Finalist: The Boston Globe, by Dante Ramos
For his evocative editorials urging Boston to become a more modern, around-the-clock city by shedding longtime restrictions and removing bureaucratic obstacles that can sap its vitality.
Nominated Work
February 26, 2013
By Dante Ramos
If ever there was a consumer-oriented business that could stay open all night without disturbing anybody, it was the Boston Sports Club on Boylston Street in the Back Bay. The gym is located in the basement of an office building, well out of earshot of the genteel brownstones of Commonwealth Avenue. So when the gym’s owners sought permission in 2006 to operate around the clock, most people saw the proposal as an amenity for late-night workers at the John Hancock Tower and other nearby buildings, not as something that would attract rowdies or turn Back Bay into a red-light district.
The proposal had the support of the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the business-oriented Back Bay Association, and even a letter of non-objection from the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay. Yet the proposal fell short before the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals. Robert Shortsleeve, the chairman of the board, couldn’t recall the circumstances, but noted that some proposals fail when board members can’t see the need.
Yet just because a need doesn’t register with the board of appeals — a seven-member group appointed by the mayor — or with the city’s elected leadership doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When stores and restaurants shut down at night, life gets difficult for people who work long hours, or odd hours. Among the pillars of Boston’s economy are institutions where 9-to-5 hours are rare — hospitals with overnight shifts; financial firms whose employees make deals in faraway time zones; and law firms whose billable-hour requirements keep attorneys at their desks deep into the night. Boston’s recent play for more tech firms, which abound with entrepreneurs who work late, only adds to the need for spots to shop, exercise, and get a bite to eat after 11 p.m.
It’s time for the city to rethink its broad resistance to late-night commerce. A compelling public-safety case can be made for amending state law to stagger bar closings so that all the crowds don’t spill out onto the streets at 2 a.m., the current closing time. But even without that change, the mayor and other Boston officials should be open to allowing more late-night hours for other businesses.
Neighborhood activists are understandably wary of late-night noise and activity. Exacerbating the problem, the gaps in the city’s transportation network become all too apparent after midnight. Yet there are ways to keep Boston open later without first reinventing the MBTA — and without hurting anyone’s quality of life. The city needs to pursue them. In a 24-hour economy, a dismissive civic attitude toward late-night commerce looks less like a quality-of-life choice than an economic hindrance.
Other communities see the value in round-the-clock gyms, which exist not just in New York and Los Angeles, but in Austin, Seattle, Charlotte, and Raleigh — mid-sized cities with which Boston is often thought to compete. There are even 24-hour gyms in a variety of suburban communities in Massachusetts. Boston’s economy won’t rise and fall on whether type-A lawyers can blast their abs at 3 a.m. But the Boylston Street case raised a vital question: Is Boston flexible enough to accommodate residents with out-of-the-ordinary needs?
“Nothing good happens after midnight,” goes an old refrain — variants of which pop up time and again at community meetings. This attitude is a vestige of when only muggers and prostitutes would brave city streets in the wee hours. But for longtime residents, it’s easy to underestimate how thoroughly parts of Boston have been transformed in recent years. Between 2000 and 2010, Boston’s tiny urban core — an area of less than 4 square miles stretching from the Fenway to the North End — added more than 13,000 residents. As once-decrepit properties fill with people and life, as the former Combat Zone gives way to luxury apartment towers, the automatic equation of late-night hours with seedy activity is less applicable than ever.
As a practical matter, few shop owners and restaurateurs in the city’s quieter, less dense neighborhoods are clamoring to stay open past 11 p.m. In some areas, though, Boston should be working actively to promote late-night commerce. City Hall could designate a few areas — the obvious candidates include Boylston Street, Downtown Crossing, the Theatre District, and the Innovation District — as target sites for late-night stores, diners, and other businesses.
With such clusters, weeknight workhorses would know where to go for 2 a.m. Cobb salads, and weekend revelers would know where to sober up over pizza after the bars let out. Police could focus their patrols on these areas, too. And if the MBTA were ever to resurrect its Night Owl service — as Governor Patrick contemplates doing, at least on weekends — the existence of specific late-night business zones simplifies the job of creating viable bus routes.
The lack of late-night transit complicates the ability of businesses to hire workers, many of whom have no way to get home beyond walking or, until recently, riding their own bikes home. A cab ride back to Brighton or Jamaica Plain can eat up much of what a downtown restaurant server earns on a slow night. Meanwhile, the limit on the number of taxi medallions means that, at least on weekends, even people who can afford cabs can’t always find them.
In the past, these problems seemed unsolvable. The T’s Night Owl experiment from 2001 to 2005 was underused, in part because the buses arrived too infrequently. But in just eight years, public transportation has become far more predictable; in the smartphone era, a bus that comes only every half-hour is still convenient because T customers know when to expect it.
Smartphone technologies can also take pressure off the taxi system — as long as local regulators leave car-hailing services like Uber to their own devices. Cab companies bristle at the competition; taxi regulators complain about fares based on GPS instead of traditional cab meters and about prices that spike when cars are scarce. Yet everyone who pays so-called “surge prices” for a car during late hours is freeing up a cab for someone else.
Other advances hold promise as well. Except in the winter, the Hubway bike-sharing system is available round the clock. Local universities may be persuaded to use their van fleets in innovative ways. Such advances make Boston’s late-night transportation problem look less complicated — and take away the excuse that Boston logistically can’t operate as a 24-hour city.
