BOSTON (AP) — When she was elected mayor of Boston in November, Michelle Wu transformed the image of the city’s chief executive — up until then the sole domain of white men, many of Irish descent.
Now in office, the Chicago-born daughter of Taiwanese immigrants is facing a raft of challenges, including making good on key campaign promises like creating a fare-free public transit system and blunting the city’s skyrocketing housing costs.
Wu, 37 and the mother of two, has also grappled with early morning protests outside her home and racist online taunts.
“You can’t take things personally in jobs like this,” Wu said in an interview with The Associated Press. “At the same time, it does seem like in the last few years especially we’ve seen a normalizing of behavior that is toxic and harmful and personally abusive to many, many people.”
“Women and women of color in particular often have the most racialized and gender-based versions of that intensity,” she added.
The noisy morning gatherings outside her home prompted Wu to push through a new city ordinance limiting the hours during which protesters can gather in residential neighborhoods to the window between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m.
She’s also dismissed online chatter which tried to raise doubts about her mental health. Wu has been open about her mother’s struggles with mental illness.
“What has been most staggering about some of the rumors or these whisper campaigns is that in fact, I think it has the opposite impact,” Wu said. “If I needed mental health support, I would be the first to say that.”
She’s also run into flak from city unions on pandemic mandates and, more recently, tried to thread a needle on whether and how to allow restaurants to continue offering sidewalk dining along the narrow streets of the city’s North End.
The post is still a dream job for Wu — a former Democratic city councilor and policy wonk in the mold of mentor Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
“In many ways, it feels familiar and exhilarating and energizing to be able to roll up my sleeves and just work on issues that I had been talking about,” Wu said. “The energy right now in Boston to get things done is felt everywhere across the city.”
While Wu is the first woman of color to be elected mayor, she wasn’t the first to hold the seat. Former City Council President Kim Janey, who is Black, held the post of acting mayor for much of 2021 after former Mayor Marty Walsh resigned to become President Joe Biden’s labor secretary.
Unlike the typical Boston mayor, Wu wasn’t born and raised in the city. She first arrived from Chicago to attend Harvard University in neighboring Cambridge.
She would eventually relocate her two younger sisters and mother to Boston as she attended Harvard Law School.
“Boston has given me everything that I cherish in my life — the ability to take care of my family, to connect my mom to health care in a way that saved her life, the schools that I was able to raise my sisters in and now my own two boys,” Wu said. “It’s a city of every possible opportunity that you can think of, but it’s also a city that really needs to take down barriers, still, for that to be felt across every single part of our neighborhoods.”
One of biggest challenges facing Wu is housing.
Boston is facing a hollowing-out, driven by rapid gentrification as sleek new apartment buildings rise in neighborhoods that traditionally relied on three-story wooden homes to house a working and middle class
“We are working to throw everything we have at housing right now,” said Wu, who has pledged to revive rent control,…
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