you guys ready good afternoon everybody um for the record my name is frank baker district 3 city council i'm the chair of the boston city council committee on planning and development in transportation i'm joined by my colleagues the um well yeah lead sponsor of part of this here kenzie uh counselor kenzie bark and then in order of our arrival our uh council flaherty council flynn council rootsy louisiana and council tanya fernandez anderson this public hearing is being recorded in live stream at boston dot gov slash city dash console dash tv it will be rebroadcast on comcast channel 8 rcn channel 82 and verizon channel 964. we will take public testimony at the end of this hearing if you wish to testify via video conference you can please email cora c-o-r-a dot montran m-o-n-t-r-o-n-d at boston.gov for the link when you are called please state your name and affiliate affiliation or residence and limit your comments to no more than two minutes uh and you also may submit written testimony today's hearing is on docket zero one nine two in order for hearing grounding use using planning and land use tools and we kind of merged it together with another with another docket zero three one four and porter beginning the process of sun setting urban renewal in the city of boston until well this says december 31st 2022 that may change um but we'll talk about that here today without further ado we'll turn it over to our first panel which is made up of uh ppta people so if you guys want to start whatever way you're going to do we go left to right please introduce yourself who you are what you do and and we can get started thank you all right thank you very much counselor baker i'm posting this hearing for the record i'm devon correct director of real estate i'll just quickly introduce my three colleagues excuse me one second i just need to a little bit of house cleaning on console luigen is a co-sponsor on zero one nine two thank you sorry about that and thank you councilman for uh co-sponsoring the parents um i would introduce myself again i'm devon cork director of real estate for the vpda um introduce my colleagues quickly heather campesano our chief of staff eileen brophy our general counsel and chris fraim our urban middle manager who you'll hear from shortly and we're very eager to be before you today to talk about the future of urban renewal in boston we believe it's really important to begin any discussion of urban renewal by acknowledging that the irresponsible use of this tool has done harm and damage to communities both here in boston and across the country the destruction of entire neighborhood the west end is a permanent stain on the legacy of a renewal in boston and and of our decision-making the displacement of thousands of families from their homes is a tragic mistake and while it would never happen again it can never be undone in addition urban renewal has a history of being closely associated with systemically racist and socially unjust practices of the past in many cases it was closely geographically tied to racist redlining and exclusionary housing practices it is similar in practice to the unjust highway takings of the 60s and 70s and it has in too many cases yielded vacant property which has sat fallow for too long as the urban renewal agency for the city the staff at the vpda are very aware of this legacy of harms and are deeply committed to bringing a social equity lens to our work as an agency going forward and that said the history of urban renewal is complex and also has resulted in benefits for the people of boston new schools and libraries exceptional open spaces new jobs and affordable homes have all come directly from urban renewal and as someone who has a background in boston's affordable housing industry i think one thing that we do not often acknowledge enough is our city's national leadership in championing mixed income communities one in five housing units in our city is an income restricted affordable housing unit and while that might not be enough to meet the current needs of our housing crisis it is better than almost any other community in the country with 20 of our housing stock is affordable we're better than new york seattle san francisco or any other high-cost city in our analysis of urban renewal we've identified nearly 10 000 units of affordable housing built on herb renewal properties so clearly urban renewal has had an important role in advancing housing choice and affordability for the people of austin the more recent uses of urban renewal tools have largely been limited to much and much more aligned with progressive pro-social and pro-community values for example we've been able to use urban renewal tools to prevent the closing of a nursing home in the north end to acquire property for affordable housing uses in dorchester and to permit the redevelopment and recapitalization of over a thousand deeply affordable bha housing units in charlestown so today we are before you with a simple request but one that is deeply tied to a complex history the agency has been working for the past six years on sunsetting urban renewal there are currently 14 urban renewal districts across boston that are expiring on april 22nd of this year so if the council takes no action all 14 urban renewal districts will expire next month my colleague chris will go over this in detail in a moment but in 2020 we submitted a comprehensive action plan to dhcd this plan called for the sun setting of four urban rural district renewal plan areas next month the remaining 10 were set to expire on a staggered basis with the majority expiring by 2026 and they're remaining expiring by 2030. so well so while the agency has long been promoting the sun setting of urban renewal the wu administration would like us to examine the timeline for this plan in light of today's boston and our collective vision for the future we are here to recommend that we allow five urban renewal districts areas to expire next month this includes the four urban renewal areas that we originally targeted for a 2022 termination several years ago plus the addition of the brunswick king urban renewal area in dorchester which we believe will not benefit from a renewal going forward we recommend that the remaining nine urban renewal districts be extended for the remainder of the calendar year until december 31st 2022 this will allow us time to work with this council the mayor our soon to be hired chief of planning and stakeholders across boston's communities to tie the future verb renewal to the future we envision collectively as a leading progressive city it will also give us time to examine who if anyone might be harmed by the sun setting of these remaining renewal districts and to establish plans for mitigating these harms ultimately as mayor wu said to this council in the request for this hearing the future of river renewal and boston must be built upon transparency and accountability to community members we we must commit to putting equity at the forefront of planning and development decisions and we must see urban renewal through this lens we are certainly looking forward to working with each of you on this important topic and crafting a more equitable inclusive and vibrant future for our city so i'll now turn over to my colleague for spring before you move on devon and chris i apologize i'm so excited i haven't chaired a meeting in three years this is my first it's going to be a good person yeah so we're going to go to uh opening statements from counselors the sponsor and the co-sponsor first and then go around the room i apologize for that devin but that was a good uh that was good i'll be happy to do it all again if you like and no that's okay thank you and and with that um kenzie your opening statement please oh and we've also been joined by council warrell great thank you so much uh cora um thank you so much to the chair and thank you to the bpda for being here um and i'm glad that there's an opportunity today for us to combine um this here at this order from the mayor um with a hearing order that counselor louis jen and i had previously filed um this is a topic that i care quite a lot about um in relationship to devin's remarks i am the counselor for the west end which has become a national and frankly international story of the perils of urban renewal um and of the kind of like hubris that can that can lead to destroying a community um and and still i hear all the time from constituents who have um both constituents who have managed to stay in boston or return to boston um and from folks who grew up in the west end um but who lost a home that they never got back uh and so um you know as a historian myself thinking about that i think it's incredibly important that the uh that the city do what the woo administration is recommending in the sense of really turning the page and saying that we you know we need to be thinking differently about the whole relationship that the city and planning have to our neighborhoods and and i'm very glad that we're here today on that this hearing is combined with our docket that we filed because at the same time one of the things that i feel is very urgent for the priorities of this council and and the things that the mayor has articulated are that we use public land use tools for the public good and and i say land use tools because it's both about places where we actually own public land and we can do things but also in some cases there are areas that may not be held by the public but where the public has a vital interest and a few a few examples of this type of thing is places where we could imagine building social housing on public land but also as we face our climate crisis places where we might need to assemble fringes along the harbor in order to protect our city you know thinking about opportunities to transfer land into land trusts as was was once famously done by the bpda with urban renewal powers um something that i'll ask about later in this hearing um so for me there's a i'm coming with a couple of sets of questions today and i'm grateful to the bpda for sending over a response a fairly thick response to a fairly extensive set of questions i sent over before the hearing counselors have that um and i know we'll get more into all the details of that i think what what i'm interested in is both making sure that we don't lose anything as we sunset these districts particularly affordable housing restrictions but really anywhere that we manage to snag something important for the public good because it would be it would be a double harm if we both hurt families and communities when we did clearances decades ago in these areas and then the public goods that we did get whether they're parks or affordable housing or whatever we allowed the restrictions to expire so it's very important to me that we have a considered plan on that front and then secondly and i'm really interested in in how we think about using these land use tools robustly for the public interest and so you know i will frame some questions in that direction to the bpda today i'm also very grateful that we're going to be joined in a second panel after the administration by some advocates thinking about sort of that future of public land use in the city particularly on the housing front and well the advocates won't be speaking specifically to the urban renewal tools i think my hope for this hearing is that we would put kind of the realities and the nitty-gritty that the administration is going to talk about next to our kind of hopes and imaginations for more robust public land use in the city of boston and think about ways that we could could affect a real transformation in that direction and also look at the seeds of places where we've used these powers for uh for a significant public good and think about how we expand that so those are those are really my hopes um i will since the chair is in here to tell me i've used my time i will just temporarily add on that on the particular order from the mayor in front of us i have two very specific issues i want to raise one of them is that i do think and the chair alluded to it that the timing of sunsetting on december 31st of this year puts this body in a particular crunch because that is when all of our legislation sunsets actually a couple weeks prior to that and so i do think that from the council's perspective it would be better and i don't think we've materially changed the request to bump that out to say like march 31st just so that we can actually process what the administration has processed with greater time i mean even this a month being today a month out from the deadline is is a little close for comfort so i i do hope mr chair that we'll discuss an extension of that a little bit today um still keeping it under a year and then the other thing is just i've heard from a number of um nearby constituents some concern about the park plaza plan and we may be pushing to shift that over into the longer consideration but it's technically in councillor flynn's district and i'm sure we'll have further discussion so thank you mr chair thank you council black council council louisiana thank you chair for holding this hearing you look even though you said you had three year hiatus you're doing a good job i also want to thank kenzie for counselor block for allowing me to join her on this docket number zero one nine two um so i'll say my first job here in the city of boston was at the age of 14 working as a tour guide for an organization called multicultural youtubers what's now when i would walk around the south and in lower roxbury and give folks the people-centered history of the city of boston and how people came together to stop highways um you know southwest quarter park was planned to be a highway um i would tell folks about the work of mel king who sometimes protested inside the office of bra to prevent to prevent the displacement of folks and so um as was has been alluded to urban renewal has a very checkered history in our city but i'm excited to think about ways that we can use as council box said public land for public good our public land and public finance are powerful tools so powerful in fact that they carry systemic change with them they have the potential to change not only the physical landscape but the broader way we interact with government this was obviously done poorly with the first iterations of urban renewal destroying communities in the west end and the south end urban renewals often dubbed negro removal by the prolific african-american writer james baldwin for its displacement impact on black communities but now with oversight and influence we're hoping that the council can learn and really understand how we can continue to use these tools for purposes of community empowerment and engagement and also community control we can regulate for community land trust using dsni's deadly neighbors community and trust model planning for more civic and green spaces through deed restrictions and ground leases urban rule was premised on the value of large-scale long-term advancement ensuring long-term values of public spaces are properly valued carolyn crockett has a great book people before highway she's the one who founded my town my first job where she talks about the ability of us to really use these tools in a community driven way to make sure that public land is being responsive to the needs of community members these long-term public profits could be better schools and more affordable housing the public should also share in the benefit when the long-term value of private land is utilized by our quasi government agencies too like the bha bphc massport convention center bureau et cetera so whether it's urban renewal idp policy linkage master planning harbor harbor planning or zoning we just have to be intentional about what it means for city to divest in the public good and to do as much as we can to bring the community along and and to uh transfer as much power we can to community control thank you and i'm looking forward to this hearing thank you counselor uh council flaherty yeah um and obviously thank you to uh the uh the bra doing business as the bpda that still hasn't been fixed by the way we need to uh have that run through the council for that um but nonetheless i want to thank uh devon uh quirk uh chris breen eileen brophy and heather campazon for your work on this i know that you guys have been analyzing all of these urban renewal plans on the council i have the most experience in this space having extended and sunset a number of them over the years so i know it's not a new concept we last dealt with this probably about six years ago and it's sunsetting as it pertains to these particular items sunsetting those areas have always been part of the discussion and part of the plan i will say that and just really more for my colleagues edification if we don't uh vote on sunsetting these then we actually lose the ability on all of them and so i think that hopefully devin or someone will explain kind of how that works so clearly we have a couple dockets in front of us here uh that address sun setting uh it's my understanding that the council does not take action on those we actually lose the ability on all of them and i would caution my colleagues particularly my district council is because um you know they are important tools and if appropriately used they can actually do a lot of good in terms of encouraging investment in economic development job creation housing open space protection and as referenced uh in the beginning and i do appreciate uh devin acknowledging urban renewals history you know the good the bad and the ugly but uh we saw how important it was with the north end treasure with that nursing home that and that community was under siege and working closely with the community leaders families that had loved ones in the nursing home and also our district colleague council lydia edwards that we were able to because of those tools we were able to save uh that from uh from demolition arguably so again make sure that and also folks need to know that it's not sort of a simple they're all they're not simple they're very nuanced each one of them is a little bit different um but uh being able to flush through that so hopefully that through the chair this hearing we'll get into maybe be able to dive into some of those nuances but i think it's important that folks explain kind of how if we don't act on the sunset we lose the ability on the others and i think that there are a couple that are maybe in midstream or have the ability to do some great things in in certain districts so i just want to put that on as a caveat and look forward to uh further testimony thank you mr chair thank you council clarity council flynn thank you thank you council baker and uh thank you councillor bark in mayo and the bpda team um for the important work that that you're doing here um as we talk about urban renewal and the in the extensions that this process may impact may take place uh we should also talk about the larger theme of how we can use planning for the public goods such as building more affordable housing preserving open space supporting community land trust many of these are in my district so i want to make sure that there is absolutely no negative impacts that it has on on my residents and that includes and i've made this clear i don't want to see one resident displaced because of this and i know i have a guarantee from the bpda that that will take place that will not take place um but i want to make sure that that's a that's noted on the record that we're able to work with small businesses in in the impacted area as well um especially businesses owned by immigrants and communities of color giving them an opportunity to stay in boston you shouldn't just be just have to be able to be a major company to stay in the city we need to support our small businesses the bpda has tools that can help that so again i'm looking forward to the conversation but i want to make it very clear that this cannot have any negative impact on any of my constituents at all especially our immigrant residents in fact it has to improve their life their life and address quality of life issues as well so thank you to the bpda team and thank you to you council baker as well thank you uh counselor anderson fernandez anderson thank you mr chairman um i'm i'm actually really excited for this meet this hearing and this process um so obviously it's a very emotional one and a very personal one and i think that we can't necessarily uh vote or take a position on something that we don't understand and i believe that so thus far the community has expressed time and time again that there should be a moratorium there should be a slowdown of process of some sort to understand the long-term concept what is the long-term concept and what how can the city be pda everybody else involved actually guarantee results that are different from what's happened so far so the overall consensus has been this is just an excuse to demolish in on a large scale to leverage to push us out and all that it does it creates pain and it kills black people inevitably we i talk a lot about the social determinants of health perpetuated by poverty perpetuated by urban renewal and everything else that you mentioned earlier and i just have to say that again i don't understand the long-term concept and i don't think that um folks here have demonstrated um what that is to the community or if they have the community we don't we didn't get it we didn't understand it so i wonder then what is missing and then if if the community process and all that is supposed to support improving this is not working then what's the problem is it performative is it just so we can say that we involve the community we care we really care all the beautiful political jargons that we can use couldn't justify what we've done to black and brown communities so i really i'm really excited because i think that when there's conflict there's an opportunity for change and i i pray and i hope that the change is going to be a positive one but i will stand firmly on uh looking at this with a lens of let's slow it down if we must so that we don't have to disproportionately impact people the way we have thank you thank you council council warrell thank you chair and thank you to council bach and council louis jen for sponsoring this this this herring um in our city faces many and i'm thank you for the bpda for for being present and also having conversations about the new renewal process um with me and my staff our city faces you know many urgent crises from climate to housing affordability that requires bold decisive action from our city that includes using all