01/27/2023
Boston Business Journal
BPDA or no BPDA, developers crave faster approvals above all
Mayor Wu is making a lot of changes to how planning and development is handled in City Hall. Developers hope all the reform results in faster, more predictable approvals.
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Mayor Wu is making a lot of changes to how planning and development is handled in City Hall. Developers hope all the reform results in faster, more predictable approvals.
GARY HIGGINS / BOSTON BUSINESS JOURNAL
By Greg Ryan
Senior Reporter, Boston Business Journal
Jan 27, 2023
The city is getting a new planning department. The Boston Planning and Development Agency will be shrunk — but not abolished. And Mayor Michelle Wu is seeking to alter urban renewal’s goals from a fight against blight to more 21st-century aims like protecting the city from climate change.
The mayor committed to major reforms this week in her State of the City address. Talk to a developer, though, and few mention as a top concern the life or death of the 66-year-old agency.
Higher linkage fees and bigger affordable-housing requirements? Yes. Rent control and a hike in the real estate transfer fee? Definitely.
But as for which entity oversees their projects, some are ambivalent. They worry about the disruption any transition could cause, but in the next breath, they lament how long it takes the BPDA to review projects as it stands.
What matters, they say, is making development faster and more predictable, whoever is regulating it. Wu said Wednesday night that she shares those two goals. For all the change she outlined, however, it’s the plan to achieve those aims that may be least developed right now.
“Whether the BPDA and its predecessor, the BRA, are perfect or not, tens of thousands of apartments have been built under that system,” said Bruce Percelay, chairman of Boston-based apartment developer The Mount Vernon Co. “If a new system is more productive and more efficient, then the real estate community would welcome it. That, we will not know until the new city agency takes shape and is put into practice.”
Not dead yet
The City Planning and Design Department, as it will be called, is expected to launch this year, with BPDA staffers becoming city employees “over the coming months and years,” according to the administration. The BPDA will stay alive, even if with a flesh wound or two. The five-person board will still approve development proposals. The agency is also sticking around because officials want to hold onto powers it has under state law to give tax breaks to projects.
Wu told reporters after her speech that when “planning and development are all mushed together… we focus on the proposals right in front of us,” to the long-term detriment of neighborhood residents and real estate firms. Developers say they see the value of prioritizing planning and the rezoning that should follow as a result. In theory, it will give them more confidence about what they can build where.
That will require city officials to stick to whatever comes out of neighborhood planning, even if a project that is a perfect fit on paper incurs the wrath of nearby residents.
“The true test will be whether the city can implement good planning that will lead to clear, streamlined by-right zoning,” National Development managing partner Ted Tye said. “Approvals in Boston often get bogged down by planning on the fly during the permitting process and hopefully this will change. The splitting of these two functions will still require close collaboration between them.”
Darryl Settles, president of Catalyst Ventures Development and managing principal of a partnership with Redgate, said he is involved in a project in Raleigh, North Carolina — an increasingly popular target market for Boston-area builders — that took less than a year from finding the parcel to winning approval. In Boston, the timeline is often much longer than that.
“Time and effort is money, period,” Settles said.
Linkage fees and IDP mandates
When the Wu administration rolled out the proposals last month to hike linkage fees and up inclusionary development policy, or IDP, mandates, officials said those measures would go hand-in-hand with a push to streamline the BPDA’s Article 80 development approval process. That includes a “scorecard” through which projects that rate highly on affordability, equity and climate resiliency will earn faster reviews. In her speech, Wu again raised Article 80 reform as a priority.
The linkage and IDP proposals are out, after the city hired consultants last year to help guide the policies. The BPDA has already started community meetings to get feedback about the two proposals. Officials said then that they expected the measures to be finalized within six months.
Approval reforms are on a different timeline. Wu said Wednesday that next month, she will form a steering committee of real estate and community leaders to recommend Article 80 changes. City planning chief Arthur Jemison said in an interview that the BPDA also plans to put a contract out to bid in February or March to find consultants to help the city improve Article 80.
Jemison expects approval reforms to come in two waves. By the end of June, he hopes to have more detail on how the scorecard will work. By year's end, the goal is to finalize how to achieve broader “time savings” with approvals, based on the recommendation of the consultants, as well as ways to standardize the community benefits that are expected from developments of different sizes, so there is less back-and-forth on each project.
He pointed to another potential change that could benefit some developers financially. As it stands, parts of state law known as chapters 121A and 121B allow the city to give out tax breaks for the redevelopment of properties found to be blighted. The city has used those laws in the past for tax incentives for residential projects and for commercial sites like Amazon.com Inc.'s Seaport offices and General Electric Co.’s now-scuttled headquarters.
Wu wants to be able to give out the tax incentives not just to address supposed blight, but to projects that protect the city against climate change or prioritize affordability. The city will need the state Legislature’s approval to make that change, however.
“A big project in Boston on the waterfront that has to build a seawall, in order to make it safe for the future, we would be able to make a finding that this project is going to provide protection from climate change and as a result get a special tax schedule,” Jemison said.
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