This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Alisha Searcy interview Smith College Prof. Carol Zaleski. She discussed her co-authored book, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, renowned for their literary and moral impact. Prof. Zaleski covers Tolkien’s life, the success of The Lord of the Rings, and its enduring themes. Additionally, she delved into C.S. Lewis’s experiences, his role as a professor, and the timeless lessons in The Chronicles of Narnia. Her discussion extends to the broader legacy of the Inklings, influencing J.K. Rowling and resonating in today’s culturally divisive era, emphasizing their spiritual and moral contributions. Prof. Zaleski closes the interview reading an excerpt from her book The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings.
Stories of the Week: Albert discussed a story from Politico about Boston commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party with reenactments and community events; Alisha commented on a story in The Washington Post about the debate on retaining students based on test scores.
Guest:
Carol Zaleski is Professor of World Religions at Smith College, where she teaches philosophy of religion, world religions, and Christian thought. Zaleski is the author of The Life of the World to Come (Oxford University Press), and is co-author, with Philip Zaleski, of The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams; Prayer: A History; and The Book of Heaven (Oxford). She is a columnist and editor-at-large for Christian Century, and has contributed articles and reviews to The New York Times, First Things, Parabola, The Journal of Religion, and The Journal of the History of Ideas. She earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in the study of religion from Harvard University.
Tweet of the Week:
https://x.com/USNewsEducation/status/1734317256409059370?s=20
Click here to read a transcript
Transcript Hubwonk
Jemison, December 19, 2023
[00:00:00] Joe Selvaggi: This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi. Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. The COVID- 19 lockdowns have had a lasting effect on downtown Boston. While neighborhoods such as Back Bay or Seaport have largely snapped back to pre-pandemic activity levels, those areas primarily dominated by commercial office buildings like the Financial District, have been hit hard by the enduring embrace of remote work.
[00:00:38] The troublingly high vacancy rates in downtown office space comes in stark contrast to strong demand for residential housing from those looking for urban convenience and amenities. This mismatch between the dearth of residential inventory and surplus of commercial property has led the city’s developers and leaders to explore the possibility that more could be done.
[00:00:59] To that end, in July, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced a residential conversion pilot program that the City hopes will incentivize developers to convert underutilized downtown commercial buildings to much needed housing, giving new life to the once bustling Financial District. Could this creative solution, which includes substantial tax incentives and expedited project approvals, be enough to bring money and talent to the table?
[00:01:24] And what can such a program teach City Hall about proactively encouraging investment in new residential stock across the city? My guest today is Arthur Jemison, Chief of Planning at the Boston Planning and Development Agency. Mr. Jemison oversees the agency’s planning, regulation of major development, and management of the agency’s 20 million square feet of property in the city.
[00:01:48] He will share with us his views on Boston’s changing commercial and residential landscape and explain how Mayor Wu’s Downtown Office to Residential Conversion Pilot Program endeavors to help fill Boston’s erstwhile bustling Financial District with new residents eager to share the city’s energy and amenities.
[00:02:06] We will discuss the profile of the buildings targeted by the program, the incentives on offer for willing conversion developers, and the projected success for a program that could be a model for other neighborhoods, and for similar cities around the world. When I return, I’ll be joined by chief of planning for the Boston Planning and Development Agency, Arthur Jemison.
[00:02:26] Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi, and I’m now pleased to be joined by chief of planning for the BPDA, Arthur Jemison. Welcome to Hubwonk, Arthur.
[00:02:36] James Arthur Jemison: Thanks so much. So happy to be here. I appreciate the invitation.
[00:02:39] Joe Selvaggi: Well, I’m pleased to have you here. I’ll say this. I’ll confess at the start. I’m a 30-year resident of Boston. So, it’s a real thrill for me to talk with someone who is helping to plan to make the city, even more vibrant and livable city. We’re going to narrow our focus on our conversation of planning, primarily on Mayor Wu’s new pilot program labeled Downtown Office to Residential Conversion Pilot Program. That’s what we’re going to talk about, but before we get to the nitty gritty, let’s start at the beginning. you’re our inaugural, Chief of Planning. Say more about you, your background, and this in this role.
[00:03:15] James Arthur Jemison: Sure. again, thanks for the invitation. I love to talk about, planning topics whenever there’s an opportunity, so I’m a 30 year, veteran of, planning and development, work, starting in the on the private side, and then spending a lot of my career in public work in just to be very specific, starting out at a real estate feasibility shop in Miami, Florida, almost specifically 30 years ago, joining the Boston Housing Authority to work on the redevelopment of the first phase of the mixed finance redevelopments of public housing, Orchard Park Mission/Main, and, and the work in South Boston on West Broadway, working in this agency as a young man, I spent, years, working, for the, District of Columbia, department of, the deputy mayor’s office, where we worked on baseball, the siting of this facility, a new national stadium and a series of other major planning, or the city center, U.S.A. or city center D.C. I should say, and then back here in Boston, working at MassPort in private industry, and then joined the Deval Patrick administration. Most recently, I spent about the last 10 years, about 7 of them with Mayor Duggan of Detroit, part of the recovery from the bankruptcy. And then I spent two years in the Biden administration as the, acting assistant secretary for planning, for community planning and development after which I joined the Wu administration.
[00:04:50] Joe Selvaggi: Wonderful. That’s quite a resume. You’ve seen — I’m trying to keep track — the ones I could, the cities I could count Miami, D.C., Detroit, and Boston, of course.
[00:04:59] So, I’ll give you, I’ll tee this up, let you hit it out of the park compared with other cities. What do you see as Boston strengths, you know, again, from a planning perspective and what are some of its vulnerabilities, you know, you mentioned some substantial cities, that’s quite a range from Detroit to D.C.
[00:05:11] James Arthur Jemison: Absolutely. So, what’s unique about Boston is that we have, other communities have meds and eds, that they really rely on to help strengthen, the economic life of the city. But Boston’s meds and eds, plus it’s already a historic presence in, the “FIRE” sector, finance, insurance, real estate, is so strong, and it’s been going on so long as led by some of the leading institutions, not just in the United States, but in the country has been a key part of our competitive advantage. And I think when you saw significant investment in biotech, in our community, maybe over the last 15, 20 years, you’ve always seen some of that growth really accelerate again that the competitive advantage of Boston is where some of the smartest and most experienced practitioners in those parts of the sort of science-based leadership are located. And so, for that reason, people come here for that. Not just the people who are here, but the sort of network of institutions and institutional relationships that make this would produce those ideas. That’s why they’re here and that’s why we’re the leader.
[00:06:21] Other cities have different advantages, but that’s ours. I think if there’s a thing that. Maybe a sort of sensitivity that we have it’s that we’ve had against the FIRE sector and sectors like it have been so strong here for so long that as office space and the way that it’s used has become, more of a sort of a different kind of venture. If the whole topic needs a little bit of a rethink, and I think we’re beginning to do some of that with our pilot program.
[00:06:52] Joe Selvaggi: Sure. So, you alluded to some vulnerabilities. Let’s say if we are, you called the FIRE sector, which may be a little more footloose or able to work remotely. I don’t want to give away or bury the lead here, but, again, as a resident here, we all live through COVID. Boston was a ghost town for a while. And but we saw a neighborhood snap back. I live on Beacon Hill, Back Bay, South End, North End, boom. You can barely move. It’s so busy. Of course, the exception there is downtown and the financial district. They’re still, really, hurting. Again, I don’t want to answer the question for you, but why do you think they have not snapped back the way the rest of the city has?
[00:07:27] James Arthur Jemison: Well, it’s a combination of things. as I think about the experience, you’re describing a lot of it comes from programming of the first, for commercial density of population and office, and I think if you go to a place, that’s really again, hard to walk around, you see a greater mix of residential and commercial uses in the Financial District with section of a few hotels and other uses really, it doesn’t have quite that density of population. As you say, you walk around back Bay, on one side of Boylston, you’ve got office and then a couple blocks further you’re in Back Bay. Or if you’re spending time in the seaport again, there’s a different mix of residential and commercial uses and a lot of focus on programming that brings people together in those places. I think the Financial District hasn’t had that exact experience. And so that’s one of the reasons it’s different. And so I think that’s also one of the reasons why it’s been a place we focused our energy and thinking about, is it possible in a few places to create some new residential opportunities for people? It’s one of the reasons we spent time and are spending time now thinking about it.
[00:08:42] Joe Selvaggi: I’m glad you pointed out that fact that I think the magic of Boston is we do have offices and people living right, side by side, densely populated. I don’t want to spend too much time on this idea. But of course, if we’re going to talk about if we’re going to gripe about Boston, we’re going to have to admit it’s a very expensive place. There’s just not enough housing. And we’re all on top of each other here on Beacon Hill, there’s no room to build and not in Back Bay. So you know, we have to make the most of what we have. You’re a planner. Again, this may be a difficult question to answer generally, but finding new places for people to live in Boston a priority, meaning, we’ve got we’re hemmed in, where can we go? Is that the, what a planner for the city does?
[00:09:21] James Arthur Jemison: You’re absolutely sending me off into a very interesting area, which I don’t want to dwell in, but we are working very hard to create more as of right opportunity for the development of housing. I think I’m proud of the work of my colleague, Sheila Dillon on the affordable housing production that she does.
[00:09:38] But we also believe that supply and creating more supply is going to be part of the solution to reducing prices or keeping prices more moderate. So, in that way, the rezonings that we have done, undertaken in a few neighborhoods and are planning to push even further in other neighborhoods of the city. We recently spent time rezoning Charlestown, East Boston, New Market, Mattapan, a wide range of different neighborhoods, and as we go into the new year, we’ll be doing a lot more of that. So, to your point, there’s lots of places where growth can happen. One of the issues we struggle with is that growth, we, through our regulation, in some ways and some places are one of the limiting factors that creates ambiguity and then people have a harder time investing. So maybe for another podcast, we can talk about zoning. but we’re, but it’s exactly what we do is finding new places to grow.
[00:10:32] Joe Selvaggi: Well, that’s good. So far you said, supply and demand is what drives prices and, regulation stifles supply. So, you’re singing our song here on, on the podcast. So let’s go, let’s focus on the,particular program that we wanted to discuss, which is the conversion of office to residential. At a high level, what are the goals of this program for those listeners who are new to this? Describe in broad strokes what it’s supposed to do.
[00:10:54] James Arthur Jemison: It’s important to step back a little bit and talk about why and I think you actually began the conversation I think in the perfect place in the sense that what you have is, parts of the city where there’s a mix of residential and commercial, places that people work places that people live were some of the 1st places to bounce back. and so, as we think about what’s going to help change the character of some, of some of the neighborhoods that didn’t have post-COVID, the same kind of bounce back would be to say, let’s have a little bit more residential in those places, if possible, or at least invite the opportunity. Now, normally that would be conventionally a good thing, but some of it has to do with some of the softness in the occupancy of office buildings, frequent focus groups that we would host, or, development interest we would talk to would describe my building as fully leased, but, there’s really, I’ve got a large number of small tenants. Many of them can work from home. There’s just been a lot less people and fewer people and less foot traffic in and around my building and fewer people kind of pass-carding into the building. So, I really need to think carefully about what my next move with my building is. We had a lot of that sort of feedback. We also began to have some owners approach us about conversion, and owners are also describing, the comparables that we’re seeing in the market where there are some older, less well-appointed buildings are beginning to trade at lower prices.
[00:12:24] And so, frankly, we saw an opportunity now approaching from another direction. Our values really, as a city are like, let’s create this density. Let’s create opportunities for people to live together. Let’s create opportunities for people to live near transit. Let’s create a more of a range of times of day and times of the week that our neighborhoods are being used.
[00:12:45] Residential is one of the ways to do that. So, I said, maybe there’s an opportunity, to maybe to put it more simply, there’s a sort of asset class, that’s being undervalued that has a chance to be converted to residential. Oh, a number of our different a number of different values. We have intersected the chance to take a historic building. That’s a key part of the city’s history that may have a footprint. That’s. Would be great for an office in 1870 but isn’t great for office now. but it’s compact enough. It doesn’t have a big floor place. The current office does that might have 40 percent use or even less occupancy. Let’s talk to that owner and see if there’s a chance and there’s a program. We could say them. “Hey, as you’re looking at these other trends, look at this as an opportunity.” We’ve been pleased with some of the response we’ve received.
[00:13:38] Joe Selvaggi: Well, wonderful. So I’m glad to hear it’s both reactive, you’re responding to the market, but proactive, you’re knocking on doors, and asking building. So describe. Go ahead. Let me love another easy question for you, which is, look, we’ve got skyscrapers, shiny ones, very proud of, but we also have some older buildings. This is Boston. So .describe it for our listeners. What does a skyscraper — what does a, somebody, a building you might knock on the door and say, look, this would be much better used as a residential building.
[00:14:05] James Arthur Jemison: What does it look like? Absolutely. So, while you’re on that topic, we are seeing some amazing new offices being built. And that’s actually a part of the dynamic as well is the places that people want to come back to are places where they’re extremely, they’re deeply amenitized and have every kind of feature. You can imagine also having great, environmental credentials, passive house or high LEED certification. So, so that’s a dynamic and people who are coming back say, well, I could actually get a really expensive sublease space. That’s really much higher end of the market. But back to your point. So, yes, we’re an old and historic city. And so, we haven’t like office spaces that run the full gamut. At one end of that gamut are a series of older buildings from the beginnings of the need for office space that have smaller floor plates that make them easier to convert to residential and they’re not often not as tall as the other buildings, and, they lend themselves, to some degree, to that kind of use. Meanwhile, people who have downtown or residential that’s close to employment centers, often, often talk about having that proximity, having the benefit of, the first-floor businesses often have the benefit of not just having during the week business, but, they might have,weekend business or other kinds of a more diverse base of a business for the work they’re doing.
[00:15:33] So, we’re finding that these are smaller, older, office spaces are places where people have been responding pretty, robustly to, to our work. There’s also a study that we had commissioned that sort of identified for plate best floor plates and named about, I think it’s 60 buildings in our downtown that they thought would be well suited to meet those kind of floor plate standards. So, again, most of them are older and then the financial district, although they’re all over the city and in areas adjacent to, like, the weather district, et cetera.
[00:16:09] Joe Selvaggi: So, we’re you’ve identified again proactively done a study sounds great. So, where the those what’s right? What’s the low hanging fruit to use a tired cliche? When you talk to owners of these buildings that you have identified and say, look, consider this might be the highest and best use of this building. What are the obstacles? We’re going to talk about what incentives this program has. What are you for those, prioritize for is it of course, everybody wants to turn a profit, this is earth, but there’s regulations, there’s environmental concerns, there’s perhaps a need for affordable housing, there’s, all kinds of incentives, once you both first lay out the concerns, and then how this program is going to address those concerns.
[00:16:48] James Arthur Jemison: Sure, so, many of the owners are, so I guess I’d say the issues of the owners talk about, I’ve touched on them a little bit before, but they include things like, well, my building is partially occupied by tenants who are very, use the space a lot. And then I have other tenants who don’t use the space. My leases are going to end in the next year or so, they have a real kind of risk reward calculation to make. Well, if the office market comes back, and it may, will it come back with at the same rates will come back as strong as it was before? Or will I have maybe a re-up?
[00:17:28] From one of my tenants that gets about 50 percent of my space, but not the other ones in the space. I’ll have to lease in order to occupy. It’ll be at a very low rate. I won’t be able to make my project work anymore. they’re having those kinds of risk award conversations and increasingly because of, the what’s happening to the comparable sales and comparable values.
[00:17:50] Their banks are also, and lenders and equity participants are also saying, they’re all having to say, like, should we stick it out and try to, release up as an office, especially when there’s brand new space coming on board, or should we think about doing something else? And so those are some of their issues.
[00:18:07] I’d also say many of them have been, say, operating an office building for a long time, or the building’s been in office for 100 years, 50 years. and so, they’re thinking, well, I’m going to enter a brand-new marketplace where I’m not an experienced office residential operator. I should say, do I really want to convert to a brand-new use? It will be expensive and potentially time consuming. And maybe there’ll be permitting risks, et cetera. and. Okay. I’ve got this kind of unique situation, so that’s that we get a lot of that, and we’ve had a lot of that experience. If it’s all right, I can tell you how we’ve tried to address some of that.
[00:18:42] Joe Selvaggi: Exactly. I’m sure our listeners are like, okay, why, when the city knocks on my door, why would I convert if there’s a chance I might, sure, not have to change a darn thing.
[00:18:51] James Arthur Jemison: Sure, so it might be easy to easiest I’m tempted to listen to the ability to save money is obviously a very significant, an abatement of 75 percent of your taxes for 29 years is a very significant investment. I also want to say, like, for the city I’ve worked here before in a time with the assessor and CFO. They were coming there were the city was in the late stages of what was possibly a recovery from a very different kind of situation. And now the city’s in a much, much stronger position.
[00:19:27] But, this is really an unprecedented action for us to offer these kinds of abatements not since maybe the fifties and sixties. Has there been anything that’s quite like what we’re proposing here? And so, in that vein, I would say that there they’re attracted by the abatement, but the thing about the abatement, that’s probably one of the reasons why it’s appealing has to do with the fact that, there are other ways to subsidize an activity.