City Councilor Mike Ross frames the issue in an intriguing way: In a densely packed city without much easily developable space, extending the city’s operating hours is a way for more people to share its amenities. Software engineers eating burgers at 2 a.m. probably weren’t occupying a restaurant table four hours earlier. Emergency-room nurses running treadmill sprints at 4 a.m. aren’t taking up machines at 8:30. And who’s to say their preferences are wrong? A city that’s open later is more accommodating in every sense of the term.
February 17, 2013
By Dante Ramos
Austin, Texas -- It was a cloudy, drippy night early last March, but the Google Village was easy to spot from a block away. To show off to participants in the South by Southwest Interactive festival, the Internet giant took over several bars along a block and a half of Rainey Street, a strip of small bungalows just to the southeast of the Austin Convention Center. Marking the entrance to the area was a towering red inverted teardrop, that familiar symbol from Google Maps. Each bungalow was lit up in a different candy color, and inside, little wonders awaited: Lego competitions, a Google Maps-themed pinball machine, and pedal-powered margarita makers. Attendees of South by Southwest, also known as SXSW, flocked to the village, all lured in by the buzz and the promise of free food and drinks.
Seeing all this, a visitor from Massachusetts naturally wonders: Would Boston ever let a major tech company — or anybody else — put up such a glitzy attraction in the heart of the city? And if so, what about something much larger? Popular as it was, the Google Village was just a sideshow at SXSW, a much larger collection of events that takes over downtown Austin every March. The festival has helped to transform the Texas capital, once known primarily for its live music, into a showcase for innovation and tech entrepreneurship.
While the Boston area has different set of assets, one of the key economic challenges it faces — a reputation as a buttoned-down place where it’s often difficult to get things done — would be dramatically countered if it played host to an event like South by Southwest. So the obvious question is: Why not?
Launched in 1987 by staffers at The Austin Chronicle, an alternative newsweekly, South by Southwest began as a showcase for the rock scene in Texas’ state capital, which at the time was a college town with a slacker vibe. A film and multimedia festival followed in 1994; it later split into two events, one of which — SXSW Interactive — soon became one of the world’s most important showcases for emerging technologies. The messaging network Twitter and geolocation app Foursquare first attracted widespread attention there.
Last year, the interactive festival alone attracted 25,000 registered attendees; tech workers, aspiring entrepreneurs, advertising executives, media bigwigs, and others paid $600 and up per badge. Call it Lollapalooza with lanyards; the Austin Convention Center and a number of nearby hotels play host to trade exhibits; to “lounges” sponsored by companies and nonprofits; and to hundreds of panels with titles ranging from “Crowdsourcing Science” to “The Great Library Swindle: Your Rights Are at Risk” to “Y Rappers R Better Marketers than U.” Thousands more come for the semi-official and unofficial events that have sprung up around the conference over the years. In all of this, high-profile Boston-area institutions are highly visible; the MIT Media Lab, the start-up competition Mass Challenge, and Harvard Business School were all represented at last year’s conference.
Austin’s chilled-out attitude, as evidenced by its accommodation of a multi-headed mega-festival, creates something important: an easy setting in which locals and visitors from around the world can meet each other, bounce ideas around, and make business contacts. There is a vast amount of pent-up energy in the worlds of technology, media, advertising, and the arts. And when a city tries to channel that energy, the result looks a lot like South by Southwest Interactive.
For its part, the Boston area doesn’t need to insist on its own importance as a producer of bright college graduates. What it does need to prove to the world, and to itself, is that it’s a place where technology, business, and culture are free to combine in creative, unpredictable ways. As it stands, there’s little interaction between tech wizards in Kendall Square and the more traditional civic, arts, and business institutions in the region. A large-scale Boston culture-and-technology event would bring them all together, and prove that the qualities that seem so forbidding to visitors — the wariness about disruptions, the skepticism about commercial endeavors, the instinct toward imposing order on things from above — can be suspended, at least for a week.
To be sure, the growth of South by Southwest is the source of some annoyance to Austinites, who fret about traffic delays and the difficulty of snagging a badge at an affordable price. But it also demonstrates an appetite for technology-and-arts events — and an obvious market opportunity for Boston and other cities that hopes to capture the same energy.
There are reasons to think Boston would be more successful: The local higher-ed community provides a wealth of tech brainpower; the ever-growing Boston Book Festival and the now-gigantic PAX East video-game expo bespeak some experience with major events. What’s been lacking is the drive to knit such events together. Doing so would open up a realm of other possibilities. The influx of eyeballs into Austin for South by Southwest has spawned activities not strictly related to it — everything from a fashion conference to a pop-up manicure lounge to electronic-music parties.
Unfortunately, big events in Boston sometimes fall victim to petty disputes and parochial questions: Who’ll handle the permitting for all the free food and drinks? Who’ll pay for the police details? But if the City of Boston can’t make a sprawling conference work, perhaps the more free-wheeling Cambridge and Somerville can.
Indeed, it’s easy to think of communities and institutions that would benefit from raising or reinforcing their profile in the tech world. Harvard and MIT, which are under ever-increasing pressure to out-innovate their rival institutions in California and New York, might be willing to serve as the bookends for a Boston-area conference. The restaurants and clubs along Massachusetts Avenue could provide entertainment venues. An event in late May or June, when Boston’s weather is blossoming and dozens of colleges and universities have space to spare, could present the region at its best.
