This article appears in the October 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
BOSTON – In the 19th-century George Francis Parkman House, just a block away from the Massachusetts State House, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu settled down on a cream-colored antique sofa in a bright, red-wallpapered sitting room. Surrounded by a rich display of elegant historic portraits of Boston notables in gilded frames, Wu seemed comfortable and confident, wearing a purple dress that matched her re-election campaign colors. Upstairs, she had just addressed a group of young interns who had worked for various city departments. Wu had been on the go since mid-morning. Her longtime mentor, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), had joined her for a campaign event near the playground on Boston City Hall Plaza to discuss her administration’s early-childhood education achievements.
Just the day before, she had been out and about ricocheting around the city, visiting the Center for Teen Empowerment, which runs several neighborhood-based youth organizing initiatives in the Bay State and New York. With her nearly eight-month-old daughter Mira, the youngest of her three children, on her hip and a smile on her face, she drew connections between her highly successful youth job guarantee, which provided summer employment for thousands of Boston teens, and the nonprofit’s mission to work toward social change through organizing and art. Heading back to City Hall, she welcomed the mayor of the Italian town of Coreno Ausonio, near Rome, along with her family and community members from the North End, Boston’s Little Italy.
Wu jumped right into a time-honored political pitch to explain why she’s running for re-election: “I’m running because we have a lot more work to do,” she told the Prospect before the city’s September preliminary election. “In Boston over the last four years, we’ve [proved] that people can still come together and take big steps to solve problems that are really important.”
She’ll get to carry on her work for another four years. Wu trounced Josh Kraft, the millionaire son of NFL billionaire Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner, by nearly 50 percentage points in the nonpartisan race, winning all of the city’s 22 wards. Before the end of the week, he’d set aside his bid for mayor.
For a woman who’s already become one of Boston’s most capable leaders, that development is a defining indicator of the remarkable power and influence that she now wields. Born in Chicago to Taiwanese immigrants and educated at Harvard University and Harvard Law School, Wu is something of a wonder child. Her election in 2014 as the first Asian American woman to serve on the city council was monumental. Just two years later, her colleagues elected her to lead the body.
Running for mayor was a natural next step, and in 2021, Wu, a progressive, won that contest with 64 percent of the vote, stunning Boston and the country with a campaign centered on major policy changes in areas like housing that would have never been possible before.
Boston’s historically marginalized communities have been given a seat at the table when it comes to real estate development.
Wu had to confront the challenges of leading a major city as well as steering residents through a global pandemic. Yet Wu headed into City Hall after building a progressive political clan during the seven years she spent as a city councilor. Her impressive work on the city council—securing paid paternal leave for city employees, advocating for unarmed community safety crisis responders, and taking aim at trying to moderate the city’s historically high rents—raised her profile and demonstrated her policy chops. These experiences contributed to her first-term successes, particularly on the housing front.
To move ahead with her more ambitious aims, Wu faces considerable obstacles, including home-rule restrictions on taxes and rent control, which must be threaded through a resistant state legislature. She has had her share of blunders, among them having to shelve a controversial proposal to move the city’s most diverse exam school from Roxbury, Black Boston’s cultural hub, to West Roxbury, a mostly white neighborhood with poor public transit links. She also has been accused of ignoring residents’ concerns over a local stadium, a sore point for some in the multiracial coalition that backed her four years ago. Issues like these opened Wu up to intense criticism from Kraft, who’d been her highest-profile opponent.
In many ways, Wu personifies the profound social and economic changes that have unfolded in Boston over the past decade: She is the polar opposite of the leaders who steered the city before she came on the scene—which means she must grapple with the staggering task of redefining what it means to be the mayor of Boston in these perilous times.
FOR DECADES, BOSTON HAS BEEN in the thrall of its long-dominant “old guard” political tribe—which was Irish or Italian, and male. Although many other major Democratic cities have made strides in electing candidates who represented diverse groups and ideologies, Boston has also seemed like it was committed to sticking with a version of political power that prioritized frayed traditions over progressive innovations.
Deferring to the city’s real estate developers who have shaped the city’s residential and commercial policymaking to suit themselves has long been a feature, not a bug, of the old ways. Being the mayor of Boston meant that you needed deep connections with the city’s most influential groups, the desire to abide by the rules of its unique brand of conservative-to-moderate Democrats, and the drive to play a political game that had been chugging along unimpeded even by the boldest residents and civic leaders since the early 20th century.
Wu’s two most recent predecessors had readily adapted to this construct. Thomas Menino, another one of her mentors, spent over 20 years as mayor and pushed through the construction of new housing units, many of them the “luxury” high-priced apartments that revved up gentrification and drove out longtime Boston residents. He died in 2014 shortly after leaving office.