[00:19:54] You want a lot of them to have really high transaction costs where, you need a lawyer. I need a lawyer. You need a lawyer. We need a sort of bank style underwriting. We’re going to turn it into a big check. And then a moment where I’m giving the big check to someone, whereas the tax abatement really is like, it’s an avoided cost and it obviously has its own sort of legal documentation required, but it has a little bit less friction in terms of making the transaction occur, because it’s an avoided cost that goes right to the net operating income of the developer. So, it’s easier for them to work with. And I wanted to use that as a point of entry, because when we’ve talked to developers, other things they said have been important where, we highlighted this as an organizational priority, we hired a talented person to help us work on it and provide the kind of SWAT-team response that many of those owners really needed. And then we’ve created and tried to pilot a kind of truncated approval process. One of the concerns have has always been well, making it through the city process can be very time consuming.
[00:21:04] We tried to shrink it down for people who are doing these for doing these conversions and so people found that appealing as well and we’ve also baked into the role that our new team leader for this plays a little bit of an ombudsman role where after you get an approval, they’re also going to work with the owners to help them close the gaps on all the other kinds of permits and approvals required to do the project.
[00:21:33] We recently piloted a new ombudsman position for regular projects, which have already been found to be valuable. So, putting a little bit of that scope into the work has been helpful. So, basically, it’s the money, but people are attracted by their resources, but we think they’re going to stay for the individualized attention we’re able to give these transactions.
[00:21:54] Joe Selvaggi: So, summarizing the incentives, you glided over the detail, which is 29 years of a reduced, property tax, but it’s going from a building tax rate, which is much higher right than the residential and for 29 years, but the transaction, As you say the sort of all in cost of converting from one to the other you’ve taken most of those costs away of course The city will have to absorb the cost of the foregone tax, right?
[00:22:19] I guess, you’ve made that elation, but also you fast track their approval process. Have you changed the regulations at all? Has, in a sense, what do they call it? Stretch codes where if you were to have built something brand new, these are the priorities, these are the constraints. But if you’re doing a conversion, it’s not as severe. Describe for our listeners — what does that look like?
[00:22:38] James Arthur Jemison: So, maybe the answer that one of your questions in there was, so we actually think that we need to. Reform modernize is more accurate modernize our what we call Article 80 review, which is when you have a larger project that comes in, what the process it goes through to get the approval of this board here at the city.
[00:23:01] We have a vendor team and a sort of organizational team that’s working right now to update and modernize Article 80, which is the part of the code that determines how we measure impact when you apply to do a project. So, the good news is that this pilot is allowing us to try out a few things, but we actually have a reform and modernization plan ongoing for the overall process right now. That is, it’s expected to reach a key milestone in the 2nd quarter this year, and hopefully be wrapped up by the summer because it’s important that we actually fix the over underlying and modernize the underlying approval system.
[00:23:42] But on this project, we’ve been trying to pilot that, one of the challenges is, there’s a process of filing documentation about your project and identify what it will look like, what impacts it will have, what mitigation needs to be proposed to mitigate those impacts.
[00:24:00] That’s it can be very complicated. and it can slow down. Some things we want, so we’ve been working to reform that. and I think, the sort of piloting we’re doing with the office to residential is going to be a sort of a way we test some of our ideas.
[00:24:15] Joe Selvaggi: Wow. More music for our ears here on the podcast, modernizing City Hall and the approval process. So, good for you. This sounds very good. So, we’re talking about a program that, as you say, is a pilot program. this was, has begun or proposed, or passed in July. We’re now almost at the end of the year. What’s been the response? There’s good ideas, but ultimately if they’re not embraced, they’re just good ideas. So how is it received by the development community?
[00:24:40] James Arthur Jemison: Sure. So, just a little sort of timeline. So, it was announced in July. We then had about three months to finalize our sort of program design. And so, in October, we posted the applications and began to invite applicants. So, as of today, about 60 days in, we’ve got four applications, a little under 200 units. Our goal for this initial round was in the around 300 units. So, we may do better than that, but we’ve got four applicants. We’ve got 10 or more people engaged with us and considering making applications, and so, I can name a few 100 other units out there that are being debated and discussed.
[00:25:23] Among those 10 applications, so I think we’re feeling good about the number. If we have a couple more of the applicants we’re expecting, we will probably exceed 300 units. The mayor identified as a goal. Again, we began to see in November, some of them, when we were doing our focus groups with development interest, they would talk about how, when there begin to be smaller office buildings that are sold at a specific price point, that’s when you’ll start to see people really take a look at the program. And so, between the developer conversations and the banks, who have also been great and engage with us as well, who are also saying to themselves, well, some of my value is beginning to go away if these valuations stay what they are — they’re beginning to engage with us as well. So, I think we’re feeling okay about it. We’d like to, I’m expecting that we’re going to get, get more, but I think we’re right on right where I was hoping we’d be about 60 days in. I think it would be a sign of something — it’s a good sign that we’ve got the level of application and the level of the other 10 strong leads we have out there make me feel good about early next year and, the kinds of projects that will be able to go forward.
[00:26:33] Joe Selvaggi: So, what you’re saying, those early implementers on the bleeding edge, perhaps they’re visionaries and they anticipate the future, but ultimately it may be financial incentives by the bank saying — if we don’t convert, its value as an office building will be substantially diminished and if we, before the knife falls, OK… You answered already my, my, we’re getting close to the end of our time together, but you already answered this question. But I want to say if, in the post-COVID move away at least for offices from downtown. We don’t want to see a rotten downtown or urban blight or any of these terrible things that we’ve seen happen other cities. So, you’ve really, it’s been a call to action to develop these programs to incentivize people to bring the vibrant residential community downtown. What insight, from this program, is going to bleed on into the rest of the city? You mentioned a whole bunch of other places. We focus on downtown, but you’ve mentioned a whole bunch of other parts of the city that could really use an infusion of imagination and encouragement to become the next Seaport or whatever — what other programs within Boston are being explored to really revitalize some of these more marginalized communities?
[00:27:44] James Arthur Jemison: So, I guess I’d say a couple of things. So, I think that the mayor made mention at a recent speech in October that she was considering other forms of providing resources to support other kinds of housing production that weren’t just office to residential. So, I think that’s one way in which some of the thinking and things we’ve learned here has been important. The value of having, we have a existing sort of development review team that does a great job. I, in my opinion, at least, managing a huge pipeline of proposed development, giving, supporting that staff further with more, more people who can basically help them carry development interests from the time they’re approved here, all the way into construction has been a real value. And again, the truncated and clearer process for regulatory review process is something I think we’re also saying that needs to be. We can bring things. We’re learning from that. Over into our regular modernization, but maybe if I’m talking more holistically about downtown, as opposed to my sort of narrow business side here would be to say the programming of the space in terms of like events, things to make the neighborhood, exciting multiple times a year, multiple times a day, multiple times a week is really essential to creating the energy in the city that we want to see and places that have done it. you see some of that in, in seaport, right now, places that have done it. Well, and invested in it are really seeing the dividend. So, I think if there’s a thing, that’s not necessarily like a conversion activity would be like, more programming is going to be essential.
[00:29:28] Joe Selvaggi: So, I hope we’ve piqued the interest of our listeners, either they be, they’re developers or, potential residents of these buildings that have been converted, or perhaps just people like me who just want to see more people on the street because we know that’s what makes our city great, makes it safe, makes it interesting.
[00:29:41] So, where can our listeners learn more about your office, your program, this particular program, and just where the boss, where what Boston sees as its goals for the future.
[00:29:51] James Arthur Jemison: Sure, so we have a downtown plan that we had a downtown kind of action plan. That’s about a year old that contains focus on look at this.
[00:30:01] And we also just passed at the board last week, a downtown plan. Both these things are on our website as well as the information about office to residential conversion. So, I think most of the stuff there and, and I think, people should come to our website and see some of the exciting stuff we’re into.
[00:30:20] Joe Selvaggi: Well, I wish your program a lot of luck. It sounds like at least your vision, is inspiring, let’s hope, where the rubber meets the road, and implementation, it gets, picked up. So, thank you very much for your time today, Arthur. You’ve been a really, a great guest, a fund of information, and I hope you’ll consider coming back if you up to it.
[00:30:37] James Arthur Jemison: We’d love to do it. I’d love to come back and talk about zoning. I’ll try to make zoning really exciting to everybody.
[00:30:42] Joe Selvaggi: I’m happy to talk about, we’ll do zoning. That’s, we beat that drum here quite a bit. So, if we want to talk about zoning, we’ll double back. But you’ve been a great guest. Thank you for joining me today, Arthur.
[00:30:50] James Arthur Jemison: Hey, thank you.
[00:30:50] Joe Selvaggi: This has been another episode of Hubwonk. If you enjoyed today’s show, there are several ways to support Hubwonk and Pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you and better for us if you subscribe to Hubwonk on your iTunes podcatcher. It would make it easier for others to find Hubwonk if you offer a five star rating or a favorable review.
[00:31:09] We’re always grateful if you share Hubwonk with friends. If you have ideas or comments or suggestions for me about future episode topics, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.
Joe Selvaggi discusses the strategic goals of Boston’s Downtown Office to Residential Conversion Pilot Program with James Arthur Jemison, the head of BPDA planning, aiming to transform underutilized offices in downtown into vibrant places to live.
Guest:
James Arthur Jemison is the Chief of Planning and Director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency. He is a seasoned public-private development leader with 28 years of planning and affordable housing expertise. Formerly Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), he oversaw key programs and partnerships with local governments. His career includes impactful roles in Detroit, Washington D.C., and Boston, contributing to equitable growth and recovery. Jemison holds a BA from UMass Amherst and a Master of City Planning from MIT and has received multiple awards for his contributions to urban development.
Massachusetts is arguably the most educated state in America, and one of the birthplaces of America’s civic tradition. If there’s any place in the country where you would expect to find consensus about the value of teaching American history, it is here.
Unfortunately, the fight for more comprehensive civics education in the Bay State has persisted for years with no sign of abating. Advocates won an important battle recently when public outcry led the Legislature to override Gov. Maura Healey’s cut to the state’s modest civics instruction budget.
The override suggests many in Massachusetts — including parents, teachers, and lawmakers — support strengthening the state’s civics and history curriculum, particularly with mounting evidence of declined student performance across the country.
And yet, for the last 30 years — since the state passed the landmark 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) — governors and legislators on Beacon Hill have steadily retreated from the legislation’s goals. MERA’s grand bargain included sharp funding increases for public education coupled with comprehensive academic standards, well-funded civics programs, and rigorous assessments to measure student aptitude and catalyze improvements.
Those reforms worked, helping Massachusetts go to the head of the class — nationally and internationally — on several major indices, including standardized test scores, college matriculation rates, and economic performance.
Nevertheless, the state’s fealty to the principles and objectives of MERA waned through the 2000s and 2010s.
Former Senate President Tom Birmingham, a MERA co-sponsor and Pioneer’s former Senior Education Fellow, lamented the stagnating civics and education funding in 2013, when he wrote that “in the last decade, support for public schools lost its primacy on Beacon Hill and state budgets reflect that. [Massachusetts’] inflation-adjusted education appropriation is the same as it was in 2002.” As Pioneer’s Jamie Gass and Charles Chieppo wrote in this 2019 article, state officials have failed to consistently follow through on MERA’s requirements and promises.
Lawmakers repeatedly postponed and, in 2009, indefinitely suspended the law’s requirement that U.S. history and civics be made part of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) testing required for graduation from a public high school. With no state-level assessment of student aptitude in these subjects, lawmakers are unable to measure the state’s curricular efficacy.
Rather than rely on time-tested methods of measuring students’ knowledge and aptitude, Massachusetts’ lawmakers implemented naïve revisions to the civics curriculum. Those revisions often pushed aside serious study of the nation’s Founding era and the tenets of American political philosophy in favor of calls to activism and protest.
The latest proposed degradation to Massachusetts’ civics education came dangerously close to fruition this fall. Gov. Healey quietly vetoed a $500,000 increase for the Civics Education Trust Fund and instead proposed lowering the program’s budget by the same amount, to a meager $1.5 million.
To put these numbers into context, the Bay State’s overall budget for the coming fiscal year is nearly $60 billion, of which about $6.6 billion will be devoted to education.
The governor’s veto was a worrying sign for civics educators and enthusiasts. In mathematical terms, the veto asserted that just $1 of every $40,000 in state spending should be devoted to the Civics Education Trust Fund.
While Massachusetts remains one of America’s leaders in per-pupil K-12 spending, cutting this program by a half-million dollars would have sent a negative message to the rest of the nation about educational priorities in a state whose historical traditions resonate throughout the land.
Thankfully, advocacy groups from across the state lobbied Beacon Hill lawmakers to override Gov. Healey’s veto and guarantee more funding for programs that connect Massachusetts’ youth with the state’s famed civic tradition. The Legislature agreed, overrode the Governor’s cut in October, and restored the increase.
The Legislature’s action is cause for celebration, with an important caveat. Small budgetary victories are no substitute for a full commitment to the requirements of the 1993 education reform law. That Beacon Hill has refused to fully comply with the law for nearly 30 years is a troubling symptom in a state that aspires to be a wellspring of democratic citizenship and a model for the nation.
The $6.6 billion in annual K-12 money and $171.5 million on lunch programs are celebrated as examples of Massachusetts’ leadership in education. In a world of high per-pupil spending, policymakers should be able to find fiscal room for civics. As the following chart shows, the $2.5 million devoted to the state’s Civics Education Trust Fund is a tiny piece of the overall education budget for fiscal 2024.
Massachusetts should be expanding civics and history education, not retreating from it. And the state should reject recent trends and fads. As recommended in Pioneer’s latest book, Restoring the City on a Hill: U.S. History and Civics in America’s Schools, the state would benefit from abandoning “action civics” teaching standards that de-emphasize America’s common cultural fabric.
Given the declining performance on national civics assessments, restoring the long-discussed MCAS civics tests would give lawmakers a valuable barometer for student performance, helping to shape more effective curricular reform.
Supporting programs like the Civics Education Trust Fund would allow interested students from across the state to participate in non-partisan civics projects that they design and lead themselves. There’s no question that our democracy would benefit from kinder, less aligned, and more open-minded participants.
A comprehensive civic education program is essential to Massachusetts’ status as a leader in education. Given its history, tradition, and contribution to the American ethos, the Bay State has an obligation to embrace the teaching and testing of American history and civics — and a great deal to lose if it continues to retreat from its own traditions.
Jude Iredell is a Roger Perry Civics Intern with the Pioneer Institute. He is a senior at Pomona College pursuing a degree in history.
“She’s a good girl. She helps me a lot. She has big, big dreams. I don’t have the money, but she has big dreams. I hope she’s going to get everything, but she works so hard. She works so hard in school.”
“Our family is needing to make some really big sacrifices because we believe this is important, and so, we’re basically going to do whatever it takes… Sometimes we look at each other and go ‘I don’t know if I can do it again another month…’”
“A lot of the families have to sacrifice and work multiple jobs… And just scraping together enough money to just make tuition, just the basics.”
“It is discriminatory, that parents who want to choose an alternative to public school for their children, would not in any way receive any compensation for that, whether it be tax credit, whether it be a voucher…”
In the 1840s, nativist movement leaders formed official political parties and local chapters of the national Native American Party (later the American Party), although they continued to be commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party. Politicians sought to insert provisions into state constitutions against Catholics who refused to renounce the pope. The Know-Nothing movement brought bigotry and hatred to a new level of violence and organization.
The party’s legacy endured in the post-Civil War era, with laws and constitutional amendments it supported, still today severely limiting parents’ educational choices. A federal constitutional amendment was proposed by Speaker of the House James Blaine prohibiting money raised by taxation in any State to be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations. These were then named the Blaine Amendments of 1875.
in recent decades, often in response to challenges to school choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court has demonstrated great interest in examining the issues of educational alternatives and attempts limit parental options. Massachusetts plays a key role in this debate. The Bay State was a key center of the Know-Nothing movement and has the oldest version of Anti-Aid Amendments in the nation, as well as a second such amendment approved in 1917. Two-fifths of Massachusetts residents are Catholic, and its Catholic schools outperform the state’s public schools, which are the best in the nation.
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Alisha Searcy interview Smith College Prof. Carol Zaleski. She discussed her co-authored book, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, renowned for their literary and moral impact. Prof. Zaleski covers Tolkien’s life, the success of The Lord of the Rings, and its enduring themes. Additionally, she delved into C.S. Lewis’s experiences, his role as a professor, and the timeless lessons in The Chronicles of Narnia. Her discussion extends to the broader legacy of the Inklings, influencing J.K. Rowling and resonating in today’s culturally divisive era, emphasizing their spiritual and moral contributions. Prof. Zaleski closes the interview reading an excerpt from her book The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings.
Stories of the Week: Albert discussed a story from Politico about Boston commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party with reenactments and community events; Alisha commented on a story in The Washington Post about the debate on retaining students based on test scores.
