In an effort to bring both the hustle and the bustle back to downtown, Mayor Michelle Wu’s office has released a plan that sticks largely to the broad strokes of how the city wants to boost its central business district in this post-pandemic lull.
The city and Boston Consulting Group produced a 76-page report titled “Revive and Reimagine: A Strategy to Revitalize Boston’s Downtown” that speaks generally about having more and more diverse businesses and residents in the city center that hasn’t fully rebounded from the pandemic, and the mayor announced alongside it that the years-stalled “Plan: Downtown” initiative will boot back up.
“We envision Downtown Boston as a space where people from all backgrounds come together,” Wu said in a statement. “Together with the restart of PLAN: Downtown, this report presents a roadmap for a truly inclusive, round-the-clock neighborhood filled with
new homes, diverse businesses, world-class public spaces, vibrant nightlife, and a thriving arts and culture scene.”
The city said BCG, the major international firm, did this work for its home city pro bono.
In general, the report says the city should get more creative with offices and public spaces, add housing units and “Expand the daily use of downtown beyond work by bolstering downtown’s cultural, art, retail, services, and hospitality ecosystems.”
Or as Boston Planning & Development Agency boss and Planning Chief Arthur Jemison put it on a call with reporters, “Having people treat downtown as a place where they live work and play is a major goal.”
A lot of the fine points remain vague. They read like this, for one example: “Set up a fund, team, or entity to engage business and philanthropic communities to secure affordable space for arts and culture institutions downtown and beyond.”
One that raised some questions in the press briefing was “Re-imagine Faneuil Hall Marketplace and Quincy Market post-COVID” — but queries into quite how the city’s imagination might be working were quickly stonewalled.
“The report said what it said, and I don’t want to elaborate,” on that matter Jemison said in the press call offered up right in the middle of a highly anticipated council meeting that touched on the fraught redistricting process.
He repeated a couple of times when asked for examples on different broad-strokes point that he didn’t want stakeholders to just “hear about something in the newspaper.”
Among the city’s other goals are updating zoning, expanding nightlife, identifying new spaces for pop-ups, “pedestrianizing” streets downtown, switch some commercial space to housing and boost the amount of affordable units available. The city also wants to hold more “large vents,” do more marketing of the downtown and launch a big subsidy program for “underserved” businesses to help them get into the area.
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