that would be more transparent and responsive to residents and businesses.
But he acknowledged Thursday that the proposal rankled many developers and business leaders, and he sought to reassure them that any changes would not disrupt the building boom that is transforming much of the city’s downtown and outlying neighborhoods.
So much for the good Democrat from labor.
“If there’s going to be changes, they are going to be well thought out, and it’s going to be a collaboration with the business community to make sure that people feel comfortable,” he said. “There’s no way that I want to discourage development.”
In other words, nothing is going to change at the BRA.
Throughout his remarks at the Boston Harbor Hotel, Walsh adopted the posture of an incoming mayor who is still trying to find his footing, instead of the confident candidate who months earlier had articulated a 14-point plan that would overhaul the BRA while spurring economic growth....
Walsh’s step back from dismantling the agency prompted relief from real estate executives....
“Why toy with the goose that appears to be laying a series of golden eggs?” said Jonathan Davis, a developer and chief executive of the Davis Cos.....
Not everyone agrees....
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Related: Project near TD Garden gets $7.8m in tax aid
Consider it a going away pre$ent.