Guest:
Carol Zaleski is Professor of World Religions at Smith College, where she teaches philosophy of religion, world religions, and Christian thought. Zaleski is the author of The Life of the World to Come (Oxford University Press), and is co-author, with Philip Zaleski, of The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams; Prayer: A History; and The Book of Heaven (Oxford). She is a columnist and editor-at-large for Christian Century, and has contributed articles and reviews to The New York Times, First Things, Parabola, The Journal of Religion, and The Journal of the History of Ideas. She earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in the study of religion from Harvard University.
Tweet of the Week:
https://x.com/USNewsEducation/status/1734317256409059370?s=20
Click here to read a transcript
Transcript Hubwonk
Jemison, December 19, 2023
[00:00:00] Joe Selvaggi: This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi. Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. The COVID- 19 lockdowns have had a lasting effect on downtown Boston. While neighborhoods such as Back Bay or Seaport have largely snapped back to pre-pandemic activity levels, those areas primarily dominated by commercial office buildings like the Financial District, have been hit hard by the enduring embrace of remote work.
[00:00:38] The troublingly high vacancy rates in downtown office space comes in stark contrast to strong demand for residential housing from those looking for urban convenience and amenities. This mismatch between the dearth of residential inventory and surplus of commercial property has led the city’s developers and leaders to explore the possibility that more could be done.
[00:00:59] To that end, in July, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced a residential conversion pilot program that the City hopes will incentivize developers to convert underutilized downtown commercial buildings to much needed housing, giving new life to the once bustling Financial District. Could this creative solution, which includes substantial tax incentives and expedited project approvals, be enough to bring money and talent to the table?
[00:01:24] And what can such a program teach City Hall about proactively encouraging investment in new residential stock across the city? My guest today is Arthur Jemison, Chief of Planning at the Boston Planning and Development Agency. Mr. Jemison oversees the agency’s planning, regulation of major development, and management of the agency’s 20 million square feet of property in the city.
[00:01:48] He will share with us his views on Boston’s changing commercial and residential landscape and explain how Mayor Wu’s Downtown Office to Residential Conversion Pilot Program endeavors to help fill Boston’s erstwhile bustling Financial District with new residents eager to share the city’s energy and amenities.
[00:02:06] We will discuss the profile of the buildings targeted by the program, the incentives on offer for willing conversion developers, and the projected success for a program that could be a model for other neighborhoods, and for similar cities around the world. When I return, I’ll be joined by chief of planning for the Boston Planning and Development Agency, Arthur Jemison.
[00:02:26] Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi, and I’m now pleased to be joined by chief of planning for the BPDA, Arthur Jemison. Welcome to Hubwonk, Arthur.
[00:02:36] James Arthur Jemison: Thanks so much. So happy to be here. I appreciate the invitation.
[00:02:39] Joe Selvaggi: Well, I’m pleased to have you here. I’ll say this. I’ll confess at the start. I’m a 30-year resident of Boston. So, it’s a real thrill for me to talk with someone who is helping to plan to make the city, even more vibrant and livable city. We’re going to narrow our focus on our conversation of planning, primarily on Mayor Wu’s new pilot program labeled Downtown Office to Residential Conversion Pilot Program. That’s what we’re going to talk about, but before we get to the nitty gritty, let’s start at the beginning. you’re our inaugural, Chief of Planning. Say more about you, your background, and this in this role.
[00:03:15] James Arthur Jemison: Sure. again, thanks for the invitation. I love to talk about, planning topics whenever there’s an opportunity, so I’m a 30 year, veteran of, planning and development, work, starting in the on the private side, and then spending a lot of my career in public work in just to be very specific, starting out at a real estate feasibility shop in Miami, Florida, almost specifically 30 years ago, joining the Boston Housing Authority to work on the redevelopment of the first phase of the mixed finance redevelopments of public housing, Orchard Park Mission/Main, and, and the work in South Boston on West Broadway, working in this agency as a young man, I spent, years, working, for the, District of Columbia, department of, the deputy mayor’s office, where we worked on baseball, the siting of this facility, a new national stadium and a series of other major planning, or the city center, U.S.A. or city center D.C. I should say, and then back here in Boston, working at MassPort in private industry, and then joined the Deval Patrick administration. Most recently, I spent about the last 10 years, about 7 of them with Mayor Duggan of Detroit, part of the recovery from the bankruptcy. And then I spent two years in the Biden administration as the, acting assistant secretary for planning, for community planning and development after which I joined the Wu administration.
[00:04:50] Joe Selvaggi: Wonderful. That’s quite a resume. You’ve seen — I’m trying to keep track — the ones I could, the cities I could count Miami, D.C., Detroit, and Boston, of course.
[00:04:59] So, I’ll give you, I’ll tee this up, let you hit it out of the park compared with other cities. What do you see as Boston strengths, you know, again, from a planning perspective and what are some of its vulnerabilities, you know, you mentioned some substantial cities, that’s quite a range from Detroit to D.C.
[00:05:11] James Arthur Jemison: Absolutely. So, what’s unique about Boston is that we have, other communities have meds and eds, that they really rely on to help strengthen, the economic life of the city. But Boston’s meds and eds, plus it’s already a historic presence in, the “FIRE” sector, finance, insurance, real estate, is so strong, and it’s been going on so long as led by some of the leading institutions, not just in the United States, but in the country has been a key part of our competitive advantage. And I think when you saw significant investment in biotech, in our community, maybe over the last 15, 20 years, you’ve always seen some of that growth really accelerate again that the competitive advantage of Boston is where some of the smartest and most experienced practitioners in those parts of the sort of science-based leadership are located. And so, for that reason, people come here for that. Not just the people who are here, but the sort of network of institutions and institutional relationships that make this would produce those ideas. That’s why they’re here and that’s why we’re the leader.
[00:06:21] Other cities have different advantages, but that’s ours. I think if there’s a thing that. Maybe a sort of sensitivity that we have it’s that we’ve had against the FIRE sector and sectors like it have been so strong here for so long that as office space and the way that it’s used has become, more of a sort of a different kind of venture. If the whole topic needs a little bit of a rethink, and I think we’re beginning to do some of that with our pilot program.
[00:06:52] Joe Selvaggi: Sure. So, you alluded to some vulnerabilities. Let’s say if we are, you called the FIRE sector, which may be a little more footloose or able to work remotely. I don’t want to give away or bury the lead here, but, again, as a resident here, we all live through COVID. Boston was a ghost town for a while. And but we saw a neighborhood snap back. I live on Beacon Hill, Back Bay, South End, North End, boom. You can barely move. It’s so busy. Of course, the exception there is downtown and the financial district. They’re still, really, hurting. Again, I don’t want to answer the question for you, but why do you think they have not snapped back the way the rest of the city has?
[00:07:27] James Arthur Jemison: Well, it’s a combination of things. as I think about the experience, you’re describing a lot of it comes from programming of the first, for commercial density of population and office, and I think if you go to a place, that’s really again, hard to walk around, you see a greater mix of residential and commercial uses in the Financial District with section of a few hotels and other uses really, it doesn’t have quite that density of population. As you say, you walk around back Bay, on one side of Boylston, you’ve got office and then a couple blocks further you’re in Back Bay. Or if you’re spending time in the seaport again, there’s a different mix of residential and commercial uses and a lot of focus on programming that brings people together in those places. I think the Financial District hasn’t had that exact experience. And so that’s one of the reasons it’s different. And so I think that’s also one of the reasons why it’s been a place we focused our energy and thinking about, is it possible in a few places to create some new residential opportunities for people? It’s one of the reasons we spent time and are spending time now thinking about it.
[00:08:42] Joe Selvaggi: I’m glad you pointed out that fact that I think the magic of Boston is we do have offices and people living right, side by side, densely populated. I don’t want to spend too much time on this idea. But of course, if we’re going to talk about if we’re going to gripe about Boston, we’re going to have to admit it’s a very expensive place. There’s just not enough housing. And we’re all on top of each other here on Beacon Hill, there’s no room to build and not in Back Bay. So you know, we have to make the most of what we have. You’re a planner. Again, this may be a difficult question to answer generally, but finding new places for people to live in Boston a priority, meaning, we’ve got we’re hemmed in, where can we go? Is that the, what a planner for the city does?
[00:09:21] James Arthur Jemison: You’re absolutely sending me off into a very interesting area, which I don’t want to dwell in, but we are working very hard to create more as of right opportunity for the development of housing. I think I’m proud of the work of my colleague, Sheila Dillon on the affordable housing production that she does.
[00:09:38] But we also believe that supply and creating more supply is going to be part of the solution to reducing prices or keeping prices more moderate. So, in that way, the rezonings that we have done, undertaken in a few neighborhoods and are planning to push even further in other neighborhoods of the city. We recently spent time rezoning Charlestown, East Boston, New Market, Mattapan, a wide range of different neighborhoods, and as we go into the new year, we’ll be doing a lot more of that. So, to your point, there’s lots of places where growth can happen. One of the issues we struggle with is that growth, we, through our regulation, in some ways and some places are one of the limiting factors that creates ambiguity and then people have a harder time investing. So maybe for another podcast, we can talk about zoning. but we’re, but it’s exactly what we do is finding new places to grow.
[00:10:32] Joe Selvaggi: Well, that’s good. So far you said, supply and demand is what drives prices and, regulation stifles supply. So, you’re singing our song here on, on the podcast. So let’s go, let’s focus on the,particular program that we wanted to discuss, which is the conversion of office to residential. At a high level, what are the goals of this program for those listeners who are new to this? Describe in broad strokes what it’s supposed to do.
[00:10:54] James Arthur Jemison: It’s important to step back a little bit and talk about why and I think you actually began the conversation I think in the perfect place in the sense that what you have is, parts of the city where there’s a mix of residential and commercial, places that people work places that people live were some of the 1st places to bounce back. and so, as we think about what’s going to help change the character of some, of some of the neighborhoods that didn’t have post-COVID, the same kind of bounce back would be to say, let’s have a little bit more residential in those places, if possible, or at least invite the opportunity. Now, normally that would be conventionally a good thing, but some of it has to do with some of the softness in the occupancy of office buildings, frequent focus groups that we would host, or, development interest we would talk to would describe my building as fully leased, but, there’s really, I’ve got a large number of small tenants. Many of them can work from home. There’s just been a lot less people and fewer people and less foot traffic in and around my building and fewer people kind of pass-carding into the building. So, I really need to think carefully about what my next move with my building is. We had a lot of that sort of feedback. We also began to have some owners approach us about conversion, and owners are also describing, the comparables that we’re seeing in the market where there are some older, less well-appointed buildings are beginning to trade at lower prices.
[00:12:24] And so, frankly, we saw an opportunity now approaching from another direction. Our values really, as a city are like, let’s create this density. Let’s create opportunities for people to live together. Let’s create opportunities for people to live near transit. Let’s create a more of a range of times of day and times of the week that our neighborhoods are being used.
[00:12:45] Residential is one of the ways to do that. So, I said, maybe there’s an opportunity, to maybe to put it more simply, there’s a sort of asset class, that’s being undervalued that has a chance to be converted to residential. Oh, a number of our different a number of different values. We have intersected the chance to take a historic building. That’s a key part of the city’s history that may have a footprint. That’s. Would be great for an office in 1870 but isn’t great for office now. but it’s compact enough. It doesn’t have a big floor place. The current office does that might have 40 percent use or even less occupancy. Let’s talk to that owner and see if there’s a chance and there’s a program. We could say them. “Hey, as you’re looking at these other trends, look at this as an opportunity.” We’ve been pleased with some of the response we’ve received.
[00:13:38] Joe Selvaggi: Well, wonderful. So I’m glad to hear it’s both reactive, you’re responding to the market, but proactive, you’re knocking on doors, and asking building. So describe. Go ahead. Let me love another easy question for you, which is, look, we’ve got skyscrapers, shiny ones, very proud of, but we also have some older buildings. This is Boston. So .describe it for our listeners. What does a skyscraper — what does a, somebody, a building you might knock on the door and say, look, this would be much better used as a residential building.
[00:14:05] James Arthur Jemison: What does it look like? Absolutely. So, while you’re on that topic, we are seeing some amazing new offices being built. And that’s actually a part of the dynamic as well is the places that people want to come back to are places where they’re extremely, they’re deeply amenitized and have every kind of feature. You can imagine also having great, environmental credentials, passive house or high LEED certification. So, so that’s a dynamic and people who are coming back say, well, I could actually get a really expensive sublease space. That’s really much higher end of the market. But back to your point. So, yes, we’re an old and historic city. And so, we haven’t like office spaces that run the full gamut. At one end of that gamut are a series of older buildings from the beginnings of the need for office space that have smaller floor plates that make them easier to convert to residential and they’re not often not as tall as the other buildings, and, they lend themselves, to some degree, to that kind of use. Meanwhile, people who have downtown or residential that’s close to employment centers, often, often talk about having that proximity, having the benefit of, the first-floor businesses often have the benefit of not just having during the week business, but, they might have,weekend business or other kinds of a more diverse base of a business for the work they’re doing.
[00:15:33] So, we’re finding that these are smaller, older, office spaces are places where people have been responding pretty, robustly to, to our work. There’s also a study that we had commissioned that sort of identified for plate best floor plates and named about, I think it’s 60 buildings in our downtown that they thought would be well suited to meet those kind of floor plate standards. So, again, most of them are older and then the financial district, although they’re all over the city and in areas adjacent to, like, the weather district, et cetera.
[00:16:09] Joe Selvaggi: So, we’re you’ve identified again proactively done a study sounds great. So, where the those what’s right? What’s the low hanging fruit to use a tired cliche? When you talk to owners of these buildings that you have identified and say, look, consider this might be the highest and best use of this building. What are the obstacles? We’re going to talk about what incentives this program has. What are you for those, prioritize for is it of course, everybody wants to turn a profit, this is earth, but there’s regulations, there’s environmental concerns, there’s perhaps a need for affordable housing, there’s, all kinds of incentives, once you both first lay out the concerns, and then how this program is going to address those concerns.
[00:16:48] James Arthur Jemison: Sure, so, many of the owners are, so I guess I’d say the issues of the owners talk about, I’ve touched on them a little bit before, but they include things like, well, my building is partially occupied by tenants who are very, use the space a lot. And then I have other tenants who don’t use the space. My leases are going to end in the next year or so, they have a real kind of risk reward calculation to make. Well, if the office market comes back, and it may, will it come back with at the same rates will come back as strong as it was before? Or will I have maybe a re-up?
[00:17:28] From one of my tenants that gets about 50 percent of my space, but not the other ones in the space. I’ll have to lease in order to occupy. It’ll be at a very low rate. I won’t be able to make my project work anymore. they’re having those kinds of risk award conversations and increasingly because of, the what’s happening to the comparable sales and comparable values.
[00:17:50] Their banks are also, and lenders and equity participants are also saying, they’re all having to say, like, should we stick it out and try to, release up as an office, especially when there’s brand new space coming on board, or should we think about doing something else? And so those are some of their issues.
[00:18:07] I’d also say many of them have been, say, operating an office building for a long time, or the building’s been in office for 100 years, 50 years. and so, they’re thinking, well, I’m going to enter a brand-new marketplace where I’m not an experienced office residential operator. I should say, do I really want to convert to a brand-new use? It will be expensive and potentially time consuming. And maybe there’ll be permitting risks, et cetera. and. Okay. I’ve got this kind of unique situation, so that’s that we get a lot of that, and we’ve had a lot of that experience. If it’s all right, I can tell you how we’ve tried to address some of that.
[00:18:42] Joe Selvaggi: Exactly. I’m sure our listeners are like, okay, why, when the city knocks on my door, why would I convert if there’s a chance I might, sure, not have to change a darn thing.
[00:18:51] James Arthur Jemison: Sure, so it might be easy to easiest I’m tempted to listen to the ability to save money is obviously a very significant, an abatement of 75 percent of your taxes for 29 years is a very significant investment. I also want to say, like, for the city I’ve worked here before in a time with the assessor and CFO. They were coming there were the city was in the late stages of what was possibly a recovery from a very different kind of situation. And now the city’s in a much, much stronger position.
[00:19:27] But, this is really an unprecedented action for us to offer these kinds of abatements not since maybe the fifties and sixties. Has there been anything that’s quite like what we’re proposing here? And so, in that vein, I would say that there they’re attracted by the abatement, but the thing about the abatement, that’s probably one of the reasons why it’s appealing has to do with the fact that, there are other ways to subsidize an activity.
[00:19:54] You want a lot of them to have really high transaction costs where, you need a lawyer. I need a lawyer. You need a lawyer. We need a sort of bank style underwriting. We’re going to turn it into a big check. And then a moment where I’m giving the big check to someone, whereas the tax abatement really is like, it’s an avoided cost and it obviously has its own sort of legal documentation required, but it has a little bit less friction in terms of making the transaction occur, because it’s an avoided cost that goes right to the net operating income of the developer. So, it’s easier for them to work with. And I wanted to use that as a point of entry, because when we’ve talked to developers, other things they said have been important where, we highlighted this as an organizational priority, we hired a talented person to help us work on it and provide the kind of SWAT-team response that many of those owners really needed. And then we’ve created and tried to pilot a kind of truncated approval process. One of the concerns have has always been well, making it through the city process can be very time consuming.
