To Boston developers, the business conditions these days already look difficult enough.
Interest rates are the highest they’ve been in more than a decade. Financing is expensive, investors harder to find. And Mayor Michelle Wu hasn’t made life easier from their perspective, with her environmental and affordable housing mandates or her proposal to shift more of the city’s property tax burden onto commercial real estate.
At least developers knew they had a sympathetic ear on the ninth floor of City Hall: Arthur Jemison, Wu’s planning chief. He understood their business and returned their calls.
Then Jemison broke the news last month: He would be heading back to Michigan after two-plus years in the Wu administration. Jemison is taking a job as executive director of the Detroit Housing Commission, though he says returning to his wife and two teenage kids is his primary motivation. His last day will be Friday, Sept. 13.
An unlucky day for developers? Judging from their general reaction to the departure — disappointed but not surprised — the answer would be yes.
They saw Jemison as a rare ally, at least these days, in City Hall, someone who was always willing to shuttle concerns between the ninth floor and Wu’s office on the fifth. (Unlike Tom Menino and Marty Walsh before her, Wu is not known for taking developers’ calls.) Surely, the thinking went, he must have become frustrated by the sometimes conflicting mandates. Wu wants to see thousands of new condos and apartments go up in Boston. That’s harder to pull off, developers say, with new expenses and regulations imposed by the city.
Jemison, for his part, denies the assertion that he’s leaving because of any conflict with his boss. In an interview, Jemison said Wu doesn’t get enough credit for the good things happening in the city, nor does the talented team he’s built in the revamped planning department. An ally for developers? Jemison would argue he remained open to every viewpoint, including but not limited to the business community’s.
Wu recruited him in 2022 from the Detroit area, where he worked for that city before an 18-month stint with the Biden administration. However, Jemison was already well known and respected around Boston, for his urban planning expertise and his diplomatic demeanor. Before moving to Michigan, he previously held several prominent real estate-related government posts in Boston — including with the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Massport, and the Patrick administration.
Most of the developers who spoke about Jemison in recent weeks declined to go on the record. They can’t risk any bad feelings at City Hall.
To many of them, Jemison’s departure represents a bit of a seismic event — or at least another unwanted variable tossed their way. Even though Jemison spent most of his career in government, they see him as someone who speaks their language and can empathize with the hurdles that can get in their way.
Jemison was seen as a champion for a proposal to offer tax incentives that would jump-start many of the city’s stalled housing projects, a backlog that exceeded 20,000 units when Wu first floated the idea before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce a year ago. But then the months dragged on, with no sign of a plan. Finally, Wu broke the bad news in April: The city simply couldn’t afford anything of the sort. More griping ensued. Separately, the administration did advance a tax incentive program to spur downtown office-residential conversions, though it has drawn only modest interest so far.
Meanwhile, Wu is working to push new net-zero carbon emissions rules through the Zoning Commission. And next month, she’ll begin requiring a larger percentage of affordable units in new residential construction. Developers generally laud these goals but worry that the actual policies are out of step with today’s economic reality. There’s also uncertainty around Wu’s effort to morph the Boston Planning & Development Agency into the city’s planning department, a long-promised shift that still has a few loose ends awaiting approval by the state Legislature.
To Wu’s critics, losing Jemison at such a pivotal time just feeds the perception that City Hall isn’t particularly friendly to business interests.
For his part, the mild-mannered Jemison does seem to bristle a bit at this kind of chatter. His initial plan to move his family here in 2022 didn’t work out, and now he wants to return. He said he’s leaving on great terms with Wu. All of the things that developers like about him, he said, should be credited more broadly to his partnership with Wu, and to the talented staff that he helped assemble following an exodus in the wake of the pandemic and an extended turnover of mayoral administrations. (Longtime BPDA staffer Devin Quirk, already a pivotal member of Jemison’s team, will serve as interim planning chief after Jemison leaves.) And Jemison notes that spirited policy discussions can be a sign of a healthy organization, not dysfunction.
Jemison will miss Boston, for sure. He says he has considerable affection for the city. Across Boston’s numerous factions, there’s a genuine appetite to do great work, he said, and it has been the honor of his career to be part of that.
City Hall officials rattle off the stats. Under Jemison’s tenure, more than 11,500 housing units were approved, roughly on par with the busy pre-pandemic years. Of those, nearly 4,000 would be income restricted.
However, relatively few are actually getting built — the industry’s sore spot.
The biggest reason is interest rates. No one would argue with that. But the city’s put-upon developers often point their fingers at the mayor. And once Jemison leaves, it could get even easier to lay some of the blame on City Hall.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.