BOSTON — WHITHER GOEST THOU

BOSTON — WHITHER GOEST THOU?

Lawrence S. DiCara

Given that I have two Harvard degrees and have been involved in various ways in the real estate business for my entire professional career, I think addressing the Harvard Real Estate Alumni Organization provides me with an appropriate opportunity to reflect upon some history, suggest some issues of concern, some of which I have surfaced previously and then engage in a dialogue concerning our future.

Long before I was in public office, John B. Hynes was Mayor of Boston. Over 60 years ago, he gave a major address at what was the first of many Boston College Citizen Seminars. It was entitled “Boston — Whither Goest Thou?” As Prof. O’Connor reports, these seminars provided a valuable forum for the public discussion of many of Boston’s most pressing problems. On October 26, 1954, Hynes laid out a remarkable vision of a completely transformed and modernized “New Boston.” It was a very formal speech, which predicted to some extent the city that we have become. Hynes was a homegrown product, trained as a lawyer at Suffolk Law School, a career city employee and the city clerk before he became acting mayor when Curley went to jail in 1947. He was thorough and businesslike.

Boston was not enjoying good times in the 1950s. First of all, following the passage of the GI bill and the resulting VA mortgages, large numbers of our most productive young citizens took advantage of those benefits that they accrued as veterans of World War II and moved out of the city. Second, federal policy called for clearing slums and encouraged the building of elevated highways, and we did both. Third, Boston’s finances were in crisis as they were until some significant shrinking of city government during the Kevin White era.

Boston was a 9–5 city; men who worked downtown wore hats and expected dinner to be waiting for them at 6:00 p.m. Men in South Boston walked to work at Gillette. Men in Dorchester Lower Mills did likewise at the Walter Baker Chocolate Factory. In J.P. and Roxbury, Plant Shoe was the large employer. In Charlestown, H.P. Hood filled that role. All of that has changed.

I think 2018 is an appropriate time and that this is an appropriate forum to once again ask: Boston—whither goest thou?

I will organize my thoughts into five major subjects, and include a case study (given that I am a Kennedy School graduate) and look forward to the robust discussion that will follow.

1.                 Public Policy Matters. Many millennials assume that Boston has always been a thriving prosperous international city, bustling with thousands of bright young people. We have emerged from our prior doldrums because, on many occasions, the public interest overcame selfish individual interests.

           Many living in Boston today do not understand that, but for the actions of state government over eighty years ago, Eastern Massachusetts would not have the extraordinary water supply that it has had for many decades.

           Others assume that Quincy Market has always been a tourist destination, while those of us who are a bit older realize that, but for activist government in the 1970s, Quincy Market might still be all but abandoned, with pigeons flying about and rain dripping through the roof. Local banks were reluctant to finance its renovation.

           Some forget that the harbor smelled and that the Central Artery was almost falling down and that the Navy Yard and the Army Base were abandoned during the Nixon administration.

           When some of us were growing up, Post Office Square was dominated by a rather ugly elevated parking structure, a testament to the efforts of government in the years after World War II to entice drivers into the city. I was part of the legal team that worked with Norman Leventhal to create the Post Office Square Park. I walk through it every chance I get, especially on sunny days in the spring and summer.

           Liberty Mutual’s decision to locate its new headquarters in the Back Bay and Converse’s decision to do likewise at North Station were the precursors to GE’s decision to build a new headquarters in Boston, which has been followed by many others. Mass Mutual is next in line.

           I know from working with some of those companies that these decisions were not made lightly. Boston, and the region in general, were attractive for a host of reasons, including but not limited to workforce, and transportation options, as well as receptive state and local governments. Anyone who studies the comparative positions of states understands that in the post war era, Connecticut was viewed as a great economic engine; today it is not, in part because of actions taken by state government.

           Going forward, there will be similar opportunities to make Boston an even greater city, one of which requires a sensible at grade Allston Interchange for Interstate 90. It is essential that we overcome old habits that result in our rebuilding roads and bridges in the same manner as when John B. Hynes was mayor.

