Nimble, Accountable, Tangible: An Interview with Michelle Wu

This interview was conducted in September 2021. Michelle Wu was sworn in as Mayor of Boston two months later.

On August 27, Boston mayoral candidate Michelle Wu gave an Instagram Live tour of a building she loves: Boston City Hall. Wu is one of two remaining candidates in this year’s tight mayoral race and is running on one of the most progressive platforms in the city’s history. As City Councilor At-Large, Wu has championed ideas that, once considered out-of-reach, are serious proposals—including fare free public transit, bringing back rent control, abolishing the Boston Planning and Development Agency, defunding the police, and ushering in a Green New Deal.

Wu’s mayoral run takes place amid a reckoning about the city’s housing crisis and racial wealth gap. Between 2007 and 2017, home prices in the city rose 61 percent. A recent report from the U.S. Department of Housing revealed that the average rental cost for a one-bedroom apartment in Boston is $2,880. Skyrocketing housing prices have forced thousands of predominantly non-white and working-class people to remai…