The gadfly

Shirley Kressel tells anyone who will listen that city development policy threatens Boston's soul. What's got her so worried?

City Player by Ben Geman

Here are some of the words on Shirley Kressel's shit list: "economic development," "public-private partnership," "linkage," and "revitalization."

They're all terms used to describe an increasingly common urban goal: bringing government and business interests together. For business and policy types, these words are part of the vernacular of rebuilding and improving a city. But to Kressel, they amount to -- as doomed Republican presidential hopeful Lamar Alexander would say -- weasel words. Alexander used the phrase to highlight the meaninglessness of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism." Kressel thinks today's development jargon is similarly empty, even threatening. "Whose economy," she wonders, "is being developed? It's the developers'." And "revitalization" makes her reach for the antacid. "It's a real Mylanta word," she says. "It's the place being revitalized, not the people."

Kressel, 52, is a Back Bay landscape architect who believes, quite simply, that it's dangerous to fuse the public and private realms, especially in historic Boston. Development, she says, threatens to turn Boston into an amusement park for the affluent and suburban.

Over the past two years, Kressel has become an unusual player in the city's frenzied development game. To push for more resident input into planning, she helped form a coalition of community groups called the Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods. She attends virtually every meeting that anyone ever calls, and she's become an oft-quoted source in newspaper stories on development. Vivien Li, executive director of the Boston Harbor Association, calls her "a thorn in the side of city planning officials."

Kressel and the Alliance believe that the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) suffers from a built-in conflict of interest, since it handles both planning and development duties for the city. Kressel wants those duties separated. And she wants more civic dialogue to help Boston avoid a fate she says is befalling other cities: commercial development and use of public space that discourages civic life.

"Boston is unique in having a lot to lose," she says. "But it is not unique in how it is going about losing it."

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Here's something that happens a lot at community meetings, especially when people are concerned about development. Someone gets up to comment and begins by saying, " . . . I have been living in this neighborhood for 45 years." Or 50 years, or 70.

Kressel, in this respect, is a bit of an oddity: someone who is deeply involved in civic life, yet is only a recent transplant. And although she attacks from the outside, she has solid insider ties -- her husband, Herbert Kressel, is president of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The Back Bay address they've shared for about six years is ground zero in her assault on development policy.

"I'm just going through my daily clippings," says Kressel, answering the door of the Hereford Street townhouse on a recent afternoon. She has copies of several newspapers spread out across the table; she says she clips stories that interest her from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe every day, adding smaller local papers when she can. When she is finished, she heads toward the third floor and warns: "You are about to see something that will surprise and shock you."

Packed on a tabletop she used to use for drafting, and inside a fearsomely large filing cabinet, are hundreds of pounds of studies, clippings, notes -- fuel for her frequent comments to city and state officials. Among the readings are reports from the New York City Council on Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs, which create mini business fiefdoms that charge shop owners additional taxes to pay for private security and other services over and above what the city provides. Right now, despite objection from Boston's police union, Downtown Crossing's business community wants to start one here.

Kressel's take on BIDs is simple: just say no. They don't consider quality of life for nearby residents -- and they cede government power to private interests.

She frowns also on the Trust for City Hall Plaza, the group of business leaders Mayor Menino has entrusted with steering development of the barren, windswept space. The same for Post Office Square, the much-lauded downtown park controlled by a for-profit business consortium called the Friends of Post Office Square. To her, each of these represents an encroachment by developers on private space. To put a hotel on City Hall Plaza, for instance, as one plan proposes, is nothing less than a violation of the public trust.

The imposition of private business on public space, Kressel says, allows corporations to dictate who they do or don't want hanging around places that should be built for everyone.

"The visitor economy has grown to become the visitor society," she says. "The reason that we do not have lively and active public space is not because we do not have enough souvenir shops and hotels. It is the public who enlivened public space and the public who needed it, who lived here and had civic and social engagement with each other."

Kressel's conviction has won her admirers among community activists at a time when development plans are pending in the South Boston Waterfront, Roxbury, the Fenway, the Back Bay, and elsewhere.

