On a chilly week night in January, some two hundred Bostonians crowded into a community center in the Hyde Park neighborhood for a “people’s conversation” about Squares + Streets, a new zoning initiative to spur the construction of affordable housing and commercial storefronts near dense, transit-accessible spots across the city. The plans were humble in isolation, but seemed to foretell big changes. Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, stood at the front of the room, holding a green notebook. She was dressed in her winter uniform—monochrome dress, tall black boots—and looked around at the audience. Thinking aloud, she observed that she was not going to make it home to tuck in her kids, as she had hoped. “I’m going to be flexible with my time,” she said. But, “I can’t go to midnight, y’all!”
She launched into a dense explanation: “Boston’s zoning code is different from that of nearly every other major city.” It’s almost four thousand pages, considerably longer than New York City’s, with variances and waivers that far outnumber the actual standards. “Most of you go through your day without hearing about the zoning code. But, in fact, so many of the issues that we do talk about all the time”—she listed her hobbyhorses (affordable housing, transit, public schools, climate change)—“all of this comes down to whether the rules for how we grow as a city actually make sense.”
Boston has shrunk in population since the nineteen-fifties, and Wu sees housing as the key to regrowth. A few weeks earlier, she had made housing (or, more precisely, “home”) the theme of her annual State of the City address. Everything “starts with housing,” she said. Her approach has been to try everything, all at once: preserving and building new public housing; imposing rent control; requiring twenty per cent of new apartments to be somewhat affordable; simplifying the process for accessory dwelling units; converting unused offices into apartments; and providing shelter for people coming off the streets. The city has the third-highest rents in the country, after San Jose and New York, and a rental-vacancy rate of less than one per cent. Its median household income is nearly ninety thousand dollars a year, though a fifth of the population lives in poverty. Boston’s planning laws are arcane; Massachusetts ranks toward the bottom of all states in new-construction permits.
Wu is the first woman and the first nonwhite person to be elected as the mayor of Boston. She is just thirty-nine years old, and has two boys in Boston Public Schools. But she prefers to talk policy over identity. Of the issues she ran on, her agenda for housing has turned out to be especially muscular. “In comparison to other places, all the pieces are there,” Lauren Song, a lawyer at the National Housing Law Project who served on Wu’s rent-stabilization advisory committee, told me. “The list of municipal tools that have been identified and deployed in Boston is pretty comprehensive.”
This new City Hall is so confident in its policies that it can seem unmoved by public opinion. Homeowners resent Wu’s quest for density. Real-estate corporations expect the special access they’d enjoyed under previous mayors. But, as she told the audience in Hyde Park, the city is pushing forward with rezoning and development, “whether you’re going to like it or not in every situation.” A woman sitting in front of me, with long, silver hair and what sounded like an Eastern European accent, was visibly shaking throughout the meeting. As soon as it ended, she rushed to the front and inched so close to Wu that an aide from City Hall prepared to intervene. “It’s going to turn into an urban ghetto!” the woman said. “We homeowners need protections.” The mayor nodded and smiled, but also flinched, as though struck by spittle.
Wu has always espoused a progressive pragmatism, but halfway through her term, as she pursues what is arguably the most ambitious housing platform in the country, that approach feels troubled. Wu believes in good sense, and good policy. City governance, she told me, boils down to “the chance to have face-to-face conversations,” to “try to establish a real, common set of facts.” Her weakness, perhaps, is her faith in reconciling renters fearing displacement, single-family homeowners, and real-estate developers. Can she win everyone over to her side?
The Boston mayor’s office, inside the brutalist shell of City Hall, depends on décor for warmth. But Wu has kept her chamber spare. The word “YES” hangs in a frame above an ornate wooden desk, along with drawings by local school children. There is a multicolored rug and two large beanbags embroidered with the names of her sons, Blaise and Cass (after the civil-rights leader Melnea Cass). A Yamaha upright sits against one wall and, when I visited, displayed the sheet music for a Rachmaninoff prelude. (Wu, a classical pianist, had recently performed the slow movement of a Mozart concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.) An orchid languished in a corner.
In an adjacent space, called the Eagle Room, Wu convened a meeting to discuss the immigration crisis. Haitian, Venezuelan, and Honduran refugees and asylum seekers were arriving in large numbers by plane and bus to Massachusetts, the only state with a statutory right to housing. In January, Governor Maura Healey announced that a state-owned recreation center in Roxbury, a largely African American neighborhood, would be used to shelter up to four hundred migrants. The community was angry; Wu felt helpless.
