Housing and education were among the key issues Mayor Michelle Wu spoke about in her State of the City speech.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu gave her second annual State of the City address Tuesday evening.
The event at MGM Music Hall at Fenway started at 7 p.m., with Wu beginning her speech around 7:30 p.m.
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"It is thanks to the people of Boston that tonight I can say, 'The state of our city is strong,'" Wu said.
The speech is delivered annually to address the city’s progress over the previous year and provide an update on any new urban initiatives the mayor has developed.
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Wu touted her administration's work to combat opioid addiction and homelessness. In August, she submitted a proposal to the Boston City Council which would allow Boston police to clear the encampments near Mass. and Cass, enforce daily counts of bed spaces at local shelters and require the city to provide transportation to those shelters. The City Council approved the proposal in October, and removal began in early November.
"Our teams built relationships on Mass. and Cass and added more beds and services citywide," Wu said Tuesday. "With unprecedented coordination, we delivered unprecedented results. Today, the encampments are gone, and hundreds of people are housed and on the path to recovery."
Still, Wu acknowledged there are challenges ahead.
"And that starts with housing, because home is a place where everything starts," she said.
She proposed making it easier for Boston homeowners to create smaller, independent living units inside their homes or yards.
The effort to address the city's housing shortage would streamline efforts by homeowner to construct the accessory dwelling units "to expand lower-cost housing options, empower residents to build wealth, and foster diverse, multigenerational living spaces," Wu said.
It was also a more modest proposal than those championed by the Democrat when she was running for the office in 2021 — proposals like making greater Boston's MBTA public transit system free. So far, a few bus lines are operating fair-free.
Wu pointed to a series of actions including working to ban fossil fuels in new city buildings, introducing zero net carbon zoning and launching Boston’s first-ever networked geothermal system aimed at delivering clean energy for heating and cooling to hundreds of families.
She said the city has launched a program to convert office buildings into residential complexes that has already attracted proposals to turn eight downtown buildings into housing. To tackle traffic, the city is using machine learning to detect where congestion is worst, then optimize signals to unclog key corridors.
Other goals outlined by Wu include preserving existing affordable housing across Boston's neighborhoods and adding 50 electric school buses this year, more than doubling the current fleet of electric buses.
The mayor spoke of the work that still needs to be done, including at Boston Public Schools.
"Boston is the birthplace of public education, founded on the belief that knowledge belongs to everyone," she said. "We have yet to deliver on that vision."
She also announced that starting in February, every Boston Public School student and up to three family members will get free admission on the first and second Sundays of each month, to a slew of cultural institutions, including the Boston Children’s Museum, the Franklin Park Zoo, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Science, and the New England Aquarium.
Wu said she was inspired by a story that her mother, a Taiwanese immigrant then struggling to understand a foreign language, told her about the time she took her in a stroller to a downtown museum on a Tuesday when admission was free so she could stare up at a painting of a cliff full of wildflowers.
"In this moment, this mom with no money and no words in this language feels like the best mom on earth because she has given her daughter the world for a day," Wu said. "Tonight, her daughter gets to announce a new program for kids all across Boston, to feel at home in the places that show them the world."
Also on Tuesday, Wu congratulated the Boston Lady Raiders Cheer Squad and the Dorchester Elite Eagles football team and Boston Lady Raiders cheer squad, who were in attendance, after their championships last month.
She also thanked first responders and praised the city's new police contract.
Protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza interrupted Wu near the beginning of her speech.
"This is our democracy at work. We are a city for all voices," the mayor said to applause.
Multiple protesters were arrested by the Boston Police Department.
In her inaugural address in January 2023, Wu introduced her plans to increase Boston’s population without disrupting the minority communities that reside in the greater Boston area, including initiatives to promote affordable housing and protect renters from eviction and rent gouging.
Wu, the first woman and first Asian American to serve as mayor of Boston, has long been a proponent of rectifying the housing crisis in Boston, advocating for limits on annual rent increases, zoning reforms that stimulate permanent affordable housing and the growth of homeless shelters around the city.
