Investing to Accelerate a Green New Deal

Of its $558.7 million in ARPA fiscal recovery funds, Boston invested $465 million toward 115 projects and $95 million for revenue replacement. The City’s largest investment category was affordable housing, which was the top concern voiced by community members throughout the engagement process in the country’s third most expensive city for renters. Boston is investing in a host of other innovative, equity-focused efforts from fare-free transit to strengthening Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) cultural institutions.

Mariangely Solis Cervera, Boston’s Chief of Equity and Inclusion says, "To get different outcomes, we must invest in different practices. Much of the work of building an equitable city is to be able to identify the gaps in opportunities. We are building a foundation for a City government that prioritizes our historically excluded communities.”

Centering equity in the decision-making process

Driven by disaggregated data
The City’s practice of collecting and analyzing disaggregated data to develop equitable strategies was foundational to its approach to ARPA investments. At the beginning of the pandemic, Boston built a comprehensive data dashboard to track its health and economic impacts by race/ethnicity, age, immigration status, gender, neighborhood, and industry. This dashboard revealed how women, low-paid workers, workers without a college degree, communities of color, immigrants, younger workers, and small businesses were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. It also showed that East Boston, Mattapan, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Hyde Park had the highest rates of COVID-19 infections as well as unemployment. This data helped drive a focus on equity by prioritizing the most impacted populations and neighborhoods.

Other data analyses also influenced the City’s equity focus and approach, including the 2020 disparity study, which found that less than one half percent of prime contracts in the City went to Black-owned businesses even though they represented about 4 percent of available firms for such contracts, as well an earlier, in-depth Color of Wealth study quantifying the City’s deep racial wealth disparities.

Prioritizing racial equity as a key value
Racial equity was an explicit priority in the City’s process. City leaders put forth a set of key values that would drive ARPA investment decisions that included racial equity along with transformative solutions to systemic issues such as climate justice, good jobs, and health recovery.

Building on two decades of work to institutionalize equity.
The City’s focus on equity through its ARPA spending builds upon nearly two decades of work institutionalizing an equity focus throughout government operations, beginning in the health department and expanding to a Citywide effort in 2015. As Chief of Equity and Inclusion, Solis Cervera, as well as her predecessor, played a central role throughout the investment process, working with the Chief Financial Officer to drive the work forward. Prior to the pandemic, city departments had been incorporating equity analysis into their decision-making, for instance by assessing equity impacts as part of the budget process.

Listening to the most impacted communities, including non-English speakers. Community engagement was integral to deciding how to invest the resources. Boston convened an Equitable Recovery Taskforce comprising 30 community members working in the nonprofit, private, and public sectors to advise on the City’s investments, and simultaneously launched a “Let’s Go Better” community listening campaign which engaged 600 residents through 15 issue-specific meetings. The campaign sought to engage people from communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 by working with community leaders, providing interpretation services, and making materials available in multiple languages. The City also used multilingual surveys, regular meetings with community organizations and small businesses, and its 311 phone service to garner community input. 

Aligning with other equity-focused initiatives. The ARPA spending plan also built upon prior plans and ongoing equity-focused efforts including a 2021 Health Equity Now roadmap produced by a community task force, as well as the City’s food access, digital equity, and inclusive procurement initiatives.

Investing in equity

The City’s first round of allocations focused on projects that met the urgent needs of people, businesses, and neighborhoods disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and also supported the expansion of its groundbreaking fare-free bus pilot.