Wu is the oldest of four in an immigrant family from Taiwan. She was born and raised in Chicago, and went to college at Harvard, then worked as a consultant. Her parents separated when she was in her early twenties, and she returned to Chicago to care for her mother, who had developed mental illness. “There were a couple of incidents, including when she got hospitalized for the first time, when I realized that she was barely getting my sisters to school,” Wu recalled. She became the legal guardian of her youngest sister and opened a tea shop with her future husband, Conor Pewarski, a banker from Long Island, New York. Wu’s mother loved tea, and Wu hoped that she might get well enough to take over the shop one day. Instead, her mother’s illness advanced.
In 2010, Wu returned to Harvard for law school and brought her mother and youngest sister with her. Wu, her sister, and Pewarski lived in one apartment, and her mother lived in another, in the same building. “Between Conor and me, we could get my sister to school, get to class, sometimes leave class early and run straight to Mass General to check on my mom,” Wu told me. “It was quite a blur.” She got a part-time job at City Hall, under Thomas Menino, the longest-serving mayor in Boston history, and grew close to her contracts professor, Elizabeth Warren. On Warren’s first campaign for Senate, Wu knocked on doors. “Election Day was cold. I didn’t know what to expect,” she told me. “I showed up to my assigned polling location and saw the line stretch around the block. The feeling that it worked—that doing politics differently meant that different people, many of whom had the same family experiences as I did, were showing up at the polls—really opened my eyes.” Warren described Wu to me as “family” and a “progressive who gets things done.”
In 2013, with Warren’s backing, Wu was elected to the Boston City Council. Much like her mentor, she paired a restrained manner with an innovative agenda: renewable energy, wetlands protection, health care, paid parental leave, restrictions on Airbnb. She cultivated the dealmaking talents of “a practical progressive,” Lydia Edwards, who overlapped with her on the council and is now a state senator, said. Wu was also relatable as a new mom with sandwich-generation duties. “She would breast-feed her son while giving a campaign speech. I was, like, boss bitch!” Edwards told me.
Edwards and Wu were in the council’s liberal camp, as was Ayanna Pressley before she was elected to the U.S. House. “Michelle weighs things,” Pressley told me. “She takes her time. And once she’s made a decision, she is resolute. She is exhaustive.” When Wu first joined the council, “I remember being one of two women, two women of color,” Wu said. (Pressley was the first.) “Everything was so gendered and racialized and pitted.” By the time Wu left for City Hall, she had served as council president, and six of thirteen councillors were women of color.
Wu lives with her husband, children, and mother in a two-unit house on a hill in Roslindale, a quiet neighborhood in Boston’s southwest. “I’ve experienced different parts of the housing challenges for people in this city,” Wu told me. She and Pewarski had been renters, then, in 2015, “scraped money together to buy . . . and realized, even a year later, we wouldn’t have been able to afford being in our neighborhood.”
She entered the mayoral race as a lefty challenger to Marty Walsh, the Irish American incumbent. When he was tapped as President Biden’s Labor Secretary, she found herself running instead against Annissa Essaibi George, another woman of color and city councillor whose politics lay somewhere in between. Wu was repeatedly criticized for being an outsider: a Chicagoan by birth. Every city tests its leaders for home-town authenticity, but Boston is famous for its provincial, white-ethnic politics. The mayors who preceded Wu were of a classic mold: male, white-haired, attention-seeking, and mainstream liberal. Wu was different in every way, yet prevailed through a combination of ground game and aspirational promises, including rent control, free public transit, police reform, and a municipal Green New Deal. The following summer, after her November, 2021, inauguration was postponed because of the pandemic, she held a block party outside City Hall. “She’s not seeking to be recognized. She usually has to be persuaded to speak,” Pressley told me.
Many voters had seen Wu as the leftmost candidate, but being mayor has complicated this perception. She has declined to call for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, for example, despite frequent protests. Last year, she increased funding for a gang database that she had previously vowed to dismantle and called “discriminatory.” The decision came after observing reforms under a new police commissioner and “spending time with people in different police units,” she told me. A few months later, she announced a new collective-bargaining agreement with the main police union. The contract included beefed-up discipline for lawbreaking officers and tightened the process for granting paid medical leave.
When Wu entered office, it wasn’t just the police contract that needed to be negotiated. All of the city’s collective-bargaining agreements had expired—four dozen in total. “It’s kind of an urban-politics horror story,” her labor adviser, Lou Mandarini, told me. Wu studied the jargon and spreadsheets as though she herself were at the negotiating table. The final teachers’ contract, for instance, seemed to reflect Wu’s values: more sick leave for educators and improved services for immigrant students and kids with disabilities. “You can only make progress and get things done when you get into the details of how things actually work,” Wu told me.