tools that are at our disposal to create long-term affordability and address community needs including green spaces urban farms and parks i'm looking forward to hearing from the panel on how we can use these two to protect our residents so thank you thank you jay thank you council and now we can continue on thank you i just had one question we have a powerpoint are people able to can you identify yourself first chris oh sorry it's chris green uh bpda urban renault manager yeah and you're gonna do a powerpoint that we'll follow along with yeah this is just the uh intro page as to why we're here at the city council well we're waiting i'm going to read this into the record um this is from counselor julia mahia dear mr chair and members of the committee on planning development transportation i'm writing to inform you of my absence of from today's hearing on the committee planning and development and transportation regarding dockets zero three one four and zero one nine two a doc a hearing on docket zero one nine two order regarding using planning and land use tools for public good in docket zero three one four in order beginning the process of sun setting urban renewal in the city of boston until december 31st 22 due to a previously scheduled engagement i am not able to attend someone from my office will review the conversations held today and follow up with relevant questions and there are some questions here but i'll let her handle those thank you chris thank you counselor thank you city council for allowing me to speak my name is christopher breen i work at the boston planning and development agency as the urban renewal manager the first screen is your essentially your title screen we are at the city council hearing and the subject matter is the extension request for nine of the 14 urban or no plans a sort of devitt devon alluded to just to sort of hammer it home the current proposal sunsets five those five plant areas are in blue on the map to your right and it asks for an extension of nine urban no plan areas up until around december 31st chris i only count four brunswick king kittred square park plaza in boylston essex is so small that you won't be able to see it right oh okay okay it's right in there thank you sorry about that next slide so this next slide is kind of where i come in sort of when i joined the agency a few years back so my name is chris and i took on the job as community engagement and our renewal manager for the bpda so basically this slide is a recap of the work that's done since the last extension of urbernol in 2016. the bulk of that work is encapsulated in the boston city council's urban renewal action plan you can see that in the upper left hand corner the action plan is a request for the bpda to take on a series of transparency measures procedural changes and document and data collection tests those tasks included the creation of an urban renewal document center that's now publicly available on our website and that document center has for public consumption you can download any plan or burn no plan any modification from that plan in any map of the area to just have the average person sort of who may not know anything about urban other than the west end just allow them to sort of read through that information because boston is so much more than just the west end experience we also updated our progress across six city council check-ins over the years we completed a land disposition agreement inventory and we also did a bpda owned property inventory and we conducted over 20 community meetings specifically regarding urban renewal in which we talked about all those things we talked about the history of urberno we talked about the tools and what they meant and we talked about land disposition agreements where they were and how they affected individual parcels in individual plant areas so we went out to every single area and we went out twice a couple times next line throughout the course of that work we discovered a whole heck of a lot we discovered that there are over 1500 parcels of land by assessing id in the city of boston that were created from urban renewal tools this discovery indicated to us that there are nearly ten thousand income restricted units created by urban oil not unlike the 500 units seen at on the top left square located at castle square in the south end many of those income restricted units consisted of elderly housing another important land use nearly 200 units were located at the bunty apartments in roxbury in the upper middle on the top row additionally we found hundreds of residential and commercial rehabilitation and preservation projects just like the ones you see at the mercantile buildings across the street in the north end and many many others can be found throughout the city in my hometown of charlestown also in south end and roxbury we also found many community and cultural spaces like the boston chinatown neighborhood center and various other public art displays cultural monuments and institutional spaces in the lower left there represented by the photo in the lower left we also discovered over 200 open spaces open space open space restricted spaces consisting of community gardens and many other large parks backyards side yards and some small resident parking parcels behind people's homes in fenway roxbury south end in charlestown lastly we found dozens of public facilities that were created with urban renewal tools just like charlestown high school and its associated play fields we also found dozens and dozens of libraries police and fire stations community centers and schools all related to urban renewal on urban renewal parcels and urban renewal plan areas particularly these 14 up for debate in total we uploaded over thousand documents attached to these parcels and that other d and attached to these parcels and others that detail massive infrastructure improvement done to the city and its sewer systems that helped jumpstart private investment in the 1960s and onwards next slide the completion of the action plan and the analysis of the lda inventory and bpda property inventory resulted in two reports to dhcd that ultimately recommended a staggered sunset of urban renewal in boston starting this month a month from today on april 22nd 2022 this initial report in 2019 that was sent to dhcd recommended the potential sunsetting of the five urban renewal areas before you today the 2021 report the follow-up report recommended four of the five but over the past year we've looked at brunswick king that fifth land area parcel and we've now added it back into the category of potentially being sunset dhc's dhcd and the council at the time wanted a timeline to sunset these parcels and we felt like with the two letters we did our jobs we selected plant areas that could sunset and we selected other plant areas that maybe need just a little bit more time to eventually sunset and each of them have their own specific reason why they need extra time how did we even choose the five well the recommendation for sunset formula kind of goes like this then first we looked at the number of urban rural related actions taken since 2016 in this planned area is this an active area is it not if you're not taking a lot of actions it's probably not an active area then we looked at the planning context of each neighborhood basically do we need do we need this plan for a project upcoming in the future or do we not really see anything coming at us in the horizon then we looked at regulatory controls that are in place we looked at how many ldas the ldas there are in each area that played a really important part obviously the more ldas you have the more risk you have of losing something that's important to someone and we don't want that to happen lastly we looked at the development status of each parcel that we owned we looked at those parcels when we tried to figure out is it difficult to develop this parcel or can we do it without having to use our urban renault tools and we sort of took that formula and mixed it into a pot and came out with an answer and the answer is was those five areas you see before you next slide one more slide sorry that's for the stuff i was talking about and then he's here are the five areas that we have now suggested and now propose could potentially sunset in april they are central business district boylston essex downtown school franklin downtown park plaza downtown kitridge square uh roxbury brunswick king dorchester next slide quick analysis of those five we'll start with the easiest boylston essex boylston essex if you don't know where it is or what it is consists of a building known as the commonwealth center or previously known as the commonwealth center back in the day it contains a cvs a boston common moving thera a ritz carlton basically we acquired a small area on the map in sort of peach and helped to get that development sort of off the ground using our tools in that small area because there's a number of easements below the mbta was you know doing new lines train lines in the late 60s so we acquired the parcel and helped sort of move that project forward and that for that building is now restricted to you know typical office space uses um that you see in there and commercial uses that you see in there and the mbta built their subway and that was kind of it next slide the analysis of the area we looked at how many properties do we own we own no properties in boylston essex how many restrictions do we have we have one lda and that covers one assessing parcel how many actions did we take in six years we took one action and that one action was to debate on whether or not we should sunset this area the community feedback when i went out and had a meeting basically we the bpda recommended to the community gave them advance notice that this could be an area that we would suggest to sunset next slide we're going to move on to school franklin if you don't know where school franklin is it's on school street in franklin street but if you don't know where that is it's near old city hall and that's also an urban renewal parcel that most people don't realize because it because it's old also urban renewal parcels and projects out there would be the irish famine memorial the community cultural space uh shoppers park the recently redesigned sort of public open space is an urban no parcel and the parcels that have ldas would be um i believe it's tj maxx tj maxx i don't go there that often anymore but my mother loves the home goods and there's an also an old bank of which i call it the borders one i used to buy cds i don't think people do that anymore but it's now a walgreens i believe and it still exists today that parcel we own only a small piece of it again it's almost similar to boylston essex where the parcel that we controlled that we put the lda on is kind of on the old bank side um and it's developed and that's just kind of where we're at with it um our analysis of school franklin we own two parcels left old city hall irish famine totally good we have two ldas that covers four ids i know that might not make sense but the two ldas can cover four assessing ids because you know those those assessing ids are built for something and they're owned by usually mutual people and so it's one ld that covers this one one ld that covers that and the number of actions taken again only two actions taken the community feedback when i went out there they did not express a strong preference to either sunset or renew at least the second time the first time they were interested in you know learning about the tools and were concerned but the second time we went out there there was no major pushback for school franklin next slide gets a little more interesting we have park plaza also downtown you might know it from the china trade building the recently rehabbed china trade building over the many decades it's a well high occupancy i believe so park plaza in the map below you see all the properties that the bpda then bra acquired in blue and developed for a specific reason in hand with the neighborhood council and of the area in red you'll see the property we still own and we still take pride in owning it the china trade building below that next slide our reason for allowing it to sunset well we only own one parcel and it and it's pretty developed we have six ldas and that cuts across multiple assessing ids because i know there's lots of condo owners in the park plaza area and some of the larger buildings but there are six lda buildings that control things like height fa far use design the actions taken we've only taken two actions on park plaza in six years which that's not too many the community feedback we received we did recommend sunsetting the plan at the most recent community meeting we had two community meetings the first one i would say folks were a little mixed opinion some wanted to keep it some didn't because they take a lot of pride for of their area and that they felt it's developed relatively well because it was developed with the community in hand certainly during the 70s but you know we are we are tasked with looking at places that could sunset and certainly park plaza is one to discuss um next slide uh brunswick king brunswick king this plan is most noted for its open space and its public facilities you might know about children's park which is a city of boston park seen in the photo that was originally an urban renault parcel you might know about ceylon park of which many parcels were originally urban or parcels taken from i believe foreclosed homes in the area you might know about mlk playground and you might know about some residential openside yards where people sort of park their car or they sit out with their family and have picnics along along their home next slide so that analysis was a little different we looked at how many properties we own and this was a really big important part of it for me and us we saw that we owned two parcels and the community was very excited about potentially using those two parcels to build something that's great for a community good the restrictions we again we had six assessing ids that had six ldas they're mostly open space restrictions just not a lot of development in the area we looked at the actions taken another six we took six actions and i think a lot of that was to um to dispose of some of the properties that that are in the area because we were prepping to maybe look at this to sunset or expire next up kittredge kittredge square kitchen square is known for its rehabbed and renovated brownstones i would say the photo you see here is seven alva catridge there are not only just renovated homes there are new homes for low and moderate income folks like the highland park estates too but predominantly you have lots of rehabilitation projects on parcels 8 and parcel 8a as well as a number of community gardens along highland street and then another one along cedar street um basically for this one we own three parcels i wait to get to this on this one we next slide we own three parcels the restrictions are 28 land disposition agreement restrictions over 83 individual assessing parcels a lot of those are sort of tight together buildings that that cover one lda we've taken six actions since 2016 so not a significant amount our community feedback was the most important aspect of this one and the the folks at kitchen square were the most supportive of a potential sunset of the plan rather than some of the other community meetings that i've attended i will say about the parcels we own two of them are within a community garden we're working very hard to give them to the community garden so it's theirs formally and the third one abuts a guy's house but the elevation is at such that it may only be proper for a side yard but we'll go to the next slide um those are just the five there's a lot more left um there's nine plan areas left and this is when everything gets confusing we have campus high school in roxbury we have charlestown we have downtown waterfront faneuil hall you might know it as the north end we have fenway we have government center where we live right now we have south cove you might know it as chinatown you have south end and south end can extend on into lower roxbury we have cell station which is self-explanatory and we have washington park which is a large swath of area in roxbury and we can go to the next slide to give you an up close look at those areas and see all of the complications and all the land use restrictions on those basically all the different butterfly colors you see there on those parcels are all there were no parcels that all have individual restrictions so in those areas campus high school to the left charlestown to the upper middle downtown waterfront to your right fenway down below to the left government center center bottom and south cove right bottom then you go into the bigger ones you have the south end you start on the south then left to right lots of restrictions lots of affordability restrictions there and you know south station lots of questions there about the south station air rights projects potential climate resiliency issues and then to your far right you have washington park an area that still maintains a lot of bpda-owned parcels and properties that could be developed for community goods that i know devin's working really hard on next slide this is kind of our final slide but we do have others if people have in-depth questions basically our next steps are pretty frequent so the immediate next step we would need an extension vote from our board the bpda board and then from you the boston city council and we would take those recommendations and submit submit the final plan to dhcd who oversees us if that works out okay during the longer extension we would love to discuss and determine appropriate timelines for sunsetting remaining herbal plant areas and to develop a plan to consider the continued protections provided by these land disposition agreements that are very important to the electeds and very important to the folks that live in the neighborhood and that's kind of uh next slide that's all i have for this part of the presentation if you guys want to ask questions thank you chris do you ladies need to weigh in at all do you have any presentations so here comes up for um questions no just questions okay uh thank you very much um i guess i'll start chris um so like you went through 6l you know like we talked about ldas can you give us a break down a little bit about maybe you know um school franklin will stop there there's two ldas and two parcels what are the ldas and what are the two parcels that's cool and like if we can go right down park plaza six ldas one parcel runs with king two parcels six ldas school franklin's lda like for for the one that's uh whole grains walgreens it's a walgreens currently it used to be a borders yeah the lda is only on a portion of that building um i'm not quite sure why it's only on that portion of the building i think that at the time the building was not in great shakes and we sort of stepped in and acquired a portion of it to help rehabilitate it to help restore it so we put an lda on the entire property for commercial uses pretty vague sort of broad uses um i'll i'll get you the actual lda language i believe it's commercial open yeah council box says we says we have it so the ldas are basically where your open space lands your your affordable housing lands and and any other sort of benefit that would come back to us the community correct yeah yeah okay public interest okay so um well then maybe instead of kind of going through that i think i think if you can come back to us with with the apostles that were in were are within these places and a breakdown of what all the ldas you know brunswick king two parcels and and six ldas kittridge three parcels 28 ldas so those 28 ldas i'm assuming are mostly affordable housing yeah they are again we investigated them we went through them with a pretty fine tip comb we partnered with mayor's office of housing and we feel pretty confident that even those 28 ldas that not not all those ldas are have affordable housing a lot of them for like rental rehab projects to to sort of reinvigorate the area of open space and stuff like that but the ones that do have affordability that i've reviewed that we've reviewed as a team most of the restrictions extend beyond 2022 most of them extend beyond 2030 which was the maximum number of years we were going to ask for an extension anyways it was the most we could thought we could get there is there was one parcel in question where the lda ended in 2022 but thanks to eileen she found a separate covenant that extended it for 30 years beyond to 2052 right yeah here we go um so when you place a land disposition agreement on a property it's usually a company for affordable housing it's usually accompanied by a covenant for affordable housing the covenant is governed by a separate statute so the term of the covenant would be 30 years plus an additional 20 years for that restriction for affordable housing so if the lda goes away presumably the covenant remains in place because it's it's in the title to the property and it restricts the affordability it just when that term ends the lda has gone and we don't have any further interaction with that property so we would be unable to at that point remain at the end of the 50 years that it would if that property changed it came in for redevelopment it would have to go under some other program like idp or something if there was um you know a development that was subject to that so without the lda we we potentially run the risk of losing affordable housing in eventually i mean yes but that's that's the design of of the program i mean it was always intended to be for a limited period of time and by statute the urban the um affordability covenants are restricted to a certain period of time we don't have like in perpetuity affordability yeah through the bpd through the era so so if you can explain a little bit um like covenants with covenant we we know with affordable housing the covenants with the owner or the builder or whatever that's how we we we would protect housing after the lda is no longer uh we're not no longer able to use it but if how would we protect open space or some of the other benefits that come with the ldas so open space restrictions are put into the deeds to the property and in the land disposition agreement that went with the property if they did not all open space property that was conveyed went with the land disposition agreement but so the the position would be that the deed restricts the property for that use there is um a further process with the state to strengthen that