Steven Senne/AP Photo
Boston mayoral candidates Annissa Essaibi George, left, and Michelle Wu, center, speak before the start of the Roxbury Unity Parade, in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, July 18, 2021.
Billed as a progressive-moderate matchup, the November Boston mayoral election between Michelle Wu and Annissa Essaibi George is shaping up to be a contest less focused on what works, what doesn’t, and what could, and more on wielding slogans like a cudgel. A September Emerson College/7News poll found that the most important issues for voters were housing and education. But the issue that could nudge out others in the coming weeks is the one that the summer uprisings of 2020 germinated: “Defund the police.”
Unlike New York, where crime shot up during the pandemic and dominated the mayoral primary race that sent moderate Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and a former police officer, into the city’s upcoming election, Boston’s overall crime rate dropped 23 percent during the COVID-19 onslaught. The Boston Police Department (BPD) cites an increase in gun arrests as a major factor in the decline, and crime came in fourth behind housing, education, and COVID-19 in the September poll of top voter issues.
That data point doesn’t mean, however, that Black Bostonians in at-risk neighborhoods are resting easy. Conservatives who get riled up by calls for defunding and progressives who call for more social service interventions and anti-violence programs instead of new police hires often gloss over the fact that for many Black folk in neighborhoods where shootings are endemic, it’s not a simple more-of-this or less-of-that situation. Black voters can support hiring more police officers and turning certain interventions over to people better equipped to handle them.
Wu favors allocating funding from the BPD to social service and mental-health professionals to handle some 911 calls and taking an assertive stance on police discipline and other issues through contract negotiations (such as ending binding arbitration for serious infractions). Essaibi George, who refuses to call herself a moderate but espouses talking points that are more conservative than those of the rest of the progressive primary field, wants to hire as many as 300 new officers for the force currently at 2,100, and also supports deploying civilians to handle minor issues to a lesser degree than Wu and other progressives. This stance sent William Gross, Boston’s first Black police commissioner (who decided not to run for mayor earlier this year and heads up a controversial super PAC supporting Essaibi George) into the Essaibi George camp, along with police and other public-safety unions.
Unlike New York, where crime shot up during the pandemic, Boston’s overall crime rate dropped 23 percent during the COVID-19 onslaught.
Boston’s housing crisis is a familiar and major conundrum for Northeast Corridor cities. Many Bostonians have responded with worry and anger over exploding rents that fuel gentrification and price them out of the city. Decades of debate and reams of studies about how to create affordable housing and dial down entrenched NIMBYism and the power of developers have yielded few if any results.
Wu has added a new dimension to this debate: a return to rent control, a proposal that would require buy-in from state lawmakers, which is not a simple proposition. (Voters repealed rent control in a 1994 statewide ballot measure, even though Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline, which were the only municipalities where it was in force, voted no on the repeal. Essaibi George is opposed to rent control, and is vulnerable on this issue also because her housing developer husband has had business before the city. A recent Boston Globe investigation found that Doug George has run afoul of the state housing and construction laws many times. (He also paid off outstanding monies due the city shortly before his wife announced her candidacy.) One former tenant actually labeled George a “slumlord.”
The Wu campaign has a strong profile on climate issues, and debates about resilience are well warranted. The Seaport, Boston’s newest neighborhood, which contains cultural gems like the Institute of Contemporary Art, sits on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, prompting much hand-wringing over the wisdom of the siting given sea level rise. Wu often touts electric buses and free fares on the MBTA, one of her longtime signature issues. In a city where frustration with public transportation is widespread, she is one of the few city leaders to channel that dissatisfaction into specific policy proposals. For her part, Essaibi George has zeroed in on greening schools and energy job training for students.
Essaibi George has argued that the Boston mayor cannot unilaterally make the MBTA free or reverse rent control, two anti-Wu charges she has recently leveled, though Wu doesn’t contend that a mayor can. But recent Boston mayors have shied away from walking a few blocks to the Massachusetts State House to seriously pressure state lawmakers for significant public-transportation and housing reforms—a tradition of nonperformance that Wu appears poised to end.
That two women of color are now facing off for mayor is an extraordinary development in this or any city.
Sadly, the Boston contest is already veering into predictable displays of anti-intellectualism and tiresome demonstrations of Boston cred. Boston and the state of Massachusetts have a national reputation for being bastions of Kennedyesque liberalism, but waves of parochialism often swamp both state and city politics.
Under the banner of “New Boston,” the city trumpets how it has pressed forward on race relations, attracted tens of thousands of new residents, and is sloughing off, or at least trying to, its white, male patriarchs for fresh faces. Lest some voters find this transition threatening, Essaibi George stresses her born-and-bred-in-Boston sensibilities (code for “I am not from away”) and has already caricatured Wu as someone who enjoys “academic exercises and having lovely conversations” over getting things done. The presumably not-really-Bostonian Wu hails from Chicago’s South Side, and is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law, and a former student of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Wu’s background is Taiwanese; Essaibi George’s ancestry is Tunisian and Polish.
A favorite of the “Wuniverse” of young voters, Wu walked off with the progressive vote in the September 14 first-round primary, coming in first or second in many wards. Essaibi George captured not much more beyond the predominantly white conservative neighborhoods where turnout is typically strong. Of the major unions, Wu has the backing of 1199 SEIU, Teamsters Local 25, and the UAW. Along with the public-safety unions, Essaibi George has garnered support from IBEW Local 103. The next union endorsement to watch for is the Boston Teachers Union; Essaibi George is a former Boston public high school teacher.
That two women of color, whittled down from the four women of color on the September 14 ballot, are now facing off for mayor is an extraordinary development in this or any city. But in a contest that had been expected to feature a Black female candidate, turnout is the wild card. In the primary’s first round, the two African American candidates—Kim Janey, who took over City Hall after former Mayor Marty Walsh departed for the Biden administration, and Andrea Campbell, a district city councilor—split the Black vote, a major disappointment for Black Bostonians. Janey and Campbell’s losses will hang heavy over the November runoff. Will Black voters sit 2021 out and will young voters, especially progressive ones, show up?
This post has been updated.
