Zoning commission rejects Mayor Wu’s preferred plan for climate-friendly buildings

It’s the latest setback to her plan to require new buildings to be fossil fuel free

The world's largest passive home/office building, Winthrop Center in Boston, opened in 2023. It's one of growing number of buildings in Massachusetts designed to be highly energy efficient and reduce the needs for cooling or warming. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is pushing to hold more new buildings to similar rigorous standards.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s plan to eliminate climate-warming emissions from new buildings hit a setback Wednesday when the Zoning Commission rejected an initiative to require large, new buildings to dramatically reduce their reliance on fossil fuels for power, heat, and cooling.

The so-called Net Zero Carbon Zoning Initiative, which would have applied to newly constructed buildings over 20,000 square feet and housing projects with more than 15 units, had been considered a shoo-in to help advance the mayor’s climate agenda. Earlier this summer, the Boston Planning Development Agency approved the plan, leading many to expect the Zoning Commission to do the same.

Wu needed seven of the 10 commissioners to vote in favor to pass the initiative; she got six votes.

The outcome came as a surprise to advocates and real estate lawyers who said it’s rare for the Zoning Commission to go against the mayor.

“We were expecting that this would be a sure-fire thing,” said Hessann Farooqi, executive director of the Boston Climate Action Network.

But starting Tuesday afternoon, there were signs that the vote may not go as expected after City Councilor Ed Flynn submitted a letter calling for “a more robust community process ... as this zoning change can have deep impacts on the development landscape in our city.”

Flynn said he sent the letter because he was hearing from “residents and business interests” that their voices had not been sufficiently considered.

Tamara Small, chief executive of NAIOP Massachusetts, a commercial real estate development association, said her organization has been concerned that the new zoning initiative would raise costs for developers. “There’s just a real slowdown in development in the industry right now, and so anything that adds significant costs is a serious concern,” she said.

But city officials and advocates say it’s not clear the zoning code would actually add any new costs. Since new buildings are already subject to the stringent requirements of a recently adopted building code that pushes buildings away from fossil fuels, “we are very close to what’s already what’s being proposed,” the city’s chief of planning, Arthur Jemison, said at the commission meeting.

That’s borne out in a recent report by Built Environment Plus, a green building advocacy group. The report found that not only has Massachusetts increased the amount of net-zero and net-zero-ready buildings in the state by nearly six-fold in the last three years, it has done so economically.

According to the report, 80 percent of net-zero-ready buildings that reported cost data were built at less than a 1 percent premium, including high-rise buildings.

The Zoning Commission’s decision “goes against mounting evidence that builders and designers are turning toward cleaner, more resilient building practices,” said Lisa Cunningham, director of ZeroCarbonMA, a nonprofit advocating for cutting fossil fuels from buildings.

In response to the vote, the Wu administration said it’s not giving up. “We plan to return to the Zoning Commission to address some of the concerns commissioners raised,” said city spokesperson Emma Pettit.

The zoning initiative was, itself, somewhat of a Plan B. The Wu administration had been hoping to participate in a state-run pilot program that is allowing 10 cities and towns to ban fossil fuels in new buildings, which otherwise isn’t allowed by state regulations. Last year, the city withdrew its application after learning that it was unlikely to be chosen.

As climate advocates expressed frustration at Wednesday’s decision, they acknowledged that there has been at least some recent progress for their movement. The city has adopted a new, optional building code that incentivizes construction without fossil fuels by making it more expensive to build with oil or gas due to requirements that a building be pre-wired to be able to go all-electric and include on-site generation of energy through solar panels, among other requirements.

But while the building code made fossil fuels less attractive, it did not outlaw them. That’s where the net-zero carbon zoning initiative was supposed to come in.

Now, with the failure of the zoning initiative, “some of those remaining developments are still going to go through with much higher emissions, and for those specific buildings, and the owners and tenants of those buildings, this is a huge deal,” Farooqi said.