Interest continues to build in Mayor Michelle Wu’s tax-incentive program to help convert older office buildings in downtown Boston to apartments.
That’s the message the mayor conveyed at an Associated Industries of Massachusetts meeting, held at Winthrop Center on Thursday, after AIM chief executive Brooke Thomson asked what her administration is doing to help address the region’s housing shortage.
Wu touted her office-to-residential conversion program, which offers developers a 75-percent property tax break over 29 years. She noted projects totaling nearly 800 units are in the pipeline right now, with that number likely to soon climb to around 1,000. The hope: bring more life to a downtown hurt by the rise of remote work, while also creating more housing.
“We’re still going by trying to expand the footprint of what kinds of buildings will qualify for that,” Wu said.
Actual construction, though, has been moving more slowly. A City Hall spokeswoman offered a few details: The program has 762 units lined up, with four projects totaling 141 units under construction now or later this summer, and based on conversations with developers, the administration hopes to have 1,000 new units finished or under construction by next summer.
Wu rattled off several other city housing initiatives: a $110 million “Housing Accelerator Fund” to help jump-start market-rate housing stalled by high borrowing and construction costs, selling off surplus city-owned sites, streamlining permitting for big projects, implementing citywide zoning, and a newly launched “co-purchasing” pilot program to help households team up to buy multifamily properties.
And she fielded a separate question from Thomson about buttressing the city’s competitiveness, by indicating that perhaps the most important attraction for businesses is “making sure Boston is a city where employees, where people, want to build their lives.”
There was little indication of how some of Wu’s more progressive policies — increased requirements for affordable housing, for example, or climate-friendly construction — faces resistance in some corners of the business community. A number of prominent executives have donated to her likely challenger in the fall election, Josh Kraft, a former nonprofit executive and one of Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s sons.
To introduce Wu at the AIM event, M&T Bank regional president Grace Lee talked about how the mayor stood her ground before confrontational members of Congress in March, over immigration policies.
“Mayor Wu bore the weight of our city, the weight of our state [and], I felt, the weight of our nation,” Lee said. “Everyone that needed a voice, she stood up for.”
Wu hearkened back to that moment in Washington when Thomson asked about the mayor’s controversial rollout of more bike lanes, a rollout that Kraft targeted with a press event of his own earlier in the week.
“When I was sitting in that congressional hearing room in D.C.,” Wu recalled, “and the questions were coming fast and furious and trying to, you know, call me names, and this and that, I quickly realized, … none of these congressional Republicans have been in a bike lane meeting in the city of Boston.”
This is an installment of our weekly Bold Types column about the movers and shakers on Boston’s business scene.
Jon Chesto can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @jonchesto.
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