Her efficient disposal of the expired agreements furthered her reputation as a technocrat, which was both a compliment and a dig. “She gets into a room, and the experts tell her something, and it maybe goes against what people in the community say. I have seen her listen to the experts,” Kendra Lara, a former city councillor, said. (Wu endorsed one of Lara’s opponents in last year’s primary.) “Showing up for people in the community matters to her, but I don’t know if that’s translating into policy.”
In October, Wu visited the Mildred C. Hailey Apartments, a public-housing complex in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood which dates to the early nineteen-forties. Residents have long complained of neglect and crime in the buildings, but the layout is comfortable: brick mid-rises with sea-green roofs; plenty of benches and trees. A decade ago, several dozen units were gut-renovated. Now several hundred more were scheduled to be redone or built anew. A young project manager named Karl Pops led Wu and a small crowd of tenant advocates through a stapled packet of architectural renderings, showing cheery-looking families among native plants or next to in-unit washing machines. Around the time Wu took office, Pops left the private sector for the Boston Housing Authority, which provides public and affordable housing to thousands of Bostonians. “The units will have all-new kitchens and baths, all-new appliances,” Pops said. Wu responded with a series of technical questions: Where would residents go during the remodel? How many units were A.D.A.-compliant? Could B.H.A. afford to maintain the apartments once they were finished?
Earlier that week, on a leafy plot in the Four Corners neighborhood, Wu announced the first round of contractors for Welcome Home, Boston, an initiative that gives away municipal land for the development of affordable housing. “We scrubbed every square foot of city-owned land,” Wu said. “In identifying a hundred and fifty parcels like this one, we saw an opportunity to not only create new homes for Boston residents and families but to create new wealth-building opportunities.” The first batch of lots would eventually produce sixty-three units of affordable housing. The lot we were standing on had been granted to a nonprofit that supports African refugees: part of Wu’s gambit was to channel construction work to women- and minority-owned firms. “The city has a mayor who’s actually taking the model of housing as a public good,” Armani White, the co-founder of the group Reclaim Roxbury, told me. “The rubric we have is, ‘Does this project have affordable housing? Does it have enough diverse contractors?’ ”
Not all housing activists see an ally in Wu. Markeisha Moore, a community organizer with Dorchester Not for Sale, had been attending hearings related to Dorchester Bay City, an enormous mixed-use development of twenty-one buildings that could break ground in the next decade. Moore rents in the neighborhood and had seen many friends and neighbors priced out of the area, and feared that a huge new complex would make the problem worse. “They’re trying to build a place for the rich,” she said. “To do that, they don’t want to see us.” At the hearings, Moore and other advocates argued that the entire project, which would sit on land owned mostly by the University of Massachusetts, should be held to the city’s standard for preventing displacement, which is to “consider impacts on area residents” and “address past histories of exclusion.” A letter signed by groups representing more than eighteen thousand UMass students and employees urged the developer, Accordia Partners, and the city to make half of the housing units affordable, and to define affordability to “reflect the incomes of the surrounding community.”
Accordia committed to making only twenty per cent of units income-restricted, and at the higher end of the income spectrum. The city approved this proposal, while promising to evaluate each of the planned buildings for its potential displacement risk at a later date. Moore was shocked by what she believed amounted to a “loophole.” “That means we have to fight this project twenty-one more times. You don’t know the amount of stress, the amount of time, the amount of energy we put into trying to get something better for our community out of this project,” she said. “If you’re rich, the development might not affect you. The way things are happening in the city, you might not be gone in five years, but I’ll be gone.”
When I put Moore’s concerns to Wu, she said, “What was approved was at a level of generality that wasn’t about the particular building designs or forms that ended up triggering all of this specific review.” I pressed for something less technical, the kind of reassurance that tenants in Dorchester might be looking for. “There is no way that the first step of approvals is going to shield or deflect obligations related to affordability,” she said. Yet it was the vague nature of those obligations—what might be affordable to a family earning forty thousand versus ninety thousand dollars a year—that made Moore so apprehensive.
Critics of Wu from the left have accused her of trying to mollify conservatives. But the right (by Boston standards, anyway) has not stopped yelling. In early 2022, after Wu announced a vaccine requirement for indoor businesses, a group of mostly white Bostonians took to showing up outside her home every day, playing loud music and yelling harassing messages. On her birthday, they chanted, “Happy birthday, Hitler.” “They’ve shouted on megaphones that my kids will grow up without a mom bc I’ll be in prison,” Wu tweeted. This continued for several months, long after the mayor lifted the vaccine rule. Fearing for her family, she had her office consult with the police, who asked for a list of the most active protesters’ names. News of this e-mailed list was published by the Boston Herald, a conservative newspaper, only intensifying the conflict.
