brendan halpin

Like most Bostonians when he was mayor, I met Tom Menino a couple of times. (This isn’t an exaggeration. I saw a poll or something the last time he ran for re-election that said that over fifty percent of Bostonians had met Menino personally). He seemed affable, and his complete inability to do competent public speaking was strangely charming.

I don’t have any personal animus, is what I’m saying. People revere Menino largely because he seemed like a good guy. Which may be true. But he wasn’t good for Boston, and I think it’s really important to acknowledge this lest a present or future mayor repeat his mistakes.

Menino neglected Boston Public Schools and failed to address the affordability crisis which began when he was mayor and continues to this day. But I’d like to talk about Menino’s most visible and worst legacy: The Seaport.

Basically Menino looked at a chunk of Boston real estate that featured some working fishing piers, the place where people embark on cruises, an outdoor concert venue and a ton of parking lots and said, “let’s put a neighborhood there!”

Now, this isn’t, on its face, a terrible idea. Oh wait, yes it is, because climate change is going to put the whole area underwater eventually, and we’ll probably have to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on sea walls or other mitigation strategies to keep it from turning into Waterworld.

Okay, okay, but let’s put climate change on the back burner just like everyone else does and say creating a new neighborhood out of what is mostly parking lots is not in itself a terrible idea.

Except what arose was not a real neighborhood, but rather a neoliberal YIMBY* hellscape. If you’re not familiar…well, this video sums it up nicely. The Seaport is, as the video says, a collection of sterile offices, hotels, and luxury apartment buildings. Though people live there, it feels immediately off for reasons that can be hard to pinpoint. You get the sense you’re in a simulacrum of a neighborhood.

This is in part because it’s got no public services at all. That’s the neoliberal part! There are park-like spaces in the Seaport, but they’re not actual city parks maintained at public expense, and their private owners can repurpose them at any time. (Also since they are not public property, they can keep any protests or other undesirable gatherings out). There are no schools. There is no public library. There are no police or fire stations. There are also very limited views of the water in this waterfront neighborhood. Yes, there is a public sidewalk that runs along the water, but if you really want to sit and enjoy the view, you need to pay for a restaurant table or live on the upper floor of one of the apartment buildings.

The problem here isn’t really the existence of The Seaport so much as the fact that with high approval ratings and strong political clout, this is what Menino chose for his bold, legacy-defining initiative. What might he have done for the real neighborhoods of the city had he devoted his energy to improving the city rather than building a playground for rich suburbanites who will move out as soon as their kids reach school age?

I don’t know the exact mechanics, somehow Menino got the Commonwealth involved in this idiocy as well, building the “Silver Line,” which is a tunnel that buses run in, to serve the Seaport. The Silver Line stations in the Seaport are beautiful, and nearly empty, because rich people don’t use public transportation, and especially not buses. Recent MBTA usage data shows the Red, Blue, and Green lines all serving over 100k passengers per day, with the Blue Line serving about 50k and the Silver Line dead last at about 30k passengers. And that’s with passengers from the useful part of the Silver Line (Nubian Square to Downtown, where the bus runs above ground) pumping up the numbers.

This happened while the rest of the MBTA system, the parts that people actually use, nearly fell apart from decades of deferred maintenance that the system is only now starting to recover from. What if, instead of building tunnels and beautiful stations for buses that are rarely used, the MBTA had made everybody else’s buses free? Or just maintained the tracks and signals so we wouldn’t have had to endure closures and shutdowns?

What might Boston have been like if we’d had a mayor whose vision for the city wasn’t just “turn a chunk of the city over to developers”? Could we have kept the rest of the city affordable or made it more liveable? Might our children learn in buildings with functioning HVAC systems? (Most Boston Public Schools do not have ventilation systems, which leads to illness and absenteeism, but nobody wants to put their “education reform” money into giving BPS students and staff breathable air).

The problem isn’t just that we have a neighborhood for wealthy white people; it’s that the Seaport aesthetic and economics are coming for the rest of the city. And that’s why I say Menino ruined Boston. Boston is unaffordable and difficult to get around in. Kids who grow up here have to move to Randolph or Brockton or somewhere else that they can actually afford to live. We bring tens of thousands of young people here every academic year, and we’re losing them immediately after graduation because Boston is less and less livable. Even if you live in the Seaport.

We need bold action to save this city. But our only model for bold action is the creation of The Seaport. Is there anyone out there with a vision for the city that actually includes people who live here? If so, could you please stand up?

*YIMBY is a religious cult comprised mostly of white men who worship the invisible hand of the free market. They have been blessed by the god of late capitalism and, because they took econ 101, believe that the affordability crisis is a simple matter of supply and demand, and if we just capitalism harder, we can make housing affordable. This is a faith-based movement impervious to rational argument.