^ Mayor Walsh and Boston’s architecture estb;lishment at Faneuil Hall yesterday celebrating the formal launch of Boston 2030

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Change is coming to Boston every day. this is, in my mind, an extremely good thing. I am glad that Mayor Walsh agrees. Because, unlike me, he has the power to shape it. So does Brian Golden, who as head of the BRA, has the power to approve actual development projects.

Walsh has the plan to shape change in Boston, and Golden endorses it, and yesterday at Faneuil hall the two leaders unveiled it formally. It’s called “Boston 2030,” which looks awfully like the Olympics’ “Boston 2024” and probably should be sen as that veture’s twin. The two go together.

However, there was no mention at all of either Olympics or 2024 at yesterday’s unveiling. The controversy thereof could only have shaken the applause with which 500 or so of the City’s architecture, city planning, and development establishments — the Hall was full — celebrated this other, and so ar much larger, plan for Boston.

^ the BRA’s Brian Golden addressing a full Faneuil hall yesterday

What, then, iS Boston 2030 ?

As Mayor Walsh described it, the plan envisions a City in which structures give “form to space” by connecting residence to commerce, convenience, and what we used to call “quality of life.” Buildings to be constructed should pay particular attention to which materials are used, and in what proportion or relationship to one another. Sidewalks assume crucial importance (as anyone knows who, not wearing mountain boots, has tried to negotiate Boston’s cracked, sloping, narrow, or badly materialized walkways).

Other important principles, said Mayor Walsh’s panel members, include these : affordable housing built on land whose price hasn’t been fattened by dollar speculation; reform of outdated zoning laws (especially usage restrictions and height or setbacks limitations); and holistic neighborhoods (restaurants and gathering places not only in Downtown). Walsh also directed the Faneuil Hall attendees to Boton 2030’s own website : imagine’boston.gov is its URL.

A singular feature of the presentation was the new Bruce C. Bolling Municipal Building (formerly the Ferdinand) in Dudley Square. its architect used a slide presentation to demonstrate the Bolling Block’s shape, surface texture, interior arrangements, open spaces, sidewalking, and relationship to neighboring structures. Also noted were the Bolling Building’s radical difference from what was the norm for Dudley Square architecture 120 years ago, when it was first developed. Esthetics of structure have definitely changed enormously, and the block’s architect has not been shy about transforming everything.

Using the city of Amsterdam as an example, she called her work “capturing the feel of older buildings without imitating them.” This description supported Walsh’s assertion that “the future of Boston design should reflect its past.”

Walsh also stated that “this is the begimning of the conversation, there will be public meetings.” The same is true of the Boston 2024 Olympics initiative. Both initiatives envision biog cahnge, at least to how Boston is built. All of which satisfies Walsh’s core mission : keeping Boston’s building boom going, expanding its reach, bringing it into the neighborhoods and putting good wages in his Building trades’ followers’ wallets.

Not everybody likes this. Many residents don’t want a building boom and the economic waves that it portends. They do not trust that there’ll be any “affordable” housing; they’re likely to be right on that, as Boston rents and house prices are climbing faster than an aircraft taking off. And they don’t want to see population density thicken, traffic metastasize, noise mushrooming — city life as we live it in 2015, much less in 2030.

Fair to say that there will be a whole lot of talking going on, in Boston during this City Council election year and heading toward the big 2017 re-election campaign.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere

^ If our state is to accomplish any of the reforms now on the table, reformers will need to support the above two leaders in huge sustained numbers. Can we do it ?

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Success breeds its own demise. As the most successul nation of the past 150 years, America now faces the largest panorama of demise.

What do I mean here ? Simply this : to carry out all of our successes we have set up organizations, bureaurcaies of people. These set-ups, having carried out their kission, have continued on, perpetuating their organization, their jobs, their income. They are now blocking the road to future reform.

The energy industry; police unions; teachers’ unions; the criminal justice system and its thousands of corrections officers; an education bureaucracy managed by people drawing outlandishly high salaries; athletes paid hundreds of millions of dollars to do — basically nothing; entire neighborhoods whose residents want nothing about them to change.

Reform means, basically, beginning things anew. It woulc be good if we could erase the blackboard and begin afresh, as those who created America were uniquely able to do. But we cannot.

Nationwide reform looks almost impossible. America is spinning off in 50 different diurections, deconstructing back to the states that pre-existed the Constitution and its unity, plus the states that came after but were set up with the same red uctyive powers as the 13 originals. In these 50 retreats from the future various immovably vested interests are crushing reform, indeed are negating even those reforms already won nationwide.

We in Massachusetts think we stand above that kind of rejection, but we mistake. What is the anti-flourdiation cult if not a rejection of reform ? Yet this return to witchcraft thinking has arisen in two Cape Ann communities.

Boston magazine recently profiled the failure, in Newtin, of an affordable housing project that some loudmoiths objected would devalue their overpriced mansions. Forget that state law calls for affordable housing in every municipality : these rejectors weren’t having it.

the same sort of rejection happens now in many neighborhoods of boston. No “:gentrification” — code word for “no money people of today buying up homes we want to pay yesterday’s price for.”

