Ray Flynn knows what Mayor Wu is going through. He has advice.
Michelle Wu’s success or failure as mayor won’t depend on how much face time she gives to various members of the Boston business community, or whose phone calls she returns — but on her ability to stick with what she believes in and build the coalitions necessary to turn her progressive promises into progressive policies.
Take it from Ray Flynn — the last Boston mayor to terrify the downtown real estate and development community with a populist agenda that critics said would kill the city’s economy.
Flynn did not schmooze with developers and, in fact, did not take contributions from developers with projects before the city. When he was elected in 1983, many in that crowd considered his commitment to wealth redistribution — what he calls “values” — a major threat to their ability to profit from the city’s emerging skyline. Yet at a time when Boston was much less prosperous than it is today, and “woke” meant not asleep, Flynn was able to achieve significant success in the areas of rent control and linkage, which requires commercial developers to set aside money for affordable housing and job training.
How? “You listen to (business leaders). You hear what they say, you’re respectful, you thank them,” Flynn told me. Then, he said, you do what you think is best for Boston.
During his nine years as mayor, there was another important piece to Flynn’s success. “Ray Flynn thought like a community organizer,” Peter Dreier, Flynn’s housing adviser who is now a professor of politics at Occidental College, told me. “Every battle for a policy was a campaign.”
Flynn had his band of “Sandinistas” — the nickname bestowed upon his left-leaning loyalists by then City Councilor Mike McCormack. (I can still hear Flynn’s chief political aide, the late Ray Dooley, complaining that the nickname was misguided because of the human rights abuses that were carried out in Nicaragua at that time under the leadership of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.) But call them what you will, these activists did see themselves as agents of economic and social revolution. “We ran against city government, corporate leadership, and developers,” said Neil Sullivan, another key Flynn aide who now heads the Boston Private Industry Council. However, once they became part of city government they realized, “If we didn’t constructively engage corporate leadership, we could not deliver,” Sullivan said in an interview.
But engaging with corporate leadership didn’t mean Flynn was hobnobbing with its representatives. He left that to others, Sullivan said. Through the network of activists who were now working inside the administration, Flynn kept the faith with tenant rights groups, unions, and other progressive community organizations that knew how to wage powerful grass-roots campaigns. But within the administration, Flynn also had key people like Steve Coyle, the head of the old Boston Redevelopment Authority, who was highly respected in the business community.
Beyond City Hall, Flynn had allies like Sam Tyler, the longtime head of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, a businessbacked group that got behind the mayor’s efforts to stabilize the city’s tenuous fiscal situation. One of Flynn’s key accomplishments was to win approval for two local option revenue sources — a jet fuel excise tax and a hotel room occupancy tax — marking the first time the governor and Legislature approved new revenue sources for municipalities beyond the property tax and motor vehicle excise tax, Tyler said. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens via highly organized political organization.
Flynn was a popular mayor who knew how to use the power that came with voter approval. Dreier recalls a meeting at the Francis Parkman House where
Take it from Ray Flynn — the last Boston mayor to terrify the downtown real estate and development community with a populist agenda that critics said would kill the city’s economy.
the mayor told an assembled group of bankers, “‘I can be your best friend or your worst enemy.’ I don’t think they had ever been spoken to like that by a politician. He was very blunt.”
Today Boston is a different place. The small but powerful cadre of bankers and insurance executives who once controlled the debate over fiscal policy is long gone. If there’s a constant, it’s the same old argument that rent control and affordable housing requirements will stifle growth. It didn’t then, and it won’t now. To press that argument, Wu needs the same tools as Flynn.
She needs continued support from the grass-roots activists who believed in her campaign for mayor. She needs allies in the business community who are willing to publicly dismiss the propaganda that progressive policies are bad for business. She also needs allies in the Legislature who will back her plan to reinstate rent control and to reorganize the city’s planning structure.
And then, there’s one more thing. Social niceties can’t hurt and they can help.
“I did return the phone calls,” Flynn said. “I was never afraid to tell them what I believed in, what I thought was in the best interests of the city.”
You may not get their vote, Flynn said. But with that conversation, you can hope to get their respect.