open space restriction or through the parks department or something though those parcels are not necessarily um fully restricted that way but most of them were given to organizations whose mission it is to to maintain that like the parks apartment or or yeah the um trustees of reservations or you know they were they were intentionally given to people whose mission it is to to maintain open space use okay um when was the last extension was it six years ago then when we had that in and my last question is how much land how many parcels do we have a number of parcels that the bpda owns now that doesn't have that could potentially be either developed for open space or like how much land is basically left yeah we currently own okay sorry we currently own 235 parcels but that includes both our land leased inventory so and then um we have for example old city hall in the yeah and the school of franklin uh is a property we own but it's already fully developed and you know sort of final end use um i don't have the number broken down by urban rural district for you right now i can certainly get that for you but the um it's it's less than a hundred uh parcels that are undeveloped vacant land within urban oil okay and they are they mostly are they where are they they i mean they were we're working that's chris mentioned we work very hard on this it's incredibly important to us to develop public land for public good and you know they they range from a small um you know single-family home lot in a residential neighborhood then the example in brunswick is a good example of that all the way up to in the campus high renault area we have parcel p3 which is the very largest parcel on our in our inventory something we are incredibly dedicated to developing in the public interest and that's over seven acres of land possibly that's the one on tremont street yeah exactly okay um and my i know i just said last question my last last question is is um for the the old city hall that's a that's a um a long-term lease with synergy i guess so does that money from that lease go in for your operating budget for bpda like is that how so in what you own and you collect rent on does that go towards bpda operations as a as a general answer you're absolutely right that is that we in general take our land lease revenue and that's what funds the agency we take no tax dollars in the city of boston um we have plenty of examples of property where we do have we have a either greatly below market ground rent or a zero dollar ground wrench to support community development uses and of course we have uses outside of our rental area like in the marine park and then cdic property where we have market rate uses that really are the engine of of funding the vpda uh in the case of or old city hall is a unique example because that was really a city i mean it was that was city hall it was a city building so the revenues from that well we have the landlace the revenues for that are dedicated back to the city okay thank you uh council block great thanks so much councillor baker and um and i would just note for colleagues that in the back of the packet connected to the information request there's a list of every land disposition agreement attached to these five so if people have a chance to if you're if you're wondering about those um we're grateful for the vpda for providing those um and then the uh on the second page that info request that kind of gives a count of how many are attached to the nine that are up for extension um i uh i guess on the on the affordable housing lda front i do think it would be helpful um i'm absolutely going to defer to councillor fernandez anderson on the kitchen square question but i know that for me in in the fenway district the big concern has precisely been that a whole bunch of the remaining ldas are affordable housing and and it's not clear to me that all of those have that kind of like duplicate restriction such that if we remove the bpda ones there's something else holding because i think basically i mean although it doesn't go on forever what i took to be the gist of your comment was that for most of the ones in kitridge square you lift the bpda lda and there's still a dnd deed restriction sitting there or some other or a bha restriction or whatever and so if you guys could speak to that so we understand that and i do think that although it wasn't in the info request getting confirmation that for each of the affordable partials in kitridge square since i think it's the only one where affordable housing is mentioned that there is like a second stop gap thing but also if you could just speak a little bit more to that issue because i mean from again from my perspective as i think about why i'm glad that fenway that we're talking about extending fenway as part of the short term it really is that issue so i'll start and we turn it over eileen who can speak in more legal detail but i think in general counsel brock what you're hitting on there is exactly the distinction between the five that we're proposing the sunset and the nine that we are suggesting we need some additional time because we need to take the time to do the thorough research so we can come to this council and say we've looked at every parcel in the fenway or every parcel in south cove every parcel and the south end those are renewal districts which have many many many more ldas and will take more time to get to that level of confidence that we're at for uh kitchen square for brunswick king and the three downtown parcels where that we're very confident there's not going to be unintended consequences and loss of affordability but turn it over to eileen to talk about kitchen square in particular did i get it yeah thank you so there is a bit of a distinction some of the um land disposition agreements were with individual property owners so by agreement with them there was a covenant placed on the units that were being um created in that project so when those units were conveyed there was a covenant that was signed by the person who bought that unit that was put on by the developer and those are the traditional 30-year covenants under you know the statute with the 20-year extension and that's that is not something that's also protected by another bha or dnd or that you know those are our individual agreements with property owners that happened at the time that property was being developed there are in other areas you know the intersection of urban renewal intervention plus bha housing plus d d financing that all came together to create multiple layers of protection for property so those are the types of things that we'd probably want to drill down on and say once urban renewal goes away here that intervention is over in the future but it's also vha housing or it's a 121a project because that's another thing that intersects with urban renewal often and so those are the types of things that have extended protections outside of just bra urban renewal lda and following up on the affordable housing front um the can can you guys talk a little bit about it was something it's on the third page of the info request i did ask um i i asked you all this but i was wondering if you talk a little bit in the hearing about um the like the way in which the bpda uses these renewal powers to acquire like land for public for not for public but for often affordable often social housing and specifically i just want to confirm that with the five districts that we're talking about today sun setting we don't feel like there are major opportunities for affordable housing development because you guys have talked about you know the bpda owned parcels and whether any of those need action and you've talked about the land disposition agreements and whether we're losing anything and i agree those are two of the important things but it does seem like a third important criteria is that it not be a place where there's a major opportunity to develop affordable housing because you guys do have these tools that make it a little bit easier than some of the city's other mechanisms so i just wonder if you could speak to that a bit yeah i'd be happy to um i think you know that chris went through the lens of how we viewed uh all that when making the decision whether or not to recommend sun setting and i think it really is check what you're saying counselor bach it's both backward looking what are we going to lose uh in terms of um protections and unintended consequences and and uh individuals might be harmed but also look forward looking how might we want to use these tools based based on that and then and then based on the current reality and how tools are used today so um a couple good examples of how we've recently used uh the acquisition power that the vpda has so one important thing to realize about the bpda's ability to acquire property is we don't we're not limited uh but the city's a city of boston's limitation on acquiring property for municipal use uh we can acquire property for economic development purposes we can acquire property for affordable housing development development purposes um the city can of course acquire property for schools and libraries but also has to go through a competitive rfp process we if we choose to can act more like a private actor in the real estate market and negotiate directly with uh sellers of land to acquire property a good example of that recently is in roslindale on walter street we acquired two parcels that were privately owned the owner wanted to sell one to sell rapidly it was a a vacant home and a piece of property next to a wetland the parks department really wanted to acquire this to preserve the access to the wetlands and bring that into that it was on their priority list for acquisition of property for conservation purposes but if they acquired it they wouldn't be able to create any housing there they could only acquire it for conservation purposes sheila dillon's team with the mayor's office of housing was very interested in acquiring that house for uh affordable housing so we acted as agent for the the city to purchase the property and then bifurcate it into two properties one went to the conservation commission to permanently conserve it as wetlands access the other we're in the process of disposing it to habitat for humanity who's going to do three affordable housing units there so a unique example of how our tools can be helpful in a more limited and a socially minded way we're doing a very similar project in elbows corner where we've acquired some property and are moving forward with plan to develop affordable housing and a new uplands corner branch library that's a mix of uses for acquisition that would be very hard for the city to do so those are those are tools we want to hang on to and think about their the right way to apply them in the future uh of verb renewal um there's lots of avenues to do that we should have that discussion over the course of the nine month extension but to answer your question directly about the five that are expiring we don't see an immediate need for using those acquisition tools or an opportunity to use those tools and to advance i should add a affordable housing use or community development use directly in those districts great okay thank you and i'll just stress um for folks for new counselors and other folks that the council actually you know really led um moving another 20 million dollars into the acquisition opportunity program that the city has over at dnd in the last budget cycle and it's super important to me in this moment where the private side on housing just is seeing insane rental and value increases that the city be able to take those rapid actions where we act as a buyer and so i think folks don't always know that the point that you raised evan that the city can only acquire land for purely municipal purposes but that you're sort of the arm that we can use to acquire land for something like housing and i just want to stress that it was very important to the council to put that money in because we're really trying to say hey how do we grab some of this land and pull it off the private market and stabilize our communities with housing and so i really want to make sure that we don't lose the tools to effectively do that because the money is not going to do us any good if we can't acquire things so just really want to stress that point but i take the point on these five um i know that there's lots of counselors waiting to ask questions so i'll just say also on the direct negotiation front that and i'll let counselor flynn address it more directly but it does concern me i've been very proud although it's not my district but i grew up like a stone's throw away i've been very proud of the way that the china trade building has been dealt with recently and not just the sighting of the of the temporary chinatown library there but also the like ability to keep some of those small businesses in there and i think the fact that we are not doing a sort of like who can give us the most rent process and you guys are just directly negotiating with some of those people um has been really fruitful for that community resource so i just want to stress that that's a thing that would make that's part of the reason why my instinct is that park plaza we should give in a little more time to figuring out but i'll let counselor flynn ask more of the questions about that you're good yes i'm good for now i'm not proud yeah we'll come back yeah i know you have more um council louisiana thank you just a few questions thank you just a few questions um so just that i understand the process here so all these ldas inspire bpda still owns the land for all of them and is still collecting rent on from all these properties um okay is there anything yes that's accurate okay um what happens like practically speaking if you can walk me through what happens if we allow all of them to expire and not just the ones that were okay to have sunset what practically will happen and i certainly think i should open on this as well but i think what we're most concerned about is it's sort of what we've there's the backward looking in the forward looking backward looking is um there are well over a thousand ldas and we need to invest the time to ensure that that a unit of housing is not an affordable housing unit is not lost that the only thing protecting it isn't it is a if if the only thing protecting it is an lda and urban rule expires on april 22nd then that affordable housing unit is no longer protected now lots of affordable housing units have lots of other protections and like we've already mentioned they may be owned by the bha we don't have to worry about those um the same can be true same can be said same can be said about open space restrictions some open space restrictions are protected by ownership the parks department some open space restrictions are protected by zoning um but that's not true of all of them so what the what we think the council deserves but certainly the residents of austin deserve is it for us to be able to speak with authority on if this urban renewal district goes away this is who might be harmed and this is what we might be able to do about it we're we are very prepared and able to say that about the five we're proposing to expire we're not in a position to be able to say that about the remaining nine and that's what we need to take the next nine months to do i just want to make a clarification quickly about the in the urban renewal areas where we actually still own the parcels those those are still in our ownership and we're still figuring out what to do with development there anything that has a land disposition agreement on it has been transferred to another person by definition the disposition has happened so when that lda goes away we don't own that land anymore that's that's in the private ownership the covenants that are on it might protect the affordability that was created when it was disposed of but once those covenants expire then that land is in the ownership of the person it was disposed to and we don't have any more interaction with that it's not that you know ldas come back to us or we're still collecting rent on those properties or that's not it by definition was a disposition to an individual so the ldas actually once they expire we know there's no longer ownership with the bpda no no no yes i mean there's no ownership even with the lda in place the ownership has been transferred um like any other encumbrance you know that you place on your property but you you own it yourself but the the there's a beneficial covenant that goes back to us once that expires the property is in the ownership of the person it was transferred to and it stays there and counselor in your packet there's a list of ldas by a renewal district that we're extending there are 731 ldas in those nine districts that we're extending and there are 235 bpd own properties in those districts that we're extending those are mutually exclusive so those are those are two two different sets of property okay um another follow-up is could we have done any of these projects in the urban renewal uh areas without using our urban renewal powers in there in its entirety and what would that what would that look like i think that said i think that's hard question to answer in the general right but i think um there i think there are certainly projects where the city of boston had been a city boston property could have accomplished the same outcome it used to work for the mayor's office of housing we certainly did a lot of public land disposition for affordable housing so there are so the answer to that is yes in some cases but then the examples i used about acquisition no we could not have accomplished that without um some without a pathway to exempt ourselves from chapter 30b which the bpda is exempt from for real estate decisions but the city is not and then one last question that dovetails off of the previous question that i asked do you have an example of a property where there once the of the ones that uh where you're seeking to have uh continued are there any uh where all that can you give an example of one where the only restriction is the lda and there's no there's no covenant that runs with the land there's no other incumbents there's nothing else and what's preserving affordability is just that lda yeah that's a that's a fair one you need to press the button sorry there you go you're good we're all getting used to the mics i still don't know how to use these things i'm here can you hear me yeah uh so i was a child sound liaison a long time ago trying not to remember about it um hosted a meeting it was supposed to be a zba i thought it was a zba meeting going to the zoning board of appeals uh vacant lot uh what guy wants to put a single family there i hosted the night strategically because there was a big hood park meeting occurring on the other side of town which is really 300 foot building not too far from us so i was like oh everyone will go there no one will come to my meeting so my meeting had about 52 people show up and the hood park meeting had about 16. and what i learned is and this was before i worked here that there's this thing called urban renault and the urban renewal it was an agreement signed many decades ago by people that have long since passed that the parcel in question would remain open space for a yard parking if possible but mostly for a yard for the enjoyment of the four condo units that are budget a developer was not aware of the lda i thought it had expired purchased it and started kicking out tenants in front of him or behind him because they were like oh no we love this little patio uh i came in i was like well you know there is this restriction on the parcel we may restrict it but you need to go through a community process and he was just i have to go through a community process and we had one public meeting 25 people showed up signatures no way this isn't happening and i just went you're gonna keep that open space restriction sorry and he was not happy and maybe that's a really small project it he wanted to do a single family outright but it upset a lot of neighborhood folks their views their light their air another car into the street it's very tight and that sort of lock a child stop um and it happened again in charlestown and it happened again in charleston it happened about three or four times in charlestown all these vacant lots and i was going on zillow they're all ldas and eventually he mortgage would reach out to me and i'd go through the same process that has an lda we're open to a community process and once they heard that never heard from them again so it's a promise between the purchases of the property and then bra and the only way to enforce that promise in this case open space is the lda the lea goes away there's no more enforcement of that promise under zoning that law could be developed that lot would have been developed on the affordable housing front i am struggling to come up with a specific example of this but i will get you one but i think that in general the concept is um a lot of a lot of affordable housing units in in boston were either or either built on bha property bha will obviously protect them or they were built with subsidies from the mayor's office of housing those subsidies carry restrictions with them so even the lda went away the mayor's office housing still has a covenant or a mortgage on the property that could serve as additional insurance the place where we have the most risk is where there are small smaller unit developments that were built by a home a small developer or small or a homeowner a rental property and a two family for example because they may not have needed any subsidies in order or the land was sold for them at a reduced cost and that that was the only subsidy provided so the only thing enforcing that lda is an agreement between the bpda and the um and the property owner those are the ones where we really need to do the most research on to figure out how to protect them thank you once that research is ready i'd be happy to take a look at who those are what neighborhoods those are in what demographics um because i think that it may out also parallel with you know what is considered naturally occurring affordable housing and so what what it looks like what does it look like once the ldas are gone um it would be interesting to see the concentration in what specific neighborhood so um thank you thank you counselor council flynn flaherty rather i'm sorry it was flaherty first sorry council flaherty thank you mr sheer um eileen just a quick question just bring me through the process when um when that when a covenant expires on the affordable