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Wu tabs former BRA planner to head Boston Planning Department

By adamg on Tue, 09/24/2024 - 9:52pm
Kairos Shen

Mayor Wu today announced she's appointed Kairos Shen, current real-estate development professor at MIT and a former top planner at the one-time Boston Redevelopment Authority, to lead the new Boston Planning Department with current planning head Arthur Jemison heading back to Detroit.

At MIT, Shen has focused on "city making" - drawing on "knowledge, research and practice across the fields of design, city planning, public policy, finance and real estate:"

The pedagogical objective of this curriculum is to prepare students for solving the most pressing and complex urban challenges such as social equity, housing affordability, climate resiliency, and the rebuilding of decaying infrastructure.

Shen, who worked at the BRA under mayors Menino and Walsh, left ten years ago as director of planning for the then quasi-independent BRA. In a statement, Wu said:

His decades of public, private, and institutional experience in Boston, and the relationships he has built across the City, will help the new Planning Department advance our ambitious work to grow Boston and make our City a place everyone can call home.

Neighborhoods: 
Boston
Topics: 
Development
Free tagging: 
Kairos Shen
Boston Planning Department
MIT


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Comments

By Waquiot on Tue, 09/24/2024 - 10:36pm.

I remember meeting him when they did a comprehensive rezoning of Roslindale about 15 years ago. I sure am glad they did that. It doesn't happen that often. Nope, not often at all.

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By anon on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 10:05am.

I don't follow this response and don't live in Rozzie. Can you please elaborate?

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By Waquiot on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 4:36pm.

He ran the rezoning of Roslindale, which is where I know him from. That went well. The subtext is that the BPDA is trying something now with zoning in Roslindale Square along with the two squares in the center of Hyde Park, and their approach is being widely criticized for not engaging with the residents and proposing some things that the residents do not seem to be in favor of.

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By dvg on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 6:33am.

That was quick! Welcome back to Boston, Mr Shen.

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By Anon on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 8:09am.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Didn’t he get the “boot” during the Marty years because of his years of transgressions during the Menino decades?

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By brianjdamico on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 10:00am.

From this 2015 Boston Globe article, it reads that he was forced out because Walsh wanted to bring in new leadership, not for specific cause. The article is about how Shen wanted to be terminated rather than willingly resign from his position as those two means to the same end had very different effects on his pension, but I'm not going to fault someone for refusing to resign if their employer wants to fire them.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/05/17/asked-resign-boston-chief-p...

Planner Kairos Shen has had enormous influence in reshaping Boston since joining the city in 1993. Now, Mayor Martin J. Walsh’s administration wants new leadership as the city embarks on a comprehensive planning effort geared toward 2030, according to the officials, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the issue.

But Shen refuses to go quietly, the officials said. Instead, he wants to be relieved of his duties, they said, which would give him the benefit of a law designed to protect employees from politically motivated firings when newly elected officials take office.

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By Hardy Har Har on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 10:11am.

Kairos Shen rose to chief planner at the old Boston Redevelopment Authority only to get ousted in 2015 after a damning McKinsey report found that the agency that he played a leading role in running was a dysfunctional mess.

As the city’s top planner, Shen helped shape the jumble of glass, steel and concrete buildings also known as the Seaport, which, all can agree, is no Champs-Élysées.

And on his way out the door, Shen made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Warming the hearts of government hacks everywhere, Shen asked the Walsh administration to officially fire him so he could take advantage of a quirky state law and double his pension to $71,000.

...

Is Shen the right choice to turn things around? Well, that remains to be seen, but given his track record, there are reasons to be skeptical.

Remember that 2015 McKinsey report? Well, it noted that housing and other developers believed that just two individuals controlled all planning and project review decisions at the agency, Kairos being one of them.

That’s the recipe for bureaucratic bottlenecks, stuff not getting approved and built, and potential cronyism.

The author, Scott Van Voorhis, leans more toward the business/development side of issues, so take this with however many grains of salt you prefer.

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By hux on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 12:49pm.

I work as an architect and had multiple projects go through Shen. The decision making process at the BRA at the time was vague and non-sensical. One week they would tell you to make your building taller, the next meeting they would cut the height in half with no explanation other than "we talked internally". I can't imagine how much of our fee was wasted by poor direction from the BRA.

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By anon on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 3:03pm.

Just as a side note to this comment, anyone interested in Boston development news should subscribe to Van Voorhis's substack Contrarian Boston. Some of his political takes are hit or miss (former Herald writer after all) but he really smothers the local development beat extremely well and clearly has very good sources. No, I am not a family member of his, just became a fan recently. Short money for that newsletter tells me more than the Globe or Boston Business Journal ever do about developement stuff here.

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By anon on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 10:47am.

So, has anything really changed in these reorganizations from BRA to BPDA to the Planning Department? It looks like it's all the same people working in the same framework.

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By W.C. Plains on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 1:00pm.

The turnover there has been INSANE over the past decade. Most of the people there now look like they were in high school when Shen left in 2015

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By Jiggles on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 9:33am.

This guy did not leave the Walsh administration under great circumstances, and he was heavily criticized for his role in creating the Seaport.

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By Frelmont on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 9:49am.

City making and city breaking. Let’s be sure we’re all agreed on omelette.

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By anon on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 10:30am.

Shen was the BRA under Menino. He made every decision with the mayor's blessing. Wu wanted to abolish the BRA and now has put the BRA back in charge. What is old is new again.

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By W.C. Plains on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 10:31am.

Kairos Shen and Tom Menino set everything in motion that led to what the Seaport is today. Like it or not. Wu ran for mayor against the kind of "planning" and development outlook that Shen apparently used to represent but now repudiates. Nothing like intellectual honesty. Looking ahead breathlessly to the Globe revisiting their Spotlight series about the Seaport now that Shen is manning the helm.

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By SomervilleSteve on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 11:33am.

If the construction of a new neighborhood on the waterfront… at sea level… with few mitigations for rising seas… is at the top of this man’s résumé, WHY would you bring him back?

I’ve read apologia claiming ignorance about climate change, “no one was talking about sea level rise back then…” BULL HOCKEY! I was there. We absolutely were.

The fact that we so badly bungled a new neighborhood (no transit; no climate mitigations; no library, no school, no grand public space) is appalling. That Mayor Wu would turn to the man who ran the BRA when those sins were committed simply shocks me.

I’ll have to do some research to see if Professor Shen has admitted to any errors or otherwise mended his ways.

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By Nobody Important on Wed, 09/25/2024 - 1:28pm.

He wouldn't want to lose money on private investments, so instead he built a mini-metropolis without any general public city services.

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By John-W on Thu, 09/26/2024 - 10:41pm.

etc. etc. As is mentioned here by others, the BRA was characterized by pretty haphazard decision making during the time Shen was there - but I think that may have had less to do with him and more to do with his autocratic boss. The Sea-snot district is definitely a failure by most sensible measures, although it did what it was intended to do - make a group of people a whole shit-ton of money. And we have a generic, overpriced, soulless, soon to be aquatic neighborhood that will need a lot of literal and figurative bailing out in the near future.

Feels a bit like Mayor Wu, who started out in City Hall during the hay-day of Menino's "Urban Mechanics," has been recreating the Glory Days of the Mumbles Mafia with folks like Chris Osgood being brought back into the fold, after Mahty replaced folks with his own Dot-rats. So resurrecting Shen seems in keeping with that. Not sure if this does much to placate all the butt-hurt billionaires who aren't having their way with City Hall as much as they're used to, but it sure does not feel like the sort of "shake shit up" move that some of Wu's supporters have been hoping for.