"She says things a lot of other people don't have the guts to say," says Stephanie Pollack, senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, a nonprofit environmental and community-advocacy group.

"It would be easy to dismiss her as a pest," says Steve Hollinger of the Seaport Alliance for a Neighborhood Design. "But the catch is, if you listen to her, you get the view that she does not have personal gain as incentive to be involved in the discussion. And her points are almost always well thought out and rational. If you allow yourself to dismiss her, you can miss the boat on some good suggestions."

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With her Back Bay address, her connected husband, and her white-collar profession, Kressel may lack the trappings of a radical. But make no mistake: she has a radical's knee-jerk disapproval of the way developers and neighborhoods negotiate to steer cash toward parks and other projects. And she has a radical's dogmatism. All her research has led to a simple conclusion: public and private must never mix. Never, ever, ever. To her, such policies send cities down a path that drains civic life, with developers taking over as residents are placated by short-term rewards.

Even among fellow activists, Kressel is all but alone in the extremism of that view. Tom Scanlon, a community organizer with the Fenway Community Development Corporation, calls himself a fan and a friend of Kressel, yet he disagrees that "community benefits" such as linkage programs -- laws requiring developers to pay into affordable-housing and jobs programs -- are harmful in the long run.

"She sees community benefits as a way for developers to buy their way into projects that communities do not want," he says. "And I think that's a negative, unfair, brush-stroke criticism. These things are often a lot more complex once you dig into them. You cannot box them all into a simple analysis."

Adds Pollack: "We don't oppose the model, but we believe that in specific applications it does not always make sense. [Kressel] opposes the model."

From a glance at her bookshelves, which are lined with books by progressive historians and economists such as Howard Zinn and Jeremy Rifkin, it's obvious that Kressel's opposition is rooted in some larger principles. Like, for example, the need to overhaul capitalism. Planners "have come to believe the purpose of the society is to support the economy, and not the other way around," she complains.

Strong stuff. Yet such thoughts haven't always inspired activism. Kressel, born in an Austrian displaced-persons camp, grew up in Europe and Montreal before her family settled in Connecticut, and didn't reveal her gadfly tendencies until relatively recently. After graduating from Brandeis, she got a master's in public health from UCLA and worked in the policy field; later, while she and her husband lived in Philadelphia, she studied landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Boston, "I lived in the 'burbs and worked at a desk," she recalls. "I largely minded my own business." Her one gesture of protest was very local indeed: she turned her front lawn into a big garden. Her suburban Philly neighbors were furious.

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These days her gestures are more public. This past summer, when the Boston Herald reported on Menino-administration plans to allow private-sector guidance of Fort Point development, she offered this critique: "Developers are already the de facto planners in this city. This just makes it official."

Her stinging quotes get attention, but they may also consign her to the margins. Like a fringe political candidate, Kressel maintains ideological purity at the expense of a seat at the table. "She's quoted a lot," says one city official. "But the people with real credibility are the people who can talk knowledgeably on planning issues on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. Someone like [the Allston Civic Association's] Paul Berkeley . . . he criticizes us and he agrees with us. He helps shape the agenda. Someone like that plays the most constructive role."

BRA spokesperson Kelley Quinn also questions the practicality of Kressel's criticism. "The reality is that we do not have the money to do everything, and some of these public-private partnerships are critical to making these worthy projects happen. We need to work in a political and financial and community reality that a lot of our critics are not subjected to."

Quinn's comments do point to a chink in Kressel's rhetorical armor. It's easy to condemn the way neighborhoods trade autonomy for goodies when you live in the Back Bay and don't need a job or job training or affordable housing -- in other words, when you have the luxury of looking at these things in the abstract.

On the other hand, that distance has its benefits. One advantage Kressel and the Alliance bring to the table, she says, is looking at the city in a holistic manner that may be beyond the reach of any one community group. She gets in arguments about neighborhood projects but doesn't confine herself to one locale; she hammers development policy but rarely mentions a politician or city official by name. Kressel pores over the nitty-gritty, raising objections to a BID plan here or Red Sox stadium proposal there, yet her beef is as broad as you can get.

"People say you should pick your fights," she says. "I have picked my fight. It is the structure."

Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.