Terrence Boudreaux has spent his time on the council watching Foundry Row's land values climb while Lowertown's population and tax base continue to shrink. Now he wants the city to formalize a fund that captures some of that growth and sends it directly to his district.
Boudreaux’s proposal would establish a dedicated fund capturing a share of the incremental property tax revenue generated as Foundry Row’s assessed values continue to rise, similar in structure to a tax-increment financing district, and direct that money exclusively toward Lowertown infrastructure, housing and small-business investment. “Foundry Row used to be Lowertown’s neighbor in decline together,” Boudreaux said. “Now one side of that old factory district has biotech offices and lofts, and the other side is still waiting for someone to fix the sidewalks. I want a mechanism that doesn’t depend on me winning an argument in the budget every single year.”
The proposal comes as the city’s budget office has projected nearly $11 million in additional tax revenue tied to Foundry Row’s biotech expansion, a windfall several council members have already proposed directing toward their own districts’ priorities. Boudreaux said he wanted something more durable than a one-time allocation. “I don’t want to win a single budget fight,” he said. “I want a fund that exists whether or not Lowertown has an advocate in this chamber ten years from now.”
Tenant advocates cautiously supportive
Denise Okonkwo-Marsh, lead organizer of the Lowertown Tenant Alliance, which is separately pursuing a lawsuit against a Foundry Row developer over an alleged affordable-unit shortfall, said she supported the concept but wanted assurances the fund would prioritize keeping current Lowertown residents in place rather than simply subsidizing new development that could accelerate the same displacement pressures reshaping Foundry Row. “Money flowing into Lowertown is good,” Okonkwo-Marsh said. “Money flowing into Lowertown that ends up pricing out the people who stayed through the worst of it would just be displacement with better branding.”
We watched Foundry Row’s land become valuable because it sits next door to us, not because it’s a different planet. I’m not asking for charity. I’m asking this city to acknowledge that Lowertown has been subsidizing everyone else’s growth with cheap land and cheap labor for twenty years, and it’s time some of that value came home.
Terrence Boudreaux, City Council Member, District 2 (Lowertown)
A budget office wary of complexity
City Manager Marcus Whitfield said his office had not yet modeled the fiscal impact of the proposal but cautioned that tax-increment mechanisms can be difficult to unwind once adopted and sometimes reduce the general fund’s flexibility for years at a time. “I’m not opposed to the goal,” Whitfield said. “I want the council to understand that a fund like this effectively locks in a revenue stream for one purpose, which can become a constraint the same way it’s currently an opportunity.”
Council Member Luis Bettencourt, whose Foundry Row district would generate the revenue captured by the fund, said he was open to the idea in principle but wanted to make sure it didn’t come at the expense of his own district’s needs, including workforce training programs he has pushed for separately. “I don’t mind Foundry Row’s growth helping Lowertown,” Bettencourt said. “I just want to make sure it’s additive, not a substitute for investment my own residents are still waiting on too.”
Council Member Aisha Muhammad said she saw parallels between Boudreaux’s proposal and her own push for a citywide affordable-housing mandate, arguing both reflected a broader question of whether the city’s recovery has been distributed fairly across districts. “Councilman Boudreaux and I are asking versions of the same question from different angles,” Muhammad said. “Is Bellwater’s growth actually reaching the neighborhoods that need it, or just the ones next door to where it happened to start?”
Council President Walter Kowalczyk asked Whitfield’s office to prepare a detailed fiscal analysis, including comparisons to how other cities have structured similar neighborhood-specific reinvestment funds, before the council takes up the proposal formally. Boudreaux said he expected to spend the coming months building support ahead of a vote. “This isn’t going to pass on the strength of one good speech,” he said. “But I’ve waited this long to make the case. I can wait a little longer to make it well.”
Council Member Gary Petrowski said he saw an obvious parallel to his own push for permanent addiction-treatment funding out of the same biotech-driven revenue, and suggested the two proposals might eventually need to be reconciled rather than compete against each other for the same dollars. “Councilman Boudreaux and I represent two different neighborhoods that got hit hardest when the factories closed,” Petrowski said. “I’d rather find a way to support both of our districts than watch this council pit Lowertown against Cedar Hollow over who gets first claim on the same pot of money.”