2.                 Transportation Matters. Going back to the end of the nineteenth century, people in Boston have known that the only way for the city to function is to have people travel at different grades—on, below or above ground. Today, there are 1.3 million daily trips on the MBTA. In my case, I take the silver line to the Seaport and occasionally the airport, the red line to Cambridge for Coop meetings and to see my daughters, the orange line to Copley Square and then to Jamaica Plain and the green line to get to Fenway Park. The recent study authored by A Better City speaks of a “transportation dividend” resulting from those 1.3 million daily trips. It reminds us that 37% of the region’s jobs are within 1/2 mile of an MBTA station or commuter line stop. I think that’s a clear message to all of us, but one which many have been reluctant to acknowledge. In addition, as many can attest, housing values have increased primarily in communities with access to transit. I think of the efforts to create the SW Corridor (as opposed to building Interstate 95) often. All the missing teeth are now being filled in. Jamaica Plain is a great place to live because of the orange line and the 39 bus.

            My City Council colleague Fred Langone was fond of saying “everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” Is that statement not indicative of our schizophrenic relationship to public transportation in Massachusetts? Every person in this room understands that, without an extensive underground transit system, downtown Boston cannot function. Yet how many of us have been on the front lines fighting for the dollars needed to sustain and expand the MBTA? Reducing the amount of money available to the MBTA via self-serving referenda so that each of us might have a few more dollars in our pockets—enough to purchase an overpriced cup of coffee once or twice a week—is foolhardy. Other cities are stepping up to meet these needs. Seattle just approved a $53 billion program.

Forty years ago few complained about overcrowding on the subway because our subway system was quite adequate for the number of people who worked downtown—a number that was significantly reduced from its peak sometime around World War II.

Recently I was on the green line, on a Saturday afternoon—nice day, not too crowded, but it took far longer than it might have taken when I was a student at Boston Latin School, more than fifty years ago. There was a signaling problem. This is not surprising, since some of the signals on that line date back to the administration of Woodrow Wilson!

The future of our city and our region depends upon the ability of residents and workers to get into downtown Boston and elsewhere via dedicated underground systems rather than the late 20th century alternative of buses, which clog our streets. We must explore every possible sensible alternative, including but not limited to time-sensitive tolling, dedicated bus lanes, relocation of bus stops to South Station and North Station, the closing of streets and a total revamping of scheduling. The city has taken some great steps in recent weeks. We must keep in mind that we benefit from being a walking city. Franklin Roosevelt in the midst of the 1932 campaign suggested “Try something . . . If it does not work, try something else.” Every option should be on the table, including the gondola proposed by Millennium Partners. We cannot be the captives of outdated ideas and sclerotic thinking.

3.                 Traffic matters. It is a topic worthy of discussion—not fancy but mundane—and something we can no longer ignore. Not unlike New York and some of the other great cities of the world, it is often quicker to walk than to drive or be driven. I know that in the modern era many encourage incentives for people to bicycle and to travel via alternative mechanisms, but I know from personal experience that if one has three young children, in car seats, or if one is approaching 70 and is arthritic and it’s five degrees outside, driving may be the only feasible option.

  There are ways we can help to solve these problems. I do not understand why most of our leaders have all but forgotten the proposed silver line tunnel, which for a relatively modest expenditure could provide easier access for people from Dudley Square and all along Washington Street via a singular system to South Station, the seaport and airport. It would connect people who want to work with the locations where there are jobs. Such an infrastructure expenditure would benefit hundreds of thousands directly and indirectly and simultaneously help diminish income inequality. I would argue that even more than the red-blue connection on Cambridge Street and the North-South rail link, the silver line tunnel would be the easiest way to get people underground and to help unclog some of our city streets. Perhaps, we could also find a way for South Boston-bound buses, which currently clog streets in downtown, especially when taking a left turn from a right lane, to also use this tunnel to get across Fort Point Channel. Traffic downtown is no longer a result of bad weather, construction sites and Red Sox games, but GPS-directed vehicles, delivery trucks with orange parking tickets on the windshield, “not in service” MBTA buses idling and gypsy buses shuttling gamblers to Foxwoods and Twin Rivers.

  And when will we as a city address the issue of Uber and Lyft drivers who feel they have a constitutional right to double park, their taillights flashing, wherever they see fit, and block lanes of traffic imperiling pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers? A recent MAPC study suggests that transportation network companies are actually damaging our public transportation system by drawing away passengers and revenues, and also are responsible for the extraordinary increase in traffic of which so many complain. A study in New York City found likewise, as did another in San Francisco. It is time to study the potential impact of autonomous vehicles and air borne taxis. Will this result in more single passenger vehicles being added into the mix available to transportation consumers? What impact will this have on parking spaces and garages?

 4.                 The lack of affordable housing matters. Our prosperity does not result from our weather, but from our workforce. Our workforce must be housed. Notwithstanding a political season that surfaced many issues, some of them quite irrelevant to the future of the republic, housing was never an issue in the 2016 campaign. Perhaps some of us should work hard so that it becomes an issue in the 2018 congressional races.

