A former board member as soon as advised me he counted 22 building cranes when he was downtown. Later that very same day, standing in Grove Corridor, he noticed none and requested a query that also hangs over Boston: “The place are our cranes?”
That query cuts straight to the fact of unequal improvement on this metropolis.
Over the previous twenty years, Boston’s Seaport has absorbed an estimated $40–$50 billion in private and non-private funding. What was as soon as a parking zone is now a metropolis inside a metropolis. In the meantime, in Roxbury —one in every of Boston’s most traditionally disinvested Black neighborhoods — we’re lastly seeing a significant public funding: the $200–$300 million renovation of White Stadium, situated within the coronary heart of Franklin Park.
This could have been our crane — our financial catalyst, our alternative to construct sturdy, native wealth. As an alternative, it’s turning into a case research in what occurs when a megaproject proceeds with out unbiased oversight.
Boston already has a nationally revered mannequin for equitable improvement: the Massport Mannequin. That mannequin works as a result of it isn’t based mostly on belief or goodwill. It’s based mostly on construction — clear targets, binding necessities, clear reporting, and unbiased accountability.
When White Stadium was first proposed, fairness questions have been raised early. We have been advised the undertaking would observe the Massport Mannequin. We have been advised that Richard Taylor was concerned within the undertaking and would assist maintain the method accountable.
As an alternative, the undertaking moved ahead with out an unbiased oversight physique, with out binding Minority Enterprise Enterprise (MBE) participation necessities tied to contractor choice, and with MBE targets underneath 14%. One white normal contractor controls each main scopes of labor.
Black building corporations in Boston are totally able to delivering a stadium. As one skilled Black contractor advised me plainly: “We’re not constructing a nuclear reactor. The issue isn’t skill. The issue is construction.”
Boston has seen this film earlier than. The Huge Dig started with a projected value of roughly $2.5–$2.8 billion and ended someplace between $14.6 and $24.3 billion, relying on how long-term debt and mitigation are counted. It stays one of many largest public works tasks in American historical past.
And what did Black Boston obtain?
MBE participation estimates vary from 1% to 2.5%, although nobody is aware of for sure as a result of fairness monitoring was so poor. What is thought is that no new Black millionaires emerged, and fewer Black building corporations existed after the undertaking than earlier than it.
That failure was not unintentional. It was the predictable results of no unbiased oversight, no transparency, and no enforcement. White Stadium is following the identical trajectory — simply on a smaller scale, with the identical dangers and the identical excuses.
We just lately noticed the settlement Everett signed with the Krafts and ours falls woefully quick. Who negotiated the Metropolis of Boston’s settlement? The mayor. Oversight has successfully been centralized within the mayor’s workplace — an workplace already accountable for all the metropolis, each company, and each disaster. That’s not oversight; it’s diffusion of accountability.
Ask a easy query: Who exterior the mayor’s workplace and the overall contractor is aware of the present full value estimate of this undertaking? The reply is nobody. That’s how megaprojects go off the rails. That’s how inequities get locked in. And that’s how public belief erodes.
At the moment, there isn’t any unbiased physique empowered to trace MBE participation in actual time, demand procurement transparency, evaluation value overruns, shield Boston Public Faculties college students, safeguard Franklin Park, or be certain that promised group advantages really materialize.
Throughout the nation, cities routinely set up stadium and megaproject oversight boards. Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Windfall all do that. These boards will not be symbolic. They’re empowered to obtain paperwork, evaluation contracts, require reporting, and create a public file.
Boston’s failure to do the identical for White Stadium — particularly given its location in a traditionally disinvested Black neighborhood — will not be regular. It’s a governance failure.
When Worcester constructed Polar Park, it deliberate a complete district round it — eating places, mixed-use improvement, housing, tourism, and small companies. Everett’s mayor has explicitly framed their proposed stadium as a regional financial engine, with cautious planning to match. Patriot Place reshaped Foxboro’s economic system.
White Stadium has none of this. There isn’t any publicly launched financial affect research, no environmental, transportation, or parking affect evaluation, no clear procurement course of, no long-term operations plan accessible to the general public, and no unbiased entity empowered to demand solutions. That’s how infrastructure investments fail to supply wealth — and the way missed alternatives harden into everlasting inequities.
The present Metropolis Council has the chance — and the duty —to require the institution of a legally mandated White Stadium Oversight Committee with actual authority, in step with what different cities already do and what this second calls for.
That committee have to be giant and multidisciplinary, embody group stakeholders, elected officers, and subject-matter specialists, and be empowered to demand documentation fairly than depend on voluntary disclosures. It should require full procurement transparency, together with who bid, who gained, and why. It should mandate speedy launch of the present full undertaking value estimate and require quarterly public reporting modeled on Massport’s transparency practices. It should implement binding— not aspirational — MBE participation necessities, require a transparent financial alternative plan for native companies and non-game makes use of, and be certain that Boston Public Faculties college students, surrounding neighborhoods, and Franklin Park profit fairly than bear the prices.
White Stadium is the primary main public funding in many years within the coronary heart of Boston’s Black group. It ought to have been a mannequin of equitable improvement. As an alternative, we’re dangerously near repeating historical past. However historical past will not be future — until we enable it to be.
Ed Gaskin is Government Director of Higher Grove Corridor Fundamental Streets and founding father of Sunday Celebrations