side so the owner of the property then is notified that the covenant no longer exist and then that person is allowed to sell that unit at a market rate when they when they've been the beneficiary of sort of an affordable unit is that what's essential hold it's when it's like fully red that you like hard to see from this angle um anyway so when the covenant expires by its terms there's no more affordability restriction on that property it's not even a notice it's it's just by the terms of the covenant it ends and then that unit is unrestricted from that point on and the average covenant is 15 years 5-0 yep 30 30 years and then in it an opportunity to extend it for an additional 20. so given that we're having this discussion about sun setting and extensions are not extending does that sort of create for example there's nine plans and there's over 700 ldas does that set up a situation where folks paying attention they can go secure a property because they know the lda is going to be expiring and say eight months and then they sit there and they make a deal with someone and then they sell it on the open market and make a score i think that yes it creates an opportunity for that type of behavior that's right so on a predatory side we obviously as a council and obviously the bra doing business as the bpd i think we need to be cognizant of that particularly in this environment uh where the economy is but also because of where the housing costs are and then um and this is an al also this isn't my first rodeo with this stuff here so and i'm gonna be frank i don't think it's realistic that so the sun setting piece you got me i'm on board with the extension for only eight months when this panel has to review nine plans and over 700 ldas it's just not realistic devin so i'm just going to give it to you straight because i've seen this movie before and then what happens is in the eight months you come in for another extension so through the chair i think we need to have a very frank conversation for the benefit of the public as to realistically how long is that going to take because i know it's going to take a hell of a lot longer than eight months to review nine plans and set over 700 ldas those are the facts plus we've got covenants expiring where people are in affordable situations that then they're going to get flipped out of them so let's be very frank here is that do you need two years to do that with three years to do that because i know eight months is that that's that's that's a crock so we're in a public hearing we're asking this body to make decisions about sun setting and about the potential to extend you know and i know that eight months is not going to cut the mustard to review nine other plans and 700 proposals so i don't want the council being played here only to have to revisit this in eight months and then get another eight month extension another image so what is the period what is the amount of time that you need honestly so that this body can go to work and give you the ability to to to to to analyze and to investigate all of these i don't when council flynn had alluded to it he doesn't want anyone in his i'm sure my district colleagues don't want anyone in their districts being displaced if we're gonna start to play a six eight month game people are gonna be displaced i don't want that to happen if it's if you need two years ask for two years if you need 14 months ask for 14 minutes if you need three years ask for three years just tell us what you need to do a thorough analysis of all nine plans and all 700 ldas and we'll work with you i just don't want to be in this game and again prior to you coming here i've dealt with a couple of your predecessors i'm the longest serving council here in terms of these ldas and through urban renewal and as a reference i've seen the movie before i've seen the movie before yeah so having some historical knowledge on it i know you know everybody here knows it's going to take a lot longer than eight months to get this work done tell us how much time you need through the chair and the lead sponsors let's noodle through what that time frame is and let's work together absolutely and thank you mr chair and absolutely counselor and i and i i want to echo the point about working together that's why we're here we absolutely want to work together with the council on this we absolutely want to take the council's direction on in shaping the future of our city and i just want to go back to the point made in the opening statement about accountability and transparency what we would hate to do is ask for a huge amount of time just to make us feel very comfortable that we would have all the time in the world to do all the research in the world and then have no transparency accountability about what that what that actual work looks like so we'd and i think working closely with administration felt that it was appropriate for us to set a short-term deadline so that everyone can hold us accountable to showing results to coming back here with analysis and making progress are there if we find that there are lots of affordable housing units for example at risk i do not think that we will be able to fully resolve that in eight months and we may need other solutions we may need further extensions and that in the in the mayor's transmission to the city council asking for this herring i think she was transparent that that further extensions may be necessary but we i think we just want to be cautious about it not kicking the can down the road forever and we want to we want to be responsive we want to in be communicating through the chair given my experience there will be requests for extensions so why don't we just step off and be honest and say why don't we give you a two-year extension with six-month check-ins through the committee chair every six months you guys come in and give councillor baker and his committee uh an update as to where you are i would prefer that then to sort of have this kind of this little cat mouse thing that's just again my experience on it is that i know you know it's going to take longer than eight months let's just call it what it is let's give you guys the time to do what you guys need to do for the plans and for the ldas it's important work yeah and it's thorough analysis in this whole process for those that aren't familiar with it it's very nuanced and every time you look around a corner or a building there's something else and then you got to worry about so this this it's intricately involved with many pieces so again i just want to have a very frank and honest conversation through the chair it ain't gonna be eight months counselor baker let's just put it on the table and so let's find out a more realistic timeline i would suggest two years with six-month check-ins through the chair into the committee working with the lead sponsors and district councillors who have these in their districts that would be my two cents based on my experience and again having seen this movie before thank you mr chairman thank you to uh representatives of the bpda for being here yeah if i can speak to that a little bit um council flaherty i i mean i'm open to that i think we want to make sure that we do this right because we don't want to lose you know affordable housing and things like that it's just sometimes like i said i'm i'm open to your suggestion here we were looking to push it out till i think um next march next march so it would be it would be a year i don't want to lose people on the board that think that that still i don't want to lose people on our council that may have maybe not a great view of the bpda and want to keep them under a microscope so that that's something that that i'd like to keep into you know true i totally agree with you i want to i want to allow this team here as much time as they need to make sure that that we're going to be able to do this this thing rightly so yeah we'll we'll and mr chair i would suggest that you keep this docket keep it keep it in committee yep and have them report every six months we want to do it quarterly but i think six months would be appropriate so we have an open docket so we have a matter in front of us if we keep this matter open and have it as a working document then to your point that's how we were able to keep the bpda's feet to the fire on this issue so okay i appreciate it mr chair thanks my colleagues for their indulgence does anybody want to speak to that i i think i i think council breaker you also put it well there are there are and we tried to acknowledge this in our opening statements there are there are certainly those who are skeptical um about their renewal given its truly checkered past and i think we want to acknowledge that those um constituents have concerns about the extent ongoing extensions so we're i think what we're trying to do here is find an appropriate middle ground that provides that transparency and accountability provides the data the council needs to review in order to make informed decisions um but also uh be responsive to the legacy of her renewal and our and our ultimately our plan for sunsetting over the long haul thank you you're all done council plans yes clarity thank you mr thank you colleagues council flynn thank you council baker and appreciate council flaherty's comments about you know giving the bpda enough time to make sure that they do their work um but i i also agree that you know the a few months is not enough time that we need to make sure that as a council as a body that we give them the opportunity to to let them do their work in a professional environment without being rushed and that brings me to the ldas in my district but also other people's district is and i've i've said this i've said this before but i can't i can't have one resident impacted at all by any decision in a negative way by the bpda as it relates to possibly being forced out of their house for apartment for any particular reason the 50 years seems like a long period of time that people are in an apartment but i've dealt with um apartments and um units in chinatown that were up after 50 years and had the opportunity to work with sheila dylan's team to to to address the situation but 50 years does come up pretty pretty fast for for us and you know we don't want to be the ones making a decision that impacts immigrants communities of color and throwing people out of there out of their apartments i'm not i'm not doing that um that's my number one priority is making sure residents that are currently living there that they're protected that their quality of life is addressed but under no circumstances could i ever support something where one tenant is forced from their apartment for any reason that's my number one priority the other the other priority i have is as council flaherty mentioned and i've said this publicly um if some of these are sunsetted as as as the plan would be over the over the next year i don't want to see developers take advantage of this situation in their own way to financially profit from decisions that that we're making here today at the expense of of residents so you know whether it's whether it's a a bpda ethics or it's bpda legal counsel but i want to make sure that there is no you know there's no developers being cute behind the scenes trying to take advantage of this situation because they follow this issue very closely and i'm not supporting anything if i know that this is going to benefit any developer down the road [Music] what do you think and that's my question yeah thank you counselor it's okay it's an exceptional question and and i think you're absolutely asking the right one and with your focus for the with the um uh the three downtown districts keeping the focus on the on the residents of chinatown and preventing displacement and preserving affordability i think is absolutely appropriate um and i think it just goes back to the distinction between the five that we're recommending for sun setting versus um the nine or additional times needed and because i don't i don't think we can say with authority today uh to the earlier points that that that situation is not going to happen i mean chris just gave a great great anecdote about uh it might might be a small case but at a open space restriction in charlestown that obviously has development interest and if um that lda expires then that if that developer still owns that property they'll want to pursue development so there's there what you're saying is absolutely spot on uh everybody was a lens we took to our analysis and what we're um why we're recommending the five that we would recommend to sunset in april and why we're for saturday night or additional time residents have asked me if this does take place are we able to prohibit the use of chapter 121a for private developers let me do would you like me to give a little bit more background on that question i would okay um so listening to some residents in the south end concerned about the usage of 121a for private developers would allow developers to get tax breaks and bypass the regular zba variants approval process so the context of this is that there is a project in the south end where developers could possibly use 121a to redevelop a building and their plans brought up a lot of concerns from neighbors so when a request comes in for us to consider a project for 121a approval we work closely with assessing because the 121a is giving a tax break to the property if it's for affordable housing um and you know there does in order to use 121a there is an extraordinary benefit that's being achieved from from that project a lot of affordable housing um saving an exceptional landmark like the huntington theater so but it it's there's a careful consideration there it's not it's not used that often in in it it's i i understand the concern but but it's looked at the the one benefit of 121a is that the zoning relief is granted through that process so it is a bra approval um it's a public hearing so there is opportunity for the community to comment on it at the time it is approved but then any changes come through the bra for further zoning or whatever in in the tax break is already built into the project um at that time but it's a careful consideration it's not it's not something that's deployed you know just because someone asked for it but eileen correct me if i'm wrong on this is the bpd's ability to utilize 121a tools to create tax rates for public benefit it's not tied directly to earth renewal plans no it's a separate statute to separate okay thank you power of the agency and then just one quick comment i think people here know the council block highlighted it china world trade center um critical role in the community temporary library was there the the the asian the chinatown historical society the urban college i believe there's another arts group there was there's a woman's hair styling company there so i want to make sure that as this process continues that that building we're able to make sure that small businesses stay there but there's a major component to community space whether it's a historical society or various non-profit groups that do a lot of exceptional work you highlighted bcnc earlier in your on your slide presentation but that that building plays a critical role in the neighborhood and i know we've talked about that before finally i just want to read something briefly the park plaza urban renewal plan someone mentioned to me what impact this would have um maybe maybe the state transportation building is not necessarily in in the in the zone per se but if but if we sunset anything in this area would this set a precedent that developers are able to build as high as the transportation building potentially knocking down the transportation build building if it was sold at one time in in building large large uh buildings in that area the um the restrictions on height and personally really jump in on this one are tied to the lda properties in the park plaza plan um so that it does not regulate height zoning regulates height on the uh properties that are not lda properties um does it provide an additional level of protection yes it does and that that would go away but the but then ultimately zoning it's pretty attentive to height in that area say the last part again what what goes away what the lda the lda properties i believe have height restrictions on them and i know your the constituents in the park plaza area are very concerned about shadows cast plaza um my understanding is that the um ldas do speak to height restrictions but zoning also speaks to hyper hype restrictions zoning does it with that um well well those well the ability to enforce those ldas would go away after april 22nd we can still enforce zoning yeah but they could get they could get approval at the zba for full larger buildings but if the bit if the urban renewal is still in place there'd be more protection for the neighborhood right that i think that's accurate so the so that's a quality of life for residents in the neighborhood so something something to think about that's why going back to my colleague council flaherty a lot of these decisions that we're making today you know have permanent are going to be with us permanently so we need to think this through and we want to make sure we give you guys enough time to to make those decisions i i would like to see a longer period of time so we're able to consider those types of those types of questions i'm sure there's there's dozens and dozens of those types of questions around the city and i think residents would want to make sure that we do our due dil due diligence as as a city council body too to make sure that we do our due diligence to represent them the best we can but having said that uh thank you for your time thank you for your hard work on this project thank you council rebecca thank you council flynn uh council fernandez anderson thank you mr chair um my goodness [Laughter] seriously um how are y'all doing at home oh my gosh so tell me how long have you known that this was going to expire and that at some point you needed to do this work i think you know chris i mean this is chris's full-time job so chris probably very apt to answer that question but i think probably the general answer is um in uh 2016 the council extended working with the mayor's office at that time there were no plan areas until uh until april right so we knew that in 2016. um in 2020 chris put together working with numerous people across our agency that proposal to sunset first five then four now back to back to five but um sunset though the a select few uh few districts in april and then set out a timeline two years ago for the uh the uh sun setting of the rest the majority sun setting by 2026 and the the last ones the largest one sun setting by 2030 that answers the question um yes thank you um how much data have you collected in since 2016 then 18 then 20 then predicting 26 now 2022. how come you don't have the data how much do we provide in common you have to do a study that essentially have to look at all of properties that went under sorry these these acronyms yeah um the land disposition agreements thank you land disposition agreements y'all just in case um which means that essentially it's an agreement that i want to understand it's an agreement that basically you create with a developer they at one point bpda acquired land as sometime way back in the 50s some agreement went in place that this brilliant idea was going to go in right and then bpa started acquiring chunks of land bpda then said we have this plan and we're going to renew stuff and we're going to make it better for everybody people were like all the way in charlestown like black people used to live there south boston east boston south end back bay and people started getting pushed out pushed out pushed out pushed out and got poorer and poorer and went into the projects and therefore suffered now bpda is here and saying hey new staff new crew new ideas we're good people this is not a pony show we actually care we want an extension because since 2016 we knew that we needed to do a study to figure out how we were going to protect people right so six years later like spongebob french guy does we just we still don't know you still don't have data you don't know you don't know what you don't have that information since 2016 you knew this and now we're here right so i'm going to move on i don't want to belabor that i can but i can respond if you'd like um so first i think it's important to acknowledge the displacement um facts that you've outlined that is there it's true that the the legacy of uh urban renewal has caused displacement in some neighborhoods and we have to acknowledge that we have to work as best we can to write that as we chart the future um i do want to acknowledge that a lot of data has been collected that was really the major charge of the council in 2016 because i think the criticism that we were we were non-transparent we did not have records we we had ldas but they were in file cabinets somewhere and no one could access those if you were in the public or the landowner so we've done a lot of work so starting in 2016 and given the director from the council to become more transparent and accountable uh we created chris's position and uh we've worked to create an lda database online we we created an action plan in 2020 that action plan spelled out exactly what we need to do in order to make sure we're as we sunset urban renewal we do it with um thoughtfully and don't cause harms to anyone or cause unintended consequences to lose tools that we might be able to deploy to help build communities in positive and progressive ways and so that that that action plan was submitted in 2020 um and like like i mentioned it called for majority of um urban renewal plan areas being to be expired by 2026 and the biggest ones by 2030 because we needed we knew at that time there's a lot of work that needs to be done i think what's important to acknowledge now is that we have a very new city council and a new mayor and that those uh and we're charting a new direction for our city and it's important that we craft a plan for the future of a renewal that's reflective of that new reality and so that's why we're not here today saying let's go let's implement the action plan from 2020. let's instead work together on an action plan that that makes sense for this council and this administration thank you and so what about the restricted properties um this projected number of restricted properties that you're trying to protect what about if one expires tomorrow so like there's a property that i know of yeah in my district it's going to expire any day now if if the the lda