Progress, not perfection: That’s how the saying goes. But what standards or objectives define progress for Lynn?
We share the view with others in the city that bringing new developments into Lynn, attracting new business and filling market-rate apartments with new residents goes a long way toward defining progress. How can a city experience economic success and stability if money in the form of new investment and new incomes isn’t flowing in?
That is one viewpoint. But there is another viewpoint. Neighbor to Neighbor, a group describing itself online as “…organizing to put people and the planet before profit” has a different view.
Neighbor to Neighbor and its allies are concerned, according to their online call to action, about “…aggressive development plans in the city of Lynn…”
Neighbor to Neighbor’s perspective is that development threatens “…to displace large numbers of low and moderate income families.”
The organization’s message to people who share its views is: “We are fighting for our right to stay and live in the city we love.” Those are strong uplifting words, but why does the definition of progress for Lynn have to be a fight instead of a conversation?
Lynn is a small enough city to bring people with a variety of viewpoints to a table for extended and honest conversations about the best ways to improve the city. It’s easy to suggest Neighbor to Neighbor is disguising its agenda with a feigned affection for Lynn. But it is just as easy to point a finger at developers and call them profit-obsessed people paying lip service to improving the city.
Both viewpoints are extreme and unfairly characterize people on both ends of the development debate as extremists or money grubbers. The truth is that there can be a conversation about development. There can be a meeting of the minds on how to provide opportunities and a better quality of life for Lynn residents.
There is a template for a meeting or meetings focused on Lynn’s quality of life. In the 1990s, the Lynn Business Partnership combined forces with the late Mayor Patrick J. McManus, the City Council, and Lynn’s legislative delegation to organize five “city summits.”
Ideas generated by the summits won the city congressional recognition.
The conversation starts around a table but someone has to bring the participants to the table. Real leadership could forge consensus among intelligent and dedicated Lynn residents and create a list of ideas for generating progress in the city. That list could require a site-plan review to include community meetings aimed at assessing the city’s overall development strategies and how the project in question helps advance those strategies.
Lynn is on the move. It is a city that can ill afford division and dissension. But that does not mean people with strong and opposing viewpoints can’t sit down and forge their differences into consensus.
Let’s start the conversation.
