Boston Bound

Executive Summary

"The City of Boston lacks the power that other major American cities enjoy to shape its own future."

Boston is an urban success story. It has emerged from the financial crises of the 1950s and 1960s to become a diverse, vital, and economically powerful city. Anchored by an outstanding array of colleges and universities, world-class health care providers, leading financial institutions, and numerous other assets, today’s Boston drives the metropolitan economy and is one of the most exciting and dynamic cities in the world. Boston is also a city at a crossroads, facing new challenges bred by its own success, by changes in the national and local economy, and by increased competition from cities across the country and around the world. Unlike many of its competitors, Boston is not gaining population. The high cost of housing, both within the city and in the metropolitan area, poses a major threat to Boston’s ability to continue to attract and retain workers whose innovation fuels the economy. There also remain serious inequities along racial and class lines and the continuing task of improving the city’s public schools in order to prepare the city’s young people to participate in and contribute to the city’s future.

The City of Boston drives the nation’s fourth largest metropolitan area economy.

Yet the City of Boston lacks the power that other major American cities enjoy to shape its own future. This conclusion derives from an extensive and unprecedented review of Boston’s legal powers compared with those of six other major American cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle. To perform this study, Harvard Law Professors Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron contracted with prominent local government law scholars from across the country to perform detailed investigations into the legal status of the six other cities. The result is an enormous wealth of compelling data that documents the various ways in which Boston’s power is constrained by the state to an extent that is unique among the places studied.

It is hard to understand why the Commonwealth should want its major city—the economic driver of its most populous metropolitan area—to be constrained in a way that comparable cities in other states are not. Like Boston, the other cities in the report are large, economically influential actors within their states and regions, have ethnically and racially diverse populations, and are doing fairly well when compared with other American cities. And, like Boston, they all face substantial related challenges occasioned by increasing suburban growth, significant immigration, the persistence of concentrated poverty, and an increasingly competitive global environment. But there is no doubt that Boston, at present, is a city bound—bound to an extent that none of the other cities we examined is.

The constraining legal structure that now governs Boston forces the city to rely on a narrow revenue base, limits the city’s ability to control its own expenditures, and distorts the city’s efforts to plan. It also places the city at a competitive disadvantage at a time when all major cities are looking to deploy as many tools as possible in order to secure their economic future.

It has long been recognized that Boston has limited legal authority. In fact, city officials have long complained about the city’s lack of power, especially its restricted ability to raise revenue. But the city’s complaints have largely been to no avail, in part because the issue has so often been framed in terms of the city’s need to avert fiscal crises. As long as requests for greater home rule are made in terms of Boston’s immediate financial circumstances, its complaints are likely to reinforce the popular view that city officials are simply trying to avoid hard budgetary choices. The report focuses, therefore, not on Boston’s short-term budgetary circumstances, important though they are, but on the city’s inability to make choices about its own future, including about its future revenue sources.

NEXT->