[00:21:04] We tried to shrink it down for people who are doing these for doing these conversions and so people found that appealing as well and we’ve also baked into the role that our new team leader for this plays a little bit of an ombudsman role where after you get an approval, they’re also going to work with the owners to help them close the gaps on all the other kinds of permits and approvals required to do the project.
[00:21:33] We recently piloted a new ombudsman position for regular projects, which have already been found to be valuable. So, putting a little bit of that scope into the work has been helpful. So, basically, it’s the money, but people are attracted by their resources, but we think they’re going to stay for the individualized attention we’re able to give these transactions.
[00:21:54] Joe Selvaggi: So, summarizing the incentives, you glided over the detail, which is 29 years of a reduced, property tax, but it’s going from a building tax rate, which is much higher right than the residential and for 29 years, but the transaction, As you say the sort of all in cost of converting from one to the other you’ve taken most of those costs away of course The city will have to absorb the cost of the foregone tax, right?
[00:22:19] I guess, you’ve made that elation, but also you fast track their approval process. Have you changed the regulations at all? Has, in a sense, what do they call it? Stretch codes where if you were to have built something brand new, these are the priorities, these are the constraints. But if you’re doing a conversion, it’s not as severe. Describe for our listeners — what does that look like?
[00:22:38] James Arthur Jemison: So, maybe the answer that one of your questions in there was, so we actually think that we need to. Reform modernize is more accurate modernize our what we call Article 80 review, which is when you have a larger project that comes in, what the process it goes through to get the approval of this board here at the city.
[00:23:01] We have a vendor team and a sort of organizational team that’s working right now to update and modernize Article 80, which is the part of the code that determines how we measure impact when you apply to do a project. So, the good news is that this pilot is allowing us to try out a few things, but we actually have a reform and modernization plan ongoing for the overall process right now. That is, it’s expected to reach a key milestone in the 2nd quarter this year, and hopefully be wrapped up by the summer because it’s important that we actually fix the over underlying and modernize the underlying approval system.
[00:23:42] But on this project, we’ve been trying to pilot that, one of the challenges is, there’s a process of filing documentation about your project and identify what it will look like, what impacts it will have, what mitigation needs to be proposed to mitigate those impacts.
[00:24:00] That’s it can be very complicated. and it can slow down. Some things we want, so we’ve been working to reform that. and I think, the sort of piloting we’re doing with the office to residential is going to be a sort of a way we test some of our ideas.
[00:24:15] Joe Selvaggi: Wow. More music for our ears here on the podcast, modernizing City Hall and the approval process. So, good for you. This sounds very good. So, we’re talking about a program that, as you say, is a pilot program. this was, has begun or proposed, or passed in July. We’re now almost at the end of the year. What’s been the response? There’s good ideas, but ultimately if they’re not embraced, they’re just good ideas. So how is it received by the development community?
[00:24:40] James Arthur Jemison: Sure. So, just a little sort of timeline. So, it was announced in July. We then had about three months to finalize our sort of program design. And so, in October, we posted the applications and began to invite applicants. So, as of today, about 60 days in, we’ve got four applications, a little under 200 units. Our goal for this initial round was in the around 300 units. So, we may do better than that, but we’ve got four applicants. We’ve got 10 or more people engaged with us and considering making applications, and so, I can name a few 100 other units out there that are being debated and discussed.
[00:25:23] Among those 10 applications, so I think we’re feeling good about the number. If we have a couple more of the applicants we’re expecting, we will probably exceed 300 units. The mayor identified as a goal. Again, we began to see in November, some of them, when we were doing our focus groups with development interest, they would talk about how, when there begin to be smaller office buildings that are sold at a specific price point, that’s when you’ll start to see people really take a look at the program. And so, between the developer conversations and the banks, who have also been great and engage with us as well, who are also saying to themselves, well, some of my value is beginning to go away if these valuations stay what they are — they’re beginning to engage with us as well. So, I think we’re feeling okay about it. We’d like to, I’m expecting that we’re going to get, get more, but I think we’re right on right where I was hoping we’d be about 60 days in. I think it would be a sign of something — it’s a good sign that we’ve got the level of application and the level of the other 10 strong leads we have out there make me feel good about early next year and, the kinds of projects that will be able to go forward.
[00:26:33] Joe Selvaggi: So, what you’re saying, those early implementers on the bleeding edge, perhaps they’re visionaries and they anticipate the future, but ultimately it may be financial incentives by the bank saying — if we don’t convert, its value as an office building will be substantially diminished and if we, before the knife falls, OK… You answered already my, my, we’re getting close to the end of our time together, but you already answered this question. But I want to say if, in the post-COVID move away at least for offices from downtown. We don’t want to see a rotten downtown or urban blight or any of these terrible things that we’ve seen happen other cities. So, you’ve really, it’s been a call to action to develop these programs to incentivize people to bring the vibrant residential community downtown. What insight, from this program, is going to bleed on into the rest of the city? You mentioned a whole bunch of other places. We focus on downtown, but you’ve mentioned a whole bunch of other parts of the city that could really use an infusion of imagination and encouragement to become the next Seaport or whatever — what other programs within Boston are being explored to really revitalize some of these more marginalized communities?
[00:27:44] James Arthur Jemison: So, I guess I’d say a couple of things. So, I think that the mayor made mention at a recent speech in October that she was considering other forms of providing resources to support other kinds of housing production that weren’t just office to residential. So, I think that’s one way in which some of the thinking and things we’ve learned here has been important. The value of having, we have a existing sort of development review team that does a great job. I, in my opinion, at least, managing a huge pipeline of proposed development, giving, supporting that staff further with more, more people who can basically help them carry development interests from the time they’re approved here, all the way into construction has been a real value. And again, the truncated and clearer process for regulatory review process is something I think we’re also saying that needs to be. We can bring things. We’re learning from that. Over into our regular modernization, but maybe if I’m talking more holistically about downtown, as opposed to my sort of narrow business side here would be to say the programming of the space in terms of like events, things to make the neighborhood, exciting multiple times a year, multiple times a day, multiple times a week is really essential to creating the energy in the city that we want to see and places that have done it. you see some of that in, in seaport, right now, places that have done it. Well, and invested in it are really seeing the dividend. So, I think if there’s a thing, that’s not necessarily like a conversion activity would be like, more programming is going to be essential.
[00:29:28] Joe Selvaggi: So, I hope we’ve piqued the interest of our listeners, either they be, they’re developers or, potential residents of these buildings that have been converted, or perhaps just people like me who just want to see more people on the street because we know that’s what makes our city great, makes it safe, makes it interesting.
[00:29:41] So, where can our listeners learn more about your office, your program, this particular program, and just where the boss, where what Boston sees as its goals for the future.
[00:29:51] James Arthur Jemison: Sure, so we have a downtown plan that we had a downtown kind of action plan. That’s about a year old that contains focus on look at this.
[00:30:01] And we also just passed at the board last week, a downtown plan. Both these things are on our website as well as the information about office to residential conversion. So, I think most of the stuff there and, and I think, people should come to our website and see some of the exciting stuff we’re into.
[00:30:20] Joe Selvaggi: Well, I wish your program a lot of luck. It sounds like at least your vision, is inspiring, let’s hope, where the rubber meets the road, and implementation, it gets, picked up. So, thank you very much for your time today, Arthur. You’ve been a really, a great guest, a fund of information, and I hope you’ll consider coming back if you up to it.
[00:30:37] James Arthur Jemison: We’d love to do it. I’d love to come back and talk about zoning. I’ll try to make zoning really exciting to everybody.
[00:30:42] Joe Selvaggi: I’m happy to talk about, we’ll do zoning. That’s, we beat that drum here quite a bit. So, if we want to talk about zoning, we’ll double back. But you’ve been a great guest. Thank you for joining me today, Arthur.
[00:30:50] James Arthur Jemison: Hey, thank you.
[00:30:50] Joe Selvaggi: This has been another episode of Hubwonk. If you enjoyed today’s show, there are several ways to support Hubwonk and Pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you and better for us if you subscribe to Hubwonk on your iTunes podcatcher. It would make it easier for others to find Hubwonk if you offer a five star rating or a favorable review.
[00:31:09] We’re always grateful if you share Hubwonk with friends. If you have ideas or comments or suggestions for me about future episode topics, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.
Joe Selvaggi discusses the strategic goals of Boston’s Downtown Office to Residential Conversion Pilot Program with James Arthur Jemison, the head of BPDA planning, aiming to transform underutilized offices in downtown into vibrant places to live.
Guest:
James Arthur Jemison is the Chief of Planning and Director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency. He is a seasoned public-private development leader with 28 years of planning and affordable housing expertise. Formerly Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), he oversaw key programs and partnerships with local governments. His career includes impactful roles in Detroit, Washington D.C., and Boston, contributing to equitable growth and recovery. Jemison holds a BA from UMass Amherst and a Master of City Planning from MIT and has received multiple awards for his contributions to urban development.
Massachusetts is arguably the most educated state in America, and one of the birthplaces of America’s civic tradition. If there’s any place in the country where you would expect to find consensus about the value of teaching American history, it is here.
Unfortunately, the fight for more comprehensive civics education in the Bay State has persisted for years with no sign of abating. Advocates won an important battle recently when public outcry led the Legislature to override Gov. Maura Healey’s cut to the state’s modest civics instruction budget.
The override suggests many in Massachusetts — including parents, teachers, and lawmakers — support strengthening the state’s civics and history curriculum, particularly with mounting evidence of declined student performance across the country.
And yet, for the last 30 years — since the state passed the landmark 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) — governors and legislators on Beacon Hill have steadily retreated from the legislation’s goals. MERA’s grand bargain included sharp funding increases for public education coupled with comprehensive academic standards, well-funded civics programs, and rigorous assessments to measure student aptitude and catalyze improvements.
Those reforms worked, helping Massachusetts go to the head of the class — nationally and internationally — on several major indices, including standardized test scores, college matriculation rates, and economic performance.
Nevertheless, the state’s fealty to the principles and objectives of MERA waned through the 2000s and 2010s.
Former Senate President Tom Birmingham, a MERA co-sponsor and Pioneer’s former Senior Education Fellow, lamented the stagnating civics and education funding in 2013, when he wrote that “in the last decade, support for public schools lost its primacy on Beacon Hill and state budgets reflect that. [Massachusetts’] inflation-adjusted education appropriation is the same as it was in 2002.” As Pioneer’s Jamie Gass and Charles Chieppo wrote in this 2019 article, state officials have failed to consistently follow through on MERA’s requirements and promises.
Lawmakers repeatedly postponed and, in 2009, indefinitely suspended the law’s requirement that U.S. history and civics be made part of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) testing required for graduation from a public high school. With no state-level assessment of student aptitude in these subjects, lawmakers are unable to measure the state’s curricular efficacy.
Rather than rely on time-tested methods of measuring students’ knowledge and aptitude, Massachusetts’ lawmakers implemented naïve revisions to the civics curriculum. Those revisions often pushed aside serious study of the nation’s Founding era and the tenets of American political philosophy in favor of calls to activism and protest.
The latest proposed degradation to Massachusetts’ civics education came dangerously close to fruition this fall. Gov. Healey quietly vetoed a $500,000 increase for the Civics Education Trust Fund and instead proposed lowering the program’s budget by the same amount, to a meager $1.5 million.
To put these numbers into context, the Bay State’s overall budget for the coming fiscal year is nearly $60 billion, of which about $6.6 billion will be devoted to education.
The governor’s veto was a worrying sign for civics educators and enthusiasts. In mathematical terms, the veto asserted that just $1 of every $40,000 in state spending should be devoted to the Civics Education Trust Fund.
While Massachusetts remains one of America’s leaders in per-pupil K-12 spending, cutting this program by a half-million dollars would have sent a negative message to the rest of the nation about educational priorities in a state whose historical traditions resonate throughout the land.
Thankfully, advocacy groups from across the state lobbied Beacon Hill lawmakers to override Gov. Healey’s veto and guarantee more funding for programs that connect Massachusetts’ youth with the state’s famed civic tradition. The Legislature agreed, overrode the Governor’s cut in October, and restored the increase.
The Legislature’s action is cause for celebration, with an important caveat. Small budgetary victories are no substitute for a full commitment to the requirements of the 1993 education reform law. That Beacon Hill has refused to fully comply with the law for nearly 30 years is a troubling symptom in a state that aspires to be a wellspring of democratic citizenship and a model for the nation.
The $6.6 billion in annual K-12 money and $171.5 million on lunch programs are celebrated as examples of Massachusetts’ leadership in education. In a world of high per-pupil spending, policymakers should be able to find fiscal room for civics. As the following chart shows, the $2.5 million devoted to the state’s Civics Education Trust Fund is a tiny piece of the overall education budget for fiscal 2024.
Massachusetts should be expanding civics and history education, not retreating from it. And the state should reject recent trends and fads. As recommended in Pioneer’s latest book, Restoring the City on a Hill: U.S. History and Civics in America’s Schools, the state would benefit from abandoning “action civics” teaching standards that de-emphasize America’s common cultural fabric.
Given the declining performance on national civics assessments, restoring the long-discussed MCAS civics tests would give lawmakers a valuable barometer for student performance, helping to shape more effective curricular reform.
Supporting programs like the Civics Education Trust Fund would allow interested students from across the state to participate in non-partisan civics projects that they design and lead themselves. There’s no question that our democracy would benefit from kinder, less aligned, and more open-minded participants.
A comprehensive civic education program is essential to Massachusetts’ status as a leader in education. Given its history, tradition, and contribution to the American ethos, the Bay State has an obligation to embrace the teaching and testing of American history and civics — and a great deal to lose if it continues to retreat from its own traditions.
Jude Iredell is a Roger Perry Civics Intern with the Pioneer Institute. He is a senior at Pomona College pursuing a degree in history.
Smith College’s Carol Zaleski on The Lord of the Rings & Narnia
/in Education, Featured, Learning Curve, News, Podcast /by Editorial StaffRead a transcript
The Learning Curve Dr. Zaleski 12/20/2023
[00:00:00] Albert: Well, hello everyone. Good day to you and welcome to another episode of The Learning Curve podcast. I’m your host today, Albert Cheng, professor at the University of Arkansas and co-hosting with me is Alisha Searcy again. Hey, Alisha.
[00:00:38] Alisha: Oh, Albert. Glad to be back again. We should make this a regular thing.
[00:00:41] Albert: Yeah, that’s right.
[00:00:42] Albert: I know. Well, happy holidays to you too.
[00:00:46] Alisha: It’s been great so far. I’m looking forward to the rest of the year and I hope everyone is safe and enjoying time with family and loved ones and all of that.
[00:00:56] Albert: So actually, you know, I think this might lead right into my news story at the end.
[00:00:59] Albert: I thought I’d pull just kind of a historical reference here that last, I think it was Saturday the 16th, was the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Actually, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Boston and seen the reenactment.
[00:01:15] Alisha: I’ve been to Boston, have not seen the reenactment.
[00:01:16] Albert: Yeah, I, I remember when I was living there several years ago and I heard about the reenactment. I had to participate, and it never occurred to me that the Boston Tea Party happened right at this time of year in the heart of December. And certainly, being out there in the cold with all the reenactors put a new light a new understanding on that whole event for me.
[00:01:35] Albert: But it’s 250 years. just Google some of the articles that are out their kind of commemorating that, but certainly a big event in our nation’s history and all the more enlightening if you kind of imagine it happening right in the heart of a Boston cold winter,
[00:01:52] Alisha: Right? Definitely gives you new meaning.
[00:01:54] Albert: Yeah. I was glad to be bundled up. I’m not sure about the some of those reenactors, but anyway you have some news as well, right?
[00:02:01] Alisha: I do. So, the article that I want to talk about is about this great debate around retaining students or holding them back based on test scores or reading proficiency or whatever measure that states are using. And so according to this article, there are two research studies I talked about, one in 2017 in Florida and then another one that has multiple states.
[00:02:23] Alisha: And so, you know, I’m a mom, I’m also an educator, I’ve been a superintendent. And so, it’s interesting to me to read about this debate, right? So, on one hand you have, according to this article, educators who are saying they don’t like students to be held back, you know, there are interventions that you can do.
[00:02:40] Alisha: You can do all that you can to make sure they have what they need, but then there’s another school of thought. frankly, the research says and particularly in this study in Florida, the third graders in Florida, if given better instruction, I think that’s an important piece that they actually perform better in math and reading in their high school grades, they need fewer remedial classes, higher GPAs and students who didn’t get held back.
[00:03:07] Alisha: And then another study that looks at multiple states, also shows higher test scores in the later grades and reduces the need for remediation. And so again, this is what the research is saying. And then there are those who are in the school of thought that say, well, what about the emotional impact that this has on students if you’re being held back?
[00:03:26] Alisha: And I totally get that, right? From a young person’s perspective, you think, you know, I’m back with the same teacher or, you know, team. All of my friends are gone. That could take a toll. But there’s a Harvard researcher who was involved in the study, Martin West, who this is his quote. He says, my question would be whether they’re confident that the students wouldn’t have had an equally painful experience if they were advanced to the next grade and consistently faced content on which they were unprepared.