His successor, Marty Walsh, oversaw a historic housing boom in areas like the Seaport District that Menino and his developer cronies had established on the edge of Boston Harbor, which immediately became one of the priciest neighborhoods in the city. But these housing developments weren’t accessible to all Boston residents. Boston’s Inclusionary Development Policy (IDP), the guiding framework during his term, mandated that developers set aside only 13 percent of the units in larger multifamily projects as income-restricted housing, which led to a severe scarcity of affordable new housing.
When factoring in effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy and the housing market, along with minimal wage growth for many workers, owning or renting a home in Boston became much more difficult. Deviating from the former mayors’ reflexes to build new market-rate developments as a remedy for the housing crisis, Wu has taken a much firmer, strategic approach to real estate development in Boston. But rather than shutting the door completely to developers, Wu instead has implemented policies that attract developers who align with her “everything starts with housing” philosophy, which prioritizes ensuring that all Bostonians can afford to live comfortably in their city.
These changes included an adjustment to the IDP, raising the percentage of income-restricted housing in new projects from 13 percent to rates between 17 and 20 percent, and a program that offers property tax abatements to landlords who convert empty office space into residential units. According to a 2022 executive order, the city is working on an expedited approval process for developers interested in building affordable housing, which will take about half the time it did in the past (a whopping 337 days).
To help remedy the impact that racial segregation has historically had on housing in Boston, large residential or mixed-use projects are now required to undergo a review process that ensures an alignment with fair-housing principles. Wu is proud of that priority. “Housing has been an all-hands-on-deck issue for us,” she told the Prospect. “We’ve done everything from audit every square foot of city-owned land and put 150 parcels out to build affordable housing in our neighborhoods, shaped by the needs and desires of the community, and also built by development firms that reflect and represent the diversity and talent of our community.”
In neighborhoods like Roxbury, which are historically Black, and have experienced the impact of racist housing policies, these changes have been transformational. As of January, more than 17,000 housing units have been built or started construction; about a third of those homes will be income-restricted. In 2022, Wu steered a home-rule petition through the city council, out of committee. Powerful Massachusetts real estate interests have snuffed out any whiff of reform ever since 1994 when a statewide referendum to preserve rent control failed, even though the controls were only in force in three municipalities: Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge.
Though Boston has made strides despite high interest rates and construction costs, which have been felt in other major cities across the country, critics have blamed City Hall for these external factors.
Wu has been at the forefront of resistance against the federal government’s attempts to carry out mass deportations.
Major money had gone into attacking Wu’s track record—and most of it has been spent by Kraft and his allies. Kraft had parachuted into the race in February, and had raised nearly $7 million on the campaign trail, with $5.5 million coming out of his own funds. Your City, Your Future, the super PAC supporting him, had received donations from major players in conservative politics, including $1 million from Jim Davis, the founder of New Balance, the athletic shoe company. These dollars paved the way for relentless television and social media attack ads.
Kraft tried to convince Boston voters that his nonprofit experience, including a decade as the CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Boston and his current posts as the head of Kraft Family Charities and board chair of the National Urban League’s Eastern Massachusetts chapter, would serve him well as mayor. But the younger Kraft’s millions, the purchase of a condo in the city at the end of 2023—the first of many eyebrow-raising moves—and his father’s support for President Trump opened him up to repeated criticism and shaved points off his popularity as the campaign season progressed.
Wu has raised around $1.8 million, with a significant amount coming from Bold Boston, a super PAC that has collected donations from environmental groups, unions, and individuals.
Kraft’s housing proposals had been influenced by the city’s developers, who have provided him with substantial financial backing. Citing slow growth in housing development, Kraft believed that Boston’s IDP should revert to 13 percent, and that the city should implement “opt-in rent control,” which would offer participating landlords a 20 percent return on their real estate taxes
It was an old-guard tactic: To escape a housing crisis, Boston had to build its way out—so private developers needed a voice in City Hall.
One Kraft claim, that Wu ignores valid criticism, has been echoed by her critics. Who exactly is Wu ignoring? When it comes to powerful local interests, Wu isn’t afraid to defend how she interacts with commercial property and real estate developers.
“We have many very fruitful and productive relationships and collaborations with developers who have been all in on our agenda to build more housing and build more affordability throughout the city,” Wu told the Prospect. “The role of city government is to direct our resources, to make it as easy and predictable as possible for private development to happen and add more housing and to put our own public resources into affordability. She added, “It is not the job of city government to bail out for-profits; to replace the profits of developers who took their own business risks and now are in a different economic environment than they were expecting.”
EVEN THOUGH THE CITY HAS IMPROVED outreach to residents who historically have been marginalized and not consulted about the city’s real estate planning, there’s simmering resentment in two Boston neighborhoods about a new public facility destined for their communities. Wu has faced strong opposition to a project to rebuild White Stadium, located in Franklin Park, the city’s largest public green space. In the late 1940s, the football facility was purpose-built to serve as the practice and game location for Boston Public Schools (BPS) athletics. Once considered one of the best school facilities in the country, White Stadium has been falling apart for decades.