Austin has grown up around South by Southwest. When the festival started, Austin wasn’t much bigger — either statistically or in its national cultural footprint — than sleepy Sun Belt cities like Birmingham or Baton Rouge. But as Austin boomed in the 1990s, its ability to handle ever larger crowds grew as well.
The logistics may be trickier in a city that first came to prominence more than three centuries earlier. But to keep thriving, Greater Boston has to conceive of itself as young, dynamic, and enterprising. A city that often takes its own advantages for granted can bring itself to tout them; and if the city can do this, it can do a lot of other things that might seem impossible.
March 31, 2013
By Dante Ramos
You wouldn't know it from the complicated parking minimums built into Boston zoning rules, but many city residents would rather have a patio, or more square footage in their apartments, than a dedicated space for a car.
These are the people architect Sebastian Mariscal had in mind when he proposed an $10.6 million apartment complex in Allston with 44 units — and just six parking spaces, all for Zipcars. Tenants would agree in their leases not to own vehicles; in return, each unit would get two bicycle spaces and extra storage for the bulky items — like ski gear in summer, beach chairs in winter — that clutter up the average Boston apartment. The lifestyle Mariscal foresees isn’t everyone’s ideal. But it is for some people. It lines up with the city’s stated environmental priorities. It doesn’t add to traffic. And it furthers an emerging vision of Boston — as a dense, growing city where car-free living is a convenience, not a last resort, and where new approaches to urban planning can flourish.
Yet in Allston, where the project is to be located, zoning rules from 1991 set a more prosaic goal: keeping new properties from overtaxing the finite supply of street parking. To their credit, neither the city nor neighbors insisted that Mariscal build the two spaces per unit that zoning requires. But they’d only bend so far. Recently, the Boston Redevelopment Authority gave Mariscal preliminary approval after he acceded to neighbors’ concerns — slightly reducing the number of units, removing most bike spots and dedicated storage spaces, and bringing the number of parking spaces to 35. Of course, Mariscal doesn’t actually want tenants to use the extra parking. In an interview, he said he will still include no-cars clauses in leases. He hopes to prove over time that, as parking sits empty, the space can be used for something better.
By focusing so heavily on neighbors’ parking fears, the public discussion of the project took too little account of the many residents — 45 percent of the renters in five surrounding census tracts, Mariscal’s market research indicates — who don’t have cars. Architects should be able to design for their needs, too. In a growing city where housing costs are notoriously high, newcomers shouldn’t have to pay, through elevated rents, for parking spaces they don’t want. Far from expecting Mariscal to add parking spaces, the city should rethink its parking requirements to encourage more projects like his original vision.
Emotions about street parking run deep in Boston. That much is evident in the lawn furniture and sawhorses that drivers use to reserve publicly owned spaces after digging their cars out of the snow. City Hall has long winked at the practice. In the turbulent 1970s and ’80s, when continued population flight was every big-city mayor’s worst fear, accommodating residents’ desire for street parking looked vital to keeping the car-owning middle class. During that period, the city established the first residential-parking district in Beacon Hill, and other neighborhoods later followed.
It’s not lost on car owners in Allston and neighboring Brighton that, as other Boston neighborhoods fill with new people, street parking gets scarcer, even with a residential sticker program. No one who’s moved into, for instance, the South End lately has ever known a time when street parking was easy.
Yet somehow, everyone adjusts. New businesses emerge to serve pedestrians, while the private market makes provision for drivers who require parking: People who own spots they don’t use can rent them out; garages offer monthly plans for drivers who need parking only on nights and weekends. Meanwhile, mobility has improved markedly for people without cars. Smartphone apps have made public transit more predictable. For major shopping trips, there are hourly car-rental firms like Zipcar. For trips to places where T service isn’t convenient, there’s the bike-sharing network Hubway.
Any one of these factors is easy to dismiss; together, they suggest that urban life in Boston is undergoing an epochal change. The city added new residents far faster than Massachusetts as a whole in the decade leading up to 2010 — the first census since 1880 in which the city’s growth rate exceeded the Commonwealth’s. By and large, growth has been concentrated in neighborhoods that were already jam-packed.
That includes the Allston-Brighton area. Because it lacks tall towers or the long rows of brownstones that mark the city center, it feels almost suburban by comparison. Yet with about 17,200 people per square mile, it’s much denser than Boston as a whole. The MBTA’s Green Line provides easy access to the city center.
As the neighborhood evolves, maintaining the same old rules about parking will have perverse effects. Relatively low housing costs have long been a lure for Allston, where in 2012 the typical two-bedroom apartment rented for $1,681 a month — $233 less than in the Fenway and $1,176 less than in the Back Bay. The neighborhood can’t remain affordable without adding new units. But requiring lots of parking with those units only adds to the cost for renters — and worsens the traffic for everyone.
One paradox of street parking is that loose rules and low costs mean maximal headaches. Because the side streets closest to Mariscal’s project don’t require an Allston-Brighton parking sticker, cabs and commercial vehicles from elsewhere park in the neighborhood. New units without parking, critics fear, would only add to the crunch.
But there are ways around this. Across town in Bay Village, residents who move into 100 Arlington St., a former charter school now being renovated into housing, will be ineligible for resident parking stickers in that neighborhood. Mariscal says he’d accept a similar restriction. To give it teeth, the city would merely have to require a resident sticker for overnight parking on surrounding streets.