[00:03:57] Alisha: Yeah. I think that was a really good one. It really helps to kind of shore up for me why I think I fall on the side of if you need to retain a student, let’s do that. And Albert, here’s another thing, I wrote a piece maybe two weeks ago about a decision that our state board of education made here in Georgia, where they essentially lowered the cut score for reading proficiency for third graders.
[00:04:21] Alisha: And so just based on that reduction, once again, 20,000 students in Georgia were essentially told that they were proficient in reading when they were not. So, this is for me about telling students the truth and telling parents the truth about where these students are. Yes, you can do all the intervention that you want, but I think if a student doesn’t have the foundation in reading and math.
[00:04:47] Alisha: Maybe holding them back is the right thing so that they can then catch up. And then it looks like exceed expectations later on in their grades. What do you think?
[00:04:56] Albert: No, I think that’s absolutely right. I mean, you know, actually, I think a couple of episodes ago, we featured an article on grade inflation and I think we really at the point we were making then was we do kids a disservice families at a service when we essentially tell them that they’re ready to move on or are ready for the next step when they’re not.
[00:05:16] Albert: So, with you on this and we really have to look carefully at this and avoid telling families and kids that they’re more prepared or better than they really are. I know the truth hurts sometimes, but sometimes obfuscating that is just going to have worst consequences.
[00:05:29] Albert: So yeah, anyway, you know, got to do this. Well, this is careful, but don’t think I’m with you. Well, stick with us. After the break, we’re going to have Dr. Carol Zaleski to talk to us about the Inklings, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and some of the other folks in that merry band of men.
[00:06:01] Albert: Professor Carol Zaleski is Professor of World Religions at Smith College, where she teaches Philosophy of Religion, World Religions, and Christian Thought. Zaleski is the author of The Life of the World to Come from Oxford University Press, and is co-author with Philip Zaleski of The Fellowship, The Literary Lives of the Inklings, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. Another book, Prayer, A History, and The Book of Heaven, all but from Oxford University Press, and The Book of Hell, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is a columnist and editor at large for Christian Century, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, First Things, Parabola, the Journal of Religion, and the Journal of the History of Ideas.
[00:06:51] Albert: She earned her BA from Wesleyan University and her master’s and PhD in the study of religion from Harvard University. Dr. Zaleski, welcome to the show, it’s great to have you on.
[00:07:03] Carol Zaleski: It’s great to be here, Albert. Thank you.
[00:07:05] Albert: You’re the co-author. Let’s talk about The Fellowship, Literary Lives of the Inklings. It’s about a British literary circle, and I think most folks in the general public will know J.R.R. Tolkien and the creator of Lord of the Rings. They probably know C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia. But they might know a little bit less about the other folks in there. So, could you start and briefly share with us, who were the Inklings? And how did all these folks, especially Tolkien and Lewis, then become among the 20th century’s most influential writers?
[00:07:38] Carol Zaleski: Okay, great. Well, it’s fun to talk about the Inklings. It’s a book I co-authored with my husband, actually. And at the center of the story of the Inklings is a kind of collaboration between friends and the core friends. that were involved in the Inklings, although friends of those friends are important too, are these two figures you just mentioned. C.S. Lewis who I think we can call the leading Christian writer of the 20th century.
[00:08:01] Carol Zaleski: There might be other contenders for that crown, but I think that’s arguable. And Tolkien, arguably the greatest writer of mythopoeic fantasy, I would say of all time. So, the two of them met in Oxford in 1926. By that time, Tolkien was The Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo Saxon, that is Old English.
[00:08:23] Carol Zaleski: And Lewis was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature, also at Oxford at Magdalen College. And they discovered that they were kindred spirits. They had a shared love for old books generally, and for, especially for mythic stories, at first Norse mythology, and also for language study at first Icelandic.
[00:08:43] Carol Zaleski: But others do. But the other thing that they shared was a kind of a sense of, vocation, a calling to try to recover after a devastating world war, which they both served in and were wounded and wounded by anyway the various forms of art and life, which seemed to them to be in danger of vanishing. So, they had this shared commitment, and they would talk about all manner of things, some of it just academic politics, but all their, their shared interests. And with a few other friends, they just began to meet for conversation and long walks in the countryside. And from that circle came the Inklings.
[00:09:24] Carol Zaleski: They actually took the name from an earlier literary club. And they continued to meet for some 30 years. Twice a week typically. get together on Thursday evenings to read each other’s works and offer commentary and criticism and encouragement. And then they would also meet in a pub on Tuesday mornings just for fun. So that’s the Inklings. They didn’t see themselves as a movement. They didn’t have, you know, manifestos or placards, but they did really constitute something like a movement, if only because they did encourage each other to write the kind of books that they love to read, even though that meant bucking certain modernist trends. And I think, if people like the Lord of the Rings, it’s worth knowing that if it weren’t for the Inklings, and especially Lewis’s encouragement to Tolkien, we never would have seen the Lord of the Rings. It wouldn’t have seen the light of day.
[00:10:20] Albert: Would have been a great loss. Well, let’s talk a little bit about, I mean, you were talking about the literary tradition, really kind of referencing that the British literary tradition that, they were trying to revive and, preserve. And that encompasses a wide variety of legends, fairy tales, dramas, poetry, fiction and as you know, it draws upon many classic works the Bible, Beowulf, Chaucer King Arthur, you know, his legends Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge — we could go on and on — but could you talk about some of the overarching themes found in British literature and how they particularly shaped and inspired the writings of Tolkien and Lewis when they were writing?
[00:10:59] Carol Zaleski: Yeah, actually it’s a complicated and really interesting question. To start with Lewis, Lewis was just really famous for his erudition, for his powers as a reader. I think it would be hard to list all the influences on him. and all that he was trying to preserve of the British literary tradition. He basically lived inside the whole, not just British, but the whole Western canon.
[00:11:21] Carol Zaleski: He was really at home with eras. So, I wouldn’t associate him or the Inklings as a group exclusively with fantasy. However. There is something special within the British literary tradition, a special preoccupation with fantasy. One way to describe that is the word fairy, faerie that is, has a kind of double meaning. There’s all sorts of legends about fairies and elves and goblins, ghosts, and trolls populating the British Isles and British folklore. So, there’s, fairy in that sense, fairy lands. But there’s also fairy in the sense of a kind of realm of imagination, which has been a really important theme in British literature.
[00:12:03] Carol Zaleski: And that I think is what, in many ways, what they’re trying to preserve. And that would include Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, great works of allegorical imagination, or gave us John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It also gave us, you mentioned Coleridge, it gave us the poetry of the Romantics. It gave us this sort of neo-medieval art of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, and the fantasy novels of, perhaps not as well known, but deservedly would be well known the Scottish clergyman George MacDonald, who was an influence on all the Inklings.
[00:12:40] Carol Zaleski: You know, you mentioned the Bible too, now that’s an interesting question. It’s certainly the case that the King James Bible has shaped all of English literature and language. But when I think about the Biblical tradition that Tolkien and Lewis carried on, there’s another aspect to it. There’s more than one English Bible. And they were very familiar with early vernacular retellings of Biblical stories in Old English or Middle English. And if you go back and read these Biblical narratives it’s almost like you’re hearing the Gospels for the first time, but only in a certain way, kind of like they’re being sung by a bard or, you have more of a sense of fate and heroic battles and dragons and magical spells, even in the retellings of the Gospel narratives that you find in, in Old English and in some Middle English texts.
[00:13:34] Carol Zaleski: And so, they were familiar with the Bible as part of that. Living English tradition and saw how much of the pre-Christian material that flowed into it was then kind of almost like alchemically transformed into the drama of Christian redemption. And I think that’s what they were trying to carry on, that really interesting mix of folklore, fairy [00:14:00] tale, biblical stories, and pagan beauty.
[00:14:05] Albert: Let’s maybe zero in on Lord of the Rings in particular. And so, Lord of the Rings, I think a poll in 1997 said it was the book of the century. Could you tell us briefly about his life. And you mentioned imagination how he as a scholar of Old English used his imagination to become one of the 20th century’s most celebrated writers.
[00:14:26] Carol Zaleski: Yeah, well, this is interesting. This poll the 1997 poll did reflect the immense popularity of the Lord of the Rings, but it was also greeted with horror by some, let’s say, highbrow literary critics. So, one of them, Germaine Greer, I remember saying, it was like my worst nightmare has been realized. Edmund Wilson saying, this is just juvenile trash, so, it’s very interesting to see, you know, why he was so reviled by certain kinds of critics and so loved by everybody else. It’s like, what was the heresy he committed? I kind of think it was the heresy of the happy ending, but that they thought it was juvenile because in their stories, things work out well in the end.
[00:15:13] Albert: Such a non-modern thing to do, you know.
[00:15:15] Carol Zaleski: Yeah, yeah, it’s not a modern thing to do. So, about his life, Tolkien’s life, I mean, I guess we’d have to look at that to figure out how did he become such a literary maverick? I think it’s partly because he really wasn’t part of the fashionable literary currents of his day Although he, you know, he was certainly familiar with modern literature and well-read and maybe not at Lewis’s level but certainly he was.
[00:15:38] Carol Zaleski: Anyway, let me just say a little bit about his life So, he was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, which was the capital of what was called the Orange Free State in southern Africa. His father died when he was around three years old. At that point, he and his mother and younger brother were in England to escape the unhealthful climate they had been in.
[00:16:00] Carol Zaleski: And so, then they got news of the father’s death. So, they moved into a little town called Sarehole outside of Birmingham. It was a rather semi-rural hamlet with a working mill that meant a lot to Tolkien as he was growing up. So, their mother, now widowed, taught Tolkien and his brother everything, really for a while there before they went to school.
[00:16:25] Carol Zaleski: They were studying ancient and modern languages, the arts. Tolkien was a really gifted illustrator and artist, which she encouraged. Mathematics. She was quite brilliant and the other important fact about her is that she converted to Catholicism. During that time, and as a result was ostracized by her family.
[00:16:47] Carol Zaleski: And Tolkien believes that this is what led to her early death. She died from complications of diabetes when Tolkien was only 12 years old. So now he’s basically orphaned. He’s orphaned. But he was adopted by a priest, which is another interesting part of his story.
[00:17:03] Carol Zaleski: This is a priest who had been educating him his name is Father Francis he belonged to the Oratorian Order in the community that was founded by Saint, now Saint, John Henry Newman at Birmingham so obviously the Catholic strain in his early life is extremely important and remained throughout his life.
[00:17:21] Carol Zaleski: He went on to study at a school, King Edward School in Birmingham. And there he formed a very close-knit circle of friends, so this is kind of like the precursors to the Inklings who had very high ideals, both moral and poetic. Made a kind of pact with one another, that they would devote their lives to rekindling the light of beauty and truth and faith in our world.
[00:17:49] Carol Zaleski: But what happened was, they all ended up fighting in the First World War, and as Tolkien says, all but one of his close friends died in that war. By 1918, they had all died. So, there’s that element of tragedy and of commitment to beauty that, you know, is so important for understanding what Tolkien’s going to try to do with his sense of calling. Now part of that sense of calling for him is a love of languages, the literal meaning of philology. So, thanks to his mother, of course, he was exposed to many different languages. He also knew the Latin of the Catholic Mass. He talks about being enchanted by seeing these Welsh coal trucks passing by with the Welsh language on them the exotic language for him, really loved that.
[00:18:39] Carol Zaleski: I’d say though his main love is in the Germanic family of languages, that’s certainly his main area of scholarship, that is Old English and Gothic, the dialects of the West Midlands, which was his own part of England, and all of these regions where He could reconstruct what English was like before the Norman invasion and the Frenchification of English beginning in 1066. all of that figures in the kind of literature he would produce. I mentioned he served in, in the First World War. And in fact, began his creative work in the trenches. You know, it’s interesting, the philosopher Wittgenstein did that too. On the other side, you know, the other the opposing side.
[00:19:24] Carol Zaleski: All these people were writing great poetry in the trenches during these hideous, deadly battles. in fact, the dead marshes in the Lord of the Rings most people think are, based on or at least resemble the war scarred landscapes that he experienced, so, he was in the, infamous Battle of the Somme, so he experienced a lot of loss early on the loss of his close friends in the war, a sense of, the English countryside, his beloved Sarehole, losing its rural because of industrialization the sense of a kind of rupture in English literature and language brought on by the Norman Conquest, which he felt led to England being impoverished when it came to a national mythology.
[00:20:12] Carol Zaleski: England needed a mythology. So, he decided he would have to create one. It would be based on language. So, the myth, and he had this feeling that language is in a way the matrix of myth. Or at least that they’re very much intertwined. So, he was hoping for something that he could create, single handedly, quite an ambition something like the Finnish Kalevala, which, you know, brings together all kinds of, mythic strands, but unites them in a narrative.
[00:20:42] Carol Zaleski: And so, he hoped to do this, and he wanted to bring the pre-Christian, even pre pagan past of England. Into the story but connect it to the Christian drama to bring in themes of mercy and sacrifice and sin and redemption, all woven in with this mythology. And I don’t really know any other writer who’s ever done anything on this scale.
[00:21:08] Carol Zaleski: There was some precedent, like Blake kind of invented a mythology. But no one that I can think of had so singlehandedly put together and this is unfinished, but he, you know, went so far to have invented and evolving languages and consistent nomenclature and geography, creation accounts and different levels of history and different stories that are not always completely consistent because they’re meant to suggest oral traditions. That kind of rich backstory. I can’t think of anyone else.
[00:21:43] Albert: Or to put it another way, a friend of mine was asked the best universe out there, Star Wars or Marvel? And he said, no, it’s Lord of the Rings, the original.
[00:21:52] Carol Zaleski: Right. And you know, you need to then read the Silmarillion and the 12-volume History of Middle Earth and all the new material that Christopher Tolkien, before his death, was gathering from all the manuscripts. His son Christopher did a massive work in, retrieving the unfinished work. Lord of the Rings is just the tip of the iceberg. So anyway, he began this whole colossal project while he was in the trenches and also he came down with trench fever, so he had sick leave that probably saved his life. And then he continued it when he came back to England and took up his academic career. and then it continued you could say it was a hobby, but it was really more like an obsession.
[00:22:33] Albert: You were talking about some themes of Lord of the Rings has and of course you mentioned the Silmarillon and of course there’s The Hobbit which came before Lord of the Rings. What other themes are there? And I’ll ask two questions here. Yeah. Why is it that you know, folks, young and old alike, remain drawn to Tolkien, and what are some of the timeless lessons that are there for us to understand today particularly for our time?
[00:23:00] Carol Zaleski: Yes, well, it’s hard to talk at once about The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings because they are really different, and they were especially different when he first wrote The Hobbit. Tolkien was quite a family man and used to tell all sorts of stories to his children and send them letters from Father Christmas and, and all of that. And also, he had to work during the summers grading examination papers to keep the family afloat financially. Well one day as he was, he says as he was marking some student papers, and he was probably bored to death. This phrase just popped into his mind out of nowhere, it went like this, in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. So, he’s got this phrase, and he’s going to take a story from it. And the story that he made, youknow, could be certainly described as a children’s book it came out in 1937, it was a popular book, so the publisher wanted a sequel.
[00:23:51] Carol Zaleski: Well, it took him 12 years to write the sequel, and all that time he was developing the mythology, the languages, the backstories, all of that. Not even backstories, he was, you know, creating, this corpus of legends, that was where his heart was, so what finally emerged from this 12-year process, with all sorts of false starts, was used to be called the New Hobbit. What was going to be the New Hobbit turned into a very different sort of story, which I would not call a children’s book. And it began to be sort of infused with, and it began to figure um, the mythology. That weren’t all present in The Hobbit, or certainly were very different in the way they appear in The Hobbit.
[00:24:35] Carol Zaleski: Like the wizards, you know, you can have a wizard in The Hobbit, sort of fits our popular idea of what a wizard is like, but once you get to The Lord of the Rings, you begin to realize that these wizards are a whole different order of beings that, they have this extreme longevity.
[00:24:53] Carol Zaleski: Or the, the elves who also have extreme longevity. They’re immortal as long as the world lasts. So, they survived these epic wars from the distant past, and they’re lingering in Middle Earth and they’re aware that they’re glorious fading. And then you have these orcs and the Ents, the tree shepherds, all of these characters that are coming in from mythology.
[00:25:14] Carol Zaleski: But beyond that gets to be a darker tale. And it’s interesting that I think a lot of the appeal of The Lord of the Rings what makes it resonate more deeply than The Hobbit is the element in it of loss and defeat, but of also a final redemption. It’s on a much deeper level. You can see that in the ring changed. At first you thought, you know, the ring was kind of a harmless magical device. But as he developed the sequel, Lord of the Rings version of the ring, you know, we find out that it was created by this dark lord, Sauron, to rule over all the different races of Middle Earth, the men, the dwarves, the elves, and so on. You have this ring and it’s the object and the cause of all these great epic wars. It has in it the power of this dark lord who himself is like a, a lieutenant of the original sort of satanic figure in Tolkien’s creation myth. Anyway, he’s created this ring. His power is vested in it.
