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Menino: Move BPS to Dudley Square
By adamg on Thu, 03/03/2011 - 2:43pm
The Ferdinand building. Photo copyright Paul Keleher.
Mayor Tom Menino today proposed moving Boston Public Schools headquarters from Court Street downtown to the long closed Ferdinand building in Dudley Square, as part of an effort to revitalize the square and consolidate city offices (he's also proposing moving some other city agencies to Court Street and the Boston Fire Department to existing city offices at 1010 Mass. Ave.). Menino would issue bonds to pay for the estimated $115-million cost of renovating the Ferdinand building, which the city has owned for several years now.
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Comments
9 Office Buildings?
What are the City's 9 office buildings?
(1) City Hall
(2) 1010 Mass Ave
(3) 10 Court Street
????
BFD and BPD
BFD on Southampton (which would be moving to 1010) and BPD on Tremont (which won't be moving anywhere, given how new that building is).
So that gets us up to five :-).
1010 Mass Ave
The city doesn't own 1010 Mass Ave. They renovated it and then sold it to someone who leases it back to the city for major bucks
Taj Majal?
How big is the Ferdinand building in square feet? $115 million?? Even at 200,000 sf that's almost $600 per sf - without any land costs and this is just a renovation - not a build. Will the "developer" they want to work with be selected by public bid or will s/he be anointed? Sounds like a lot of kaching - no wonder no private bidders stepped to the plate.
The concept sounds good - the execution is already looking dicey.
Could the $115 million include the other moves?
I imagine moving the BFD is going to take some work as well. That would certainly reduce the per-foot cost of the Ferdinand work.
That would make more sense
Strategically this all sounds pretty good - I don't see a lot of downside to moving BPS over to Dudley (unless you are an employee and have to figure out how to get there which may not be the most convenient).
The finances though are a bit concerning - the BRA link says they are going to borrow to do this and our borrowing costs have gone up dramatically in the past few years along with health care and pension costs. Our debt service is still quite low as a percentage of the budget but like a balloon - you push in on one side it has to pop out somewhere - what do we give up to pay for this? The move needs to generate probably $7-10 million in annual savings to pay for itself without impacting other areas of the budget (and that assumes it really costs $115 million - see Big Dig, Newton North, etc. etc. etc.).
How to get there?
The building is spitting distance from a major transit hub.
Transit Hub?
That serves only buses? The T takes 4 hours to get somewhere these days without transfers! :-)
It's doable - but I would bet for most of the chosen 400 it's not very convenient. On the plus side maybe some day it will give the T the incentive to build a real rail line of some sort to Roxbury like they should. Granted, I think first they are going to have to replace the entire MBCR fleet and then they have to pay off a few billion in debt before they can get around to this project.
For some it might work out better - but I'm guessing a lot of people spit up their afternoon coffee yesterday and went awwww crap!
Not only
It's half a mile from the train station, for you anti-bus folks. And if the walk is too far, a bus from Ruggles to Dudley passes the Reggie Lewis Center about every 2 minutes, since there are so many routes that do that. They don't usually even make you swipe your card if you're just going to Dudley.
(BTW, yes, we need more trains here, but the orange line does in fact go to Roxbury.)
Most of the city doesn't live downtown though, so having the building pretty much in the dead-center of the city will shorten most people's commutes. Think about all the people who have to go to Dudley or Ruggles first to GET downtown.
Rennovation v. New Build?
I'm guessing that renovating an historic building costs more than building from scratch.
BRA has the plans
The BRA's website has the plans here.
When Boston Police
When Boston Police Headquarters moved to the South End, it was supposed to revitalize the area. So now, decades(?) later, the plots across the street are still empty. What do we learn from this? Nothing. School headquarters goes to Dudley, where there's no rapid transit access. And what will change in the square? Nothing.
When City Hall moves to Grove Hall or Franklin Field, I'll be impressed.
No rapid transit?
...Silver Line?
...can't the same thing be said for all of Greater Boston recently?
so many snarky comments, so little time.
Make that the Fraudulent Silver Line
He says "Rapid Transit"; and, you respond, "Silver Line." Make that the "Fraudulent Silver Line Bus not-so-Rapid Transit."
Is it too tedious to mention, again, that the Police Headquarters is in Roxbury, not the South End?
Captain..
