There’s a piece of legislation, House No. 853, that sounds like mom and apple pie. We want to protect our parks. So why not pass a law that would prevent any building not conforming to Boston’s 1990 zoning code from creating any new shadow on the Esplanade, Christopher Columbus Park, the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, Copley Square and the Back Bay Fens and Magazine Beach?
“An act protecting certain public parks” was filed by state Representative Marty Walz, one of the bill’s three sponsors. Walz said that passage of the bill would protect the parks from shadows just as the 1990 legislation protecting the Common has “proven successful in ‘balancing’ development.”
Walz said she sponsored the bill because “we don’t trust the BRA to make the right choices for the city.”
But this bill has problems. It pits parks against other important goals. It further erodes Boston’s autonomy in that the legislature is making decisions that should be left to city officials. Finally, it may end up hurting the parks more than it helps them.
It’s hard to anticipate all the ways the bill might prevent us from achieving other important goals. But the first one that comes to mind is filling in the Mass Pike’s gash in the city. Gashes are not good, especially ones that contain a loud speedway that assaults pedestrians as they cross above it. Forget green space like the Greenway on top of the turnpike. No one will pay for it. So that leaves us relying on developers, companies, hospitals and universities for covering up the gash. Past failed projects have shown that it’s hard enough, without this constraint, to knit the South End back into the rest of the downtown. Building tall is probably the only way any entity can pay for such construction, given the expense of building over the turnpike and the amount of green space neighbors will demand. Such height probably means at least some shadow at some part of the day on at least one of the parks included in this bill.
Any shadows that would be cast would be fleeting and probably not much noticed by park users. And that brings up the question of why promoters believe this bill is so necessary. The Fens might be affected by expansion by the MFA, Northeastern or the Gardner Museum. But the other parks “protected” in this legislation are bordered by historic areas in which, short of catastrophe, development is extremely unlikely.
The park most likely to need protection in the way the initial legislation protected the Common and the Public Garden is the Greenway. Nearby development is almost certain to occur here. But the Greenway has been removed from this legislation at the request of state Representative Aaron Michlewitz, in whose district the Greenway lies.
We do know that if this bill had been in place, one dramatic benefit to our city could not have been built. The 1990 zoning at the Liberty Hotel’s site had no height limit, but limited the floor-area ratio to 4. Now the hotel’s FAR is about 5, and it throws a shadow on the Esplanade at 9 a.m. on December 21.
Another problem with this bill is the complications it imposes on Boston. In the early part of the 20th century, it is said, the state legislature was run by Yankees who didn’t approve of the way the Irish were running Boston, so they instituted rules that left Massachusetts municipalities having to petition the legislature for all kinds of actions. Walz said this is probably an urban legend.
Legend or not, Massachusetts municipalities must rely on the legislature to make decisions for them in a way that cities in other states usually aren’t constrained. No matter how much some citizens criticize the BRA’s decisions, I can’t imagine they’d be any happier with the legislature making them instead.
Our parks do face jeopardy— but not from new shadows. It’s lack of funding that—like it or not—has little chance of increasing except by the taxes the new buildings and their occupants throw off. Under this bill’s scenario, the parks might not have additional shade, but they might lie unkempt because the financial institutions, the bio-tech industries, and the commerce attracted by the universities that help pay for their upkeep wouldn’t have room to expand.
Walz said that the 1990 zoning code is part of the negotiation. She suggested that if a developer wanted to exceed the height limit, he could change the zoning code. But that is not true unless the bill
is fundamentally changed to allow whatever building height Boston zoning in the future allows, which would seem to defeat the whole purpose of the bill.
This bill is still in the Committee on Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture as I write this. With objections from the city of Boston and a host of the usual business-supporting suspects, it is probably going to die. But this is the kind of legislation that packs a pretty picture hiding a drove of demons. It should not pass.