A former board member as soon as informed 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 truth 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 —certainly one of Boston’s most traditionally disinvested Black neighborhoods — we’re lastly seeing a serious 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 examine in what occurs when a megaproject proceeds with out impartial 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 impartial accountability.
When White Stadium was first proposed, fairness questions have been raised early. We have been informed the challenge would observe the Massport Mannequin. We have been informed that Richard Taylor was concerned within the challenge and would assist maintain the method accountable.
As an alternative, the challenge moved ahead with out an impartial oversight physique, with out binding Minority Enterprise Enterprise (MBE) participation necessities tied to contractor choice, and with MBE targets beneath 14%. One white common contractor controls each main scopes of labor.
Black building companies in Boston are totally able to delivering a stadium. As one skilled Black contractor informed me plainly: “We’re not constructing a nuclear reactor. The issue isn’t capacity. The issue is construction.”
Boston has seen this film earlier than. The Massive Dig started with a projected price 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 initiatives 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 understood is that no new Black millionaires emerged, and fewer Black building companies existed after the challenge than earlier than it.
That failure was not unintended. It was the predictable results of no impartial 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 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 answerable for the complete 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 final contractor is aware of the present full price estimate of this challenge? 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.
As we speak, there isn’t any impartial physique empowered to trace MBE participation in actual time, demand procurement transparency, assessment price overruns, defend Boston Public Faculties college students, safeguard Franklin Park, or make sure that promised neighborhood 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 usually are not symbolic. They’re empowered to obtain paperwork, assessment contracts, require reporting, and create a public document.
Boston’s failure to do the identical for White Stadium — particularly given its location in a traditionally disinvested Black neighborhood — is just not 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 a publicly launched financial affect examine, no environmental, transportation, or parking affect evaluation, no clear procurement course of, no long-term operations plan accessible to the general public, and no impartial 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 accountability —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 massive and multidisciplinary, embody neighborhood stakeholders, elected officers, and subject-matter consultants, 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 fast launch of the present full challenge price 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 make sure 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 neighborhood. It ought to have been a mannequin of equitable improvement. As an alternative, we’re dangerously near repeating historical past. However historical past is just not future — until we enable it to be.
Ed Gaskin is Govt Director of Larger Grove Corridor Principal Streets and founding father of Sunday Celebrations
