Mayor Michelle Wu Wants to Change Boston. But Can Boston Change?

When Michelle Wu became mayor of Boston just under a year ago, she was seen as a transformative figure — not only for what she represented as the first woman and first person of color to be elected as the city’s mayor but also for the progressive policies she hoped to pursue, like a civic Green New Deal, waiving fees for some public transportation and reinstating a form of rent control. When Wu took office, these lofty goals were complicated by circumstances both predictable and unforeseen, mundane and extraordinary. “I was sworn in and immediately was trying to navigate Boston through the Omicron surge,” says Wu, who is 37. “Then there were major searches for another police commissioner, school superintendent, director of our planning and development agency, fire commissioner. We were shepherding through a first budget and allocation of federal recovery funds. Our state-run public transportation system announced that they were shutting down one of the most heavily used subway lines for 30 days with two weeks’ notice.” It’s been a busy 11 months. “Has it only been less than a year?” Wu asks. “It feels like much longer!”

Boston is experiencing both a housing-affordability crisis and growing wealth inequality at the same time that industries like pharma and biotech are booming in the city. As long as that sort of structural dynamic is in place, where are the real opportunities to help make the city more livable for working-class people and their families? We will never be successful as long as the challenge is how to most fairly or least painfully allocate a shrinking pie or even one that is of a fixed size. We have to grow it. That’s uniquely challenging in Boston. You could count on one hand the spaces that are left for major development, unlike other parts of the country where there is more landmass available. But I have in my head the number 800,000, which was the peak of Boston’s population in the 1950s. We have been climbing back but still are at or under 700,000. So the question is: How do we ensure that we can be a green and growing city that’s healthy and affordable for everyone? We need to have the infrastructure to be able to support getting back to that height of our population with growth that is equitable and sustainable. So we did a land audit to identify opportunities on city-owned land — maybe it’s a parking lot; maybe it’s a community center in need of renovations — to wherever possible add affordable housing that is climate-resilient and accessible. We’re rethinking the whole process of how planning, development and zoning happens.

Does that rethinking involve abolishing the Boston Planning and Development Agency? Our plan is to ensure that the institutional structures that Boston has match the current needs of the community today and into the future.

You punted the question. Yes. The answer is yes. We have a planning and development system that is still basically what was created in the 1950s and ’60s in an era of trying to tackle blight and focusing on the downtown areas. Today Boston is in a very different place, and we have needs that are just as dire, and so we need to reorient our systems and governments to focus on resiliency, equity and affordability. That involves separating planning and development and empowering planning to be connected with how we think about climate and transportation and housing.

But as far as housing, how do you define what success looks like? Do you have a number in mind for new units of affordable housing built and a date by which that should happen? Our Office of Housing and the Boston Housing Authority have goals in terms of how many new units of affordable housing we intend to formally propose or get into the pipeline over the three years left in this term. But to your average residents living in one of our neighborhoods, that number is meaningless if they are still feeling that they have to make hard choices between paying the rent or paying for groceries — or if they’re feeling that they managed to buy their home when it was still possible in Boston, but that their kids don’t have any scenario in which they can. That’s why I’m focused on understanding how we can house people and get to an 800,000 population number, which feels different than just counting units of housing.

Michelle Wu celebrating her election as mayor of Boston, November 2021.
Stuart Cahill/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald, via Getty Images

Almost a year into the job, what have you learned about the tensions between trying to enact the transformative policies you ran on and the day-to-day operational and transactional realities of running a city? City government can be nimble, innovative and move quickly when we choose to, but sometimes it feels as if we don’t have a choice because we’re dealing with a major crisis — public-health-related or infrastructure-and-transportation-related. But the goal, always, is to try to carve out the time and space from the unexpected crisis-level situations that need an immediate response to be able to change systems and get to root causes in a transformational way. We can’t take only safe steps that get us to maybe mediocre outcomes. We have to take risks. Sometimes we will fail, but we will keep learning from what we’re doing. For example, our experience with the Orange Line shutdown: That entire subway line closed down for major repairs and upgrades. That was the purview of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. The city stepped up to support all of the diversionary transportation, the alternative shuttle service, traffic signals, dedicated bus lanes, making our bike-share system free for 30 days. It went about as smoothly as it could go. Since the reopening, we’ve kept some of the changes, because many of the ideas that we accelerated and made happen have been helpful for traffic flow and public safety. That’s the goal, to look for opportunities for lasting impact and constantly iterate and show improvements.

