As Boston’s new mayor pushes for big change, old energy brokers push back

When Mayor Michelle Wu cracked down on outdoor dining in Boston’s overcrowded North End neighborhood last year to appease residents beset by crowds, trash and blocked sidewalks, restaurant owners voiced their displeasure by protesting at City Hall and a to file a lawsuit.

In another era, their print campaign might have worked. For decades, the city’s mayors were Boston-born men of Italian or Irish descent who had close ties to local entrepreneurs and powerful labor unions.

Ms. Wu, 38, is different: a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who campaigned as a catalyst for change and became the first woman and person of color ever elected to lead the city. She made a few small concessions to the restaurants and moved on – but not before threaten to end dining out altogether if they found her compromise unacceptable.

The clash revealed two things. True to her reputation as a workhorse, Ms. Wu tries to avoid distractions while hammering away at them her campaign agenda, focusing on “racial, economic and climate justice.” And true to Boston’s reputation, some old-fashioned power brokers are pushing back against their loss of influence.

A coalition of real estate owners and brokers, the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, is willing to spend $400,000 to quell Ms. Wu’s rent control plan, recently approved by the city council. And the city’s main police union, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, has so far rejected its proposals, including making it easier to fire officers for misconduct.

Union leaders say contract talks are deadlocked and they are seeking arbitration, which has led to favorable outcomes for police in the past.

Since Ms. Wu won the 2021 election and her ambitious agenda was endorsed by a whopping 64 percent of voters, progressive leaders across the country have come under increasing scrutiny, particularly due to rising crime rates and homelessness.

Still, Boston remains its own ecosystem, and Ms. Wu still seems to have some running room. Now that the pandemic has ebbed, allowing her to focus more on her campaign priorities, some longtime political observers say the growing resistance to her plans simply indicates she is making progress.

Ms. Wu, who grew up in Chicago and moved to Boston in 2009 to attend Harvard Law School, has promised innovative approaches to climate change and a greener city, real progress in affordable housing and long-sought checks and balances for the Police. .

Her landmark election, along with that of several new Boston City Council members — younger, more liberal, and more racially diverse than their predecessors — marked major shifts in the city of 650,000, where less than half of the population is white. The hunger for change has not abated in the 18 months since, said one of the new council members, Kendra Lara.

“The cultural shift is striking; you can feel it,” said Ms. Lara, 33, a socialist who previously worked with the Boston-based social justice foundation Resist.

At the same time, the emergence of more diverse leadership has led to ugliness and more discussion about race and racism.

During her first weeks in office, Ms. Wu was the target of racist and sexist vitriol from across the country after taking aggressive measures to stem a resurgence of Covid-19, including a vaccine mandate for city workers.

Local critics of the mandate descended on the mayor’s house, organizing noisy early morning protests that lasted for months in 2022. City Council President Ed Flynn — whose father, Raymond Flynn, served as mayor of Boston from 1984 to 1993 — expressed concern at the time about the “personal, vengeful” tone of some protesters.

“The demonstration among the white mayors was professional, it was respectful,” Mr Flynn said last year at a meeting where a divided council voted to ban residential demonstrations before 9am.

This spring, Ms. Wu further restricted outdoor dining in the North End, banning it from streets and most sidewalks. In response, a handful of neighborhood restaurant owners returned to court with a new claim, now claiming that the mayor was discriminating against them because they were white men of Italian descent.

As proof, they cited a joke she made last year at the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, an annual Boston tradition where politicians exchange benign barbs. Ms. Wu joked about getting used to dealing with “problems that are expensive, disruptive and white. I’m talking about snowflakes – I mean blizzards.

One of the restaurant owners who sued her for discrimination, Christian Silvestri, said he saw no explanation other than the mayor’s bias to cripple his business while restaurants in the neighboring West End neighborhood were allowed to have tables on the street.

“The taxes we pay to the city are astronomical; we keep the city running,” he said. “She should go to companies, developers, labs, hotels and ask them, ‘What can I do as mayor to help you grow?’ But that’s not happening – she has her own agenda.

