CommonWealth Development Compact

Our Partners

The History

In 2017, the Boston Globe published an eye-opening series on the status of race in Boston. One article described the Seaport District as “one of Boston’s whitest neighborhoods,” and laid bare how its planning and development utterly failed to assure diversity in its population and racial equity in its wealth creation. In 2020, Shirley Leung published a column about Mayor Tom Menino’s intentionality in creating the Innovation District (now known as the Seaport District). Letters in response to the column, however, expressed emphatic dissatisfaction with the lack of diversity and inclusion in the area’s development and planning. One went as far as labeling the Seaport District “a gleaming disappointment.”

In response, in collaboration with the Boston Globe and others, the Civic Action Project orchestrated a month-long process to develop policy initiatives that sought to remedy the lack of diversity and racial equity in the Seaport District, and serve as a template to ensure that development of future neighborhoods—Suffolk Downs, Fort Point Channel, Midtown, and Allston, meet our highest aspirations for diverse companies, employees and cultural activities, and share the economic value of the development equitably with people of all races and backgrounds.

In June of 2021, CAP sponsored, with the Boston Globe and WBUR, a Zoom forum to launch a discussion of this urgent topic. Over 300 people tuned in to the panel, over 160 people asked for more information about the project, and over 40 people submitted questions—many of which contained useful ideas about how to ensure diversity and economic equity in the development of new neighborhoods. After this successful launch, the project team spent several months discussing these issues, researching similar initiatives across the country (there are very few), and designing a strategy for change—the essence of which is to embed DEI criteria in the submission process of private real estate development projects, as well as in the RFPs for development of publicly-owned land. That general strategy was adopted by the group and described in a Boston Globe op-ed in December 2021.

In early 2022, CAP partnered with the Boston Society for Architecture and the Builders of Color Coalition to operationalize and demonstrate the DEI strategy. Eastern Bank Foundation joined the team and offered both key strategic and funding support for a pilot project. Five municipalities signed onto the pilot—Boston, Cambridge, Lynn, Salem, and Somerville. The resulting CommonWealth Development Compact commitment was formally launched in May 2023 at an event featuring Mayors Siddiqi of Cambridge, Nicholson of Lynn, McCarthy of Salem, Ballantyne of Somerville, and Boston’s Chief of Planning Jemison, all pictured above.