29-01-2025
Wu trying to make the world a better place for people who love glass towers
The new plan is now on a fast track to approval — all in the name of creating more housing.
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'Nobody knew this was coming. Nobody had seen it before January and now they're saying you've got a month to approve it,' said Anthony Pangaro, one of the developers of Millennium Tower and now a resident of the area. 'This isn't planning. This is the very opposite of planning.'
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He isn't alone in opposing the 'up-zoning' plan that was the topic of the BPDA's only public meeting earlier this month — a
Pangaro, who knows a little something about building high rises and housing, said units in a new high rise in the Ladder District would cost at least $1,000 a square foot to build and would need to sell for at least $2,000 a square foot.
'They are very expensive to build, so you get luxury housing,' he said. 'There are more cost effective ways to build [housing].'
One example is
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Boston is no stranger to skyscrapers, even in the Downtown Crossing area, where the 60-story Millennium Tower — built in what
But since 2018, city planners and community leaders had been working on a plan for the other side of Washington Street that extended through those 'ladder' streets to Boston Common — a preservation district where buildings would be capped at 155 feet. Then came COVID-19 and the Wu administration — first with Arthur Jemison heading the BPDA.
Jemison left in mid-September. Kairos Shen returned to the BPDA in October to become the city's chief of planning after a stint at MIT. And,
voila
, a new more encompassing plan — running from the western side of Washington Street to the Common and Public Garden, from School Street and running along Stuart Street to Arlington Street.
The new plan would allow buildings of up to 500 feet in much of that corridor, but only if they are 60 percent or more residential.
Those who were part of the planning process over the past several years are feeling blindsided.
'What this amendment tells me is that you have not taken anything that we have said over these last years into account,' Martha McNamara, board chair of Revolutionary Spaces, which oversees the operations of the Old State House and Old South Meeting House, said during the Zoom meeting.
'The plan that Shen unveiled was completely different,' Pangaro said, 'and now it affects thousands of people. It's a very one-dimensional plan — essentially it says you build towers and you solve the housing problem. … The old plan was about preservation, renovation, and protection of the parks.'
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As of last April that much smaller zone would have established a 155-foot height limit in the Ladder District and Washington Street, with an exception for a 23-story building proposed for the old and long vacant City Sports site on Bromfield Street.
Shen told the virtual meeting that the proposal was actually a 'kind of compromise.'
Well, kind of is right.
That former low-rise zone is now bifurcated — lower buildings closer to the Common but the potential for 50-story ones on or nearer to Washington Street. It would also allow those hideous pencil buildings that now dot the Manhattan skyline.
There is another way to create housing, and New York City seems to have found it with its
What is astonishing is that Wu, who fought to bring the BPDA under her control and who as a city councilor fought for greater transparency in its workings, would then use it to produce a plan that makes the world a better place for people who love to live in glass towers.
Rachelle G. Cohen is a Globe opinion writer. She can be reached at