The idea, surprisingly, meets a lukewarm reception in Allston. That may be because some Allston residents are students who , for tax or insurance reasons, don’t want to register their cars in Boston. But protecting some residents from a modest car-insurance hike is an unpersuasive reason to turn away promising car-free development ideas.
The development process in Boston today was forged amid the bruising neighborhood battles of the 1970s; in fighting off planners who insisted only new highways could slow the city’s decline, neighbors won veto power over projects in their midst. Yet all that’s happened in the two generations since — the Big Dig, the growing threat of climate change, and now an urban population boom — calls for rethinking how people and vehicles share space in a dense city. Of all people, Bostonians should know that not everything has to revolve around cars.
June 23, 2013
By Dante Ramos
For cash-strapped urbanites who see all of Boston as their playground, a tiny apartment in a convenient location is far preferable to a large one that’s farther from work, friends, and things to do. In that spirit, a group of young designers recently built a prototype micro-unit that squeezes the essentials of Boston living into an economical 300 square feet. The footprint is big enough to accommodate a normal-sized bed; a compact, all-in-one kitchenette; and even a designated storage space for a bike — something for which designers’ research showed strong demand.
The prototype, alas, is in storage, when it could be a model for thousands of smaller apartments in key locations around town. For there are two main ways to make sure people up and down the income spectrum can afford to live in Boston. One is to build up an inventory of rent-subsidized apartments, as the city has taken great pains to do. The other is to think small — to let developers build apartments compact enough that even people of modest means can afford them at market rates.
Mayor Menino’s administration has put a toe in the water, by authorizing 190 of what it calls “innovation units” in the Seaport District, the smallest of which are about 350 square feet. They are to be located in buildings with the kind of common work and living spaces that promote chance meetings among creative people. Bending the usual minimum-size rules to allow these units was a bold step to attract young, work-addicted techies and entrepreneurs to an area that’s emerging as one of the city’s priciest. Yet the rents on these units, perhaps as much as $1,500 a month, will still be too high for most recent grads.
Worse still, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the city’s main planning agency, is strangely reluctant to permit more of these smaller units elsewhere in the city; chief planner Kairos Shen surprised the audience at a recent Suffolk University forum on micro-units by saying the city won’t allow them outside the Innovation District anytime soon. In an interview, he warns against letting the development of micro-unit projects outstrip the city’s ability to regulate them. His agency’s stance reflects some ancient fears: that warrens of tiny rooms may turn into flophouses, that little apartments are inherently exploitative.
Yet this attitude fails to recognize just how attractive living in Boston’s urban core has become. Worse yet, the city is refusing to let the natural workings of the housing market relieve the pressure not just on recent graduates, but on a broad variety of lower-income Bostonians.
For many Boston-area residents, traditional affordable-housing programs are of little practical use. Consider the case of Quinton Kerns. He’s a 28-year-old designer at the firm ADD Inc. who worked on the micro-unit prototype, but his own circumstances show the rationale for such units. His job is in the Seaport District. He doesn’t have a car. He earns somewhat below the median income. He also has, as he puts it, “tons of student debt.”
Before a recent move, Kerns called more than 30 companies that manage rent-restricted apartments, and found that some units had wait lists of three or four years. The one ostensibly affordable unit with a vacancy still had a monthly rent of $1,060. Instead, he took a room in a house with five strangers in Somerville for $630 a month.
This dilemma is too easily dismissed as a ritual of 20-something life in Greater Boston, a problem seemingly less pressing than the travails of working families and the elderly. Yet the difficulty that recent graduates face in establishing themselves here worries employers, such as Vertex Pharmaceuticals, that depend on an influx of new talent — and raises the pressure on working families, too. When grad students or young professionals room together instead of living on their own, they can outbid many families for units in brownstones or triple-deckers. Boston’s failure to allow the construction of smaller housing units only aggravates the problem that traditional affordable-housing programs are trying desperately to solve.
Virtually everyone who lives in Boston has decided to skimp on space to some degree. Yet city rules limit just how big of a sacrifice tenants can make; by one rule of thumb, new one-bedroom apartments must be 750 square feet or more to gain zoning approval, and studios must be 500 square feet. The city eased up in 2006 by creating a new category of “metro” units, which allow for one-bedrooms as small as 625 square feet, and studios as small as 450 square feet, in dense areas north of the Mass. Pike or along major transit lines.
But even that laxer standard can mean rents well north of $2,000 a month for a small apartment. The obvious way to bring that cost down — without rent subsidies or elaborate regulatory interventions — is to relax the prohibition on smaller units, and to encourage their construction all across the city. Building thousands of micro-units in transit-friendly locations, such as the Forest Hills T station and the Longwood Medical Area, would provide market-rate housing within the reach of people just getting their start in Boston. And neighborhoods would benefit as new residents bring their business to local stores and eateries.
Regulating low-cost market-rate housing out of existence, or refusing to let it be built in the first place, doesn’t eliminate the demand for it. Students and others seek cheaper under-the-table living quarters: unlicensed rooming houses, illegally divided units. The consequences can be tragic, as when 22-year-old Boston University student Binland Lee died in April in a fire in an overcrowded rooming house in Allston.
That tragedy prompted calls, quite reasonably, for stepped-up safety inspections. Yet Bostonians — and especially candidates in the upcoming mayoral race — should also reconsider development policies that yield luxury housing and subsidized housing, but nothing in between.