can only be amended because the ldas are owned by private individuals um not always developers in some cases there are homeowners and affordable homeowners or people who bought open space next to their house or but but sometimes developers true too um that lda is a contract between the dpda and that that developer to amend it will require the parties to enter into a negotiation and amend the contract um so if those are going to expire there would have to be some event they'd have to come in and want to change in order for us to change it what is i think our greatest concern is that we have those and those expiration dates are further in the future there if and if we allow urban neural to in some of these plan areas where we haven't done enough of the research to tell you when there's those are going to expire and how they can be protected that that that the action of allowing a renewal to sunset next month would cause that contract to terminate and couldn't they just use a 121 a to amend it and develop luxurious condos whatever however they want a no a 121a is a generally a tax deal and would have that's a new contract they'd have to come in and we'd have to run through a process and decide whether or not we want to do that but i guess i'll also want to highlight the majority of these land disposition agreements that we're concerned about are not um opportunities for a high-end luxury housing but are in in some cases restrictions on homeowners properties that they actually may want to retain because it helps them you know it keeps their property value lower it keeps their tax payments a little bit lower because the the open space restriction or the affordable housing restriction limits the value of the property in some cases that might be a bad thing but in some cases actually might be a good thing for that homeowner because it helps them stay in their home i i want to understand thank you for that explanation i want to understand you acquire land it's a business you acquire land you sell it the land belonged to a people that now died and suffered now you have the land just you you can't give it back could you give it back you can't just give it back but if you have the land now you're gonna sell it to developers that don't even reflect the community that it's already affected and those developers now are going you're going to commoditize this idea and you're going to those developers are going to make money and how does that benefit bpda like how does bba make money how i want to understand how if you sell the land you get the money or how is bpda financed or how does bpda benefit from developers or how does all this work yep um it's a very big question i'll try to give you a quick vignette and and i'm happy to dig into it deeper um the bpda is self-financed uh we do where the 70 of our revenue comes from real estate transactions mostly ground leases that are that are paying uh money into the to the bpa over time would you get some uh grants for workforce training programs and other other grant sources of the reigning 30 um the um the the vast majority of our our real estate revenues in total honesty come from the marine industrial park in south boston where we operate um job creating maritime industrial focused uh um uh property in uh outside of the marine park uh when we're developing land in boston's communities residential development's forbidden and the marine park is an industrial space we are we are very deeply commute committed to public plan for public good and putting the community at the center of decision-making processes on the future of their property and we the the revenue deal for that the future of that revenue the real estate needs to make sense for the people of boston right we shouldn't give away the people of boston's land for free to enrich private actors um so if we're doing something that is if the community supports a market rate development on a piece of property then that market rate owner should pay a market rent but oftentimes what we're doing and what the community's vision is for a particular piece of property is open space or affordable housing or community development and then those are properties we're happy to give they either greatly reduced or are no monetary value to that point it's at that point and i'm gonna make just uh three final remarks i'm sorry and i'm gonna close i'm so sorry and i know that you and your job you are doing what you can with the resources that you have available to you and i appreciate your time and your work to uh doing it to the best or at least as equitable as possible and i appreciate that what i i will continue to hopefully work with you on is to advocate for the community one give back the land two hopefully if you don't get back to land fine that's not gonna work uh can we negotiate can we talk about real real solutions for equitable development responsible development and because what i have to say about that is in in district 7 you know why my position is the way i grew up in roxbury right like i really know this area and um and you know those meetings how they go poor morgan so it's really like it's a lot on the community these people come and they cry and they're they're in pain right and um they're not being heard and they feel dismissed every single time they ask you for affordable units none of that happens none of these solutions work affordable rental units on eighty percent a hundred percent ami seventy percent mi is impoverishing the black and brown community bpda solutions to selling to white developers to build in our community even when they're black those affordable ami rates don't work so it's a policy issue and now you have people that feel dismissed they're in pain that cry that die that suffer and it's just a perpetual cycle of like no su real solutions right and they come and they yell at you and they're yelling at morgan and the community engagement feels pretentious and performative none of it works you're not reaching real people that really need to learn about this stuff so then you have like a handful of you know naysayers and then everything is disregarded just a big mess just a big headache right so what i have to say about that is we need we have a lot of work to do on engagement like uh washington park got marked 100 trees to be cut down i didn't even get word of it wow what is going on right so then we have all of these all of this commotion going on over there in south end developers are trying to buy parking lots out of you know affordable housing units so that they can make luxury condos anything that they can any type of urban renewal laws or you know little nuances as he calls it to go in and displace people that's what happens and we don't have the answers you don't have the answer we don't have the answer so i'm not pointing fingers but i'm saying this is a real problem extending it to my colleague clarity mentioned extending it i feel it's like well if you don't have the solutions and you knew that you needed the data and now you're gonna go work on studying this thing shouldn't we ask you for progress report before we extend it past eight months shouldn't we examine what work you've done shouldn't we put you on some sort of probationary something right you would agree so i don't get the two-year thing i really would like to be able to critically look at a comprehensive plan and say we are examining every six months every eight months so that we can actually measure how we are actually getting to a solution because if we continue to just oh sure like urban renewal great thing and it gave us parks who cares they're crumbs and all of these things have killed and pushed people out who cares so i would all do respect and love and sincerity you know uh you know you're my god you know i like you but i have to say we have to work together we have to be honest with each other about how this is not it counselor i deeply appreciate your advocacy on behalf of your constituents and the people of boston i think it deeply resonates with us and what we want to achieve i think you know the intent is there to lead forward a more equitable solution more equitable solutions in development and i think that's the lens we want to take to this request for the extension are there are the problems we need to install solve across the board in community engagement and developing land for public good yes there are um and we're looking forward to working forward thank you working together to do so thank you i think we also have to ask the city what is the alternative plan what are our options when you can't protect these residents right because it it can't just be on bpda obviously again your business 70 70 i mean privately funded like that's obviously in the business of making money so where i think the alternate alternate solution has to come from us the city and figuring out what is the plan to protecting these residents so that we are actually sincere about what we say that we're about thank you so much for uh bearing with me thank you thank you concept finance anderson um before we move to brian so clarification if we take no action all of these go away in april yes we're gonna go and wait one minute the ldas would lose all the open not necessarily open space but all the lda's dhcd has required us to get a city council vote of approval to extend any urban renewal plan area so if the city council takes no action all renewal areas would would sunset and end on april 22nd of this year okay thank you councilworld thank you mr chair um quick question kind of pick it back pick it back in off of what counselor fernandez anderson asked was can you talk to me about the community engagement process and the contact rate on when you were engaging the community based on like the feedback that you provided here and the reports yeah so we um we know to every every neighborhood every uh urban old neighborhood um some of them we did twice particularly the ones that we had earmarked for potentially sun setting but we did all of them individually we had childs now we had 280 people in the south end on zoom we had 256 people in washington park we had about 50 people in person just pre-pandemic that were into it they had written their own books about it it was actually a pretty enjoyable team power plaza similar small group uh if i recall but they were um they were part of the cdc cnc and they're very interested in the history and they were very kind and friendly some of the ones downtown school franklin government center minimal attendance maybe some students from nearby universities who northeastern boston university that were interested in it none maybe doing it as a class south cove we had a large turnout along with councillor flynn's backing certainly so any sort of aid to get the word out there tends to make the biggest um community meetings um so yeah southampton was busy it was really busy it was 260 but it was on zoom maybe which is maybe not the same um we did do some smaller outbreaks to like the civic groups just introduce it i don't know if you count that as community meeting but it was overall it was a great experience i i wanted to go to every urban area because that's the way my brain works like they're all different they're all unique and when you start talking about one and then another one and the same meaning it gets too confusing so that's the way i did it and i thought it was relatively successful and in terms of the brunswick king area i'm a district councillor so what are the negative impacts for the residents in that area when the sun set and can you talk to me what can be done to help those residents are going to be negatively impacted brunswick king has negative impacts in the sense that that's something me and eileen have been talking about you have a number of open space parcels that i believe are taxed at a lower rate because there's a restriction on your parcel now should the lda go away should that plan go away should that restriction go away would you be taxed at a higher rate it's something that's ringing through my head and brain and certainly hopefully we have some of the people in the building that can answer that for us but um that's a concern of mine um you know to see elderly folks get taxed at a rate that they're not accustomed to is is dangerous i think in the brunswick king area that's that's probably the biggest risk and do we know how many residents that will be impacted i can foresee two side yards lodgable side yards that you could build on um that i use for parking uh and then the residents do not want to make that change you know they feel they've made enough changes in their life and they are renters and nearby um but i think one thing i want to make sure we add chris is when we went out and did the community engagement in brunswick king the um my understanding is that the majority of uh constituents who attended that meeting and provided a feedback were supportive of the uh verb renewal expiring in the district but had their own their the concerns voiced were around the remaining publicly owned property so the bpda has two properties um the city of boston uh mayor's office housing has a few properties as well that seem to be very good opportunities for our continued effort to create affordable housing on infield vacant lots i think there's a lot of enthusiasm uh in that area for doing something with that vacant property there's concern i think across the board that vacant property is not doing anything for adjacent community members and that they were at the time and this was one of the reasons why brunswick came out is we thought is it possible that we might need urban renewal tools in order to advance the development project in the public interest there it seems so we that's why it came out originally with that because of that concern um it seems relatively unlikely that we would need or or if we would need it there wouldn't be another way to get it because we're talking about residential infill development and that's something that the city of boston has done relatively successfully yeah and i'm going out to the communities and walk in the walk and walk in the streets is probably the most intensive way to see how they live and what they need and certainly in the public meeting public good is important particularly when it's something that directly affects the resonance of the area and they do see those two parcels that are vacant and they do have dreams of it being potential home ownership units for friends families cousins um so so sorry uh but in total we have about four buildable lots inside the brunswick king yeah okay two of them attached to homeowners yeah and for us it was two and then you know for for dnd it's it's more and they were asking me you know could you do something bigger could you come by and make it something really amazing but it's two there are there are two bpda-owned properties yeah right for us but why not right um so i think it's that outside the box thinking what the support of the community where you could use an urban oil tool in a really successful way and so when it's sunset it goes back to the city of boston or we continue to own the property okay all right and then what is the impact um that this has it's sunset and have on lila frederick if any that the school or the school yeah i don't want to talk out of turn i i think the by the frederick i i think initially we controlled or or took the playground area slash parking area not the actual physical school so imagining yeah i've had some conversations with bps on this recently because this might be a question that came up um the the frederick school is one of the middle schools that um that bps has advanced the thinking on that it's not the model they're going to continue um i believe the the current plan is for the school to be used to swing space for renovations at other schools so we'll continue in educational use um and to chris's point we did transfer some there are some ldas on the on the open space but those are now in bps ownership and being used as a as a playground so it doesn't seem like there's a lot of risks there and it i guess this is in the eye of the beholder but that it does not seem that there's a immediate obvious need for the use of renewal tools like if if the school became vacant property we wanted and it was surplus by this council and then wanted to be redeveloped in some scenario would we need our room tool tools to do it that's a pretty it's pretty large hypothetical there and we don't see the immediate you need versus the residence feedback that you know are they're really on their only concern with those those two properties all right and then um last question those two homeowners that would be affected when the sun sets is there any communication that would go out prior to their tax bill that that would inform them that you might see an increase in your taxes or the the impacts you know the sun setting will take i think the technical answer that is no because it depends on what the assessor's department assesses the property at and what the zoning implications are for open space it may be it may be impactful that to chris's point but it may have no impact um if they're if the backyards were unbuildable i mean catherine's gonna come talk to me about it anyway so if we can get a definitive answer and how much it goes up i don't mind delivering that message because we don't even know if it will or if it maybe won't the city process for how they assess property when they do it when they catch up with restrictions ending it's just a matter of it's definitely something that the property owner would want to be aware of but it's not going to happen overnight i don't think that they you know the city is going to send someone out there and say hey that restriction's gone this property you now owe higher taxes on this property because it's it's worth more i don't even know how how they would assess that side yard piece in relation to the larger parcel so it there's a couple of factors that go into determining that but i do think that it's important that people are aware that that is a potential outcome right um you might see me out there for a minute sweeping it was one or two of that it's clear to them what's actually going to happen if there's something that the bpda can do in conjunction with the assessor's office in your office to mitigate any of those negative impacts we will absolutely do that especially in this specific instance where it's one or two individual homeowners i appreciate that sure thank you chair thank you council warrell um and along that line that could also affect them positively if they wanted to build on the land correct it could yeah it's definitely you can build on it okay um so the first round of questions i wanted to be able to people have their time to get the questions out that they wanted to now we're gonna just go around another brief brief round if people do have more questions and if we can keep everything as as tight as possible i would appreciate that i just have one question on how we move forward so we had some we had some suggestions on maybe a longer longer extension period i don't know how people feel about that but um if the bpda board votes first who's going to come up with the language to it so they vote on and will vote on the exact same language or can someone run me down we'll need to work closely with council and igr to make sure we coordinate this quote appropriately i don't think anyone the panel today is the appropriate person to answer that okay so it's like we're involved we're involved in the in the language and what we're actually going to be voting on so what we vote on will be the same as vpda award yeah okay um and i'm going to turn it over i knew i had another question someplace but i'm a little bit spread out here so i'm gonna turn it over to council council brock great um yeah and i'll be very brief because i know we've got several panelists um in our second panel uh who have been waiting for a long time so i would just say the one note i wanted to make was vis-a-vis counselor warrell's question about his district i mean it does seem to me like the whole reason why why we need to do this right and i agree with counselor fernandez anderson that if the goal had been to sunset on the timeline that you're talking about now previously then the city would have taken different actions than it did but it seems like there are a number of things where there are opportunities to mitigate the harm so for instance like with these two property owners right like you know there's probably a way for someone to offer a voluntary open space restriction that somebody else holds which prevents that that like tax thing from going up but i think the issue is we can solve that on a bespoke level for two privately owned parcels in brunswick king we can't in a matter of days solve that for almost 300 parcels in charlestown right and so i just i really want to stress that the to me the work that lies ahead is not just work of information gathering it's work of like strategizing and problem solving right it's like how would the city deal with xyz issues with the other tools that we have or you know are there situations where there's a parcel that we don't have anything better of renewal and so we want to shrink the boundaries of the district to adjust that parcel right and say we're gonna so i just want to stress that i think that seems soluble now but there are a number of these where it feels like the whole problem is that we need to kind of work through them individually and to that end i mean my my gut on the extension conversation is that we is that the short lease makes sense but that as i said at the start that december 31st is a very inconvenient time for this body and our legislative calendar and so that it would be better to push that to like march 31st but i'm not necessarily suggesting that we as councilor flaherty did that we'd go to a full two year because i think the idea of hey we got to really be working on this important and then just the one question i wanted to ask because it relates to our second panel um this is i know counselor friend is interested in the streets of hope um it's a book that i love but there's a quote from the newspaper when so we'll talk a little bit more about this i asked you in my questions but folks may not know that the whole way that the dudley scott neighborhood initiative the sort of grandmother of the land trust movement in boston and frankly nationally got its land was through the bpda's eminent domain powers and the use of and i think was the first time in the country that those powers were basically transferred to a non-profit as an agent and there's a quote from the