Boston revamps building guidelines

Can Boston spur new development and economic activity in its struggling downtown while preserving its historic character? A new plan from the Boston Planning and Development Agency aims to do just that by streamlining a mishmash of building height restrictions, highlighting areas best suited for new development, updating design and architecture guidelines, and suggesting ways to re-energize public spaces left quiet after the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposal, still in draft form, culminates a five-year planning process known as PLAN: Downtown. Its release comes as downtown faces challenges unforeseen in 2018, when the process was launched. The pandemic and its aftermath have reshaped how and where people work, cutting the population of commuters coming into the city, increasing vacancy rates in office buildings, and shuttering retail and service businesses that catered to downtown workers. City leaders are pursuing several approaches to revitalize the central business district, including offering tax breaks to developers who convert empty offices to housing. The PLAN: Downtown report doesn’t explicitly lay out strategies for revival, but rather offers proposals that would guide what downtown will look like in the future, and how it might evolve. Preserving existing historic structures while maximizing growth in the city’s economic core is at the heart of PLAN: Downtown, said Andrew Nahmias, a senior planner with the BPDA. But historic preservation advocates already are pushing back at the plan. They say proposed height allowances for future projects would intensify wind and rain tunnel effects that have already damaged the Old State House, which sits on a corridor of Colonial-era properties along Washington Street. “Unless we want our iconic buildings to be continually covered in scaffolding and boarded up because masonry is crumbling off them, then we have to take action,” said Martha McNamara, board chair of Revolutionary Spaces — the steward of both the Old South Meeting House and the Old State House — and an architectural historian at Wellesley College specializing in 18th- and 19th-century New England. The plan highlights five “character areas” — Downtown Crossing and the Ladder Blocks, the Wharf District, the Financial District, the Theater District, and Chinatown — and broadly outlines areas for growth and the city’s priorities for each zone. Chinatown, meanwhile, will have its own cultural plan — crafted by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture — as well as its own future zoning study. — CATHERINE CARLOCK