In 2023, Wu announced that the city had entered into a partnership with Boston Unity Soccer Partners, signing a ten-year, public-private lease agreement with the organization to renovate the stadium. Under the lease, in exchange for Boston Legacy FC’s (a professional women’s soccer club) “shared usage” of the space with BPS teams, the city would split the construction costs with Boston Unity. The projected amount that the city will be expected to chip in keeps increasing: Wu stated in July that the city’s cost will “likely” exceed the current estimate of $91 million of the project’s estimated total $200 million cost. Wu has consistently argued that this public-private partnership is the best way to rebuild the stadium.
“This is the first time the city is moving forward with real action to deliver the renovations that our student athletes and our park users and our community members deserve,” says Wu. “We were very intentional about the deal that was involved here—where BPS and our community are getting a professional stadium at more than half off the sticker price. Our tenants, the professional soccer team, committed in the legal lease language to pay for maintenance and operations entirely, forever, for throughout the term of the lease.”
Boston Unity will pay an annual rent of $400,000, share a small percentage of a few revenue streams with the city, and contribute $500,000 in the first year (then increasing by 3 percent annually) to a community benefits fund for local organizations.
Although the city’s plan provides considerable benefits, namely, a state-of-the-art facility for BPS high school students and teams, it also has been widely criticized. Money, of course, is one of the most cited concerns, as the amount of the taxpayer-funded contribution has yet to be confirmed. In July, Wu declined to give an update on the cost, saying that Bostonians would be informed by the end of the year—but bids for utilities and construction have already gone out.
Some organizations and individuals in the surrounding neighborhoods of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain have voiced doubts about the project. Leading the charge has been the Franklin Park Defenders, a local advocacy group backed by the Boston NAACP and the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, which oversees the city parks designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
This past spring, the conservancy and several community members filed suit against the city and soccer club in an attempt to halt the plan, citing traffic congestion, community disruption, reduced usage time for BPS sports teams, and damaging environmental impacts, including felling dozens of mature trees. The Suffolk County Superior Court ruled in favor of the city and the soccer club. That decision is under appeal.
Some of the project’s critics argue that residents have had limited opportunities to voice their reservations. Although the city hosted quite a few community discussions in 2023 and 2024, there have been no sessions this year so far and the stadium demolition is under way. Kraft had seized on the discontent, pledging to halt the project if he’s elected mayor.
Wu has worked to make the city safer and more equitable. Violent crime rates have dropped, with city officials pointing to the power of community policing. “We [Boston] are the safest major city in the country because we are safe for everyone,” says Wu. Boston adopted a Green New Deal plan, which included the goals of running the city on 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, divestment from fossil fuel industries, and an expansion of housing co-ops. Wu invested $20 million into Boston’s universal pre-K program, which increased the number of seats available in early-education centers and integrated family child care providers into the system.
Overall, the mayor has been consistent in her messaging, which has helped rally voters to her purple banner. She has stressed what needs to be done locally, while also standing up for the city at the State House and on Capitol Hill. Wu doesn’t mince words when it comes to discussing the people who have attempted to browbeat her.
And she never hesitated to call out what she described as Josh Kraft’s “negative campaigning” and “privilege.” “This city has high standards of candidates; it’s a testament to Boston’s rich political culture, and the priorities of its people.”
IN THE PAST FEW MONTHS, sanctuary cities across the country have come under fire for refusing to comply with the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies. Wu has been at the forefront of resistance against the Department of Homeland Security’s attempts to carry out mass deportations. Wu hit back at the Trump administration during a March appearance before a congressional committee on Capitol Hill that was cheered back home as well as in multiple press conferences since then. More recently, when Attorney General Pam Bondi threatened her with legal action, she sent a strongly worded letter back. Since then, the Department of Justice has moved to sue Boston, charging that the city’s policies violate federal law by preventing local police from cooperating with civil immigration enforcement.
It’s been a particularly harsh landscape to run any political campaign in, and Wu is up against a host of other disparagers, from some of her own constituents to the president of the United States. Yet it is very clear that Wu will not back down from anyone who has opposed her, because she believes strongly in both the work she is doing and the results she has achieved.
When I asked her what Boston would do if Trump escalated his attacks on the city, Wu did not flinch. “They are already throwing everything they can at us, and this is not a city that puts our heads down and hides,” she says. “It’s a complicated and scary moment for all of our community members, and we intend here in Boston at the city level to be a source of support, strength, and hope to remind all of us that we can still do big things if everyone is part of shaping our future.”
While some American cities have seen a decline in support for Democratic candidates and groups aligned with progressive policies, Boston delivered a decisive victory for Wu in the preliminary—which means the November election is shaping up to be more of a vote of confidence. As Bostonians stride forward even as the nation moves backward to reopen some of its darkest chapters, Michelle Wu has emerged as the leader best equipped to grapple with these uncertain times.
This article appears in Oct 2025 Issue.