In an interview, Ms. Wu said her decision to restrict outdoor dining in the densely populated North End was prompted by pleas from residents, who had begged the city for help.

“The people are our compass – which is important for people who live in the city, who go out of their way to make life livable and fulfilling,” she said.

Her concern for the quality of life and the concerns of the working class has strengthened her support in some circles. On Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury, a woman who tried to herd a stray dog ​​outside a gas station said she liked what Ms. Wu had done to improve access to public transportation, raising fares on three city bus lines in low-income areas two-year trial.

Nemiah Brown, 60, a hairdresser and part-time construction worker wearing a hard hat while having lunch outside in Dorchester, said he voted for Ms Wu because she seemed to be focused on ordinary people. Mr. Brown said the city council had approved her rent control plan and nodded in approval.

“Maybe I work there,” he said, pointing to a construction project that towers over Morrissey Boulevard, in a fast-moving corner of the city, “but I can’t afford to live there.”

This was shown in a recent poll 65 percent of Boston voters supported rent control, as the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city hovered around $3,000 per month. But Ms. Wu’s proposal, which would limit annual rent increases to between 6 and 10 percent, depending on inflation, still faces major hurdles.

It must be approved by the state legislature and the governor, and Greg Vasil, the CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, said the group will continue to fight it, confident it will do more harm than good in the long run by drive developers away from the city.

Often characterized as a mayor with “big ideas,” less interested in everyday grit, Ms. Wu recently announced a series of smaller, faster innovations that could be thought of as the millennial version of pothole repair: new bike lanes; a curbside composting program; a Boston Common beer garden; and more dog-friendly restaurant options.

Such changes fail to impress Jim Napolitano, 68, and other longtime East Boston residents who held court at a neighborhood market in the back Wednesday morning while Ms. Wu held a community coffee hour at a playground a few blocks away.

“The yuppies might like it, but we’re all set on bike lanes,” Mr. Napolitano said. “We would like her to fix the streets.”

In East Boston, as in the city’s other old Irish and Italian-American centers of power, Mr. Napolitano and others said they felt forgotten by a mayor who seemed intent on moving the city forward without them.

“We want her to know that besides poor people and people of color, there are other people in the city,” he said. “You still have the base, the Italian people. You have conservatives, which they don’t realize.

The police also flouted Ms. Wu’s proposals. The mayor sent a strong message last summer by appointing a new police commissioner, Michael A. Cox Sr., who himself was a victim of misconduct at the hands of his fellow Boston officers 30 years ago. But bending the terms of the police contract will be extremely difficult.

“With an institution as entrenched as this police force, the way this one is set up, you need a dragon slayer,” said Jamarhl Crawford, a community activist who was part of the city’s Police Reform Task Force in 2020.

Crime in Boston hasn’t risen like other places, though there have been 17 homicides in the city this year, compared to 10 during the same period in 2022. The rate remains one of the lowest in decades, and the incidence of most other Crime types have declined or remained stable, making the issue less of a concern for Ms. Wu than for other major city mayors in the wake of the pandemic.

She takes a measured tone in her public remarks about police work, emphasizing the morale of the officers and the difficulty of their work. That approach, along with its proposal for a modest increase in the police budget next year, has not gone unnoticed by the union, which reserves its harshest criticism for the city council. But Ms. Wu has also made it clear that there will be no contract agreement without the changes she sees as crucial, even if the police contract ends in arbitration.

Ms. Wu greeted residents at East Boston’s bustling coffee hour, wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the name of a nearby soup kitchen, and listened intently as one after another lined up to raise concerns.

Mary Berninger, a resident for decades, told Ms. Wu that she was frustrated with the constant development and loss of parking spaces. She came away unsatisfied.

The mayor “has a heart of gold,” Ms. Berninger said. “But she’s surrounded herself with people who can’t recognize that there’s an established community in Boston that needs to be heard.”