Where’s an urban mechanic for downtown Boston?
Of course Boston’s downtown should be a 24-hour neighborhood. Who wouldn’t want that? So the Wu administration’s new plan for a revitalized downtown is absolutely on the right track.
But getting from Point A to Point B — from the current collection of half-vacant office towers in the Financial District to a city shining with new possibilities and new life — needs to be about more than lofty promises. It needs to be about a collection of small but essential improvements and services.
It needs to be about the art of the do-able, a return to what earned Mayor Michelle Wu’s early mentor, the late Mayor Tom Menino, the title of Boston’s Urban Mechanic.
The report, done for the city by the Boston Consulting Group and released on Thursday, certainly provides some much-needed truth telling about the state of the city’s core business district and its slow recovery from the pandemic.
“Demand for office and retail space remains to be seen; while rents reached 5-year highs pre-pandemic, vacancy rates are rising, and office occupancy remains at 30 percent” of prepandemic levels, the report notes.
So, yes, the district — defined in the report to include the North Station area and the land around Massachusetts General Hospital in addition to Downtown Crossing and the Financial District — needs help and a new vision fitting new work patterns that are unlikely to return to those prepandemic days of bustling offices and bustling streets. And before we romanticize those, let’s not forget that those 9-to-5ers didn’t create a 24-hour neighborhood either.
“We don’t intend to return to the way things were before the pandemic, but to instead push beyond the status quo and realize a new, more equitable, more exciting future for downtown Boston,” the report said, and that’s a good thing.
But the big vision part — the potential for conversion of underutilized office space into much-needed new residential offerings — remains long term and exceedingly difficult.
The design firm Gensler, which has studied the possibility of such conversions around the country, looked at 84 office buildings in downtown Boston and found only 10 viable for such conversions — assuming their owners would be interested in making that investment.
Now that’s not nothing — and certainly worth the city’s efforts to promote the idea and to do what it can to make the permitting as easy as possible. (Maybe ditch those parking requirements.)
But there are smaller proposals that would bring life to empty storefronts and more foot traffic. Segun Idowu, Wu’s chief of economic opportunity and inclusion, cited a $9 million pocket of federal recovery money set aside by the city to provide rent subsidies to retail businesses across the city. It will launch in December and could provide a boost to an estimated 60 businesses for a three-year period.
Some of those subsidies could well be targeted to attract new local enterprises to a “reimagined” Faneuil Hall, as the report notes, “to create a more authentic connection between Boston’s history, culture, and the business offerings at the property.” The property’s current landlord, Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp., operating under a long-term lease from the city, has long been criticized for turning a major tourist attraction into just another outdoor shopping mall of national chain stores. It seems unlikely a few more local shops will turn the area into anything like Chicago’s Navy Pier, an example of a wildly successful operation cited in the report, but that’s not to say the pier wouldn’t be a good role model. It also assumes the city could get tougher with the property’s steward.
Tourists are an important part of the downtown landscape and always have been. As the report notes, the downtown is home to at least a dozen of the city’s top 100 tourist attractions, including historic sites, and yet there too traffic is down. An all-inclusive cultural or tourism pass — with an appropriate marketing budget — is proposed as a possible solution. Sure, why not?
There are a number of ideas that definitely fall into the urban mechanic mold — better sidewalks, for example. How difficult is that? The city should simply bring some up to a decent state of repair and widen others. Bike lanes that could actually get people all the way to their offices or shops or restaurants in the downtown would help too.
But the report did not deal with the one thing without which none of this works — public safety. Downtown needs safe streets and traffic control for bikers, better lighting and foot patrols so pedestrians feel safe day and night, and programming that provides better overnight options for the homeless than storefront doorways.
Good public policy is always a combination of the visionary and the do-able. It’s also a matter of knowing the difference between the two. Right now downtown needs a solid dose of the art of the possible, while it works toward those loftier goals.
But getting from Point A to Point B needs to be about more than lofty promises. It needs to be about a collection of small but essential improvements and services.