Letting developers build smaller, cheaper market-rate apartments runs up against half a century of assumptions about housing policy. An earlier generation of community activists in a tumultuous era in Boston saw housing matters in stark moral terms: Proposals for new apartment and condo buildings were intrusions into the fragile fabric of a historic city; rising rents were proof of landlords’ indifference to tenants’ plight. Today, rent control is history, and it’s clearer that Boston’s stiff housing costs primarily reflect the mismatch between the limited supply of housing and growing demand for it. Yet an instinctive suspicion of the motives of for-profit builders and landlords still colors the development debate.
Indeed, Shen cites the fact that rents per square foot are significantly higher for smaller units than for large ones as a reason to proceed carefully on building micro-units; there’s a palpable concern at the agency that developers will exploit the price differential to build too many small units.
Actually, it’s an opportunity — a sign that the private market can provide more of a kind of housing that’s sorely needed. The city should let it do so.
July 1, 2013
By Dante Ramos
In the parts of Boston that show up on postcards and in guidebooks, the population is resurgent, the skies are full of construction cranes, and the restaurants are packed. Quite justifiably, City Hall has tried for years to spread that prosperity to the more diverse neighborhoods to the south and west. Boston has devoted a chunk of its community-development block grants to “Main Streets” groups, which help neighborhoods spruce up their business districts. And initiatives at every level of government seek to stimulate entrepreneurship among women, ethnic minorities, and immigrant communities across the city.
Those efforts, however, are likely to come up short, unless Boston can give business owners like Karen Henry-Garrett and Tran Le a fair shot at licenses to serve alcohol in their restaurants. In a risky, competitive business built on perishable ingredients and low margins, the ability to sell beer, wine, and liquor gives restaurateurs much-needed breathing room.
Le, with her family, runs a two-year-old restaurant called Pho Le in the Fields Corner section of Dorchester; it’s one of a cluster of Vietnamese restaurants in an area just off the MBTA Red Line. Farther south on Dorchester Avenue, British immigrant Henry-Garrett has tried to turn her five-year-old Dot2Dot Cafe into an informal community center. But restaurants simply can’t live up to their potential — as vehicles for their owners’ culinary ambitions or as strong businesses — without the right to sell liquor, or at least beer and wine. State law limits the number of alcohol licenses in cities and towns across the state and imposes a hard cap on licenses in Boston. The city’s Licensing Board seldom has any open licenses to give out.
In its failure to get the cap lifted, the city has closed off a time-honored path to prosperity. To her credit, City Councilor Ayanna Pressley is leading a drive to persuade the Legislature to let Boston issue licenses as the city sees fit. Under her proposal, the Licensing Board would still screen applicants and solicit input from neighbors, but it — not state lawmakers — would determine the total number of licenses in the city. Pressley’s approach shouldn’t be remotely controversial. Yet many State House wheeler-dealers are happy to meddle in a quintessentially local matter. And while Mayor Menino recognized the need for new licenses in the emerging Seaport District, securing Boston’s ability to issue new licenses elsewhere in the city hasn’t been a priority.
Technical and moral support for restaurateurs only goes so far. What they really need to thrive, and become the anchors of vibrant neighborhood Main Streets, is the ability to earn money on their own.
The cap on liquor licenses was imposed on an Irish-dominated city by a censorious Yankee legislature in the 1930s. And in the grim postwar decades of urban decline in Boston, neighbors often came to see establishments with liquor licenses as magnets for criminals, prostitutes, or, at best, students with fake IDs.
Yet just as Boston and other major US cities have sprung back to life in recent decades, diners have grown more adventurous — and have come to expect a restaurant experience that includes a drink. “The dining-out culture has changed in Boston,” observes Tran Le, the Fields Corner restaurant owner. “If people go out and have sushi and sake, it’s not perceived as being that exotic anymore. And having a glass of wine with a meal can be a rather common thing.” Restaurants that can’t fill that need aren’t able to provide a complete dining experience.
While Boston can’t issue new licenses, well-financed restaurateurs can buy them from someone else. But because of the artificial scarcity of licenses, a full liquor license can go for more than $300,000. Even a beer and wine license often costs $40,000 or more — a crippling expense to someone like Henry-Garrett, who bought her restaurant tables at Ikea to save money.
Though opaque to outsiders, the market for Boston alcohol licenses is manageable for large hospitality companies. It works well for lawyers and brokers who’ve mastered the process, and for the elected officials to whom they contribute. Yet the cost and complexity of the system freezes out a classic American type — plucky entrepreneurs, often immigrants or first-generation strivers, who start restaurants on a shoestring. “Why should I have to call a lawyer first,” asks Henry-Garrett, “to even know what the process is?”
The cap on liquor licenses creates broader problems. The system has, for instance, become a locus for political corruption. Former state senator Dianne Wilkerson — whose district included Roxbury, a neighborhood long starved for economic development — took bribes in exchange for trying to steer a license to a local businessman.
Sordid as it was, the Wilkerson case also hints at how hard it’s become to get alcohol licenses outside the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, for the cap turns alcohol licensing into a zero-sum game. When planning glitzy new locations in upscale areas, established chains will buy liquor licenses from less-well-heeled establishments in Dorchester or Mattapan. Increasingly, these neighborhoods are cut off from what in other cities is a common engine of redevelopment: Seeing empty storefronts and low commercial rents, a restaurateur takes a chance on opening a new eatery. Novelty-seeking diners scout out lower-cost eats in funky settings. If one restaurant’s appeal is broad enough, others follow. So, eventually, do other businesses.