[00:26:15] Carol Zaleski: He’s been partially defeated, but the ring is trying to get back to him. And if it does, if it succeeds, he will recover his power and use it to dominate and to destroy. Including the Shire itself, once he finds out that there is such a thing as the Shire. Because the funny thing is, it seems to be just by chance, the ring falls into the hands of this minor figure, this hobbit, Bilbo Baggins.
[00:26:39] Carol Zaleski: Up until now, the Dark Lord doesn’t know or doesn’t care about these funny little people. But now that it’s in the hands of a hobbit, the Dark Lord becomes aware of the hobbit and the Shire. And so now, this whole realm of these simple, ordinary, Sarehole-like shire folk, are in danger of becoming extinct. Everything that’s good and worth saving is on the verge of extinction at this point. So, the ring has to be destroyed. The interesting thing that I think Tolkien brings out here is that the defeat of Sauron can’t be accomplished by the strongest races of Middle Earth, the men, the elves.
[00:27:21] Carol Zaleski: So, the quest to destroy the ring falls to these simple shire folk, so to the hobbit Frodo, to his friends. Sam, Merry, and Pippin, who form a fellowship together with representative figures, loyal representatives of the races of elves and dwarves and men. Together they form this multi-race fellowship but without these humble and ordinary hobbits, they wouldn’t have succeeded.
[00:27:52] Carol Zaleski: And it’s partly because this is the one way you can outwit a power like Sauron, who knows only about the calculus of self-interest, of power, denomination. He only understands those things. But this fellowship with its simple hobbits at the core has a kind of resilience and also a willingness to sacrifice their self-interest that Sauron just couldn’t even think of.
[00:28:19] Carol Zaleski: And that’s how they’re ultimately able to defeat him. So, I think one reason that the tale is so enduring is that you have this group of ordinary hobbits that we can identify with. These are the kind of heroes we can identify with. And we can love them for their ordinariness, and also it brings a certain humor in, you know, when they’re singing, sing ho for the bath, and things like that.
[00:28:44] Carol Zaleski: These moments, because you go through this terrible long slog, and there’s so much misery, like going through the trenches. But then there were these, these moments of respite and refreshment that the hobbits can really, and that we can identify with. So, there’s that. I think also it’s basically just, it’s a great story. Tolkien had a certain theory about what great stories are like which we don’t really have time to go into. It’s like he executed on that. Yeah. it had deep roots in the British literary tradition, in human oral traditions and storytelling traditions generally.
[00:29:19] Carol Zaleski: But at the same time, it was very new. No one had ever done anything quite like it. Lewis when he reviewed it, and I forget for what, periodically he said, it was like lightning from a clear sky. Just completely unexpected. So, it’s this amazing combination of very traditional, rooted in the past conservative in a way, but also totally surprising and novel. And giving rise to then all the imitations that would follow.
[00:29:48] Albert: Yeah, Alicia.
[00:29:50] Alisha: Thanks for being here, this is quite fascinating. So, I want to switch gears for a moment and talk about C.S. Lewis, who was a British writer, an Anglican lay theologian, and author of The Chronicles of Narnia. So, could you talk about Lewis’s life, his faith journey, and how his experiences fighting in World War I powerfully shaped the moral message of his work?
[00:30:11] Carol Zaleski: C. S. Lewis. So, he was born in 1898 to an Anglo-Irish Protestant family in Belfast. Like Tolkien, he lost a parent when he was young. Like Tolkien, he fought in the terrible First World War, in the trenches. He was wounded. I mean, this was supposed to be the war to end all wars, right? He saw friends killed or maimed. And then he lived to, like Tolkien, lived to witness the Second World War after the war to end all wars.
[00:30:41] Carol Zaleski: So, like Tolkien, you could think of him as a war writer. like Tolkien also, he believed that the world we live in Both the natural environment and the culture was under siege by forces like, of Sauron, you might say. Well, maybe that’s over dramatizing it, but certainly forces of technocracy, materialism, certain kinds of dehumanizing modernization.
[00:31:08] Carol Zaleski: In they weren’t trying to turn the clock back, but they did have a sense of the culture being at risk and needing to be renewed through connection to things that used to be valued in the past So, as I mentioned Lewis lost his mother when he was young And he also his father continued to live but they got on badly He had a wretched experience of boarding school, first principal of the school he went to actually ended up in an insane asylum. He went to Oxford as an undergraduate which should have been really exhilarating, but his studies were interrupted by the war, so he spent his 19th birthday on the front line. At the notorious Battle of the Somme, again, by Tolkien. He was wounded by friendly fire, actually, and two companions were killed by the same British shells.
[00:32:00] Carol Zaleski: Wow. Which was terrible, he made friends with another cadet who had been stationed along with him at Keeble College in Oxford. The colleges of Oxford were turned into barracks, basically, during this period. Anyway, they made a pact with each other to take care of their one parent, they each had one parent, if one of them died, and Patty died in the war, so Lewis inherited Patty’s mother, Mrs. Moore and lived with her from 1918 until she was hospitalized with dementia in the 1940s, so you know, very unusual. Household life in which he was really caring for her a lot, doing a lot of the household chores and so on. During the Second World War, he and Mrs. Moore opened their home to children being evacuated from London.
[00:32:45] Carol Zaleski: So just like in the Narnia tales, children sent away from London, in this case to the suburbs of Oxford. He had some that lived with them. He also served in the Home Guard during the Second World War. after the death of Mrs. Moore Lewis eventually married a writer named Joy Davidman. And was very influenced by her and in the end of her life they did some collaborative writing together, and then he wrote a very searing memoir of his experience of her death. But just to describe Lewis, wow, I mean, he was a genius too, and in a lot of different areas. He began his academic career as a philosopher, but then he became a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature, especially courtly love poetry.
[00:33:37] Carol Zaleski: He was a defender of Milton’s Paradise Lost at a time when the critical establishment was kind of rejecting it. He also was a philosopher, and he would get involved in, public debates. He was a very vigorous, sort of no-holds-barred debater, and he worked his way through most of the philosophical positions that were on offer in his day and in his part of the world. So, he was a young atheist of the kind who shakes his fist at God for not existing. He was a believer in the life force while still an atheist at a certain stage. He was an idealist philosophy that was just on the wane in Oxford. And eventually a sort of generic theist, that is someone who believes in God, but not in terms of any sort of church doctrine.
[00:34:24] Carol Zaleski: All that time. even as an atheist, he loved the picture of the world that he was finding in medieval literature, most of which, of course, is Christian. But he thought that he couldn’t engage with that world because modern science somehow vetoed it. So, what convinced him otherwise, and led to his conversion, Not just to a generic sort of belief in God, but to Christianity was conversations with two of his very important friends, Owen Barfield a member of the Inklings, and Tolkien himself, and Tolkien who was Catholic while Lewis would remain throughout his life a member of the Church of England Tolkien from the managed to convince Lewis that if you love mythology, you ought to love Christianity, because there’s the myth that entered history, and became fact that was just one factor, I think it’s too complicated a story to tell all the reasons for his conversion to Christianity, but once he did convert to Christianity, he became in part because of talks that he gave over the BBC during the Second World War, a kind of voice of Christianity for millions.
[00:35:31] Carol Zaleski: And he came to see that as, during the Second World War, in addition to being the Home Guard, that was kind of his war work, was to defend the faith, to keep up spirits, and at the same time to defend literature, and the two things are related for him. And that’s the basic picture of Lewis, which I hope is covering enough ground for us to get a sense of, of his multifaceted genius.
[00:35:55] Alisha: Multifaceted and brilliant and compassionate to know that he took on someone else’s mother and took care of her. That’s beautiful. You mentioned a couple of times his academic posts at Oxford and Cambridge as a medieval scholar. And also, he became a popular writer. Can you talk about Lewis as a professor and his interactions with students and fellow faculty members and how they received some of his more popular works those religiously themed works like Narnia, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity?
[00:36:29] Carol Zaleski: there’s a lot of student memoirs about Lewis and they tend to describe this guy with the red face and a booming voice. One anecdote about him is that he would start his lecture in the class, classroom lectures, he would start them as he was coming through the door and he would finish them as he was walking out the door, which I guess meant there wasn’t time for questions.
[00:36:51] Carol Zaleski: But anyway, he was very, very popular. Professor, teacher, he also tutored individually, and he was, you know, had a huge influence on, really thousands of students one way or the other. Some didn’t take to him like the poet John Betjeman, he was kind of a bete noire for him. He was also, as I mentioned, a debater.
[00:37:12] Carol Zaleski: There was a group called the Socratic Club where there would be debates between religious believers and atheists and so on, and he would take part in those debates. So as far as the reception of his popular Christian works goes, there’s a lot of variation Oxford itself, his colleagues and just the public in Oxford knew of him as a scholar and also as a very sophisticated lay preacher.
[00:37:39] Carol Zaleski: I mean some of his sermons were written up in the British press. Which named him Oxford’s new John Henry Newman, great Oxford preacher. And they knew him from his BBC radio broadcasts as a kind of really captivating evangelical soundbite person. And American evangelicals were flocking to the published versions of the BBC talks, that is, Mere Christianity, as well as Screwtape Letters, and works like that. But there were people who, for that very reason, looked down upon Lewis. the sort of people that were looking down upon American evangelicals.
[00:38:18] Carol Zaleski: Looked down upon Lewis as a kind of guilt by association and a lot of people knew him through Narnia and Screwtape but didn’t realize that he was also a really serious scholar and had other ways of writing about these religious themes that it wasn’t a theologian, but there was more theological sophistication in some of those two writings.
[00:38:42] Alisha: Interesting. So, I want to talk more about the Chronicles of Narnia. And of course, it’s considered a classic in children’s literature, having sold 120 million copies in 47 languages. Can you talk about briefly some of Narnia’s major themes and characters, and interestingly, the importance of the heroes being children who are called upon to protect Narnia from evil.
[00:39:06] Carol Zaleski: Yeah, I think it’s similar to the hobbits in Tolkien’s tales. You have what Tolkien called the Exaltavit humiles principle that is speaking in Latin from the Song of Mary when at the Annunciation, that God raises up the humble. And so, these are, little people who still have a certain kind of innocence, and they have a sense of wonder and also a kind of unprejudiced rationality.
[00:39:32] Carol Zaleski: Lewis really gives us that in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when Lucy knows she’s been to Narnia and the others have to try to figure out whether to believe her. And the professor says, well, have you known her to lie? No. Have you known her to be unhinged in any way?
[00:39:49] Carol Zaleski: No. Then why not believe her? So, there’s that. I think again we can identify with the children who see things that adults sometimes. miss. one of the questions about the Chronicles of Narnia is whether it’s just a kind of preachy didactic allegory, kind of clobbering us with its Christian symbolism. The people that don’t like Narnia see it that way. Tolkien himself had reservations about it for that reason. If we were to believe Lewis though, Lewis, it’s kind of like the story of the origins of the Hobbit. Tolkien said, you know, that this idea of the hobbit, that the word hobbit just came to him.
[00:40:34] Carol Zaleski: Lewis says that for him, it just began with an image, an image of a fawn carrying an umbrella. And then these other images, the white witch, the lion, and he didn’t at first think, oh, this is Christian, you know, but because his mind and his heart were furnished with Christian themes and convictions, they kind of pushed themselves into the story somewhat the same way that the mythology for Tolkien pushed itself into The Hobbit sequel.
[00:41:08] Carol Zaleski: So, Tolkien criticized Narnia because it seemed like a sort of preachy allegory, but Lewis insisted that it wasn’t that kind of preachy allegory. He said, actually what it is, it’s not an allegory, but a supposal, an imaginative supposal, and the supposal starts like this. although it wasn’t what prompted the first writing of the Narnian Chronicles, that is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
[00:41:34] Carol Zaleski: The supposal goes like this, what might Christ be like if there really were a world like Narnia and he chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he has done in ours? So, a world, in other words, that has talking beasts, the fawn and other creatures are talking beasts, which is [00:42:00] something that Tolkien pointed out too is, I think we have a kind of nostalgia for it, a great desire to be able to communicate with animals, so we love to hear stories in which the animals can speak, so if you have a world made up of these talking beasts, and you want a kind of Christlike story, then it would make sense for the incarnation to take the form of this magnificent lion.
[00:42:25] Carol Zaleski: So that’s supposedly not allegory, but supposal. I think that’s debatable. But from that seed of imaginative supposal, everything else sort of derives from there. He didn’t — I don’t think he planned it all out, but eventually he would have a creation story in The Magician’s Nephew, an account of how evil came into the world, which would illustrate a point that’s extremely important for both Tolkien and Lewis.
[00:42:49] Carol Zaleski: They both shared the belief that everything that exists is good. The creation is good. So evil is only a privation or a distortion [00:43:00] or Lewis would call it a bending of that original goodness. So, there’s no absolute evil in the world. So, he would give us a creation story in The Magician’s Nephew and he would do this in other works as well that would give us a sense of how evil came into the world without positing some absolute evil force opposed to God. And then throughout all the Narnian books, you’d have stories of sin and redemption and spiritual adventures and an account of end times in The Last Battle, which with the last judgment. So, these are all themes that he developed in a lot of different ways.
[00:43:38] Carol Zaleski: And I think if, I were trying to help someone appreciate Lewis, who is turned off by the Narnian Chronicles, I would recommend reading his Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, where you have a lot of the same themes at a more grown-up level.
[00:43:59] Alisha: Gotcha. So, you mentioned his use of animals. I would love to ask you about Aslan, who’s a major character in the Chronicles of Narnia. And unlike any other character in this series, he appears in all seven chronicles and is depicted as this talking lion. And described as the king of beasts, the son of the emperor over the sea, and the king above all high kings in Narnia. So, can you talk about Aslan, his symbolism, as well as Lewis’s role as a Christian apologist in a sweepingly secular age? And you talked about that a little bit earlier.
[00:44:32] Carol Zaleski: Yeah. So obviously Aslan is a Christ figure. And you have basically the crucifixion and resurrection, spoiler alert, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I think what makes that work effectively as a kind of retelling of the Gospel, yet also be universal in appeal so that people that don’t want to be preached to about Christianity can still love it, is how he depicts the talking beasts and the children responding to Aslan. In some ways that’s the best way to try to give a literary portrait of Christ is in the eyes of those who respond to him.
[00:45:15] Carol Zaleski: So, you know, it’s like Jesus is saying, you know, who do you say that I am? And people are responding to that question because there’s a mystery at the center. Of a Christ figure which isn’t going to be able to be fully revealed in any story but the response of people to that Christ figure, in this case Aslan. It’s going to reveal as much as one needs to know in a sense about, the whole symbolism and doctrine that’s being conveyed there. Yes, he’s a talking line. He also sings in the creation narrative. And this is something you find in Tolkien’s creation myth as well, that you have the creator sings the universe into existence.
[00:46:02] Carol Zaleski: Wow, I think that’s interesting because it’s the idea of, you know, in the beginning was the word. Creation happens through the word of God, just saying, let there be light, you know, but depicting that as singing has a, is a wonderful idea. I like that.
[00:46:17] Alisha: So finally, J. K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter, who has sold more than 600 million copies worldwide, making them the best-selling book series in history, commented that as a child, she enjoyed reading C.S. Lewis and was also influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien. We’re living in an era of great cultural divisiveness, sadly, and so would you talk about the Inklings’ wider spiritual, moral, and literary legacy across our modern world?
[00:46:46] Carol Zaleski: Wow, thank you for that question, Alisha. Yeah, I think they speak to and reveal to us, if we haven’t been noticing it, that there’s a great hunger for transcendence. For hope especially hope in situations where there’s a lot of defeat and cultural decline. I mean, that is so much the theme of Tolkien’s work.
[00:47:10] Carol Zaleski: Actually, he was once asked what the main theme was, and he said it was death, death, and immortality. But, but really, I think it’s about hope in the face of defeat and cultural decline. And we have a real hunger for that. And also, for reading in a way it’s kind of an endangered art. Louis said that reason we read is that we want to see with other eyes, not just with our own. And if we could do that, we would have more charity towards others as well, more capacity for understanding perspectives different from our own. There’s a hunger for faith, and they’re able, and this is something you don’t find in much modern literature, to offer a kind of faith, a kind of hope most of the time without being too cloyingly sentimental or superficially self-help like, and I think the reason for that is, their own erudition, that is that they were steeped in a great intellectual tradition and imaginative tradition, which has both moral and entertainment value. So, I guess that’s what I would emphasize. I think there are shared ideas about evil, about providence, about friendship and fellowship. About vocation. All of these things are themes that they deal with each in their own way, but it’s a shared treasure.
[00:48:39] Alisha: I love that. And so needed. So, as we close out this interview, Dr. Zaleski, we would love you could read for us, perhaps one of your favorite paragraphs or passages from your latest book?
