brendan halpin

As you may or may not know, the City of Boston is entering into a partnership with a bunch of very wealthy people to renovate and expand White Stadium in Franklin Park in order to bring an NWSL team here.

There are many reasons to oppose this move. I’m always suspicious of “public-private partnerships,” because these are usually just a way for the people on the private end of the equation to direct taxpayer money into their pockets. And sports stadiums are a notoriously terrible deal for municipalities. Also—there’s no parking, so the team proposes to run shuttle buses, and basically my neighborhood will be inaccessible by car for probably four hours every time there’s a home game. Oh yeah, and they’ll be taking some parkland for, like, a beer garden or something.

Despite all these valid reasons to oppose the project, I actually support it. In order to explain, I’m going to have to tell you about a paving project.

Don’t worry—I’ll keep it brief, unlike this paving project.

In April, the Parks Department put temporary chainlink fencing up across several paths in the park, announcing that this was a project to repave the paths. The fencing stayed up all summer—after a few months, paving went down and then work, which was only happening two days a week anyway, stalled. Several weeks later they put up signs saying they’d have to take up the pavement they had just put down because they’d paved over a historic feature they knew was there but somehow paved over anyway. No work happened, but the fences stayed in place.

Then, in early September, the fences that were in place for five months came down at last! New signs explain that they’ve got to put crushed stone down for cross country season and that the paving project will be complete in the spring, roughly a year after it began.

Regular park users can have ugly fences blocking paths for five months, but the cross-country teams that come to Franklin Park, the majority of whom are not from Boston, certainly shouldn’t have to deal with them.

This is just the latest example, but twenty years of living near and going to Franklin Park have made it clear that the Parks Department doesn’t care about Franklin Park unless out-of-towners are using it. I’d say they treat the park’s regular users with contempt, but contempt implies that you’re at least thinking about someone. For those of us who use the park regularly, being treated with contempt is actually aspirational.

Which brings me back to the stadium.  I believe the team will go under because the last Boston NWSL team went under, in large part because they played in a stadium that had insufficient parking and was difficult to access by public transportation. The same problems exist at White Stadium, and the project planners have the delusional idea that the youth soccer teams from suburban towns are going to take the Orange Line to Jackson Square and board shuttle buses to get to the games.

Probably the city will be left owing money when the team goes under. And yet I support the project anyway.

Because anything that brings out-of-towners to Franklin Park on a regular basis is going to compel the Parks Department to pay attention to the park. And I firmly believe this is the only way the park will ever get regular maintenance, not to mention the upgrades it needs.

I wish I had confidence that the city’s decades-long neglect of Franklin Park could be solved by other means. But 20 years of using the park have shown that there’s simply no hope of that happening. So let’s get this stadium project underway!