Many of Boston’s humbler neighborhoods need the boost that a thriving restaurant can provide. Restaurants — if they’re allowed to — will play an ever larger role in the health of local business districts. Unlike bookstores and clothing shops of yesteryear, they’re not vulnerable to e-commerce.
They’re also essential to the holy grail of development in Boston: mixed residential and commercial projects along major transit lines. The success of these projects hinges on whether residents can walk to a variety of businesses — including places where they get something to eat. But to justify building ground-floor retail space, developers need to be sure they can fill it. To a developer, a restaurant without an alcohol license looks like a potentially unreliable tenant; to a lender, a developer with iffy tenants looks like a bad risk. There’s a good reason the Quincy City Council — which has approved an ambitious $1.6 billion plan to remake its center with dense mixed-use development — has petitioned the Legislature for more than two dozen new downtown liquor licenses. “This may be the most important decision you make to the success of Quincy,” a consultant told the council.
Meanwhile in Dorchester, restaurant owner Henry-Garrett is trying to build a following for Dot2Dot Cafe: She has pictures by local artists on the walls. She plays host to a book club and a knitting night. She’s held events using one-day alcohol licenses. Yet a beer and wine license would only enhance her ability to serve as a neighborhood rallying point — and make it practical for her to stay open for dinner.
One can imagine a thousand different public initiatives that would help a fledgling business like hers grow: low-interest loans, economic development grants, assistance in getting the word out. But City Hall could help far more by leaning on Beacon Hill — and letting aspiring restaurateurs get the alcohol licenses they need to thrive.
July 11, 2013
By Dante Ramos
The race to succeed Thomas Menino as mayor is getting underway in a Boston that is steadily banishing most of the demons of its 20th-century history. The curse of the Bambino is over. Whitey Bulger is on trial. And Menino’s genuine commitment to inclusion has taken many of the ethnic and racial antagonisms of the 1970s off the table. Suddenly, a city that lost population for decades after World War II is growing faster than the state as a whole. In this hopeful new environment, even a gruesome terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon, one of the city’s signature public events, ended up unifying rather than dividing the populace.
The candidates seeking to lead today’s Boston ought to acknowledge how much it differs from the city that Menino inherited in 1993. Each owes the voters an account of how he or she would open Boston up to the challenges and possibilities of this next stage in the city’s history — and let go of the baggage of the last one.
In recent months, the Globe’s editorial page has described a number of ways in which standoffish civic attitudes make Boston seem forbidding to newcomers. The bias against late-night commerce. A tendency among established leaders to keep the region’s innovation economy at arm’s length. Parking and square-footage requirements that add to high housing prices. A baroque liquor-licensing system that defeats would-be restaurateurs and keeps neighborhood business districts from thriving.
Each of these problems grew out of an earlier era, when most changes looked like threats. When all movement seemed to be downward; when longtime residents were fleeing by the hundreds of thousands; when the city’s famous brownstones seemed destined to become symbols of urban squalor — these were reasons to distrust strangers and to lock the doors tight.
Those conditions no longer apply. By failing to acknowledge that the city has changed, Boston risks walling out workers seeking a lively, diverse, accommodating climate — and the businesses that depend upon, and are founded by, these workers. The next mayor can set a new tone, because of the office’s influence over planning and licensing matters, and also because of its broader role as chief advocate for Boston on Beacon Hill and in the public eye.
These issues call out for attention:
Encouraging late-night business. Even before all the recent attention on tech workers with 24-hour schedules, people in many long-established occupations — late-shift cops, medical residents, emergency-room nurses — needed places to eat, shop, and work out after the city rolls up its sidewalks at night. But they’ve run up against the view that nothing good happens after midnight — a view buttressed by memories of the seedy Combat Zone, where crime and prostitution once dominated. Public policy should recognize how much those concerns have abated, especially as gleaming residential buildings replace the Combat Zone.
Working through parking anxieties. When Boston was hemorrhaging residents to its suburbs, the city bent over backwards to provide something suburbanites take for granted: free, convenient parking. In addition to launching resident-only sticker programs for street parking in neighborhoods, the city also required developers of new housing to build spaces for cars. Yet minimum-parking rules push up housing costs significantly and squeeze out other amenities, such as outdoor space or extra storage, that tenants might value more. The rules also send an odd message: that Boston won’t accept newcomers if they make it harder for current residents to park for free.
These rules are being overtaken by events. Once-utopian ideas like car- and bike-sharing have become part of the local transportation system. Even as the population grows, the number of vehicles being registered in the city keeps falling. Recognizing all this, the Boston Redevelopment Authority has wisely eased up on parking requirements. Will the next mayor go further, or reverse course amid criticism from some neighborhood groups?
Using the market to make housing affordable. In theory, minimum-square-footage rules keep unscrupulous landlords from keeping tenants in Dickensian squalor. In practice, fears that smaller apartments will turn into flophouses aren’t warranted, especially in a city where soaring housing costs pose a far greater danger than urban blight. Allowing smaller units onto the market cuts costs by squeezing more units into the same pricey lots.
