It wasn't by chance Hub grew with Ganz

8 December 2000

For a long time, people who studied urban areas figured cities like Boston had one of two futures. One vision saw them as playgrounds: centers of entertainment and shopping that people visited but in which they never really lived or worked.

A second, even bleaker, saw them as reservations for the poor and disenfranchised: vast slums of poverty, crime and hopelessness.

Alex Ganz had a different vision.

It is hard to overstate the crisis that Boston faced some 30 years ago. From 1930 through the 1960s, the city had continually lost jobs and people. Run by a government that seemed to care most about fanning class resentment and making sure the right pockets got lined, Boston suffered through the equivalent of a 30-year depression.

In the 1960s, spurred by a new breed of leaders such as Mayor John Collins, Boston tried to bootstrap its way up, building the Prudential Center and creating Government Center. Still, as the end of the decade approached, Boston's economy was in shambles. The city seemed increasingly irrelevant. Suburbs, it appeared, would dominate the geography of the future.

Against this tidal wave of despair stood Ganz. A soft-spoken MIT economist of eclectic interests, he had worked in Washington and in South America, helping to design and build urban areas. He was internationally known, yet in 1970 the White administration was able to persuade him to come work for Boston's Redevelopment Authority. For 21 years, as director of policy development and research, Ganz charted a new course for Boston.

Instead of a playground or a reservation, Ganz conceived of Boston as a dynamo, an economic and cultural engine. Not only did Ganz believe Boston could be revived, but he believed, for economic and sociological reasons, that such a revival was critical to the long- term success of the entire metropolitan region.

It was a contrarian notion. Where some saw manufacturing and trade jobs disappearing, Ganz saw a transformation of Boston into a service economy. Where some saw an inevitable depopulation of the city, he conceived of revitalizing its neighborhoods. Well before the term had entered into the popular currency, Ganz understood that we were entering the information age. He understood that the economy of the future would increasingly be defined by intellectual capital, not mass production.

At the BRA, Ganz assembled what could only be described as a think- tank - a collection of often-brilliant people who thought deeply about urban issues. They conceived of what Boston might be, and then set out to create it.

If one compares photographs of that era with the Boston of today, the differences are striking. Much of the city is almost unrecognizable. But those physical changes are only one manifestation of the changes that Ganz and his colleagues wrought.

An example: taxes.

When Ganz first came to work for Boston, the city derived virtually all of its revenue from the property tax. While states and the federal government relied on the income tax - a tax that rose and fell with the success of the economy - Boston's revenue was tied to an inflexible tax that related to property values. And property values, Ganz argued, were a poor measure of economic activity. Boston might very well be the economic engine of the region, but it was being starved fiscally, unable to realize any tax benefit from the wealth it generated.

Worse, Boston's tax system was profoundly corrupt. Assessments and valuations were way out of line. Businesses were heavily and unfairly taxed. The amount of tax one paid was often politically driven. If the mayor liked you, your taxes were low. If not, the quarterly bill brought an unpleasant surprise.

High taxes and the uncertainty of those taxes drove businesses out of the city and kept them out. It was a problem that had to be fixed.

Ganz and his colleagues methodically laid out the intellectual and political groundwork for reform. It took them until 1983 to clean up the tax system itself, ending the backroom dealing and tying taxes to the real value of people's property. They also pushed to diversify the revenue base, with an increasing amount of resources coming from the state and federal government. Property taxes today are still half of the city's revenues, far more than Ganz wanted, but much better than it once was.

The results of those reforms can be seen today in a city that, by almost any measure, is thriving.

Ganz was widely admired. Although he left the BRA in the early 1990s, the culture of discipline, knowledge and public service that he created survives. And his intellectual influence, his notion that cities matter deeply, changed the way people think of cities, not only in Boston but also around the nation.

Cities like Boston are not happenstance. The Boston of today is a consequence of the plans and decisions made by people such as Alex Ganz.

Eighty years old, Ganz died just after Thanksgiving. His body is stilled now. But his life persists in the soul of the city he helped save, the city he loved.