More recently, a private school in Dorchester and a group of homeowners in Charlestown each sued the city to block modest construction of affordable housing. Meanwhile, George Regan, a local P.R. executive, reportedly embarked on, then denied embarking on, a fund-raising “mission” to support future challengers to Mayor Wu. His stated aim was to rescue the citizenry “from the negative impacts of the ultra-progressives . . . at Boston City Hall.” There was an atmosphere, Wu told me, of “people feeling like they’re losing their grip on power and influence.”
Between 2020 and 2021, the number of homeless adults in Boston increased by around twenty-five per cent. Some lived in a large tent encampment near the busy, industrial intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard. Until 2014, homelessness had been less visible on the street: services for the poor and people with addiction had been offshored to an island in Boston Harbor, not unlike a social-services version of Rikers Island. When the city shut down an aging bridge to the island, “Mass and Cass” became the city’s new skid row. A couple of weeks into Wu’s term, she decided to clear Mass and Cass, based on reports of crime and fires, and the imminent freeze of winter. Activists protested the clearance as a sweep, but the city claimed that everyone was placed in some form of shelter. “Our very first set of actions was to build new housing and treatment—two hundred units of low-threshold housing, which had never existed in any form in Boston,” Wu told me. Within a few months, however, another encampment grew in the same area.
Last fall, the administration conducted another large-scale clearance at Mass and Cass. The operation was minutely detailed. Workers from the city and several nonprofits spent weeks counselling the tent dwellers. They talked them through shelter options and made plans for pet care as well as the treatment of addiction, wounds from fentanyl mixed with xylazine, diabetes, and heart conditions. The police were on the scene as tarps and belongings were dragged away.
At a press conference the following day, Wu said, “As you can see, the street looks a little different than it has before. But what we are here to share a little bit about is the people who we have been able to work with.” She was careful not to sound jubilant—or to come across as equating tents with human beings. Her remarks were so deliberate that each word was its own discrete unit, surrounded by space. The people who’d been living outside “as the temperature was dropping” were now “in safe, warm placements with a roof over their head,” she said. The city’s ultimate goal was to help them “move into permanent housing of their own.”
Yet the demand for such housing—all housing, really—was on the rise. Migrants fleeing violence around the world continued to arrive in Boston, with no place to go. The mayor relayed her alarm to Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, when he visited Boston last summer. Was there more federal money? Could D.H.S. expedite work authorization? In January, she scheduled a follow-up meeting at his office, which happened to coincide with the House Republicans’ attempt to impeach him.
Before catching an 8 A.M. flight to Washington, D.C., Wu stopped by Terminal E at Logan Airport. Large flags, representing the nations of the world, hung above the check-in counters. Downstairs, the international-arrivals gate was quiet; the baggage carrousels were still. Several dozen migrants, nearly all of them Black, huddled along a hallway by the exit to the parking lot. There were single men, couples, and families with small children. Many had just woken up and were tidying their spots on the floor. Wu was briefed by a police officer and a manager from the Massachusetts Port Authority. “Are we providing food?” she asked. “We did initially, but it got too overwhelming,” the manager said.
Wu approached a man standing against a wall. He was from Honduras, so she slipped into Spanish. “I’m the mayor of Boston,” she said, holding out her hand. “How long have you been here?” He had arrived the previous week; a baby slept on a blanket on the floor next to him. A woman, also from Honduras, told Wu that she’d been in town for two months, bouncing from place to place. She rolled up the sleeves of her hoodie to show the mayor a hospital bracelet and a field of large black spots. “I have a microbial infection. It itches so badly, I went outside once and rubbed myself with snow,” she said. Wu assured her that the city was doing its best to help, though it wasn’t clear what that entailed.
The new migrants now occupied a quarter of the city’s shelter beds. “They want what we all want—to provide for their families,” Wu told me. “It’s an impossible situation.” In Washington, Mayorkas dodged a first attempt at impeachment, but not a second. His staff provided updates and relayed a “plan to clarify and expand legal pathways,” Wu told me. Two days later, back in Boston, she accompanied volunteers on the annual, overnight point-in-time census of people living on the street. Meanwhile, the recreation center in Roxbury had shut down its programming and filled up with hundreds of cots. The mayor was in touch with the track coach and had a staff member chase down a lead on an alternative space for handball. She was working with the superintendent of schools to register migrant kids right away, to give families a sense of stability. “It’s not an issue of where people are coming from,” Wu said. “If we want to grow as a city, sustainably, and be a city for everyone, we have to get the basics right.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated Wu’s living arrangement while in law school and the signatories of the UMass letter.