newspaper when that happened that said there's nothing new about community residents in unifying to influence the thrust of development in their neighborhoods what is very new however is a community-based group that doesn't just have the ability to influence development but the authority to control it as well and and i think this relates to something counselor louis jen said at the start i do think that the the future of like if there's a way to use some of these public land use tools well i think there it has to run through real community control and you know one of the interesting points that's made by this book is that it was a huge political effort by the residents of roxbury to get the urban renewal tools used in that way in that moment for dsni it's had enormous positive impacts over decades but it's never been replicated and now we sort of have like a burgeoning land trust movement in the city and i think i just want to ask you guys on record i know it hasn't been a sort of continuing tradition of the agency but in principle there isn't anything am i correct today to prevent us from again using the urban renewal powers in conjunction with a community land trust is that the case is in principle now and um i think it's worth acknowledging and you just did counselor buck that the dsi is a national model right people come from all over the country to look at the way that that land trust has um succeeded over time and if there are as we chart the future the course for the future here if there are ways we can um look to that example and incorporate that into the future planning we're very eager to have those conversations great thank you that's it for me mr chair did you have something to say council louis chen thank you uh hopefully two short questions you said 30 of the revenue from the bpda comes from grant's work can you expound that uh so uh the majority of those and happy to fall off offline with some detailed numbers but the um the the office of workforce development is under um the bpda they're eligible for community development block grants and so uh those those dollars pass through dnd and then are transferred to the bpda to operate those workforce development and training programs and is that the basic is that basically all of the 30 i i believe so that that i think they're all grant programs yes okay um and then shout out to jeep jones for his work in the city and the ingenuity with making dsni happen um i actually i agree with um uh my counselor counselor bloc like i think that a short lease is good here i think a good idea could be to automatically put this before the council annually until they're no longer necessary to have us vote and reapprove i think two years would be too long i think uh mark i think eight months is too short so i think um you know we do want to have our eyes on this and i think but we also do want to be realistic hopefully you know we can make good progress in that time but um but yeah so that's just my thoughts there you go thank you council uh council fernandez anderson thank you chair um i think i'm a little tapped out but um my question i i think just a little bit about um how bpda transfers land to um office of dnd mayor's office housing yeah um mayor's office of housing and then becomes available to potentially sell as low as a hundred dollars um how can we make that more available or possible yeah um and then let's go ahead and we enjoyed a close relationship with mayor's office housing just mentioned earlier i i worked there for five years i know i'm sealing our team well we're very eager to collaborate together um i think that um with the bpd also very eager to dispose of property for 100 bucks in support of 100 affordable housing if that's appropriate um i think the one i think maybe one important distinction between the bpda's real estate portfolio and the mayor's office of housing is that our in in general our model is ground leases um we do do some sales where then we give up ownership but as across the board in general our model is ground leases which retains public ownership of the property the model of the mayor's office housing his sale of real estate which then gives up public control of real estate now there's nuances that we could talk about it more but that would i think that would be the major distinction and there's possibility to do that with non-profit or outside agencies as well yeah and we routinely do it together and we would like to do it more i'd like to thank you for um our previous collaboration our ongoing collaboration on the district 7 art corridor and activating spaces um really enjoying that and i thank you and your team for really putting your money where your mouth is yeah i look forward to it i'm looking forward to continuing work with with you i do agree with consul bach um on the date so i think march 31st um is that what you said council black um is good and then i would also say can we talk about or maybe it's an it's the next hearing or working session can we talk about details in terms of what are we looking for how are we checking in what are our questions because again i just want to measure it i just want to really get results thank you so much thank you council council bureau the as of now no further questions okay thank you thank you council um and i'm i'm almost wondering if we bifurcate it and we just vote for the five that we want to sunset and then figure out what date we put on the other one but again we'll go into a working session or some sort of model of what we what our next move is to clarify council we need your vote on the extension it's the uh the extensions required so the five we don't you don't vote on that we just don't take any action just experience by choosing not to vote to extend those they work perfect and i will just add again on behalf of myself and counselor flynn that i think we're looking for that to be the four because there's significant like issues with the park plaza one that have been raised after our attention both the china train building and then this concern that basically because it's the only state plan we it's an urban renewal plan that is both city and state that right now it gives us more lovers for a conversation if the state were to dispose of significant assets there a thing which they are doing around the city um so i think we really want more conversation so we are looking for us to to move that into the march 31st bucket instead of having it in the okay okay and i just have one quick question here you the on the on the um example you pointed to 555 columbia road um as as a an acquisition you guys how did the building across the street to sit the citizens bank goal how was that how did that happen so um so we the bpd directly acquired through direct negotiation with the bank bank america was the owner and the bank of america building um the mayor's office of housing has a program known as the acquisition opportunity program uh which works with non-profits and in some cases for-profit owners to acquire real estate they fund the acquisition of the um but mayor's office housing does not actually acquire they fund the acquisition of a third party um to do in this case ds9 so required is that just a grant to dsni uh it's a depends on the structure in some cases it's alone okay thank you i think we're no further questions i think we're good and we'll we'll bring down our next panel thank you guys appreciate it thank you very much okay minnie mcmahon we had molly but i think we um good afternoon um i think what i'll do is we'll we'll go to you guys first and then we'll go to zoom up to lydia up there i see her up there on zoom so uh whoever wants to start first you can just present is this okay good afternoon my name is minnie mcmahon i'm here representing dudley street neighborhood initiative and the greater boston community land trust network thank you for the opportunity to speak before the council today and john smith who is our executive director sends his apologies for not being able to be here today so as you know and has been discussed a little bit already today dsni is a community planning and organization organization in roxbury and north dorchester and in addition to our planning activities we run a community land trust called dudley neighbors incorporated which owns and stewards over 30 acres of land for multiple uses in perpetuity on those acres today we have 226 affordable housing units both rental and home ownership we have open space we have a playground we have ground leases with urban farms we have a couple two three community gardens and currently nine affordable commercial units that are that are being rented from us so dsni's 30 acres were acquired from the city and from private owners with the help of eminent domain powers granted in 1998 by the city of boston and the bra and at that time the financial value of the land in the dudley neighborhood was minimal and no doubt the differences in perception about the value of the land was instrumental in the people of dudley gaining control of the land at that time and so the community land trust was formed to manage and steward those acres permanently just a brief word on community land trusts um clts are a model we we remove land from the speculative market and commit its use to community clt stabilize communities both in times of hot and cold real estate markets they build community they ensure community governance through the board structure and other activities and measures and i'd like to note that while dsni is indeed a leader and has some cachet on the national stage we work very closely um and and help support the greater boston community land trust network which is an association of regional of clts regionally working together very strongly to deepen and broaden community control of land housing and our neighborhoods for the long haul so yes we do continue to be a model nationally because of our activities stewarding land and prioritizing community control and i would like to highlight in addition to the the fact of the ownership and management of land we do have an mou with the city of boston regarding disposition of public lands within a portion of our catchment area called the dudley triangle so we conduct with the city land use processes for these partials to ensure that the uses that are decided upon are in line with our community priorities and this type of community control of planning should be a model for each neighborhood in the city because it is the local residents who best understand and can plan for their needs so today as we think about land use tools and and better ways to develop our communities you know just some some suggestions we would like to make you know we advocate for continuing models of co-governance that do rely on working with you the members of the council with departments at the city and of course with community-based organizations and local residents and really need to uplift long-term stewardship strategies as well as preservation which has come up quite a bit today so some you know we ask that you today and as we continue to work together in the future consider the following suggestions um that the city set acreage um and parcel unit whatever the appropriate units are goals to actually bring more land onto clts to really put some numbers attached to ideas around support for clts we want to see rfps really focusing on community priorities from whatever whatever department is issuing those rfps we want to see um you know it would be wonderful to see rfps requiring or you know more heavily weighing proposals that work with clts and we would also like to see rfps that really prioritize equity partnerships and encourage and reward diverse applicants and and groups of applicants who couldn't develop on their own and then we also would really like to look into with you the establishment of a municipal land bank to to compile vacant properties problem service surplus properties and and part of that land bank having you know a preference for disposition to clts of course for appropriate properties and i will just add a couple more points and then and then i'll close um a lot of these sort of tools and uses can be on clts um or not and the benefit of the clt really is is huge community governance long-term stewardship we would like to see 25 more urban farm sites by 2025 commercial zoning overlays that promote innovation incubation and flexibility for new local and small business home ownership and rental units at rates that are truly affordable according to neighborhood conditions not area median income and a preference for other shared equity models like owner owner co-ops or rental co-ops in rfps or somehow incentivized or supported through other city programs thank you thank you minnie josh uh thank you uh mr chair thank you uh councillor bach uh for the invitation and you mr chair and councillor luigen for for co-sponsoring this councillor uh it's nice to be here it's my first time sitting i think in this in this room i may have sat in every other seat in this room before um but to be quick i know um what's your name josh thakum executive director of housing ford massachusetts i want to be quick i know we've been here a while today and you know i'm here obviously to talk about innovative ways to create more housing in the city of boston and we have a lot of tools to do that and that's what housing forward's mission is it's to through reforms through smart growth strategies to make it easier for people to produce housing at all levels of the market and the city of boston and as we just heard extensively the bpda has a lot of tools to do that as does the city itself as does the city council and right now there is an urgency and there has been for as long as i can remember to create more affordable housing uh at all levels uh create affordable home ownership opportunities something that i think is often not at the forefront of the conversation we need to be talking about rental and home ownership opportunities and community land trusts obviously are a proven method to do that and we would certainly advocate for when the city is disposing of property or in some cases building on top of existing city infrastructure i know you mr chair have often talked about building above libraries or schools for affordable housing and senior housing over the years i think it's incredibly important and something that in most cases won't cost any money for the city of boston it could be a partnership with non-profit or for-profit developers looking at tax incentives but there needs to be a sense of urgency i feel uh on this front and i i got a lot of that um from the the counselors in the earlier part of this hearing that there's been a lot of talk about these issues and we need to do something about it with direction from this body from the mayor's office there's a lot that can be done in council box district i often talked about and i'll let her speak to it if she wants to but you know things like the west end library which is a prime example of you know really prime location real estate that the city owns that is a thriving the library is a thriving and important part of the community but should be looked at to see what can go next to it or on top of it and again in partnerships that are not going to cost the city significant dollars but will create more housing more affordable housing and again depending on the specific structure more future revenue for the city and other city services something that in our work and housing forwards only existed for about 18 months maybe 20 months at this point is when talking to developers either non-profit for-profit community development corporations whomever it is looking for predictability uh in the city process so that they can plan out what is feasible how much affordability how many units can be created and that's something that's very much in the power in this building to do i think with the direction with that sense of urgency to do something we're at a minimum we're always looking at several years out you know building permitting planning having community input on something but we have the resources we have a lot of city-owned land and that goes from large parcels to you know smaller parcels in the neighborhoods that can hold single-family or two or three family homes making changes making zoning and planning policy that makes it easier for folks to build on those parcels to attach long-term affordability to them to create homeownership opportunities is critical so i applaud you for holding this hearing i thank you for giving me the opportunity uh to speak here and to join you and i look forward to continuing this conversation i have many ideas um on this front i know you all do as well but there is something here there is an ability in city hall in boston city hall and city and town halls across the commonwealth to take important steps more funding absolutely it is important on this front but there's a lot we can do in a revenue neutral way that's going to create significant more affordability in housing across the city of boston thank you mr chairman thank you josh lydia lo thank you for this opportunity to speak i'm lydia lowe i'm executive director of the chinatown community land trust and i wanted to say that you know many people are not aware but actually the first use of urban renewal in boston was not the west end it was chinatown and the new york streets the adjacent new york streets area which was documented in mel king's chain of novel chain of change um and you know urban renewal and the bra have really been a double-edged sword for chinatown on the one hand we had the so-called slum clearance we had land turned over to the highways for construction we had institutional expansion and then luxury development but on the other hand um hundreds and you know hundreds and hundreds of affordable housing units also um were related to are related to the use of urban renewal powers and have been in fact some of the developments that have anchored chinatown over the decades um there is also been the the ability to assemble larger parcels um to pro to prevent expiration of affordability um when subsidies expire and to enforce long-term agreements through land disposition through ldas so over like 30 years of fighting the bra around community control and development i've started to learn more about urban renewal tools and started to realize that you know it's not so much the tools that are the problem the problem is power and accountability and who is doing that who is making those decisions so i think you know now as um the director of a community land trust our goal of the community land trust is community governance and um i think that if community governance can be tied and some of these tools can be used to actually increase the the possibility of community governance that's where we can make a real transformative impact on the city and we were formed inspired by the experience of the dudley street neighborhood where you know where that neighborhood has stabilized so much as the rest of boston has been undergoing a displacement crisis so i want to speak to just a few examples of you know how we could maybe use these tools or how we could think a little bit more um proactively um to really bring to really stabilize our neighborhoods because it's almost been like a given that you know this is great you know the dsni was given the power of urban renewal you know in the 90s you know they did this this great thing and it's never going to happen again but why couldn't it happen again um so for example um and i have seen i just want to say i have seen changes in how the bpda operates over the last five years but again it's a double-edged sword because i think when the bpda is involved in public parcels then there is much more attention to community planning there's much more attention to community priorities and really i'm trying to figure out how to use the public land for the public good but when the bpda is in charge of development review processes on private land then private it seems like there's a lot of unwanted private development that's still happening um so but in terms of the examples so for example in chinatown there's parcel r1 which is a public parcel that's up for development that's really being looked at for the purpose of affordable housing in a permanent library um but but there's also um why couldn't the bpda work with the community to acquire a sliver of privately owned land in order to ensure that that development either could be extended to increase the amount of affordable housing or maybe to have a really excellent community building public open space next to the library there are other public publicly owned parcels or properties such as parcel 12 i think that there were some sliver parcels just across the bridge in the south end which may have already been disposed of but sliver parcels in the community's hands can actually help us to have more community control and influence over private development there's the china trade center which people have mentioned in relationship to the um park plaza urban renewal plan that that commun that china trade center uh a few decades ago it was meant to be a center for community economic development with small chinatown businesses as well as community spaces we would like to see that building be under community control again and really try to make that vision a reality we have you know people think that chinatown is all either is mostly luxury development now or the old uh properties but you may be surprised to know there are buildings in chinatown that have been boarded up for 20 years why cannot the um bpda you know use those powers to move this um property that's you know that's been boarded up all this time these travel problem properties into productive use for the community for the priorities that the community wants and um you know particularly when we think about buildings like you know like the dynasty restaurant which has been boarded up since the i think the 90s or or earlier um the china trade center you know this is a particular moment for um you know with the experience of the pandemic for this these very historic and important small business districts such as chinatown to um to really make sure that they survive and um these using some of these tools uh could enable us to uh protect and ensure this that these businesses are sustained um there's an opportunity to move as there are um there is housing currently affordable a lot of affordable housing in chinatown is on old urban renewal property you know is there an opportunity to use as we move out of urban renewal and you know into the sun setting period to use those towers to move