Giving restaurants room to thrive. Aspiring restaurateurs set up shop in Cambridge because an artificial scarcity makes liquor licenses in Boston outrageously expensive. Main Streets in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods lose energy as a result. An obvious question for candidates is whether they support City Councilor Ayanna Pressley’s effort to allow Boston, rather than the state Legislature, to control the number of liquor licenses in the city. It’s also crucial to understand how much political capital a mayoral candidate would invest in making that happen. Beacon Hill power brokers need to be persuaded to give up their power to meddle in city affairs. Pressley, who’s running for reelection to the council, has made the issue a personal crusade. Boston needs a mayor who will do the same.
Reinventing civic life. In the 1960s, when urban planning meant bulldozing some parts of town and blasting highways through others, Boston’s historic neighborhoods had much to fear from grand schemes from on high. The city learned from that, and now gives neighbors and neighborhood associations a strong voice in decisions that might affect them.
But fending off ill-conceived planning schemes is only a small part of what keeps a neighborhood vital; filling it with a varied mix of people, businesses, buildings, and attractions is the bigger part. Yet in discussions of business licenses, proposals for new housing, and other ideas, neighbors often wield their veto reflexively, and it’s easier for authorities to say no to unusual proposals than to say yes. Weekday Licensing Board meetings or early-evening planning meetings don’t draw in the full range of public opinion; would-be mayors should seek out additional ways — from online forums to social media — to gather input from a broader range of Bostonians.
To longtime Bostonians who lived through the city’s worst, a bright-eyed focus on micro-units and bike sharing and restaurant-driven redevelopment might seem overly idealistic — a distraction from the realities of many neighborhoods. The city’s problems haven’t all disappeared; gang violence holds some areas hostage, and the city still struggles to upgrade its school system.
Even so, taking on all of those problems is immensely easier because of Boston’s revival over the last generation. The city avoided the fate of hollowed-out Rust Belt cities in large measure because of its renowned hospitals and universities, which flourished, and spun off new industries, as Americans spent heavily on health care and higher education. Yet especially as pressures mount to cut costs in both of those sectors, Boston’s prosperity depends on openness to new possibilities. A core issue of this mayoral race is how to make sure Boston is a place where new residents, new businesses, and new ideas can take root.
December 22, 2013
By Dante Ramos
Like the minister in that crazy town in the movie “Footloose,” authorities who try to micromanage dancing are sending the message that they don’t trust ordinary people very much.
In Boston, swaying your hips on a public street won’t get you arrested. But any business that wants to allow patrons to dance needs a specific type of entertainment license. Obtaining that license is far more arduous than it should be.
The dancing license requirement — the most easily parodied of licensing rules in Boston — derives from a state law that requires businesses to seek special permission in order to use a jukebox, radio, or other music system or to hold a “dance exhibition . . . of any description,” including dancing by patrons.
Elsewhere in the state, bars and restaurants at least get their entertainment licenses from the same agency that handles liquor licenses. But in Boston, the liquor license board is nominally an arm of the state; entertainment licenses come from the city. For business owners, that means twice the regulatory uncertainty, a separate set of public hearings, and more bills from pricey lawyers.
Meanwhile, as the Globe’s Farah Stockman recently reported, vigorous enforcement of Boston’s entertainment licensing rules continues apace. The Police Department has two officers who ferret out violations. One of them made $45,000 in overtime last year.
It’s tempting to attribute Boston’s microregulation of entertainment to the city’s prim heritage; the Puritans, an old joke goes, disapproved of sex because it often led to dancing. Viewed more charitably, Boston’s entertainment regulations reflect city leaders’ desire to tame the city’s red-light districts, where “dancing” was the disguise under which obscenity and prostitution masqueraded. But Scollay Square was bulldozed, and the peepshows and adult theaters of the Combat Zone have given way to high-priced condos.
Now the entertainment license rules fulfill a separate purpose: to give neighbors control over potential disruptions. But there are better ways to handle their legitimate concerns. If neighbors’ goal is, for instance, to limit noise outside a bar, an owner can address it through soundproofing. Police can enforce restrictions on noise regardless of whether anyone’s dancing inside.
In the meantime, licensing rules steer dancing to big, noisy nightclubs willing to go through the red tape and pay the $1,000 to $2,000 cost of a dancing license. The rules discourage the emergence of lower-key lounges and other neighborhood hangouts where, on some nights, patrons might end up dancing to a jukebox and, on other nights, no one dances at all.
Overly zealous enforcement of dancing regulations exacts a toll on social life, as well. The next Mark Zuckerberg won’t necessarily flee to Silicon Valley just because a bartender reprimanded him and his friends for dancing, but the limits on unlicensed dancing, which establishments are required to enforce, are inherently unwelcoming. They turn an innocent expression of fun into an offense against the city.
They also represent a restriction on Boston’s cultural development and another burden on would-be business owners. If Mayor-elect Martin Walsh hopes to foster a warmer, more inclusive atmosphere in Boston, easing up on rules around dancing would be a symbolic place to start. Bringing entertainment and liquor licensing under the same agency is an important longer-term goal.
Some licensing rules are inevitable and desirable; everyone benefits — business owners, customers, neighbors, and the city as a whole — when entertainment venues are safe and well-run. But not every mode of human conduct needs strict regulatory oversight. Joy and spontaneity are pleasures that should be encouraged, not problems that need to be controlled.
December 30, 2013
By Dante Ramos
Tom Menino, a quintessential neighborhood guy, is nobody’s idea of a privileged 1-percenter. But in his 20 years as mayor, he deliberately avoided casting local politics as a zero-sum battle between powerful downtown interests and Boston’s working class.