Please set sarcasm detector to 11.
And you are correct sir/madam. It is too tedious to mention again that the South End has yet to metastasize over to Police HQ.
BPD headquarters moved in
BPD headquarters moved in 1997 so that's approximately 14 years ago. In the past few years three gigantic brand spanking new buildings have gone up right next to the headquarters. Changing the entire immediate neighborhood takes time. It's just that one vacant lot wedged in-between Whittier and RCC. The landlord might be a real pain and not want to sell or clean it. Who knows. I think they've done a fine job in that area.
Also, Dudley has gotten much better over the past decade. It's at this point 1/2 revitalized, and I think fixing the ferdinands building would make a huge difference. It's a beautiful building and pretty much the most noticeable eyesore in that neighborhood.
City workers revitalize nothing
This is Boston for you. You have a downtrodden area and the response from the city is to bring in a bunch of office workers on essentially a fixed income who will never buy anything bigger than a salad and a yogurt for lunch. In my neighborhood this took the form of the ten guys at the fire house who got fat on the fast food from the pizzeria next door.
City workers don't revitalize anything. To see change you need workers who are seeing leaps in income because they are inventing new products and so on.
To see change you need
So you want to rent to the Chinese?
hey now
We've recently invented some grrrreat products in Boston proper. I mean all those financial products that the investment bankers downtown were manufacturing under sweatshop conditions (I believe they had saunas).
Leaps in income?
Total comp for city workers including bennies, pensions etc. has gone up by about 65% over the past 11 years. Very few other industries leapin' like that!
Aging Workforce
That's what happens when people hang onto their jobs forever and nobody is hired for a long time and people don't retire because of the economy: seniority levels increase, average age increases, health plan costs increase.
Health costs also increase because the person with the job carries the health insurance for those who can't find jobs with benefits.
Next time, don't oversimplify, 'kay? It is always quite tempting to pull a "summary statistic" out of a hat and work it for all it is worth in talking points - only it doesn't explain much about much of anything real.
What world do you live in?
Example
Health costs also increase because the person with the job carries the health insurance for those who can't find jobs with benefits.
Patently false - Something like 95% plus of city workers (and retirees) use city health insurance because it's far better than their private sector spouse can get - this has been true forever. The average private sector spouse of a city worker contributes effectively zero for employer sponsored health insurance - nobody in their right mind would give up their city health insurance if they could help it.
We have actually seen a decrease in average teacher salaries recently - why - a large cohort of teachers hired in the 70's is in the process of retiring and being replaced by younger teachers (but the school budget still goes up every year). That alone is a quarter of the workforce.
You talk about stats for average workforce age, seniority etc. - can you cite a source for this information? And even if true, we still have the same number of teachers, firefighters, cops etc. doing the effectively the same job as 11 years ago - how does this justify a 65% increase in compensation. If we repeat the past decade nobody will be able to afford to live in Boston - unless you work for the city.
Good luck finding ANYTHING that justifies compensation increases at double the rate of inflation, much less anything that points to these kinds of increases being sustainable.
Talk about not living in reality.
Any Number != "Real World"
I understand statistics: using them, understanding them, critiquing them, explaining their interpretations and limitations ... I do this for a living ...
You clearly do not. You just like to throw out *some* number that MAGICALLY EXPLAINS EVERYTHING ... except that it doesn't. Then you throw a tantrum when pressed to examine the interpretive value of your special magic number given a host of likely confounders which were uncontrolled in your raw magic number ...
Not that you could likely define what a confounder is ... When you can demonstrate some basic knowledge, we'll talk about "understanding reality". Hint: talking points and magic numbers that are not controlled for extremely well established demographic shifts are not reality.
But do you understand arithmetic? Astronomy maybe?
If cost per employee goes up at double the rate of inflation (and taxes at triple the rate of inflation) for the next 10 years or so the Hub of the Universe becomes a black hole that will simply swallow household after household - even in the "rich" neighborhoods - if they start leaving and downtown residential values go south- turn out the lights - the party's over - if the neighborhoods west of Mass Ave get hit with the tax transfer from the downtown neighborhoods that account for about a third of the $600 million in residential taxes - they'll get buried.
People are already struggling - now double their property taxes and add 20% and what do you think happens?