these properties into tenant or community ownership so that there can be affordability not just for 50 years but in perpetuity um these these are all important questions um that are very real for chinatown that we can connect to specific properties but which i think are examples of what can be done in other neighborhoods across the city thank you thank you um does anybody have questions i'm sure you do counsel bach we will start with you thank you so much council figure and thank you so much to all three panelists uh to lydia minnie and josh for sitting through a long hearing and this is the hazard of us combining the two dockets and and i also want to thank um unfortunately molly goodman from abundant homes had to go but she's a huge housing advocate in the city and um we really we regret that she that the panel took so long the first panel so i want to thank molly and then also wanted to um express thanks to boston harbor now which spoke to me extensively in relation to this docket and ultimately weren't able to be here today but um they they also sort of raised the what wasn't addressed on the panel which is the kind of like climate mitigation type impacts where we may need creative land assembly approaches and and um you know and really thinking about what's the benefit of the whole community there's a few places where the city of boston has land that it knows is a piece of that puzzle so i know you know down in councillor baker's district obviously talking about moakley park as a berm and sort of imagining it as a protection for the surrounding public housing communities and neighborhood but but you know it's come up increasingly that especially in the places where our waterfront is dispersed among a large number of private owners that some of those like larger community interests are going to need um going to need real stewardship and attention and may involve some of these tools so i just i wanted to thank them for raising that set of points to me and and apologize to molly that we weren't able to have around the panel um i guess just uh you know quickly um because i know everyone's been here a long time um if you could give a little bit of an example many of like what we mean when we talk about like community governance of land and sort of maybe just an instance of how in dsni that has actually looked because i mean i totally agree what lydia just said like i love the idea that where we come out on the park plaza vis-a-vis the china trade building is that we transfer it to some kind of community control since that's really the that's really the interest that we the city have seen for that building anyways and but as we all know there's a difference between the city doing something on behalf of the community versus the community kind of having that but i think it'd be great to hear a bit about that um and then yeah and then josh i mean just think if there's um if there's any i i don't want to put you on the spot but any example you can think of of kind of um the west end library is a great one i would love to see as folks know significant housing density on top of the redeveloped library but uh just you know places that you've seen like significant housing development done in partnership with a city in partnership with public land or like any you know just any um examples that we could copy or think about if you got any that'd be great but many i don't know and lydia as well if there's anything on on community governance and sort of what you dream of when you say that just because i think for those of us who for you all in the community land trust movement and for those of us who have the pleasure of talking to you we talk about that a lot but i'm not sure if everyone watching the hearing will really know what that means sure yeah um do it again okay that's good thank you um yeah so two two things come to mind one is we have a sustainable development committee which is a committee it's a it's a board of director chaired committee of residents who review development proposals in the community so this this is a this is a committee that private development comes through for comment and then when there's parcels that are owned by mayor's office of housing that are an rfp is being crafted for those parcels the mayor's office of housing presents to this committee and together actually crafts the language of the rfp so um you know a number of processes are protracted of that that's that happens and because of covid so there's one parcel um on on dudley street um currently owned by the mayor's office of housing years ago we did a community process around okay what do people want to see here people said you know we want mixed development we want commercial on the first floor we want affordable housing above it um a preference for multi you know we want multiple rooms because we're interested in housing families in this space input into the size of the rooms we want to make sure bedrooms are big enough to have a place for my kid to sleep and a desk to do homework so really getting into actually some of the design of design and really thinking seriously about the use of the development that would happen and being in an iterative process with dnd around that before the rfp gets released and then you know once the proposals actually come in community members who are present in that space and have like the voting powers and to make recommendations to um the city to the mayor's office of housing on on who to actually select for that development um so that's one example another is our you know we own this was mentioned earlier five 568 572 columbia road which is the former citizens bank building uh we dudley neighbors incorporated owns from you know we got this aop loan to acquire that building we went through an extensive community process to um go through yeah what what do people want to see in this building basically this there's a 20 000 square foot building it needs to be redeveloped we own it we're a community land trust what can we do with this um and and and this actual site is part of a larger redevelopment of oppam's corner that involves um land owned by the bpda and landowned by i don't know if it's public facilities or dnd um so so we've that that the outcome of that remains to be seen it hasn't you know we're still in pre-development with that particular project um but those are examples of like this the sustainable development committee having this um review power recommendation power and also really like design process power with both the city and the developer when they really push back against the developer if they want to see changes with the proposals and then with the land and the assets that we actually that we already own like this citizens bank building okay what do we want to see built here and how do we you know we ourselves you know we wrote the rfp and released that um as part of this larger redevelopment of between's corner thank you uh for the question counselor so it was a question as i understand it of examples of was it public private partnerships or using public land for for housing sure um you know i think one that always comes to mind you know is in in chicago they've done that usually with schools or not usually but on more than one occasion with schools it's been a way to get private financing to build you know a primary school a k-8 school with usually housing above it i think that's something that would be great in the city of boston and i think any sort of public infrastructure on any sort of public land um you know every neighborhood is different obviously and not every neighborhood makes sense to build significant height above public buildings obviously we have to be conscious of that but in i can't think of anywhere where it wouldn't make sense you know aesthetically neighborhood wise to add a few floors uh of housing above a library above a public publicly owned land and obviously the city itself is not going to be the builder um but working in conjunction with so many of the non-profit or for-profit developers who are in the space and putting out rfps which you know happen all the time of course and i was just reading in the paper today about a large one you know parcel three that's an enormous one but it shouldn't all be that complex there are hundreds of parcels in the city ranging from ones that are appropriate for one or two family homes to ones where you could build hundreds of units of housing and thinking about how to do that and saying let's let's start with the 10. let's start with the top 10 and say we want rfps for these let's get them out there let's turn them around in six months figure out who's going to do it and then obviously have that community planning process get the input from the neighborhood from local civic associations from elected officials on what should go there but a lot of this also should can and in my view and my organization's view done through zoning and saying you know we need to do some significant rezoning of the city make a lot of this as of right i hear and it's anecdotal so take it for what you will but that a lot of the smaller parcels that um that dnd or i'm sorry the mayor's office of housing uh that's the new formal term it's gonna take me a while to get used to that um is is putting out there is just is very challenging for people to build and bid on even for those hundred dollar fees because there's a lack of predictability on what can be built there um even with the affordable i'm not talking about the affordability covenants being a challenge it's that you know for one family or two or three family house then potentially go through a year and a half two years three years of reviews so it's something that i think this body has a real ability to encourage and direct making it more as of right not just getting the the land or the property in the hands of folks who are going to build affordable housing is not it's not the end of the line it's not the end of the duty of the city it's making it more predictable for folks who are doing that and setting a threshold for affordability is it thirty percent is it twenty percent is it forty is it fifty or more i mean on city owned property but making that fast track as well i think is critical i just want to respond i want to respond to that just quickly then we'll go to lydia um so the best model that i saw that that we did that was was the nhi model where where they took uh dnd took city lots they they um they packaged them together and then they went to the developers and said this is what we want built so it cut out the whole it cut out that process i i i don't really want to go to a model that is um well i'd be i'd be hesitant to go to a model that that would be as of right i mean i understand and i've been through hundreds of of planning processes and in some of them two years some of them eight years you know um but i think it's it's it's in that model and and we need to include the private the private private money private development fields corner library i pushed for units above that for years we finally brought it out to the community they blocked it and fields corner is one of the areas that really needs needs affordable housing so you know there's some tension there in the middle where we want to build housing but people aren't letting us do it so thank you lydia do you have anything to say on this examples of this was on community if you had any community governance about community governance i mean i think many answer that pretty well i i it's what's interesting is typically the community governance community land trust through owning the land involved the community and making decisions about the land and how to protect it in our case since we don't own that much land in chinatown it's actually been different but we have still started to play an important role in community governance one of the examples is actually parcel r1 which is the public parcel that's now going through a process through bpda but we began that community governance and community visioning process before the parcel was put out to bid by kind of you know organizing the community to reclaim a public parcel that was in use by the institutions mainly used as hospital parking and um engaged in a lot of people in talking about what it is that we would want to see on that land instead and then um eventually got you know had got a conversation between the institutions bpda and the city in which the institutions agreed to give up their development rights to the parcel um it went into a public process and the review process really drew on that visioning that the community did and now through the bpda's new project review committee process that has kind of replaced um our community governance role or we've been supporting the project review committee um to play that community governance role through this point another example is um there's a park you know that's right next to the steam plant the violia steam plant reggie wong park and uh we want to be sure that as dot sells the land out there that the park remains and um that it can actually be improved so again we don't own the park we don't own the land but we have already started to work with the community with residents of chinatown the leather district the chinese nine men volleyball players that really use the park the most to develop plans for improvement of the park to share the stewardship in terms of who gets to play play when they have kind of an informal community schedule the volleyball players share it with the skateboarders share with the neighbors that want to let their kids ride their tricycles around um during the day etc great thank you all so much mr chair those are all my questions thank you council luigi i think you want to thank minnie josh and lydia for giving us so much of your time i just have one question um for uh something you said really sparked my interest in understanding how we can be more creative here as a city um he said that there's an mou um the city regarding the dudley triangle um regarding this position of land um before any action is taken with the disposition of land the dsni dsni is consulted and brought into that process um i'm curious to learn more about whether that's just is that for public land or is it also for private land and if it doesn't include private land because i'd be really curious if it includes like if you are able to have some say over like privately owned land and what happens in that area because that would be dope um but if not do you have ideas on how we can actually also apply that to private land yeah thank you privately held land privately held there interesting yeah no i love yeah i that's what i've been thinking about i would like to learn more about bpda's powers and other powers to think through that so my understanding is at the time of the eminent domain agreement um the city said you know that the power of eminent domain was granted and the city made a pledge to dispose of publicly held land to dsni to dni at that time and um either at that time or subsequently this agreement was made that um well i'm thinking now that so so we currently there are three there are three moh owned parcels city-owned parcels in the deadly triangle which is where the eminent domain agreement was that remain so because of that original agreement we know that we have um we have a right to to take over and develop that land so so so we are yeah we we speak closely with moh as as rfps are getting developed um we help run the community processes once those three one of those parcels we actually do own but it's still in pre-development two of the parcels the city owns what we expect to take over once those are in use and developed work that's that's it for for public land as far as we understand um that that would be up for disposition any you know anytime soon so we don't have yeah so any private development that's happening in the triangle they don't they don't have to come through us the city we have a very good relationship with mayor's office of housing so if you know officers there are in communication with developers who are interested in developing they'll say oh you really need to go talk to dsni and they'll send people to us to go through that our sustainable development committee process to get a recommendation because if someone's you know if they want to build something new or they're applying for a variance with zba or whatever they want to have a letter from dsni that says look the community supports us um but i i don't think it's required that private projects um come through us and i don't i don't know the like i like that question like well how how can we encourage that i one one thing i've noticed about working with the bpda is um you know we don't have the same sort of like partnership close working relationship with them that we have with moh so we don't necessarily hear about projects that are happening in our catchment area we sometimes have to kind of chase them and say hey like can you let us know about this meeting or wait a minute we need to extend the public comment period we're just finding out about it so we've definitely identified the need to like try to improve that relationship or those lines of communication in terms of like tools and rights around private development um i would love to talk more with you with the council about that and understand options better thank you yeah so um like with the s and i have some of them in my district if if someone's looking to come and develop them in my district i would send them to dsni if they're with within there um and if they don't if they don't come to me they're on they're unable to go to dsni they don't get my supporter they don't get the sni support which is why when we talk a lot about when we're we're talking about rezoning the city rezoning the city is going to become about what josh had said yeah you you now went to apostles that all this is as of right you know there was a two family there it's nine units so basically that cuts us out of it when we have that rezone the city talk you know like so in roxbury they're not going to go talk to tonya anderson bananas they're not going to come to me in my district so i get concerned when when we talk about just blanket rezoning the city you know because the zoning's in place so they come in front of me and you nds and i and those sorts of things and there's quirks and all of it but um back to you back to you josh i think you know what no i'm going on i want to go to the time can i just no no no no no no because you just no no no i'm tired too okay um no but uh the point that i wanted to mention and the things that i like to think about in my head are like what does it look like to use like the right of first refusal and to think about what rights we give groups and what rights the city can have whether it's an a privately held parcel right like what like how do we think creatively about who has the you know do we take precedent over a private owner who's interested can we think creatively about about that and and i take your point but those are sort of the the things that i have going like where can we exert our power as a city or or in partnership with community groups to allow them even if it's paying fair market value right uh to have and to be stewards of you know privately held land to put that into a community lands i think lydia actually also alluded to this too right like the beat pda's ability like work why isn't the bpda working with uh uh the chinatown community land trust to help them acquire a private like a sliver of private land so that the whatever is developed out of p1 could be could be larger and so those are the things that i am very curious about like how can we exercise power there not to be a completely you know also you know we could do it on a fair market value it doesn't have to be completely you know community everything completely socialistic yeah but um yeah i think that those are the things i like to think about so just curious if you've thought about that and that actually is what what the the bpda what the city did back in the 90s you know when the power was given to dsni ds and i didn't just get public land they got the right to take private land by eminent domain yeah that private land that was abandoned and was not being taken care of by the owners yeah can i add just a couple thoughts um that you know one thing we're advocating for as a network with and with this wider coalition is the tenant's opportunity to purchase act which is a statewide enabling legislation that you know what would be that would help tenants become owners it would also just help tenants stay in place if they then pass their right to us to purchase the building of course we need revenue you know we need to be able to purchase the building that's just giving it would give the right but not the money but that's something we're advocating for and if that does you know if if that were to pass and the city enabled it um yeah what what channel to like really facilitate those transfers like that could be uh something the city council could look at and and as well as funding and then also you know in our ecosystem of course are a lot of this like what you might call like the front line groups like city life peter urbana and you know working to prevent evictions and no fault evictions and and um we've groups in our network including chinatown clt including boston neighborhood clt have worked very close with sheila dillon and the aop program to really try to save some at-risk properties but of course there's so many there's so many more right and and right now we're kind of just like statistically a drop in the bucket in terms of need um but yeah i think i think you know mapping at-risk at-risk properties and and really starting to think about how much money would it take to secure like a significant amount of properties in the next five years in boston um and where could that come from is is a project we're looking at can i quickly add i know counselor you've got questions um i think uh councillor louisiana you're saying i i you know the bpda certainly already has that authority in my opinion i believe the city also has an inherent eminent domain authority um paying fair market value and what that question is can often be prolonged and litigated um but what i would i would just add on top of that is that as we you know we're talking about city-owned parcels already like there's a lot that's already there that's like at our fingertips that we don't have we that the city would not have to litigate and pay for um and i think what you're i think your comments about figuring out and mapping some of these other opportunities are a good idea from a