After Menino opted not to run again this year, it didn’t take long for that style of politics to reassert itself. Union-affiliated groups supporting candidate Martin Walsh sent out mailers alleging that opponent John Connolly “does not understand working-class people” and depicting the school at which he once taught at-risk children as an “elite New York” private institution. Never mind that last year Walsh, a state representative who also headed the city’s building trades, had more than twice the income of Connolly, a lawyer turned city councilor. Class-warfare arguments like these play on the insecurities of various voting blocs. They’re also a stand-in for historic divisions that have held Boston back, sometimes grievously so — Yankee vs. Irish, business vs. labor, Ivy League vs. non-elite, “outsider” vs. native Bostonian.
In an age of growing inequality, the question of whether a political candidate’s policies favor the wealthy at the expense of others is an urgent one. But the unions’ mailer made no such argument. Instead, the mailer played some old, insidious tricks: marking turf, appealing to group loyalty, and questioning other Bostonians’ authenticity.
These tactics are not only an obstacle to healing, but tend to confirm a larger, unflattering narrative about Boston as a hive of parochial grievances, where historic slights that would have long passed from memory in other places continue to shadow current-day progress. It’s an insider narrative that confuses and alienates those who have no stake in it, even as it ratchets up tension among those who cling to it.
But Walsh, whose expansive personality overcame longstanding ethnic divides during the mayoral campaign, has a chance to promote a broader prosperity without playing on old resentments. To do so, he must reject, as Menino did, the negative form of identity politics that pervaded Boston for so much of the 20th century.
In the waning years of the 19th century, a Protestant upper crust didn’t just run the city; it saw itself as a natural aristocracy. As Irish Catholic laborers poured into Boston, a disdainful Yankee Legislature passed laws to deny them influence. When James Michael Curley came to dominate the city’s political life from 1914 to 1950, he got revenge — channeling the anger of the city’s working class, outmaneuvering fellow Irish-American politicians who took a more conciliatory stance, repaying the Yankees’ hostility with relish.
As Boston seethed over past grievances, other big industrial centers just moved forward. During the Curley era, economists Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer have observed, Boston grew more slowly than any other major American city. Decades of stagnation set in, during which a gritty skepticism came to define the city’s image.
Since then, yesterday’s immigrant groups have become today’s power elite. Boston has surged back amid a boom in medicine, higher education, finance, and technology. But this growth has clustered in the dense northern sliver of the city; the neighborhoods along the Charles River and Boston Harbor are now bulging with successful newcomers from throughout the region and around the world. That same energy hasn’t spread to middle-class residential areas to the south, much less to those neighborhoods where keeping children safe and adequately fed are the overriding concerns.
What Boston needs is a model for reducing inequality that doesn’t come draped in Curley-era bunting. Taxpayers are regularly prodded by police and fire unions that purport to stick up for Boston’s working class, even as their members earn six-figure incomes. This kind of posturing misdirects city resources — and gets in the way of addressing the educational and health disparities that keep today’s poor Bostonians from thriving.
An alternative approach would, among other things, create jobs and ease housing costs by promoting significantly more construction across the city; remove barriers to opening new businesses in economically isolated areas; and enlist the region’s technology sector to fix transportation and education problems outside the city’s healthy downtown core. Walsh, with his ties to building trades and credibility in the city’s neighborhoods, has the power to usher Boston in this direction.
“We Are One Boston,” insisted a slogan after the Marathon bombings in April, an implicit acknowledgment of the city’s history of turning on itself. If the electoral map from last month’s mayoral election was any guide, Boston is starting to heal at least one of its deepest divisions: Walsh drew fairly equivalent support from white, black, and Hispanic residents.
Still, one more task awaits: hauling class politics out to the curb. In the movies and in political lore, there are always two Bostons, and the tension between them is inexorable. But especially at the end of a tumultuous year in the city, it’s clear that Boston rises or falls as one.
Winners
Prize Winner in Editorial Writing in 2014:
Editorial Staff
For its lucid editorials that explain the urgent but complex issue of rising pension costs, notably engaging readers and driving home the link between necessary solutions and their impact on everyday lives.
Editorial Writing
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Editorial Writing in 2014:
Andie Dominick
For her diligent editorials challenging Iowa's arcane licensing laws that regulate occupations ranging from cosmetologists to dentists and often protect practitioners more than the public.
The Jury
The Jury
Susan Albright(Chair )
co-managing editor
Vincent Carroll
editorial page editor
Kate Riley
editorial page editor
Robert Robb
editorial columnist
David Shipley
senior executive editor
Winners in Editorial Writing
Tim Nickens and Daniel Ruth
For their diligent campaign that helped reverse a decision to end fluoridation of the water supply for the 700,000 residents of the newspaper's home county
No award
No award
Joseph Rago
For his well crafted, against-the-grain editorials challenging the health care reform advocated by President Obama.
Tod Robberson, Colleen McCain Nelson and William McKenzie
For their relentless editorials deploring the stark social and economic disparity between the city's better-off northern half and distressed southern half.
2014 Prize Winners
Donna Tartt
A beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy's entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.
Annie Baker
A thoughtful drama with well-crafted characters that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theater, rendering lives rarely seen on the stage.
Alan Taylor
A meticulous and insightful account of why runaway slaves in the colonial era were drawn to the British side as potential liberators.
Megan Marshall
A richly researched book that tells the remarkable story of a 19th century author, journalist, critic and pioneering advocate of women's rights who died in a shipwreck.