  Contrary to what some suggest, housing is not an aspect of our economy, which has always been left to the free market. In the years after World War II, the nation rewarded the 16 million men and women who were in uniform with favorable mortgages. The federal government and, to a lesser extent, state governments also constructed public housing, much of it for returning veterans. Of course, the private sector had provided housing for their employees in prior generations, in Lawrence and Lowell and Whitinsville and other company towns. Indeed, today, many of the great universities of our nation subsidize the housing of professors and other key personnel. Therefore, it is historically inaccurate and simplistic for anyone to suggest that housing should be left to the so-called free market. Perhaps we should encourage employers of the modern era—Amazon and Google and Facebook and Vertex—and all these companies that are new to our cities—to also provide housing in some fashion for their employees. Perhaps we should, as a nation, contrary to the recent Trump tax bill, provide greater incentives for people to own property! Should the federal government get back in the housing business and spend money currently earmarked for weapons of war, and instead facilitate the building of new housing, near subways and train stations? Most importantly, we need to encourage cities and towns, notwithstanding these ancient fantasies about local control, to construct housing, especially for families. My prior research has suggested that Boston is on the brink of becoming an urban Disneyland with a third of the population somewhere between 20 and 34, nearly none of them married with children. They compete for housing with those who have children. It is simple arithmetic—families with children lose that competition.

  My brother Vin and I recently traveled to Westport to celebrate the 100th birthday of the lady next door. Long before anyone had written that “it takes a village to raise a child,” we lived in that kind of neighborhood—in St. Gregory’s Parish, in Dorchester Lower Mills—in the 50s and the 60s. Sadly, in part because of air conditioning, in today’s world, we do not know our neighbors; in some cases, we do not even know their names. It makes for a very different concept of community. Growing up, a new baby, the passing of a loved one, an acceptance to college of a high school senior were all reasons for a neighborhood to come together. Sadly, that is no longer the case.

           Given that I went to the Kennedy School, here is a brief case study concerning the New York Streets area as an example of our ever-changing city. Though few Bostonians realize it today, Albany St. is the last remnant of a dense grid of tenement-lined blocks known as the New York Streets. It was once one of seven streets named after towns along the Erie Canal in New York State, along with Seneca, Oneida, Oswego, Genesee, Rochester and Troy. When Hynes was mayor, Boston’s core had been in decline for decades, and city planners decided the best way to create jobs and increase property taxes would be to bring factories downtown; that meant eliminating housing.

When my father came to this country in 1919, he and two other generations of his family settled on Fay Street right behind JJ Foleys. It was probably the worst housing in the city. They heard the shriek of the elevated subway, which we now call the orange line each time a train approached Dover Street Station from 5:30 a.m., for the next 19 or so hours. As soon as they could, they escaped to the promised land—Dorchester—where they no longer heard the trains and need not walk down the hall to share a bathroom with other residents in the tenement. This was a tough part of town, sometimes known as “Skid Row”; certainly into the 60s when I was a young man, it was not a part of the city where one would be seen frequently and be proud of it. The chief business at the corner of Dover and Washington Street was Harry the Greek’s, who I represented in the 1980s. Milton Kamenides and his father were certainly bigger than life figures in the neighborhood. All the housing in this area consisted of tenements—housing for poor people of many different backgrounds: Greeks and Syrians and Italians and African Americans including folks from the islands; one of them, Mel King, ran for mayor of Boston and is still with us and still speaking out on important issues.

Public policy in the 1950s followed the dictates of the Housing Act of 1949, which suggested “slum clearance” as a way of making cities a better place to live. This neighborhood was demolished and the lots were then offered up for commercial and industrial uses. There was not a lot of public process and these residents didn’t have a lot of political clout. Some of them were not citizens and they were linked politically to the more powerful North End, as a result of the re-drawing of the ward lines in 1925. Not surprisingly, the neighborhood was demolished quickly. People disbursed elsewhere in the South End and Roxbury and Dorchester and nobody thought very much about it. Hub Mail had a facility at 1000 Washington Street. It later became Teradyne. Quinzani Bakery built a large facility. There were other warehouses and facilities for trucks, but the biggest user was the Boston Herald, which was, believe it or not, in the 1950s, the paper of record in this city. It was the Boston Herald where my father worked and rose from a co-op job he received via Northeastern; he was there until the Herald was sold to the Hearst Corporation in 1972. I remember attending the opening of the building sometime in the late 50s when the Herald was flying high, given that they had just been awarded the Channel 5 television license. The escalator that went to the second floor was quite impressive. Many times, I took that escalator seeking support from the Herald, without too much luck. Well, 50 years after people’s homes were destroyed, it was decided that perhaps this neighborhood didn’t make sense anymore as an industrial and commercial area so close to downtown Boston. Housing was proposed for this community, which was to be called the Ink Block. But these are different kinds of people. Very few of them are poor, very few of them have children. It is younger, whiter, richer and very few of them are from around here. It is a primarily residential neighborhood but for a Whole Foods that serves the people who live there today.