[00:48:51] Carol Zaleski: Well, I guess to kind of continue with talking about their legacy, there’s an epilogue here, which we call the Recovered Image. [00:49:00] So I’ll read a little bit from that. So, talking about the Inklings as a whole. So not just Lewis and Tolkien, although they’re the stars of the story, but also Owen Barfield and Charles Williams who are important in our book. my husband Philip Zaleski and I say that the Inklings’ work, taken as a whole, has a significance that far outweighs any measure of popularity, amounting to a revitalization of Christian intellectual and imaginative life. They were 20th century romantics who championed imagination as the royal road to insight, and the medieval model, as Lewis called it, as an answer to modern confusion and anomie. Yet they were for the most part romantics without rebellion, fantasists who prized reason, for whom fairy was a habitat for virtues and literature a sanctuary for faith. Even when they were not on speaking terms, I should comment that did happen. But those are stories we can’t get into today for, anyway, not, not forever, but there were times when they fell apart.
[00:50:08] Carol Zaleski: But even then, they were at work on a shared project to reclaim for contemporary life what Lewis called the discarded image of a universe created, ordered, and shot through with meaning. Thank you very much.
[00:50:23] Alisha: It’s been so great to have you. This is a new area of literature for me, so I learned a lot today and I’m grateful for that.
[00:50:31] Carol Zaleski: Well, thank you, Alicia and Albert. I really enjoyed the conversation.
[00:50:36] Albert: Yeah, it was huge pleasure. I mean, I’d love to sit and go on and on and on. Yes. So much to talk about. But thanks for taking your time and being here.
[00:50:42] Carol Zaleski: My pleasure.
[00:51:12] Albert: Now moving to the Tweet of the Week. This one comes from U. S. News Education. The Duolingo English test, a computer adaptive language proficiency exam, is gaining momentum as a way to measure the language skills of prospective international students applying to U.S. colleges and universities. So, check out that link. we’re always seeing a bunch of technology change the way we Practice education change how our educational institutions are evolving being influenced by that. I think there’s just another one that caught my eye this week. least I don’t know if you are familiar with the procedures and application process of international students coming to the US for college but have to take additional exams about English language readiness. And so do a lingo, apparently has a computer adaptive test. And so, this is one that applicants from other countries can take remotely. But it’s computer adaptive unlike now, the TOEFL or some of these other exams where the set of questions is, already sets.
[00:52:26] Albert: This one. Kind of adjust. If you get an answer correct, it’ll start asking you a more difficult one and vice versa. And then basically gets you to land at what your level is at and report your results pretty quickly. So that’s more accurate sounds. Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s some gains there.
[00:52:41] Albert: Certainly access, I think is going to be something that’s going to change. You know, kids can take this from home. So, take a look at that tweet always lots of stuff advances, changing the way we do education. Yes. Alicia, it was great to co host another show with you, glad to have you on.
[00:52:58] Alisha: Yes, as always, Albert, great job, very interesting today, and I look forward to being on with you again.
[00:53:03] Albert: Yeah, that’s right. In the new year. So happy holidays. Happy new year, everybody. We wish you that from the Pioneer Institute look out for our next set of episodes coming this January in 2024. See you next year.
This week on The Learning Curve, guest co-hosts Prof. Albert Cheng of the University of Arkansas and Alisha Searcy interview Smith College Prof. Carol Zaleski. She discussed her co-authored book, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, renowned for their literary and moral impact. Prof. Zaleski covers Tolkien’s life, the success of The Lord of the Rings, and its enduring themes. Additionally, she delved into C.S. Lewis’s experiences, his role as a professor, and the timeless lessons in The Chronicles of Narnia. Her discussion extends to the broader legacy of the Inklings, influencing J.K. Rowling and resonating in today’s culturally divisive era, emphasizing their spiritual and moral contributions. Prof. Zaleski closes the interview reading an excerpt from her book The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings.
Stories of the Week: Albert discussed a story from Politico about Boston commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party with reenactments and community events; Alisha commented on a story in The Washington Post about the debate on retaining students based on test scores.
Guest:
Tweet of the Week:
https://x.com/USNewsEducation/status/1734317256409059370?s=20
Boston’s Building Bargain: Coaxing Commercial Conversions to Condos
/in Featured, News, Podcast Hubwonk /by Editorial StaffClick here to read a transcript
Transcript Hubwonk
Jemison, December 19, 2023
[00:00:00] Joe Selvaggi: This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi. Welcome to Hubwonk, a podcast of Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston. The COVID- 19 lockdowns have had a lasting effect on downtown Boston. While neighborhoods such as Back Bay or Seaport have largely snapped back to pre-pandemic activity levels, those areas primarily dominated by commercial office buildings like the Financial District, have been hit hard by the enduring embrace of remote work.
[00:00:38] The troublingly high vacancy rates in downtown office space comes in stark contrast to strong demand for residential housing from those looking for urban convenience and amenities. This mismatch between the dearth of residential inventory and surplus of commercial property has led the city’s developers and leaders to explore the possibility that more could be done.
[00:00:59] To that end, in July, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced a residential conversion pilot program that the City hopes will incentivize developers to convert underutilized downtown commercial buildings to much needed housing, giving new life to the once bustling Financial District. Could this creative solution, which includes substantial tax incentives and expedited project approvals, be enough to bring money and talent to the table?
[00:01:24] And what can such a program teach City Hall about proactively encouraging investment in new residential stock across the city? My guest today is Arthur Jemison, Chief of Planning at the Boston Planning and Development Agency. Mr. Jemison oversees the agency’s planning, regulation of major development, and management of the agency’s 20 million square feet of property in the city.
[00:01:48] He will share with us his views on Boston’s changing commercial and residential landscape and explain how Mayor Wu’s Downtown Office to Residential Conversion Pilot Program endeavors to help fill Boston’s erstwhile bustling Financial District with new residents eager to share the city’s energy and amenities.
[00:02:06] We will discuss the profile of the buildings targeted by the program, the incentives on offer for willing conversion developers, and the projected success for a program that could be a model for other neighborhoods, and for similar cities around the world. When I return, I’ll be joined by chief of planning for the Boston Planning and Development Agency, Arthur Jemison.
[00:02:26] Okay, we’re back. This is Hubwonk. I’m Joe Selvaggi, and I’m now pleased to be joined by chief of planning for the BPDA, Arthur Jemison. Welcome to Hubwonk, Arthur.
[00:02:36] James Arthur Jemison: Thanks so much. So happy to be here. I appreciate the invitation.
[00:02:39] Joe Selvaggi: Well, I’m pleased to have you here. I’ll say this. I’ll confess at the start. I’m a 30-year resident of Boston. So, it’s a real thrill for me to talk with someone who is helping to plan to make the city, even more vibrant and livable city. We’re going to narrow our focus on our conversation of planning, primarily on Mayor Wu’s new pilot program labeled Downtown Office to Residential Conversion Pilot Program. That’s what we’re going to talk about, but before we get to the nitty gritty, let’s start at the beginning. you’re our inaugural, Chief of Planning. Say more about you, your background, and this in this role.
[00:03:15] James Arthur Jemison: Sure. again, thanks for the invitation. I love to talk about, planning topics whenever there’s an opportunity, so I’m a 30 year, veteran of, planning and development, work, starting in the on the private side, and then spending a lot of my career in public work in just to be very specific, starting out at a real estate feasibility shop in Miami, Florida, almost specifically 30 years ago, joining the Boston Housing Authority to work on the redevelopment of the first phase of the mixed finance redevelopments of public housing, Orchard Park Mission/Main, and, and the work in South Boston on West Broadway, working in this agency as a young man, I spent, years, working, for the, District of Columbia, department of, the deputy mayor’s office, where we worked on baseball, the siting of this facility, a new national stadium and a series of other major planning, or the city center, U.S.A. or city center D.C. I should say, and then back here in Boston, working at MassPort in private industry, and then joined the Deval Patrick administration. Most recently, I spent about the last 10 years, about 7 of them with Mayor Duggan of Detroit, part of the recovery from the bankruptcy. And then I spent two years in the Biden administration as the, acting assistant secretary for planning, for community planning and development after which I joined the Wu administration.
[00:04:50] Joe Selvaggi: Wonderful. That’s quite a resume. You’ve seen — I’m trying to keep track — the ones I could, the cities I could count Miami, D.C., Detroit, and Boston, of course.
[00:04:59] So, I’ll give you, I’ll tee this up, let you hit it out of the park compared with other cities. What do you see as Boston strengths, you know, again, from a planning perspective and what are some of its vulnerabilities, you know, you mentioned some substantial cities, that’s quite a range from Detroit to D.C.
[00:05:11] James Arthur Jemison: Absolutely. So, what’s unique about Boston is that we have, other communities have meds and eds, that they really rely on to help strengthen, the economic life of the city. But Boston’s meds and eds, plus it’s already a historic presence in, the “FIRE” sector, finance, insurance, real estate, is so strong, and it’s been going on so long as led by some of the leading institutions, not just in the United States, but in the country has been a key part of our competitive advantage. And I think when you saw significant investment in biotech, in our community, maybe over the last 15, 20 years, you’ve always seen some of that growth really accelerate again that the competitive advantage of Boston is where some of the smartest and most experienced practitioners in those parts of the sort of science-based leadership are located. And so, for that reason, people come here for that. Not just the people who are here, but the sort of network of institutions and institutional relationships that make this would produce those ideas. That’s why they’re here and that’s why we’re the leader.
[00:06:21] Other cities have different advantages, but that’s ours. I think if there’s a thing that. Maybe a sort of sensitivity that we have it’s that we’ve had against the FIRE sector and sectors like it have been so strong here for so long that as office space and the way that it’s used has become, more of a sort of a different kind of venture. If the whole topic needs a little bit of a rethink, and I think we’re beginning to do some of that with our pilot program.
[00:06:52] Joe Selvaggi: Sure. So, you alluded to some vulnerabilities. Let’s say if we are, you called the FIRE sector, which may be a little more footloose or able to work remotely. I don’t want to give away or bury the lead here, but, again, as a resident here, we all live through COVID. Boston was a ghost town for a while. And but we saw a neighborhood snap back. I live on Beacon Hill, Back Bay, South End, North End, boom. You can barely move. It’s so busy. Of course, the exception there is downtown and the financial district. They’re still, really, hurting. Again, I don’t want to answer the question for you, but why do you think they have not snapped back the way the rest of the city has?
[00:07:27] James Arthur Jemison: Well, it’s a combination of things. as I think about the experience, you’re describing a lot of it comes from programming of the first, for commercial density of population and office, and I think if you go to a place, that’s really again, hard to walk around, you see a greater mix of residential and commercial uses in the Financial District with section of a few hotels and other uses really, it doesn’t have quite that density of population. As you say, you walk around back Bay, on one side of Boylston, you’ve got office and then a couple blocks further you’re in Back Bay. Or if you’re spending time in the seaport again, there’s a different mix of residential and commercial uses and a lot of focus on programming that brings people together in those places. I think the Financial District hasn’t had that exact experience. And so that’s one of the reasons it’s different. And so I think that’s also one of the reasons why it’s been a place we focused our energy and thinking about, is it possible in a few places to create some new residential opportunities for people? It’s one of the reasons we spent time and are spending time now thinking about it.
[00:08:42] Joe Selvaggi: I’m glad you pointed out that fact that I think the magic of Boston is we do have offices and people living right, side by side, densely populated. I don’t want to spend too much time on this idea. But of course, if we’re going to talk about if we’re going to gripe about Boston, we’re going to have to admit it’s a very expensive place. There’s just not enough housing. And we’re all on top of each other here on Beacon Hill, there’s no room to build and not in Back Bay. So you know, we have to make the most of what we have. You’re a planner. Again, this may be a difficult question to answer generally, but finding new places for people to live in Boston a priority, meaning, we’ve got we’re hemmed in, where can we go? Is that the, what a planner for the city does?
[00:09:21] James Arthur Jemison: You’re absolutely sending me off into a very interesting area, which I don’t want to dwell in, but we are working very hard to create more as of right opportunity for the development of housing. I think I’m proud of the work of my colleague, Sheila Dillon on the affordable housing production that she does.
[00:09:38] But we also believe that supply and creating more supply is going to be part of the solution to reducing prices or keeping prices more moderate. So, in that way, the rezonings that we have done, undertaken in a few neighborhoods and are planning to push even further in other neighborhoods of the city. We recently spent time rezoning Charlestown, East Boston, New Market, Mattapan, a wide range of different neighborhoods, and as we go into the new year, we’ll be doing a lot more of that. So, to your point, there’s lots of places where growth can happen. One of the issues we struggle with is that growth, we, through our regulation, in some ways and some places are one of the limiting factors that creates ambiguity and then people have a harder time investing. So maybe for another podcast, we can talk about zoning. but we’re, but it’s exactly what we do is finding new places to grow.
[00:10:32] Joe Selvaggi: Well, that’s good. So far you said, supply and demand is what drives prices and, regulation stifles supply. So, you’re singing our song here on, on the podcast. So let’s go, let’s focus on the,particular program that we wanted to discuss, which is the conversion of office to residential. At a high level, what are the goals of this program for those listeners who are new to this? Describe in broad strokes what it’s supposed to do.
[00:10:54] James Arthur Jemison: It’s important to step back a little bit and talk about why and I think you actually began the conversation I think in the perfect place in the sense that what you have is, parts of the city where there’s a mix of residential and commercial, places that people work places that people live were some of the 1st places to bounce back. and so, as we think about what’s going to help change the character of some, of some of the neighborhoods that didn’t have post-COVID, the same kind of bounce back would be to say, let’s have a little bit more residential in those places, if possible, or at least invite the opportunity. Now, normally that would be conventionally a good thing, but some of it has to do with some of the softness in the occupancy of office buildings, frequent focus groups that we would host, or, development interest we would talk to would describe my building as fully leased, but, there’s really, I’ve got a large number of small tenants. Many of them can work from home. There’s just been a lot less people and fewer people and less foot traffic in and around my building and fewer people kind of pass-carding into the building. So, I really need to think carefully about what my next move with my building is. We had a lot of that sort of feedback. We also began to have some owners approach us about conversion, and owners are also describing, the comparables that we’re seeing in the market where there are some older, less well-appointed buildings are beginning to trade at lower prices.
[00:12:24] And so, frankly, we saw an opportunity now approaching from another direction. Our values really, as a city are like, let’s create this density. Let’s create opportunities for people to live together. Let’s create opportunities for people to live near transit. Let’s create a more of a range of times of day and times of the week that our neighborhoods are being used.
[00:12:45] Residential is one of the ways to do that. So, I said, maybe there’s an opportunity, to maybe to put it more simply, there’s a sort of asset class, that’s being undervalued that has a chance to be converted to residential. Oh, a number of our different a number of different values. We have intersected the chance to take a historic building. That’s a key part of the city’s history that may have a footprint. That’s. Would be great for an office in 1870 but isn’t great for office now. but it’s compact enough. It doesn’t have a big floor place. The current office does that might have 40 percent use or even less occupancy. Let’s talk to that owner and see if there’s a chance and there’s a program. We could say them. “Hey, as you’re looking at these other trends, look at this as an opportunity.” We’ve been pleased with some of the response we’ve received.
[00:13:38] Joe Selvaggi: Well, wonderful. So I’m glad to hear it’s both reactive, you’re responding to the market, but proactive, you’re knocking on doors, and asking building. So describe. Go ahead. Let me love another easy question for you, which is, look, we’ve got skyscrapers, shiny ones, very proud of, but we also have some older buildings. This is Boston. So .describe it for our listeners. What does a skyscraper — what does a, somebody, a building you might knock on the door and say, look, this would be much better used as a residential building.
[00:14:05] James Arthur Jemison: What does it look like? Absolutely. So, while you’re on that topic, we are seeing some amazing new offices being built. And that’s actually a part of the dynamic as well is the places that people want to come back to are places where they’re extremely, they’re deeply amenitized and have every kind of feature. You can imagine also having great, environmental credentials, passive house or high LEED certification. So, so that’s a dynamic and people who are coming back say, well, I could actually get a really expensive sublease space. That’s really much higher end of the market. But back to your point. So, yes, we’re an old and historic city. And so, we haven’t like office spaces that run the full gamut. At one end of that gamut are a series of older buildings from the beginnings of the need for office space that have smaller floor plates that make them easier to convert to residential and they’re not often not as tall as the other buildings, and, they lend themselves, to some degree, to that kind of use. Meanwhile, people who have downtown or residential that’s close to employment centers, often, often talk about having that proximity, having the benefit of, the first-floor businesses often have the benefit of not just having during the week business, but, they might have,weekend business or other kinds of a more diverse base of a business for the work they’re doing.
[00:15:33] So, we’re finding that these are smaller, older, office spaces are places where people have been responding pretty, robustly to, to our work. There’s also a study that we had commissioned that sort of identified for plate best floor plates and named about, I think it’s 60 buildings in our downtown that they thought would be well suited to meet those kind of floor plate standards. So, again, most of them are older and then the financial district, although they’re all over the city and in areas adjacent to, like, the weather district, et cetera.
[00:16:09] Joe Selvaggi: So, we’re you’ve identified again proactively done a study sounds great. So, where the those what’s right? What’s the low hanging fruit to use a tired cliche? When you talk to owners of these buildings that you have identified and say, look, consider this might be the highest and best use of this building. What are the obstacles? We’re going to talk about what incentives this program has. What are you for those, prioritize for is it of course, everybody wants to turn a profit, this is earth, but there’s regulations, there’s environmental concerns, there’s perhaps a need for affordable housing, there’s, all kinds of incentives, once you both first lay out the concerns, and then how this program is going to address those concerns.
