Hey Boston. Want to move the needle on wealth, wages and welcoming? There are moves we can make right now. Together. And they require putting the power of business together with the power of public policy. Anyone interested?
The Boston Globe has begun a 7-part Spotlight series on race and racism here in this thriving global progenitor of innovation and ideas. The second installment details how the building of the zillion dollar Seaport made the city even whiter and created no wealth or expanded opportunity in the region’s Black community. Neither did the $24 Billion publicly funded Big Dig. And so we return to a familiar and painful topic.
Fortunately, as those who have been paying attention to this topic know, we have a tremendous and readily actionable opportunity to do better.
Immediately, the City of Boston and all surrounding municipalities and public or quasi-public building authorities and tax exempt non-profits should adopt the approach to diversity and inclusion recently adopted by the Massachusetts Port Authority, known as Massport. Make diversity and inclusion a core element of every public or quasi-public development project in the region by making it part of how all bids are evaluated. No robust, actionable diversity plan? You probably won’t win the work.
Gone forever would be the toothless, disingenuous and unenforceable ask that a developer promise to make “best efforts” to include diverse contractors on a project.
In its place would be a sea-change very much unlike the Seaport. We would see entirely new patterns in the distribution of resources, while investors, engineers, designers, builders and suppliers and their employees would begin to reflect the human diversity of the region and the nation. Together we would unleash opportunity and growth for people of color who own businesses in the sector and would also unleash access to capital, joint venture
opportunities and advisory services so that entrepreneurs of color could take advantage of the new demand for their services. And even better would be the relationships that get built and new networks that form to bring a city and region together around business.
Some context might help illustrate how actionable this idea actually is and what the result could be.
As the Globe mentioned, after allowing almost the entire Seaport to be built, Massport implemented a new policy: Twenty-five percent of the final score attached to a developer’s bid for the right to develop a parcel of land is now based on that developer’s plan for diversity and inclusion.
What has been the result so far?
Massport catalyzed a surge in creativity, resourcefulness and collaboration. The construction of a new $550M Omni Hotel has been green-lighted with a diverse team of investors, contractors, architects, suppliers and much, much more. The firms that put the Omni deal together created a partnership called New Boston Hospitality LLC that is led by the Davis Companies (for which Emblem Strategic has done some work recently) and the Taylor Smith Group, among others.
What else is part of the package that earned this team the right to build on public land?
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A commitment by Omni to build a job training center in Roxbury set up to feed skilled talent to the hotel and the hospitality industry at large;
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Profit sharing for some highly relevant local non-profits;
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Investment by the nation’s largest Black owned architecture firm which opened an office in Boston and is partnering with local firms in order to participate in the project;
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New relationships between major developers and contractors that have already begun to spawn voluntary collaboration on private construction projects.
That the Seaport was largely completed with no real attention to the impact on racial and economic division reflects very poorly on our civic and business leadership. We could be well on our way by now to scaling up expertise, capacity, job growth and ultimately intergenerational wealth in communities of color. That is exactly what happened over the last thirty years in many different white communities that the overwhelming majority of real estate developers and contractors hail from in Boston.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh should implement the Massport approach to diversity and inclusion at the city’s planning and development agency right away. Surely an impressively diverse and ambitious City Council would be eager to support him.
Not all of the focus should be on the City of Boston. An identical approach at the state’s School Building Authority and the UMass Building Authority would also move the needle on diversity and inclusion. Perhaps Speaker DeLeo could be enrolled to explore amending the laws that govern the region’s non-profits to encourage or require this approach on construction projects they commission. In the interim, the biggest non-profits that do significant building in the region are led by generous and thoughtful civic leaders like Drew Gilpin Faust at Harvard University, Robert Millard at MIT, and Edward P. Lawrence at Partners Healthcare, each of whom is in position to set an agenda that reflects the values of his or her institution.
Even privately funded projects should be encouraged to follow suit, perhaps by the civic leaders who lead organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, Associated Industries of Massachusetts, and others. They ought to be inspiring their members about what business is capable of doing to grow the entire economy in the region.
Sure there will be obstacles like the need to significantly strengthen the pipeline of qualified firms in some categories and sizes, for one; but imagine what our higher education, business and innovation centers could do to support this kind of public-private push. Imagine us applying the same focus we have put on getting the Olympics or attracting an Amazon headquarters. This is Boston aligning its values with its value proposition. How we build greater Boston from here on out will determine many things about the kind of Boston we build. Let’s get started today.
Andy Tarsy is Principal and Founder of Emblem Strategic, a public affairs and strategy consulting firm. This post originally appeared on the EmblemStrategic.com blog on December 10, 2017.
OK, what’s the nutshell version of what these infrastructure projects have to do with race. I don’t know enough about Seaport, but I’m pretty sure drivers of all races suffered while the Big Dig was happening, but equally that everyone benefits from the results. I know sometimes these things bulldoze neighborhoods (and more of that would have happened if all those interior highways had not been cancelled), but I don’t recall that being an issue with the Big Dig.
Isn’t this going to raise the price of housing by insisting that developers pay more for less optimql contractors?
Could be. Depends. Its a big picture idea – and will have different consequences than the status quo. Over time there is no reason there should be a price difference. In the short run, who should bear the cost of the circumstance we are in? Great and legitimate question. I am certain it should not be the Black community or its highly capable entrepreneurs and skilled workers. They need investment. Career paths. Capacity building. And Customers…
I may be the only person to see this who has worked alongside black and white and Latino at a low-level labor job, and it is not less important to be attentive and skilled, in fact your life depends on your co-workers being strong physically and mentally. I work with and under black and Latino contractors, and for wealthy black and latino customers. I see a difference at the lowest level in physical and mental health between white and black workers. It comes out in physical stamina, reliance on drugs and smartphones for distraction and calming. My personal conclusion is that it is a chemical effect from the interaction of heredity and environment, of course I have no proof of that…
Racism exists, oppression exists, statistical inequality exists, I’m just not sure that the difference is because of oppression. If it’s not, then no amount of favoritism towards black contractors will create the equality you want. It will just raise prices for the buyers/renters, and may send a little more money black people’s way. I suppose that’s something but it’s not what you want, or is it?
I assure you, this is not true.
Sociologists have described similar affect, naming it the ‘culture of poverty,’ across all nations and ethnicities and not specific to any one culture or ‘race’. That you consider it to predominate in African American and/or Latino populations is likely because you discount similar behaviors in some White people, because you have a larger sample size (nearly every one else you meet is likely to be White) with which to make inter-ethnic comparisons…
African Americans are under-educated. African Americans are undereducated because White Americans kept them from being educated and still try to keep them from being educated and because our national sports culture provides stovepipe access to college through athletic scholarships and then falls down with respect to actual education . That is the result of oppression and the one thing maintaining their oppressed status. It is the reason that this well intentioned post is wrong and the one reason any diversity hire scheme is likely to come up short.
Education. Education. Education. Deval Patrick, the son of an itinerant blues trumpeter from Chicago got a scholarship to Milton Academy and wound up Governor of the CommonWealth. He may well be our next President, too. Education IS the answer.
Pat Patrick was a baritone saxophone player in Sun Ra’s band.