Planning Approaches in Boston Millennium Tower and Burnham Building Redevelopment Plan

Open Commentary Paper

Jan 31, 2016

Planning Approaches in Boston Millennium Tower

and Burnham Building Redevelopment Plan

The Boston Development Authority approved a $615 million private development project to revamp Boston’s Downtown Crossing neighborhood as an upscale residential and commercial hub. The project includes two parts: a restoration of the historic Burnham Building and a new development of a mixed-use luxury tower named Millennium Tower. This project started in 2012 and completed in 2016. It became controversial because the developer did not pay $5.9 million affordable housing fee as required in Boston’s Inclusionary Development Policy, and it also failed to meet the hiring goal as required in Boston Residents Job Policy. Both failures caused protest and demonstration against the developer.  

The city used three planning approaches in this project: rational, advocacy, and communicative. First, it is rational because the city set a clear goal to invigorate Downtown Crossing with high-income residents, private investments, and new stores and offices. The benefit of this project was a round sum property tax, sales tax, and professional job growth of the city. The cost was the displacement of Chinatown residents due to increased rental rates. Planners used rational approaches to define the goal and assumed they know what the public interests was (Brooks 2002). As technical a-political experts, their role was to assist government agencies to achieve the goals (Brooks 2002). In this project planners used cost-benefit analysis and assumed the forecasted revenue generated by this project outweighed the costs of imposed on historical Chinatown. This planning approach would lead to the domination of the more powerful. It also misunderstood the important aspect of human experience and social activity (Brooks 2002). In addition, the outcome is not always desirable since in Boston the housing supply was concentrated at the higher end of the market so a shortage of affordable units might lead to a market failure.

Before this project, the city enacted Boston Inclusionary Policy and Boston Residents Job Policy to let the residents and minorities to speak up for themselves and protect their own interests. This indicated the city used advocacy planning approach. Planners framed plans for public interest which represented many interest groups, including minorities (Davidoff 1965). Their question was whose name/ interest was developed rather than how a plan was developed (Davidoff 1965). Hence, its methodology was essentially different from rational planning. The role of planner in advocacy planning was to provide technical assistance for a community or an interest group to develop its own plan (Davidoff 1965). The weakness of this approach was people who was paying for such planning was not always the group of people who proposed the plan. Thus, a conflict was inevitable between the developer and the interest groups, in this case were the construction workers and Chinatown residents. Planning climate and government funding were particularly important in its implementation process.