[00:16:48] James Arthur Jemison: Sure, so, many of the owners are, so I guess I’d say the issues of the owners talk about, I’ve touched on them a little bit before, but they include things like, well, my building is partially occupied by tenants who are very, use the space a lot. And then I have other tenants who don’t use the space. My leases are going to end in the next year or so, they have a real kind of risk reward calculation to make. Well, if the office market comes back, and it may, will it come back with at the same rates will come back as strong as it was before? Or will I have maybe a re-up?
[00:17:28] From one of my tenants that gets about 50 percent of my space, but not the other ones in the space. I’ll have to lease in order to occupy. It’ll be at a very low rate. I won’t be able to make my project work anymore. they’re having those kinds of risk award conversations and increasingly because of, the what’s happening to the comparable sales and comparable values.
[00:17:50] Their banks are also, and lenders and equity participants are also saying, they’re all having to say, like, should we stick it out and try to, release up as an office, especially when there’s brand new space coming on board, or should we think about doing something else? And so those are some of their issues.
[00:18:07] I’d also say many of them have been, say, operating an office building for a long time, or the building’s been in office for 100 years, 50 years. and so, they’re thinking, well, I’m going to enter a brand-new marketplace where I’m not an experienced office residential operator. I should say, do I really want to convert to a brand-new use? It will be expensive and potentially time consuming. And maybe there’ll be permitting risks, et cetera. and. Okay. I’ve got this kind of unique situation, so that’s that we get a lot of that, and we’ve had a lot of that experience. If it’s all right, I can tell you how we’ve tried to address some of that.
[00:18:42] Joe Selvaggi: Exactly. I’m sure our listeners are like, okay, why, when the city knocks on my door, why would I convert if there’s a chance I might, sure, not have to change a darn thing.
[00:18:51] James Arthur Jemison: Sure, so it might be easy to easiest I’m tempted to listen to the ability to save money is obviously a very significant, an abatement of 75 percent of your taxes for 29 years is a very significant investment. I also want to say, like, for the city I’ve worked here before in a time with the assessor and CFO. They were coming there were the city was in the late stages of what was possibly a recovery from a very different kind of situation. And now the city’s in a much, much stronger position.
[00:19:27] But, this is really an unprecedented action for us to offer these kinds of abatements not since maybe the fifties and sixties. Has there been anything that’s quite like what we’re proposing here? And so, in that vein, I would say that there they’re attracted by the abatement, but the thing about the abatement, that’s probably one of the reasons why it’s appealing has to do with the fact that, there are other ways to subsidize an activity.
[00:19:54] You want a lot of them to have really high transaction costs where, you need a lawyer. I need a lawyer. You need a lawyer. We need a sort of bank style underwriting. We’re going to turn it into a big check. And then a moment where I’m giving the big check to someone, whereas the tax abatement really is like, it’s an avoided cost and it obviously has its own sort of legal documentation required, but it has a little bit less friction in terms of making the transaction occur, because it’s an avoided cost that goes right to the net operating income of the developer. So, it’s easier for them to work with. And I wanted to use that as a point of entry, because when we’ve talked to developers, other things they said have been important where, we highlighted this as an organizational priority, we hired a talented person to help us work on it and provide the kind of SWAT-team response that many of those owners really needed. And then we’ve created and tried to pilot a kind of truncated approval process. One of the concerns have has always been well, making it through the city process can be very time consuming.
[00:21:04] We tried to shrink it down for people who are doing these for doing these conversions and so people found that appealing as well and we’ve also baked into the role that our new team leader for this plays a little bit of an ombudsman role where after you get an approval, they’re also going to work with the owners to help them close the gaps on all the other kinds of permits and approvals required to do the project.
[00:21:33] We recently piloted a new ombudsman position for regular projects, which have already been found to be valuable. So, putting a little bit of that scope into the work has been helpful. So, basically, it’s the money, but people are attracted by their resources, but we think they’re going to stay for the individualized attention we’re able to give these transactions.
[00:21:54] Joe Selvaggi: So, summarizing the incentives, you glided over the detail, which is 29 years of a reduced, property tax, but it’s going from a building tax rate, which is much higher right than the residential and for 29 years, but the transaction, As you say the sort of all in cost of converting from one to the other you’ve taken most of those costs away of course The city will have to absorb the cost of the foregone tax, right?
[00:22:19] I guess, you’ve made that elation, but also you fast track their approval process. Have you changed the regulations at all? Has, in a sense, what do they call it? Stretch codes where if you were to have built something brand new, these are the priorities, these are the constraints. But if you’re doing a conversion, it’s not as severe. Describe for our listeners — what does that look like?
[00:22:38] James Arthur Jemison: So, maybe the answer that one of your questions in there was, so we actually think that we need to. Reform modernize is more accurate modernize our what we call Article 80 review, which is when you have a larger project that comes in, what the process it goes through to get the approval of this board here at the city.
[00:23:01] We have a vendor team and a sort of organizational team that’s working right now to update and modernize Article 80, which is the part of the code that determines how we measure impact when you apply to do a project. So, the good news is that this pilot is allowing us to try out a few things, but we actually have a reform and modernization plan ongoing for the overall process right now. That is, it’s expected to reach a key milestone in the 2nd quarter this year, and hopefully be wrapped up by the summer because it’s important that we actually fix the over underlying and modernize the underlying approval system.
[00:23:42] But on this project, we’ve been trying to pilot that, one of the challenges is, there’s a process of filing documentation about your project and identify what it will look like, what impacts it will have, what mitigation needs to be proposed to mitigate those impacts.
[00:24:00] That’s it can be very complicated. and it can slow down. Some things we want, so we’ve been working to reform that. and I think, the sort of piloting we’re doing with the office to residential is going to be a sort of a way we test some of our ideas.
[00:24:15] Joe Selvaggi: Wow. More music for our ears here on the podcast, modernizing City Hall and the approval process. So, good for you. This sounds very good. So, we’re talking about a program that, as you say, is a pilot program. this was, has begun or proposed, or passed in July. We’re now almost at the end of the year. What’s been the response? There’s good ideas, but ultimately if they’re not embraced, they’re just good ideas. So how is it received by the development community?
[00:24:40] James Arthur Jemison: Sure. So, just a little sort of timeline. So, it was announced in July. We then had about three months to finalize our sort of program design. And so, in October, we posted the applications and began to invite applicants. So, as of today, about 60 days in, we’ve got four applications, a little under 200 units. Our goal for this initial round was in the around 300 units. So, we may do better than that, but we’ve got four applicants. We’ve got 10 or more people engaged with us and considering making applications, and so, I can name a few 100 other units out there that are being debated and discussed.
[00:25:23] Among those 10 applications, so I think we’re feeling good about the number. If we have a couple more of the applicants we’re expecting, we will probably exceed 300 units. The mayor identified as a goal. Again, we began to see in November, some of them, when we were doing our focus groups with development interest, they would talk about how, when there begin to be smaller office buildings that are sold at a specific price point, that’s when you’ll start to see people really take a look at the program. And so, between the developer conversations and the banks, who have also been great and engage with us as well, who are also saying to themselves, well, some of my value is beginning to go away if these valuations stay what they are — they’re beginning to engage with us as well. So, I think we’re feeling okay about it. We’d like to, I’m expecting that we’re going to get, get more, but I think we’re right on right where I was hoping we’d be about 60 days in. I think it would be a sign of something — it’s a good sign that we’ve got the level of application and the level of the other 10 strong leads we have out there make me feel good about early next year and, the kinds of projects that will be able to go forward.
[00:26:33] Joe Selvaggi: So, what you’re saying, those early implementers on the bleeding edge, perhaps they’re visionaries and they anticipate the future, but ultimately it may be financial incentives by the bank saying — if we don’t convert, its value as an office building will be substantially diminished and if we, before the knife falls, OK… You answered already my, my, we’re getting close to the end of our time together, but you already answered this question. But I want to say if, in the post-COVID move away at least for offices from downtown. We don’t want to see a rotten downtown or urban blight or any of these terrible things that we’ve seen happen other cities. So, you’ve really, it’s been a call to action to develop these programs to incentivize people to bring the vibrant residential community downtown. What insight, from this program, is going to bleed on into the rest of the city? You mentioned a whole bunch of other places. We focus on downtown, but you’ve mentioned a whole bunch of other parts of the city that could really use an infusion of imagination and encouragement to become the next Seaport or whatever — what other programs within Boston are being explored to really revitalize some of these more marginalized communities?
[00:27:44] James Arthur Jemison: So, I guess I’d say a couple of things. So, I think that the mayor made mention at a recent speech in October that she was considering other forms of providing resources to support other kinds of housing production that weren’t just office to residential. So, I think that’s one way in which some of the thinking and things we’ve learned here has been important. The value of having, we have a existing sort of development review team that does a great job. I, in my opinion, at least, managing a huge pipeline of proposed development, giving, supporting that staff further with more, more people who can basically help them carry development interests from the time they’re approved here, all the way into construction has been a real value. And again, the truncated and clearer process for regulatory review process is something I think we’re also saying that needs to be. We can bring things. We’re learning from that. Over into our regular modernization, but maybe if I’m talking more holistically about downtown, as opposed to my sort of narrow business side here would be to say the programming of the space in terms of like events, things to make the neighborhood, exciting multiple times a year, multiple times a day, multiple times a week is really essential to creating the energy in the city that we want to see and places that have done it. you see some of that in, in seaport, right now, places that have done it. Well, and invested in it are really seeing the dividend. So, I think if there’s a thing, that’s not necessarily like a conversion activity would be like, more programming is going to be essential.
[00:29:28] Joe Selvaggi: So, I hope we’ve piqued the interest of our listeners, either they be, they’re developers or, potential residents of these buildings that have been converted, or perhaps just people like me who just want to see more people on the street because we know that’s what makes our city great, makes it safe, makes it interesting.
[00:29:41] So, where can our listeners learn more about your office, your program, this particular program, and just where the boss, where what Boston sees as its goals for the future.
[00:29:51] James Arthur Jemison: Sure, so we have a downtown plan that we had a downtown kind of action plan. That’s about a year old that contains focus on look at this.
[00:30:01] And we also just passed at the board last week, a downtown plan. Both these things are on our website as well as the information about office to residential conversion. So, I think most of the stuff there and, and I think, people should come to our website and see some of the exciting stuff we’re into.
[00:30:20] Joe Selvaggi: Well, I wish your program a lot of luck. It sounds like at least your vision, is inspiring, let’s hope, where the rubber meets the road, and implementation, it gets, picked up. So, thank you very much for your time today, Arthur. You’ve been a really, a great guest, a fund of information, and I hope you’ll consider coming back if you up to it.
[00:30:37] James Arthur Jemison: We’d love to do it. I’d love to come back and talk about zoning. I’ll try to make zoning really exciting to everybody.
[00:30:42] Joe Selvaggi: I’m happy to talk about, we’ll do zoning. That’s, we beat that drum here quite a bit. So, if we want to talk about zoning, we’ll double back. But you’ve been a great guest. Thank you for joining me today, Arthur.
[00:30:50] James Arthur Jemison: Hey, thank you.
[00:30:50] Joe Selvaggi: This has been another episode of Hubwonk. If you enjoyed today’s show, there are several ways to support Hubwonk and Pioneer Institute. It would be easier for you and better for us if you subscribe to Hubwonk on your iTunes podcatcher. It would make it easier for others to find Hubwonk if you offer a five star rating or a favorable review.
[00:31:09] We’re always grateful if you share Hubwonk with friends. If you have ideas or comments or suggestions for me about future episode topics, you’re welcome to email me at hubwonk@pioneerinstitute.org. Please join me next week for a new episode of Hubwonk.
Joe Selvaggi discusses the strategic goals of Boston’s Downtown Office to Residential Conversion Pilot Program with James Arthur Jemison, the head of BPDA planning, aiming to transform underutilized offices in downtown into vibrant places to live.
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Better Civics Education Is the Massachusetts Way
/in Blog, Blog: Education, Blog: US History, Featured, US History /by Jude IredellOverride of governor’s civics budget cut a sign of hope
Massachusetts is arguably the most educated state in America, and one of the birthplaces of America’s civic tradition. If there’s any place in the country where you would expect to find consensus about the value of teaching American history, it is here.
Unfortunately, the fight for more comprehensive civics education in the Bay State has persisted for years with no sign of abating. Advocates won an important battle recently when public outcry led the Legislature to override Gov. Maura Healey’s cut to the state’s modest civics instruction budget.
The override suggests many in Massachusetts — including parents, teachers, and lawmakers — support strengthening the state’s civics and history curriculum, particularly with mounting evidence of declined student performance across the country.
And yet, for the last 30 years — since the state passed the landmark 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) — governors and legislators on Beacon Hill have steadily retreated from the legislation’s goals. MERA’s grand bargain included sharp funding increases for public education coupled with comprehensive academic standards, well-funded civics programs, and rigorous assessments to measure student aptitude and catalyze improvements.
Those reforms worked, helping Massachusetts go to the head of the class — nationally and internationally — on several major indices, including standardized test scores, college matriculation rates, and economic performance.
Nevertheless, the state’s fealty to the principles and objectives of MERA waned through the 2000s and 2010s.
Former Senate President Tom Birmingham, a MERA co-sponsor and Pioneer’s former Senior Education Fellow, lamented the stagnating civics and education funding in 2013, when he wrote that “in the last decade, support for public schools lost its primacy on Beacon Hill and state budgets reflect that. [Massachusetts’] inflation-adjusted education appropriation is the same as it was in 2002.” As Pioneer’s Jamie Gass and Charles Chieppo wrote in this 2019 article, state officials have failed to consistently follow through on MERA’s requirements and promises.
Lawmakers repeatedly postponed and, in 2009, indefinitely suspended the law’s requirement that U.S. history and civics be made part of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) testing required for graduation from a public high school. With no state-level assessment of student aptitude in these subjects, lawmakers are unable to measure the state’s curricular efficacy.
Rather than rely on time-tested methods of measuring students’ knowledge and aptitude, Massachusetts’ lawmakers implemented naïve revisions to the civics curriculum. Those revisions often pushed aside serious study of the nation’s Founding era and the tenets of American political philosophy in favor of calls to activism and protest.
The latest proposed degradation to Massachusetts’ civics education came dangerously close to fruition this fall. Gov. Healey quietly vetoed a $500,000 increase for the Civics Education Trust Fund and instead proposed lowering the program’s budget by the same amount, to a meager $1.5 million.
To put these numbers into context, the Bay State’s overall budget for the coming fiscal year is nearly $60 billion, of which about $6.6 billion will be devoted to education.
The governor’s veto was a worrying sign for civics educators and enthusiasts. In mathematical terms, the veto asserted that just $1 of every $40,000 in state spending should be devoted to the Civics Education Trust Fund.
While Massachusetts remains one of America’s leaders in per-pupil K-12 spending, cutting this program by a half-million dollars would have sent a negative message to the rest of the nation about educational priorities in a state whose historical traditions resonate throughout the land.
Thankfully, advocacy groups from across the state lobbied Beacon Hill lawmakers to override Gov. Healey’s veto and guarantee more funding for programs that connect Massachusetts’ youth with the state’s famed civic tradition. The Legislature agreed, overrode the Governor’s cut in October, and restored the increase.
The Legislature’s action is cause for celebration, with an important caveat. Small budgetary victories are no substitute for a full commitment to the requirements of the 1993 education reform law. That Beacon Hill has refused to fully comply with the law for nearly 30 years is a troubling symptom in a state that aspires to be a wellspring of democratic citizenship and a model for the nation.
The $6.6 billion in annual K-12 money and $171.5 million on lunch programs are celebrated as examples of Massachusetts’ leadership in education. In a world of high per-pupil spending, policymakers should be able to find fiscal room for civics. As the following chart shows, the $2.5 million devoted to the state’s Civics Education Trust Fund is a tiny piece of the overall education budget for fiscal 2024.
Massachusetts should be expanding civics and history education, not retreating from it. And the state should reject recent trends and fads. As recommended in Pioneer’s latest book, Restoring the City on a Hill: U.S. History and Civics in America’s Schools, the state would benefit from abandoning “action civics” teaching standards that de-emphasize America’s common cultural fabric.
Given the declining performance on national civics assessments, restoring the long-discussed MCAS civics tests would give lawmakers a valuable barometer for student performance, helping to shape more effective curricular reform.
Supporting programs like the Civics Education Trust Fund would allow interested students from across the state to participate in non-partisan civics projects that they design and lead themselves. There’s no question that our democracy would benefit from kinder, less aligned, and more open-minded participants.
A comprehensive civic education program is essential to Massachusetts’ status as a leader in education. Given its history, tradition, and contribution to the American ethos, the Bay State has an obligation to embrace the teaching and testing of American history and civics — and a great deal to lose if it continues to retreat from its own traditions.
Jude Iredell is a Roger Perry Civics Intern with the Pioneer Institute. He is a senior at Pomona College pursuing a degree in history.