Councilor Says Article 80 Changes Could Tie City’s Hands

Boston City Hall. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman Staff

The biggest proposed changes in Boston’s development reviews since 1996 attracted pointed questions from city councilors including whether they would safeguard neighborhoods from undesirable projects.

The Wu administration is seeking to amend Article 80, the section of the zoning code that regulates proposed projects that are at least 20,000 square feet or include at least 15 housing units.

Community benefits would be determined from a menu of options ranging from sustainability and resilience to housing and civic facilities, according to a presentation to the Boston City Council’s Committee on Planning, Development and Transportation on Tuesday.

“Everyone thinks they know what mitigation and community benefits mean, but when you ask them what it is, one person might have a totally different definition than another,” said Nupoor Monani, the Planning Department’s senior deputy director of development.

But District 3 Councilor John FitzGerald warned that the changes could limit City Hall’s ability to extract concessions.

“If you have a formula and a checklist and they check every box, we lose that leverage in trying to dissuade or stop bad development from happening,” FitzGerald said. “When it gets too formulaic, people say that’s great for predictability, until it’s not the prediction I want.”

FitzGerald is former deputy director of real estate operations at the Boston Planning & Development Agency, which was broken up to form the new Boston Planning Department July 1, while its board remains and continues to act as the city’s Planning Board.

In May, the Wu administration and BPDA unveiled a series of proposed changes to Article 80. The overarching goal is to make reviews more predictable and transparent, while standardizing the process of negotiating community benefits packages with developers, BPDA officials said.

A report by land use consultants Zone Co. of Cincinnati concluded that Boston requires more mitigation than 10 similar North American cities, but does so in an inconsistent manner through project-by-project negotiations. The consultants recommended standardizing the process and offering developers across-the-board incentives to achieve policy goals such as housing creation and public benefits.

City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune said the changes should include new outreach to residents who are unfamiliar with how the city regulates development and determines benefits.

Developers, for their part, complained about the difficulties associated with the open-ended timeline for approvals, according to a survey.

Among the notable changes are a requirement for developers to present preliminary plans to the community before a formal proposal to the new Boston Planning Department. And appointed impact advisory groups that review individual projects would be replaced with community advisory teams that review multiple projects in a neighborhood.

District 9 Councilor Liz Breadon cited the Boston Landing project in Brighton as an example of one that was approved without sufficient affordable housing and family-sized units. In the past, BPDA approvals were driven by the desire to maximize revenues, Breadon said.

“The development wasn’t adequately addressing the needs in our neighborhood, so it left us with a really bad taste in our mouths,” Breadon said.

The timetable for the potential changes includes implementation in spring 2025, according to a BPDA timeline presented to councilors.