planning perspective and saying if you know something sparks up and we could do something incredible with it and it's worth both the actual dollars financially but also what's you know i'm not an eminent domain attorney um but what i understand is often a protracted and expensive legal process hence i didn't use that word i'm trying to think about you know you already said it we have it in our head i didn't well i didn't mean to start all that but um i would just say i think you know there's so much exciting opportunity with land that we already have you know on on the city roles yeah about point taken yeah and then that begs you know what i talked about earlier that nhi model i mean we have a hundred lots that we could use that nhi model and not just as single-family shoe families but put 40 units on places and turn it over for for home ownership i mean it's it we talk about affordability affordability but unless you're getting in there and you own that unit forget about it it's still not total stability there so council fernandez anderson okay so i really in uh mr chair i really am i'm interested in this uh nhi model um i don't know much about it so we'd love to talk to you offline about that um hi uh minnie nice meeting you um i've been talking with mr smith and really excited about the work that you guys are doing there and collaborating with you um i'm interested in understanding when you are built creating affordable home ownerships are these all restricted deeds well so speaking of the nhi the neighborhood homes initiative so histo historically yes all of our units have been are deed restricted the highest um the last the in the most the most recent developments we have had i think we have two units total at 100 affordable at 100 ami most are at 80 and then some are at 60 percent ami and they're all deed restricted you know 99-year um that built built-in equity formula resale formula the current we do have um through the nhi program in the pipeline 16 units of home ownership 12 of them will be affordable enrolled onto the clt four of them will just be sold off at market rate and that is in order to make the deal possible so i think this is the first time that we're doing that but the market rate is also limited also it's like you can't it's it says market rate but it's not really moderate right that yeah and the city's been very clear about not wanting to be the market leader on the yeah on those units that's right have you thought about a way to making the restriction limited so that people can actually liquidate assets and build generational wealth so not you know one thing we do we we do have been looking at and sort of paying attention to this what seems to be a wider conversation around yeah how do we build generational wealth how do we close a racial wealth gap homeownership has been a huge tool and also destructive force as well when it comes to equity and and um economic parity we you know part of the ethos i would say of the clt movement of rclt is upholding community wealth upholding community stabilization and also wanting to say that while equity is limited it is a shared equity model so folks are you know people are accruing equity over time but it is not at this you know it's not at market rate um and yeah so we we are certainly part of that conversation around like yeah how do we like how do we balance the goals of individual like family generational wealth building and neighborhood stability and community wealth building but i would love to speak with you more about that and hear more about what's behind that question and your own thoughts too i guess one more for you is in terms of the rfi or fees that you mentioned um creating a process prior to it being actually published or announced that you know creating that process and making it equitable so that there's opportunity of grants or affordability or accessibility for community members really interested in that and would love to hear more about that is there a plan in place or is this just an idea for now for like for the crafting of the rfps that i mentioned is that what you mean yes so we for like so for the dni the the building in uppam's corner that we own which was formerly the citizens bank building that was part of the re you know sort of like a multi multi lot it is part of this multi-lot multi-owner redevelopment process in upwarms around the arts and innovation district so our lot has been that the rfp for our lot was crafted in conjunction with and parallel to the rfps for the two city-owned lots and that was over that was like a i don't know starting in 2017 through 2020 roughly community process that was wider than dsni um and centered around uppims um so we could certainly go into like share a bunch of info about that and also um where we are now with that the the the crafting of rfps for like the site you know these two particular sites on dudley street um yeah those i think you know the rfps the stipulations have to be obviously it has to be within whatever the zoning is and the city might have an idea about what they want to see there so they're like i don't know how wide open those when you're really starting at the beginning how wide open those processes are um but yeah i yeah there are thank you there are a lot of lots that are not necessarily buildable because of size but opportunities to create those urban farms or small food access spaces incubators smaller incubators maybe you know food trucks parking spaces mobile boutiques there are so many ideas and there are so many entrepreneurs and already existing small businesses that are getting pushed out out of brick and mortar and i'm look i'm wondering if the rfi the rfps process can include community in discussing how that maybe dsni would then support community in activating those spaces so beyond what you're doing now but accessing smaller lots in district seven i can speak for district seven um and how we can partner in doing that right so that's that's where i was taking that in terms of our rfps and looking at the process and making it accessible means that if bpda has money or if the city can we can figure out a way then putting in money so that there are grants that folks can access in order to activate those spaces um josh if i i mean i i understand your zoning thing about you know building up and i i i actually agree i think we need to build up i also but my only concern with building up is that so the city and their you know in the states master plan and the city's plans in terms of moving to transit transportation does not address the population that the very marginalized population that is not prepared to moving toward a transit culture and so you have you know single parents with sickly children more disparities more issues that have to access their car at the drop of a dime so my concern then is while we build up that we address the families that continue to need cars or are in transition to just you know riding a bike or jumping on the tee um and i think that the city and the state both have a bad habit of speaking for um the marginalized community and telling us what we need and what's good for us without any concern and so i would say that i would support building up and i'm i know that our zoning policies are outdated but i also agree with my colleague that we have to be careful in what the limitations are so that they we can continue to have a say in terms of approving development yeah so i can certainly address that i want to after the chair's comments on that i think when you're rezoning it's a long-term involved community process um you know it's what it takes out of the equation though is the one-off battles it's the one-offs where someone takes one of those neighborhood homes um the nhi you know a lot of acronyms takes some of the city-owned parcels that are being put out for a hundred dollars you know purchases one of them and then is in a going with the neighborhood association and the zba to build a two or three family house every time now what i in my view what what could work is having a thoughtful maybe it's a two year maybe it's a three year process maybe it's probably hundreds of community meetings that are going to say this is what makes sense height wise use wise parking wise um for each neighborhood but to making it not ad hoc each time i think is the overwhelming challenge on the zoning front uh in my view um and also moving on if it's all right if i could talk a little about the home ownership as well if that's yeah let's hear it okay great um so we're the only ones left in the building let's go i know i'll try and be quick and i know you all probably have about five the boss said okay other meetings today um quickly about you know some of the things that i sparked in my mind when you were talking about home ownership uh and building wealth and because this is about using city resources in particular you know something that i think you know is worth examining is the city on a limited level and this would require you know talking with the cfo and corporation council of course as acting as sort of a guarantor for people who are looking for mortgage loans almost a cosigner um say that again you want the city as a guarantor or almost a co-signer for folks on loans and this is something that you know needs to be obviously significantly fleshed out both from a dollars and cents perspective and from a legal perspective but the city of boston has significant borrowing capacity has a stellar credit rating and i'm not saying we max out the credit card so to speak but thinking about some sort of pilot program at least that could do that you know along similar lines working with folks on um on supplementing pmi or private mortgage insurance oh like the one i filed josh the pmi one you're gonna help me on that i absolutely i absolutely am um and and and helping people with that is is critical because that is usually several hundred dollars a month um on folks first time home buyers and we need to be looking at city resources for that too it's not just all about building uh new things getting public land we we can be creative this is a smart city there's a lot of smart people in this building with a lot of resources and we can tackle issues of own home ownership increased housing capacity at the same time i'll stop you're all done rudy looks sleepy constantly are you talking about just on public land or are you talking about in all aspects no i'm so i maybe i'm taking a little too broad of a view on public resources in this in this discussion but you know putting it whether it's in dnd i don't want to say you know which department needs to do it but saying the city has a stellar credit rating the city of boston has done a great job over the past decades in doing that because we don't max it out so to speak but do thoughtful capital planning there is an avenue a pathway that i think is certainly worth examining on a pilot program level to say how is this going to impact it you know how much does this count on our balance sheet so to speak don't want to be overextending ourselves don't want to run into any trouble but it's something it's a conversation that that could happen you i think would need you know the city's bond lawyers you know the cfo's office certainly this body involved in it but um but it's something that you know especially as interest rates are rising right now especially if it's being more challenging for people to get home loans um to think about that and again it's a as as i like to i know it says before i'm trying to think of as many revenue neutral ways to address the housing process yes we need more money we need more resources we need to build more low income very low income housing but things that are not going to cost a lot of money there are a lot there's also a lot in that toolbox too happy happy to help any any way we can okay so we're going to go to closing statements now i think everybody tons of bach we'll start with you sure and i just want to address a couple of things that have come up here because i think this is this is like what's so important um about bringing these conversations together the one that we had earlier and the one that we're having now um is that you know what's what's really interesting and unusual about the way that the bpdas from renewal powers were created by state statute is that a ton of the things that the city can do the city can only do for municipal purposes and the bpda has this like broader remit where he can do things and and that is it lydia used the word a double-edged sword because it's meant that historically they were able to use it for the economic benefit of private actors but the really interesting thing is that when you talk about doing something for the economic benefit of boston's lowest income communities the bpda's tools are actually better for doing that than the city of boston's tools because those people are actually private actors so when you think about a program like this like something where the city would be assisting but ultimately ownership ends up being private it's it's actually bpda that allows us to put public resources more easily towards those things especially when it has to do with land acquisition and property and all kinds of things whether you're talking at the household level like the city i suspect if we were thinking about a like city guarantor program for affordable home ownership where ultimately the ownership ends up being private there's a very good chance that we would need to use bpda powers in relation to that because the city itself the question would be well what's the municipal building that you're doing this for so i just think that and the funny thing is that i don't think that the real estate lobby would let us get these powers today at the state house like if we went today and we said hey we'd love to get they would say no no the city of boston you might do something crazy socialism right like you know that's what they'd say but and i think that um so it's to me it's really interesting to think about a moment where the city is inventorying all its public parcels and there's a real interest in using public land and public finance for public good and thinking about that expansively and also thinking about that in cases where it benefits quote-unquote private entities but those private entities are our communities or there are land trusts right like you know as a way for our private entities to sort of form corporately and and to counselor um counselor baker's point about sort of like leverage and hooks right i mean i think zoning has been historically a way that in boston we've brought the community perspective in but one of the reasons that there are folks like in park plaza who are concerned about us not giving up the renewal district there is because these these ldas if people look in the presentation for the other nine districts there's like everything that's colored has some bpda restriction on it and that's the leverage over private parcels in this area like that's what basically within these areas it's very hard for private entities to act without coming and working with us and so that's like another level of of kind of like public level leverage and engagement it's frankly the whole reason that the state's gonna have to really do business with us on the hurley building which otherwise they would probably just sell the highest bidder and do what they would with because because it's in a renewable district and we have these hooks on it um so i just think that it's i exact you know i think it's really interesting that we have i think a very different moment in terms of mayor and council in terms of what we want to do and we have this toolbox that has not with the exception of the dsni case necessarily been used in a lot of these ways but which has the ability to be used in these ways so i i am really interested in that i would love to see us do more with community land trust with building social and public housing with the fact that some of that housing may not end up owned publicly and therefore these ppda tools let us execute on that and i just uh i hope this is the beginning of a conversation about how we can really do this reimagining so i'm grateful to everybody for coming today and to the vpda for the first minute thank you council bond god so luigen yeah i'm not going to belabor the moment i really think uh josh i mean you're used to this so i mean i really thank you mina for spending a lot of your time here um part of the reason i think counselor brock spoke to um you know the need to you know the city has to do everything for public purpose which is why when josh mentioned this idea you know part of potentially a pilot would be restricting it to publicly owned land i think you probably have a greater hulk of the city being an originator in that case right as a pilot um but i really you know this was very long i really enjoyed this portion of the discussion for sure because it's it's like thinking creatively about how we can use the city's tools to for that community control and to build more affordable housing so i just thank you all and look forward to working together thank you council fernandez anderson thank you mr chair um thank you josh and minnie so much for your presentation um i really look forward to this this is exciting thank you counselor bach lujen as well for filing this um i have to agree with my colleagues there's a lot of opportunity here and it's exciting times to be able to see the possibility of using these tools hopefully i'd be interested to hear more from my colleague council block about how we can actually leverage some of this possible power that we have with bpda so i'm looking forward to working sessions or further hearings and building a more affordable boston hopefully thank you um in public testimony there's nobody in the in the stands but there is oh councilorell um closing statement yes um thank you uh mr chair and thank you for the panelists for joining us today and thank you for uh thank you to counselor bach and captain louis jen for bringing this important topic to the floor um definitely interested in what we can do what use we can um what you uh tools we can do as a use as a city to make sure that we're developing public land to create affordable housing and also to protect the climate at the same time looking forward to continuing discussions and i missed a good amount of the your presentation but i have my staff members taking a look and taking down notes but also feel free to reach out to have one-on-one conversations with the staff thank you and we have one one letter that council blocker is going to read into the record that's public testimony uh thank you so much yeah thank you so much mr chair and we received a number of letters of public testimony related to the park plaza district um anthony pangara was here and was going to testify but again had to leave so i'm just going to read his as like as a representative sample the counselors should have in their inboxes a significant number of these um but this one from from anthony is um i'll just read it my name is anthony pangaro and i have resided in boston since 1973 and it won charles street south in the park plaza area for the last 17 of those 49 years i believe that an important neighborhood planning tool would be lost if the park plaza urban renewal plan were closed out entirely as is now scheduled for april 22nd of this year while it may appear the work contemplated in the park plaza or renewal plan is complete and is no longer necessary you may recall the idea of selling the state transportation building has been floated from time to time because of the high price it could fetch in the private market any redeveloper of the site would seek to build a much taller and more intensively used building the existing building was restrained by the maximum 145 foot height currently allowed there by the park plaza urban renewal plan while the sale idea has faded for now it can always return in the future or after a fire or other accidental cause affecting any of the buildings that sit near the public garden in the common in addition the current urban renewal plan names specific allowed uses that are consistent with the current surrounding residential uses and does not allow for others like laboratory biotech space for example this height limit and control of use is not assured under the current zoning which we know can be easily abridged by map changes variances in plan development areas state law governing shadows caused by buildings on boston common in the public garden also have exceptions that are permissive for several hours of shadow during every day and also for certain times of year these allow for taller buildings than those that currently exist and say nothing about use on the other hand urban renewal plans are subject to great scrutiny requiring detailed massachusetts environmental policy act analysis of urban renewal plan modifications by its independent regulatory entities of state government in short this layer of extra protection can help to assure a long-term protection for residents living inside and outside of the urban renewal area as well as for the public garden and the common themselves i respectfully request that park plaza should be added to the list of nine urban renewal plans to be extended otherwise the plan will expire on april 22 2022 the sod extension would be um for the same period as the others to allow for further study of the elements of each plan that might remain in place thereafter until a new downtown plan can be enacted please know that your support would be most welcome thank you thank you councilwonk and um thank you guys for coming out and the panel that came earlier i thought it was informative and this is what's important about getting in person i think it's much better for us as counselors to be able to get a better understanding of the material josh some some good ideas you know i've been talking about mixed use libraries the entire time i've been here i would never build another single story anything in the city but also with the with the rf rfp should be going out with the city saying to the developers or whoever this is what we want built and your zoning's already taken so that cuts three years off the process right away the minute you win that rfp here's your here's your um your um thank you your building permit and then you stop building because is that three years apparent if you're lucky three years of carrying costs trying to get through a process and and that so that would go a long way but i i think it's good that we're having the conversations and i appreciate you guys for coming out with that this hearing is adjourned [Music] you