Mayor Menino has set a goal of building 30,000 more units of housing by 2020, even though he won’t be mayor for most of that time. Governor Patrick set a goal last year of building 10,000 new units of multi-family housing during the same time period.

So Suffolk University’s Sawyer Business School and the Greater Boston Real Estate Board sponsored a forum last week to discuss the problems and possibilities for achieving such goals. Panelists were attorney, author and former city councilor Larry DiCara, Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Richard Davey, journalist Paul McMorrow, and real estate developer Ted Tye of National Development.

They were in awe of how Boston had changed since 1959 when writer Elizabeth Hardwick described Boston as an old lady—“wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming.” Hardwick wasn’t finished with her diatribe. She went on to declare that the city was exhausted under “the weight of the Boston legend, the tedium of its largely fraudulent poster of traditionalism,” and that its was a “culture that hasn’t been alive for a long time.”

Boston is no longer exhausted or depleted. It now has new legends—it still claims to be the hub of the universe, but its expertise now is in education, health, science, technology and finance, not in railroads and textiles. History is still a source of pride but it no longer triumphs over contemporary life. The city’s culture has been reinvigorated. People young and old want to live in Boston. Continue reading →