Boston’s Mayor Makes Friends—and Enemies—with Her Focus on Housing

Many voters had seen Wu as the leftmost candidate, but being mayor has complicated this perception. She has declined to call for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, for example, despite frequent protests. Last year, she increased funding for a gang database that she had previously vowed to dismantle and called “discriminatory.” The decision came after observing reforms under a new police commissioner and “spending time with people in different police units,” she told me. A few months later, she announced a new collective-bargaining agreement with the main police union. The contract included beefed-up discipline for lawbreaking officers and tightened the process for granting paid medical leave.

When Wu entered office, it wasn’t just the police contract that needed to be negotiated. All of the city’s collective-bargaining agreements had expired—four dozen in total. “It’s kind of an urban-politics horror story,” her labor adviser, Lou Mandarini, told me. Wu studied the jargon and spreadsheets as though she herself were at the negotiating table. The final teachers’ contract, for instance, seemed to reflect Wu’s values: more sick leave for educators and improved services for immigrant students and kids with disabilities. “You can only make progress and get things done when you get into the details of how things actually work,” Wu told me.

Her efficient disposal of the expired agreements furthered her reputation as a technocrat, which was both a compliment and a dig. “She gets into a room, and the experts tell her something, and it maybe goes against what people in the community say. I have seen her listen to the experts,” Kendra Lara, a former city councillor, said. (Wu endorsed one of Lara’s opponents in last year’s primary.) “Showing up for people in the community matters to her, but I don’t know if that’s translating into policy.”

In October, Wu visited the Mildred C. Hailey Apartments, a public-housing complex in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood which dates to the early nineteen-forties. Residents have long complained of neglect and crime in the buildings, but the layout is comfortable: brick mid-rises with sea-green roofs; plenty of benches and trees. A decade ago, several dozen units were gut-renovated. Now several hundred more were scheduled to be redone or built anew. A young project manager named Karl Pops led Wu and a small crowd of tenant advocates through a stapled packet of architectural renderings, showing cheery-looking families among native plants or next to in-unit washing machines. Around the time Wu took office, Pops left the private sector for the Boston Housing Authority, which provides public and affordable housing to thousands of Bostonians. “The units will have all-new kitchens and baths, all-new appliances,” Pops said. Wu responded with a series of technical questions: Where would residents go during the remodel? How many units were A.D.A.-compliant? Could B.H.A. afford to maintain the apartments once they were finished?

Earlier that week, on a leafy plot in the Four Corners neighborhood, Wu announced the first round of contractors for Welcome Home, Boston, an initiative that gives away municipal land for the development of affordable housing. “We scrubbed every square foot of city-owned land,” Wu said. “In identifying a hundred and fifty parcels like this one, we saw an opportunity to not only create new homes for Boston residents and families but to create new wealth-building opportunities.” The first batch of lots would eventually produce sixty-three units of affordable housing. The lot we were standing on had been granted to a nonprofit that supports African refugees: part of Wu’s gambit was to channel construction work to women- and minority-owned firms. “The city has a mayor who’s actually taking the model of housing as a public good,” Armani White, the co-founder of the group Reclaim Roxbury, told me. “The rubric we have is, ‘Does this project have affordable housing? Does it have enough diverse contractors?’ ”

Not all housing activists see an ally in Wu. Markeisha Moore, a community organizer with Dorchester Not for Sale, had been attending hearings related to Dorchester Bay City, an enormous mixed-use development of twenty-one buildings that could break ground in the next decade. Moore rents in the neighborhood and had seen many friends and neighbors priced out of the area, and feared that a huge new complex would make the problem worse. “They’re trying to build a place for the rich,” she said. “To do that, they don’t want to see us.” At the hearings, Moore and other advocates argued that the entire project, which would sit on land owned mostly by the University of Massachusetts, should be held to the city’s standard for preventing displacement, which is to “consider impacts on area residents” and “address past histories of exclusion.” A letter signed by more than eighteen thousand UMass students and employees urged the developer, Accordia Partners, and the city to make half of the housing units affordable, and to define affordability to “reflect the incomes of the surrounding community.”

Accordia committed to making only twenty per cent of units income-restricted, and at the higher end of the income spectrum. The city approved this proposal, while promising to evaluate each of the planned buildings for its potential displacement risk at a later date. Moore was shocked by what she believed amounted to a “loophole.” “That means we have to fight this project twenty-one more times. You don’t know the amount of stress, the amount of time, the amount of energy we put into trying to get something better for our community out of this project,” she said. “If you’re rich, the development might not affect you. The way things are happening in the city, you might not be gone in five years, but I’ll be gone.”

When I put Moore’s concerns to Wu, she said, “What was approved was at a level of generality that wasn’t about the particular building designs or forms that ended up triggering all of this specific review.” I pressed for something less technical, the kind of reassurance that tenants in Dorchester might be looking for. “There is no way that the first step of approvals is going to shield or deflect obligations related to affordability,” she said. Yet it was the vague nature of those obligations—what might be affordable to a family earning forty thousand versus ninety thousand dollars a year—that made Moore so apprehensive.