• Basic needs assistance for families not eligible for previous COVID-19 benefits ($1 million). After learning through community feedback and data collection that undocumented residents were struggling to access pandemic relief, the City dedicated ARPA funds for cash assistance (one-time, $1,000 payments) to 1,219 households unable to access other federal pandemic benefits. To remove barriers for residents uncomfortable with dealing directly with the government, Boston enlisted the Massachusetts Immigrant Collaborative — a network of immigrant-led nonprofits — to help distribute payments.
• Fare-free bus pilot ($10 million). Mayor Wu’s Green New Deal platform envisions reliable public transit as a fundamental right and a public good, and fare-free transit as a step toward realizing that right. On her first day in office, Mayor Wu requested ARPA funds to expand the fare-free bus pilot launched by Mayor Janey to two additional bus lines also serving Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester: three environmental justice communities hard-hit by the pandemic and not served by the City’s subway system. ARPA funds supported the pilot for two years as well as an evaluation of its impact. The midterm evaluation, released in 2023, found an increase in ridership, riders savings and bus accessibility for youth, unhoused people, and older adults. In February 2024, the City extended the pilot for an additional two years using $350,000 per month in remaining ARPA funds. See our case study.

The City’s second round of allocations focused on long-term, transformative investments in the City’s future. Aligned with community priorities, housing received the largest portion of funding at almost $236 million across 21 projects addressing affordable homeownership and rental housing development and preservation,—much of it on city-owned land—energy efficient retrofits, community land trusts, permanent supportive housing, and more, including the following:

• Affordable homeownership development ($58 million). The “Welcome Home Boston” program aims to address the racial wealth gap by developing green, affordable homes on 150 city-owned parcels,with preferences for developers of color,and providing up to $50,000 in reduced interest rates, down-payment, and closing cost assistance for first-time homebuyers. As of July 2023, the program has helped 103 first-time homebuyers buy homes, with 72 percent belonging to BIPOC communities. “We have been trying to buy a place off and on for almost 35 years,” new homeowners Julieta Lopez and Julien Williams said. “We had to stop because of many trials and tribulations. This was going to be our last shot.”
• Combat displacement through strategic property acquisition ($48 million). This investment will expand the City’s successful housing acquisition program that supports mission-driven housing developers to purchase and maintain permanently affordable housing. The focus is on transit corridors where the City is making investments, which are vulnerable to displacement pressure and speculation. As of December 2023, the program has helped developers purchase 171 units.
• Deep green retrofits for affordable housing ($20 million). This innovative housing and environmental justice initiative will conduct deep energy retrofits of small market-rate, multi-family affordable rentals and buildings recently preserved as affordable rental housing, improving air quality, energy efficiency, and livability. The City aims to retrofit 300 buildings housing BIPOC and historically underserved renters while training minority-owned contractors and subcontractors to perform the retrofits.

Boston’s project list includes investments that address underlying issues that perpetuate inequities such as supporting the childcare sector, food justice, workforce development, and digital infrastructure, as well as targeted investments in underserved populations such as those highlighted below. 

• Elevating and investing in BIPOC-led cultural organizations ($13 million). Aiming to support a next generation of cultural anchors in Boston that is much more reflective of the City’s diverse demographics, this project dedicates multi-year grants to BIPOC organizations, cultural facilities, and individual creative workers. In December 2023, the new Cultural Investment Grant program awarded $7.35 million to 11 nonprofit art organizations anchored in communities of color to help them strengthen and scale their programming.
• Creating an ecosystem to grow BIPOC-owned businesses ($8 million). Since Boston’s 2020 Disparity Study exemplified significant racial gaps, the City has been working to make contracts available to businesses owned by people of color and the share of city contracts to minority-owned businesses has increased from 5 to 12 percent. To continue this effort, Boston dedicated $8 million in ARPA recovery funds toward inclusive procurement, including developing an innovative new business accelerator program connecting underrepresented business owners to accessible city contracts. In 2023, the Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion and the Supplier Diversity Office opened applications for the $750,000 Boston Contractor Opportunity Fund to support BIPOC-owned firms operating in priority sectors. See our case study.
• Green Jobs Program PowerCorpBOS ($9 million). Modeled after a successful program in Philadelphia, PowerCorpsBOS is a green jobs program that provides “learn and earn” opportunities in green careers such as urban forestry and energy efficient building operations for young adults, particularly from Boston’s environmental justice communities. The 10-month program provides stipends, transit passes, and wraparound supports to participants. Now in its fourth cohort, the program has served 173 young people. “Everything I have learned has been a tool to unlock my true potential,” December 2023 graduate Daquan Dixon says. “I got the opportunity to experience things I never could have imagined. The program has taught me that the tools are there; it's up to you to reach out and grab them.”