You mentioned the need to take risks. What’s an example of a real risk you’ve taken? The first thing I did in office: We filed a request with the City Council for funds to make three bus routes fare-free in Boston. I advocated for a program like this over the years, and we had been told this could not happen — that the system would be overrun and unable to accommodate the demand; that this would somehow lead to devaluing the service if anyone could just get on and ride. We had to work through weeks of negotiating all the way up to the Federal Transit Administration and Secretary Buttigieg about getting the rules clearly defined and determining that this was something that could proceed — and did it! These three routes have been running for months now. I have met people who have said this is life-changing, not only for their ability to move around the city and access opportunities and resources, but even for something as basic as their feeling like they belong in the city when there’s a service that is available for all.

But the federal money that pays for those free bus lines is going to run out in the not-too-distant future, right? There was some portion of the federal recovery funds that was used for revenue replacements, and we allocated somewhere around $350 million, including the $8 million for that pilot. The eight million is for the next two years, and the rest of the federal funds mostly have to be spent between 2025 and 2026. This is in some ways a risk that we are taking to prove and make tangible the impacts of a different way of doing things so that we can make the case for increased investment from the state and federal government or a new revenue source at the city level.

Wu with Gov. Charlie Baker and Representative Aaron Michlewitz in September.
Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald, via Getty Images

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it determined that the first of the free transit lines was by and large not saving people money because most riders had to transfer to get to the free lines? I think one-third of folks were just riding the bus and therefore directly saved on their fares. That number can seem small if you’re looking at it like 33 out of 100 percent, but for the 33 percent of community members who now are fully plugged into job opportunities, getting to and from Roxbury Community College and child care and social meetings with friends and family, that makes a big difference. You know, it’s not all or nothing. Think about traffic flow, for example. Boston had, prepandemic, the worst rush hour congestion of any city in the country. The thing about traffic is, some folks will say, “You’re never going to get everyone to give up their cars.” But that is not the goal. The goal is to ease traffic. Studies have shown that getting even 5 percent of cars off the road creates enough space for the folks who are still driving to maneuver around other cars. That’s the scale of work at the city level that can add up to quickly having impact.

You won your election by a wide margin, but the overall turnout was very low — less than 30 percent. How much is public apathy a problem for your work? There’s a lot of not even apathy but outright cynicism and disillusionment around politics today, for very good reason. Battling that sense that we can’t do anything, that delivering change is impossible, rests entirely on building trust and creating a connected community. At all levels of government, this is a major struggle, but city government is the place where we can demonstrate regular progress, and the steps are immediately impactful and can make a difference in people’s lives. For example, if you take the school system, there are a lot of structural challenges that our Boston public schools have been facing. We could implement all the new curriculum and policy that we want, but unless your child’s bus comes on time and you can rely on the fact your child is going to get to school and have a great, full day there, none of the big-picture stuff matters. So it’s at that scale: You build back trust by getting the little things right.

Do you feel you’ve made any mistakes that undermined public trust? I’m thinking of an example like the controversy around Ricardo Arroyo, in which you endorsed him for district attorney, then rescinded the endorsement, and then said you voted for him anyway. I mean, there are so many immediate situations that require almost instantaneous decisions and responses. No day is perfect, and on any number of issues, we try to debrief and learn and be transparent with residents about what went well and what didn’t go well so that we can keep improving. I do my best to be transparent about my own decision making.

It’s hard enough in Boston to do what sound like relatively simple things like converting the city’s gas street lamps to LED or creating an electric school-bus fleet, let alone even bigger projects. So when that’s the case, aren’t you in danger of getting caught in an overpromise-underdeliver cycle that then feeds the cynicism you talked about earlier? People understand that longstanding challenges didn’t happen overnight and aren’t going to be fixed tomorrow. But that’s why it’s so important to be honest about what the specific milestones are, what the process is, who’s involved and why pieces need to be put in place in order to deliver change. For example, we had a community meeting about the Boston police union contract-bargaining process, and someone in the meeting remarked that this was not something they had ever heard of happening before. Usually it’s a closed-door conversation. Someone else in the meeting said, Why are we even talking about contracts when the real issue is accountability or police reform overall? But it’s important to be clear that something that feels as technical as legal language in a contract has a lot to do with outcomes that we experience on the street in terms of training and preparedness and community interactions and funding. Bringing people into that process is important to get to the real purpose of government, which is for us to have shared ownership over big problems so that we can actually solve them. It has to be a shared endeavor.

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This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and writes the Talk column. He recently interviewed Lynda Barry about the value of childlike thinking, Father Mike Schmitz about religious belief and Jerrod Carmichael on comedy and honesty.