Critics of Wu from the left have accused her of trying to mollify conservatives. But the right (by Boston standards, anyway) has not stopped yelling. In early 2022, after Wu announced a vaccine requirement for indoor businesses, a group of mostly white Bostonians took to showing up outside her home every day, playing loud music and yelling harassing messages. On her birthday, they chanted, “Happy birthday, Hitler.” “They’ve shouted on megaphones that my kids will grow up without a mom bc I’ll be in prison,” Wu tweeted. This continued for several months, long after the mayor lifted the vaccine rule. Fearing for her family, she had her office consult with the police, who asked for a list of the most active protesters’ names. News of this e-mailed list was published by the Boston Herald, a conservative newspaper, only intensifying the conflict.

More recently, a private school in Dorchester and a group of homeowners in Charlestown each sued the city to block modest construction of affordable housing. Meanwhile, George Regan, a local P.R. executive, reportedly embarked on, then denied embarking on, a fund-raising “mission” to support future challengers to Mayor Wu. His stated aim was to rescue the citizenry “from the negative impacts of the ultra-progressives . . . at Boston City Hall.” There was an atmosphere, Wu told me, of “people feeling like they’re losing their grip on power and influence.”

Between 2020 and 2021, the number of homeless adults in Boston increased by around twenty-five per cent. Some lived in a large tent encampment near the busy, industrial intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard. Until 2014, homelessness had been less visible on the street: services for the poor and people with addiction had been offshored to an island in Boston Harbor, not unlike a social-services version of Rikers Island. When the city shut down an aging bridge to the island, “Mass and Cass” became the city’s new skid row. A couple of weeks into Wu’s term, she decided to clear Mass and Cass, based on reports of crime and fires, and the imminent freeze of winter. Activists protested the clearance as a sweep, but the city claimed that everyone was placed in some form of shelter. “Our very first set of actions was to build new housing and treatment—two hundred units of low-threshold housing, which had never existed in any form in Boston,” Wu told me. Within a few months, however, another encampment grew in the same area.

Last fall, the administration conducted another large-scale clearance at Mass and Cass. The operation was minutely detailed. Workers from the city and several nonprofits spent weeks counselling the tent dwellers. They talked them through shelter options and made plans for pet care as well as the treatment of addiction, wounds from fentanyl mixed with xylazine, diabetes, and heart conditions. The police were on the scene as tarps and belongings were dragged away.

At a press conference the following day, Wu said, “As you can see, the street looks a little different than it has before. But what we are here to share a little bit about is the people who we have been able to work with.” She was careful not to sound jubilant—or to come across as equating tents with human beings. Her remarks were so deliberate that each word was its own discrete unit, surrounded by space. The people who’d been living outside “as the temperature was dropping” were now “in safe, warm placements with a roof over their head,” she said. The city’s ultimate goal was to help them “move into permanent housing of their own.”

Yet the demand for such housing—all housing, really—was on the rise. Migrants fleeing violence around the world continued to arrive in Boston, with no place to go. The mayor relayed her alarm to Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, when he visited Boston last summer. Was there more federal money? Could D.H.S. expedite work authorization? In January, she scheduled a follow-up meeting at his office, which happened to coincide with the House Republicans’ attempt to impeach him.

Before catching an 8 A.M. flight to Washington, D.C., Wu stopped by Terminal E at Logan Airport. Large flags, representing the nations of the world, hung above the check-in counters. Downstairs, the international-arrivals gate was quiet; the baggage carrousels were still. Several dozen migrants, nearly all of them Black, huddled along a hallway by the exit to the parking lot. There were single men, couples, and families with small children. Many had just woken up and were tidying their spots on the floor. Wu was briefed by a police officer and a manager from the Massachusetts Port Authority. “Are we providing food?” she asked. “We did initially, but it got too overwhelming,” the manager said.

Wu approached a man standing against a wall. He was from Honduras, so she slipped into Spanish. “I’m the mayor of Boston,” she said, holding out her hand. “How long have you been here?” He had arrived the previous week; a baby slept on a blanket on the floor next to him. A woman, also from Honduras, told Wu that she’d been in town for two months, bouncing from place to place. She rolled up the sleeves of her hoodie to show the mayor a hospital bracelet and a field of large black spots. “I have a microbial infection. It itches so badly, I went outside once and rubbed myself with snow,” she said. Wu assured her that the city was doing its best to help, though it wasn’t clear what that entailed.

The new migrants now occupied a quarter of the city’s shelter beds. “They want what we all want—to provide for their families,” Wu told me. “It’s an impossible situation.” In Washington, Mayorkas dodged a first attempt at impeachment, but not a second. His staff provided updates and relayed a “plan to clarify and expand legal pathways,” Wu told me. Two days later, back in Boston, she accompanied volunteers on the annual, overnight point-in-time census of people living on the street. Meanwhile, the recreation center in Roxbury had shut down its programming and filled up with hundreds of cots. The mayor was in touch with the track coach and had a staff member chase down a lead on an alternative space for handball. She was working with the superintendent of schools to register migrant kids right away, to give families a sense of stability. “It’s not an issue of where people are coming from,” Wu said. “If we want to grow as a city, sustainably, and be a city for everyone, we have to get the basics right.” ♦