I suppose we can be thank ful that we haven’t many people here who want to roll back the women’s rights and civil rights reforms of the past 60 years, not many anti vaccine people or climtae change deniers and not many people who want to break unions or abolish the social safety net. Wow, huh ?

Still, we can’t comngratulate ourselves just yet.

Massachusetts needs to transform its schools, diversify its public workforce, eliminate corporate giveaways, reform the MBTA from top to bottom, change the way we deal with addiction — handling it as a health matter, not a criminal thing; enact a living wage — say $ 15 an hour; reform our sentencing laws and imprisonment system, redraw the outrageous costs of higher education, amend our transgender rights law, build an Olympics 2024. We need to do all of these, but the constituencies of No stand loudly and passionately in the way.

As Boston school Superintedent John McDonough wisely but sadly says : “change is difficult.”

So I ask it again : who will do these reforms ? Who will accomplish even one of them ? Can Governor baker and Speaker DeLeo, working now as solidly in sync as any Governor and Speaker I have seen in 30 years, do it ?

The two men cannot do it without a tsunami of support from the voters, support that they can see, hear, feel, touch. the opposition to each reform is already there, occupying the ground to be shifted. They are playing defense on their own turf, always a strong position to be in. The forces of reform will need to outnumber the defenders of things-as-is by at least two to one and do it every minute of every day for probably two entire legislative years. The same thing is true of reform (and reconstruction) at the neighborhood level. I am not holding my breath.

Nonetheless, this is our chance. A hugely popular Governor and a strong-minded Speaker have forged the most effective public policy pairing in decades. We of the reform party must support them as they move forward to pry loose the defenders of ways long since past their sell-by date.

—- Mike Freedberg /Here and Sphere

^ Our fellow Americans protesting what we too would protest were it done to us

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For a few days I have held off writing this editorial because I did not want to rush to judgment. i wanted to ponder to think, the other side, to confirm myself. i have done that now. My view is, if anything, more committed than it was at first.

This was injustice. It was indifference to life. It was a violation of Freddie Gray’s civil rights, from beginning to end. There are no shades of grey in it, it is black and white.

That people rioted, that they destroyed much property — of their neighbors and maybe even family — wasn’t a rational act or an excusable one. The President rightly said so. But it was violence grievously understandable. I cannot say that, were I in the position of the Baltimore angry, that I would not have thrown a nutty. I think i would have. I get angry when I am disrespected.

The dignity of self requires, sometimes that one not turn the other cheek, not retreat, not go quietly away.

The riot was a sign of life in people who generations of police indifference — or worse — have left maimed at the fringes of living, bruised mentallly, beaten in the soul. The riot proved that bruises may maim the soul but do not have to crush it.

Did selfish ones exploit the burst of anger, to loot and burn ? Yes they did. Them, I condemn. They are enemies of the people.

And so, the people. Are these Baltimoreans not Americans every inch as American as you or me ? They are. Does the poverty that many live in put an asterisk on their American-ness ? It does not. Does the violence that plagues one of America’s most crime-ridden cities defray their Constitutional and civil rights ? It does not.

One suspects that the police — including two who themselves are Black — who arrested Freddy Gray without cause and who thereafter treated him like a bag full of empty tin cans as they bumped the van along Baltinmore streets, stopping several times, ignoring his cries for medical assistance did all of that because that is simply how they do. It’s the custom. It makes the citizens of dangerous neighborhoods afraid of the police, who experience has taught need to be feared, or else.

Lawyers for the six indicted police assert that t.hey did nothing wrong. I have not the slightest doubt that they fully believe that. The six did what they always do. Freddy Gray was not, when the incident began, known to the police. He was just the usual suspect. Running ? Up to no good. Screaming about being manhandled ? Don’t they all. Requesting medical assistance ? Hmmm, he’s preparing a lawsuit.

Then all hell broke loose.

This is how it happens. This is how decades of civil rights abuses and police terror get called to account. Not by a superstar but by a man utterly ordinary. As one protester said : “there are a lot of Freddy Grays in this City.”

There’s an even larger lot of Freddy Grays in the nation, our nation, our experiment in black and white. The age of smartphone video cameras has made clear just HOW many. Too many. A whole lot of people who by the color of their skin incite fear in those of us who look upon people with dark skin as dangerous thereby. And not just dangerous. People of dark skin carry entire placards of negative stereotype on their shoulders. We have put those placards o them. Dare we now deflect the bad consequences ?

The President said that the nation needs to do a lot of soul searching : that this problem “is not new.” It is not new. It is in our soul and if we search it there, we will find it, the problem, the stereotype, the injustice as a matter of conscious policyl of intimidation.

In Court the six officers may avoid conviction. Criminal cases demand a high standard of proof, and the defense for these six writes itself : we were simply following procedure.

It is high time that police departments change that procedure.

It is also way past time that we searched our souls. search and destroy the badass we find inside us. It is time we reform our poloice departments, reorder their priorities, embrace people of dark skin color, and in poverty, as folks like us. Because, believe me, no one wants more to be part of us than those we have put out of the home that belongs to all of us as Americans.

If you were listening to what was said by actual Baltimoreans during the events, you heard exactly that, spoken with urgency that i applaud. I am not sure that we deserve their wanting to be part of us. Let us work to deserve it.

—- Mike Freedberg / Here and Sphere