BPDA

A group of Franklin Park area residents convened on June 4 to gather community input as they pressed forward with a lawsuit against the proposed plan to revamp White Stadium for use by a professional women’s soccer team.

Since the city’s announcement last summer that a women’s professional soccer team would lease White Stadium, park advocates and activists in neighborhoods surrounding Franklin Park have struggled to keep up with the breakneck pace of project review meetings.

A growing number of Franklin Park abutters and open space advocates are calling on city officials to hit the brakes on controversial development plans for White Stadium.

A development project currently under review by the Boston Planning & Development Agency (BPDA) would bring 23 units of affordable and market-rate housing to the Garrison Trotter area of Roxbury.

It isn’t often in a city the size and density of Boston that the opportunity presents itself to re-imagine — and indeed rebuild — more than four acres of publicly-owned land in the heart of the city. But that is exactly what the sprawling parking lot along Harrison Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, currently owned by the Boston Water and Sewer Commission, represents.

Representatives of neighborhood groups from across the city are voicing dissatisfaction over the composition of a steering group appointed by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu to overhaul the city’s planning and redevelopment process known as Article 80, which governs how public and neighborhood input are incorporated into major development projects.

As Mayor Michelle Wu pushes forward with an ambitious overhaul of the city’s planning and development processes, neighborhood leaders and civic advocates are cautioning that any streamlining of development should not come at the cost of community input.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is promoting her agenda for action at the state level as a new legislative session begins on Beacon Hill.

After months of internal discussion and debate, one development team has now secured the endorsement of the guiding Roxbury Strategic Master Plan Oversight Committee (RSMPOC) to transform a long-vacant parcel into affordable housing, lab and commercial space.

If memory serves me correctly, it was John F. Collins in the late ’50s, who brought Edward Logue here to Boston to start up the Boston Redevelopment Authority. He arrived in Boston shortly after doing his “urban renewal” vision nearby in New Haven. Tearing down the old because it was old and building what was called here “the New Boston.”

Last week, Mayor Michelle Wu announced new guidelines requiring developers of privately-owned land to report on their plans to hire people of color and subcontract with firms owned by people of color as part of the Boston Planning and Development Agency’s Article 80 development approval process.

Asked during a press conference last week about her pledge to abolish the BPDA, Wu acknowledged that the agency, which originally focused on urban renewal projects in the city’s core neighborhoods is outdated, but was noncommittal on when she would move to dismantle it.