This leads to my last point—whose city is it?

Boston was initially a city of the Puritans, who were intolerant of all. It became a city of angular Anglicans, singing hymns about satanic mills, which they assumed did not include the ones they owned. Was it for a while a city of the Irish, with rival factions vying for patronage and power, trying to prove that everything the Puritans and the Anglicans stood for was wrong? It was never a city of the Italians, even when Tom Menino was mayor, for his was, without any doubt, a coalition government. Will it soon become a city of those without roots, many of whom will stand in line outside a bar on a cold night, but neglect to stand in line to vote except perhaps once every four years?

When I wrote Turmoil and Transition, I referred to the quote of Theodore H. White, another son of Dorchester who went to Boston Latin School, in his own autobiography suggesting that the life of the city was actually the story of a ballet and that one group follows the other. In the case of the New York Streets, we have poor people being replaced by industrial and commercial uses being replaced by rich people, some of whom may actually be the descendants of some of the poor people who lived there 50–60 years prior. But this is also a story about the reduction in the importance of boundaries. The turnpike had separated this neighborhood from downtown, as had the railroad line to Albany a hundred years prior. This was literally and figuratively the “other side of the tracks.” Those tracks and that highway are just not as important in the 21st century as they were in the 19th and 20th. There are no real limitations except economic ones as to who lives where. Downtown is wherever people think downtown is and some people living in the Ink Block may think of themselves as living in downtown Boston, even if no buildings may ever be constructed over the pike, knitting together the city, as was the case with Copley Place on which I worked for many years.

Although train tracks and turnpikes may no longer separate us in the modern era, is there a new, more nasty form of division rampant across our nation? In zip codes full of lawyers and doctors, we witness subtle rhetoric to prevent the construction of multi-family housing. On the national level, we no longer acknowledge E Pluribus Unum, but rather follow the script of realty TV that suggests we vote off the island anyone who does not pass a litmus test. The public square is dominated by conspiracy theories, innuendo and character assassination. We all have studied McCarthyism, when cigarette-smoking, angry old men destroyed hundreds of careers. Many of us endured and survived the hateful rhetoric in the 1970s in the streets of Boston. Our current era has seen a more genteel version of the same scenario—a Vineyard Vines McCarthyism. Is Boston becoming a city where a Starbucks is more important than the Legion Post or the local church? Does our widely professed tolerance cover up a new intolerance? What is the message when a newly arrived affluent condo owner requests the abutting social services building to shut off their lights at 8:00 p.m.? Is this message any different than “whites only” or “no Irish need apply” or the falsehoods spread about eastern and southern Europeans by those who succeeded in radically restricting immigration a bit more than a century ago?

I cringe at the thought of a city where the acceptance of some results in the exclusion of others. As we look around the Ink Block or the seaport, there may be dog parks, but there are no softball fields. I don’t see many basketball courts. I don’t see playgrounds for children, or at least not very big playgrounds. To some extent that is a message to families with children that they are not welcome.

Boston is a very different city than when John B. Hynes posed the question: Boston-whither goest thou? We have rebounded from a steep decline during which time the MBTA was sufficient, traffic was not an issue and housing was affordable for most Bostonians.

Today, as Boston continues to grow, with 20,000 new jobs/year, will we become victims of our own prosperity? We will face very different challenges than Mayor Hynes did after WWII. The great challenge facing those elected to public office and those who work in positions of importance in city and state government will be to strike a balance between different demands for the use of space. This also is a challenge for all of us who, in whatever way, are involved professionally, or as citizens, with the development of the built environment. The Boston I envision is a city where housing is available for three generations who choose to live under one roof, as well as for a single person who chooses to live in a micro unit and a city where residents can travel to work or to school via various affordable means. As we look toward planning for the rest of this century, I would argue that it is essential that we plan for a Boston in which all are welcome.