Starting over

The scandal at the Boston Redevelopment Authority reveals the bankruptcy of Mayor Menino's housing and development policies. Here are a few ideas for moving forward.

The decline and pending (at press time) fall of Boston Redevelopment Authority director Tom O'Brien -- obviously necessary, given the BRA's and City Hall's deplorable insensitivity to the affordable-housing crisis -- obscures a far larger problem: the utter bankruptcy of Mayor Tom Menino's housing and development policies.

Last week the Boston Globe Spotlight Team reported that O'Brien and other BRA officials had given permission for their $91,000-a-year chief-of-staff (make that former chief-of-staff) to buy a tony Charlestown condo meant for a moderate-income family.

Menino expressed the appropriate degree of outrage. But then Menino has a history of saying the right things, and of directing his outrage at everyone but himself.

The ugly truth is that Boston's efforts to manage development and provide affordable housing are now officially a shambles. In his State of the City address in January, Menino made affordable housing his number-one priority. Yet even as the BRA scandal fades, working-class and middle-class families continue to flee a city they no longer have the means to live in. Indeed, Boston is virtually as expensive to reside in as New York and San Francisco, the most expensive cities in the US. Several hundred artists are slated to lose their housing in and around the Fort Point Channel area over the next few years. There are rumblings that the convention center will end up costing far more than anticipated. And Menino seems ready to bless the Red Sox' plans for a new Fenway Park, despite serious concerns about traffic and unanswered questions about how much the taxpayers will ultimately be asked to pay and the potentially abusive use of eminent- domain powers.

Six years into his mayorship, Menino -- and the city -- need an agenda. A few ideas:

* Earlier this year Menino plucked one of Boston's brightest legislative stars, Charlotte Golar Richie, out of the State House to be his principal housing adviser, but she's rarely been heard from since. Perhaps Menino doesn't like the talk that Richie could be the city's first African-American (not to mention first female) mayor. But he did the right thing by picking her, and now she needs to be unleashed.

* As other observers have noted, one of Menino's problems is that he is loath to surround himself with smart, independent people. That has to end. Menino can start by naming a strong leader to replace O'Brien at the BRA. The first priority: changing the agency's internal culture. After all, O'Brien was not the only one to sign off on the sleazy Charlestown condo deal. Among the others who approved it was deputy director Paul McCann, who's reportedly under consideration to be the interim director. Clearly it's time to clean house.

* The budget and staff of the BRA have been cut by more than half since 1990. Now, in the middle of Boston's greatest boom in years, the BRA lacks the resources needed to take Boston into the next millennium. Those resources must be restored so that the BRA can reclaim its traditional role as a planning agency, rather than merely reacting with dubious effectiveness to development proposals as they are unveiled.

* The city council must return to its traditional role as a generator of ideas for how to deal with affordable housing and development. Under the city's strong-mayor charter, Menino will continue to call the shots. But the councilors, either individually or as a legislative body, should put together their own proposals and hold the mayor's feet to the fire.

* Neighborhood activists can't be given the final say on every development proposal, but neither can they be ignored to the extent that they are now. Menino shows great deference to city-council president Jim Kelly's South Boston constituents. But earlier this year Barbara Burnham, the mayor's choice to oversee planning and development in the Fenway, quit amid reports that she believed the neighborhood's concerns about the Red Sox' proposal and other development projects were not being listened to.

* There may be much to gain, and nothing to lose, by working with officials from surrounding communities and studying other cities around the country. Menino should be just as interested in what's going on in Somerville -- and San Francisco -- as he is in the internal operations of the BRA.

Since becoming the accidental mayor, Tom Menino has had a remarkably easy time of it. By most measures -- crime, the economy, even public education -- the city is in better shape than it has been in many years. The lack of affordable housing and the threat of overdevelopment are the kinds of problems created by success. Menino's legacy will be shaped in large part by how he deals with them.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com.