Ensuring equitable implementation

Boston’s leaders recognize that committing to targeted investments is not enough—they need to proactively connect “hard-to-reach” communities with ARPA programs. Language accessibility is a strong focus in Boston, which has a large low-income immigrant population, and the City dedicated over $635,000 in ARPA funds to increase access to ARPA-funded programs for residents who communicate in languages other than English, including American Sign Language via translation and interpretation services. Most large-scale ARPA projects have communications circulated in the City's top 10 languages, for example. The City also works closely with trusted community based organizations to conduct outreach in underserved communities.

Key challenges to equitable implementation for the City include compliance across departments, standing up new programs quickly and equitably, and comprehensive data collection. With more than 30 departments involved in ARPA implementation, the City is working to ensure new language access and demographic data collection standards are uniformly adopted. For projects that have quickly built new programs from scratch, the City has had to balance the need to deliver within the ARPA timeframe with the need to address crucial equity concerns, such as preventing gentrification, which can take longer-term, deliberative processes. Finally, collecting data across more than 115 diverse projects in a way that can summarize collective impact has proven to be more challenging than initially anticipated—but also an opportunity to build stronger institutional infrastructure for equitable public investment.

Anticipating the ARPA funding obligation deadline at the end of 2024, the ARPA implementation and evaluation team is currently meeting with all departments to review funded projects, strategize around barriers to implementation, and identify projects that positively impact vulnerable communities and should continue in some way, as well as those for which funding can be redirected to more successful initiatives.

Toward transformative change

ARPA funds helped accelerate the City’s Green New Deal plan, supporting innovative new programs and projects that will continue after the federal funds have been spent down. In addition to the fare-free bus pilot which has been extended for two years (and the Streets Department expects it to be permanent), the City is building a short list of ARPA-seeded projects they are working to continue, either with operating funds or through partnerships with philanthropy or state or federal government. 

The City has also built important new community relationships through the ARPA experience, dramatically increasing the number of grassroots community organizations receiving City funds, expanding the City’s footprint, and forging new connections with historically underserved communities. This has created an opportunity for deeper partnership to address inequities—though it will be important for the City to continue to nurture these new relationships to deliver equitable outcomes.

ARPA’s massive scale and tight timeline also expedited the City’s work to build stronger data collection and evaluation infrastructure. At the launch of their ARPA process, the Equity and Inclusion Cabinet partnered with the analytics team to develop a standardized template for demographic data collection across all ARPA projects, gathering information on race/ethnicity, gender, and neighborhood to assess whether programs are reaching their intended target populations. This tool launched a process of creating a uniform citywide demographic data collection standard, similar to what the City has produced for data on gender and is in the process of doing for disability. 

Aleja Jimenez Jaramillo, the City of Boston’s Director of Tech Governance and Policy, says that while the City is currently using an interim demographic data collection standard based on the ARPA tool, they are taking an intentionally slower and deliberative approach to create the uniform standard, recognizing the complex and dynamic nature of racial/ethnic identities. “We are working to structure a process that creates the conditions for coordinated, consistent government function across Boston but also acknowledges the very complex lived experience that a lot of people have around race,” Jaramillo says. This development work will continue in 2024 and beyond. 

ARPA funding is also helping Boston strengthen its evaluation and evidence-based decision making capacities. The evaluation team, led by Sebastián Sandoval-Olascoaga who came on board as Evaluation and Research Lead in fall 2023, has been taking stock of the ARPA-funded projects to assess their current evaluation status and prioritize projects for impact evaluations. While the City has traditionally contracted with outside evaluators, Sandoval-Olascoaga says the City of Boston is “building the muscle to do evaluations internally.” They are also working to increase evidence-based decision making at the front end of project development and to create a culture where evaluation is used as a tool for learning what works, continually improving programs and services.  

Through these ARPA-supported policy and process innovations, Boston has strengthened its equity investments and lens in ways that will persist long after the funding is spent.