I see your point Stevil
but no ones taxes are going to get doubled unless your property value goes up. Unless you are talking about the 11 year period which could be true. But the 2011 cost isn't going to sneak up on you either.
When the burden of taxes becomes too much for specific towns, the people speak up and vote down overides and tax increases. If they don't, they either don't care enough, or it doesn't effect them in the pocket right?
Not exactly true
If you assume the traditional 4% increase in the levy the total property tax burden grows to about $2.4 billion (that's a virtual lock - and doesn't require any overrides). If you then bump the commercial residential split to 50/50 from the current 38/62(this is a much bigger variable and depends on relative property values, interest rates, commercial rents, inflation and a host of other issues) - the residential property taxes become $1.2 billion - or double their current amount. New development is a portion of this - so maybe the number is a 90% increase, not 100% - but it's still a big jump - and perfectly feasible even if your property value simply increases at the same rate as everyone elses (if values don't go up at all or god forbid go down then we have a bigger problem because we hit a point in 5-6 years where we can't increase the taxes by statute because they are limited to 2.5% of the total assessed value - we are currently about 1.85% I think).
Bottom line - property taxes are almost 70% of the budget now and go up 4% a year. State aid won't be increasing for some time to come. Other receipts go up 2-3% per year which means we can only increase the budget by 2-3% per year - including pensions, health care and everything else. The only way around that reality is to increase taxes or cut heads.
Also
Any police officer that is married to a nurse (I know a few of them) is going to have their wives health insurance. The nurses in Boston Hospitals get much better health insurance.
But
what if the officer is married to a male nurse? Nurses aren't all female.
Did you miss
when Adam posted that Herald thing showing the salaries of all City of Boston employees?
"bunch of office workers on essentially a fixed income who will never buy anything bigger than a salad and a yogurt for lunch"
The BPS administrators (and actually most people who work for BPS) make a lot more money than I do, and I certainly spend money in the neighborhoods where I work. A lot of people join gyms close to work, do their shopping near work before they head home because they know they're going to decide they're done being out once they get back to their neighborhood, etc.
Vacant Lot
Isn't that the lot that Elma Lewis Partners have been trying to get off the ground for a number of years? They were just recently given another shot at trawling for funding after having missed a second deadline or something like that.
And the other new, gigantic buildings in the area are all NU related, n'est-ce pas?
The Vacant Lot
Is a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. Several different groups are vying for control of the parcel, and the ones with the greatest claim have the least financing.
South End?!
Boston Police Headquarters is in South End? What map are you looking at? Its in Roxbury! Smack dab in the middle of it! Is Northeastern in the South End too?
I thought they moved it to that spot, in part, because it is the rough geographical center of Boston.
The vacant lot across the
The vacant lot across the street hasn't been developed because the BRA will not allow the owners to build on it. The Phoenix did a story on it and the politics behind it.
Police HQ
In response to an earlier poster, the Boston Police Headquarters has spurred development... Northeastern has completed massive expansions into the area and an enormous shopping center is going up across the street. Dudley isn't a wasteland--it has a sizable population some of which have some money to throw around (the very nice areas off of Moreland Street and around Fort Hill). It's the buildings not the people that's the problem. BPS in Ferdinands in addition to the new police station, the updated firehouse, the post office, and haley house buildings, will add significantly to the area's vitality.
Northeastern has moved across
Northeastern has moved across the railroad tracks because it was the only available land for them to expand into - it's hard to imagine the police headquarters having anything to do with it. And that's certainly not the development that we were sold at the time - it was supposed to be private development. They moved to Tremont st. in 1997 - that enormous shopping center certainly has taken its time. When they made the move, people weren't claiming that development would occur 14 years later.
How exactly does a rebuild of the police station 'revitalize' the area? The 'old' building isn't even old, for Christ sake. When they built that station, it too was supposed to 'revitalize' Dudley sq. How did that work out?
What ever you do, don't let the facts get in your way.
And like Court Street
there will be no parking.
More details on the overall plan
Here.
One interesting thing: The city won't try to sell off Court Street (aw, no second Hole!), but will instead use it to consolidate (non-school) offices now scattered all over the place.
Also, the $115 million is just for the Ferdinand building:
How many people work for the school department?
Can they fit into one of the schools the city is closing instead of spending a couple hundred million dollars on a new headquarters?