Massachusetts News

January 26--Mayor Menino appointed a close personal friend and political fundraiser, Mark Maloney, to be his choice to run the city’s rudderless redevelopment agency yesterday, leading many insiders to cautiously question just how loyal and independent the new director will be. 

Maloney, President of Maloney Properties, Inc., comes to the city with an impressive record of housing management under his belt, with over twenty-six years of experience and 49 housing developments, containing over 5,000 units. Maloney’s bio lists numerous ventures, most of which, however, are in the public sector. 

"Mark is an effective manager of property," said a city hall source who asked not to be identified, "but I don’t think you will find he has much development experience. How he works with private developers is going to be the test of how effective he will be." Two major city projects under Maloney’s management are the elderly housing units at the Heritage development in East Boston and the new Madison Park Village (III) revitalized townhouses in Roxbury. 

Maloney also sits on the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership and is the President of the Board of Directors of "The City School," a center for service learning located in Boston’s South End. He is also a member of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board.

As for his relationship with the mayor, Maloney and the mayor go back years. The mayor handpicked Maloney in 1994 to head a Task Force charged with evaluating the Boston Housing Authority’s loose administration of elderly housing developments. Maloney’s connection to the Boston Housing Authority is not casual either. Massachusetts News has learned that it was Maloney who lobbied Menino to hire a Maloney Properties executive, Sandra Henriquez, to head the city’s embattled public housing agency. Henriquez is said to have an ownership share of Maloney, too.

Whether Maloney will be able to connect with private developers who may not share his ideas of housing creation is open to question, as is his independence from the mayor. In the past, the combination of agency direction and director ego have often driven irreconcilable wedges between previous mayors and BRA directors. Long before Tom O’Brien left for other reasons, he was considered person non grata in the Mayor’s inner circle. Marisa Largo, who preceded O’Brien, was never in the inner circle to begin with, and Steve Coyle, the irascible and feisty director dating back to Flynn, grated many with his abrupt manner and is said to have survived as long as he did only because of the housing boom over which he had no control. 

Maloney is said to bring to the table a level of comfort that the mayor will be able to deal with, at least for now. He shares the mayor’s views for housing creation, and he can be expected to press developers for the creation of that which he is most comfortable with: publicly subsidized housing. Insiders expect to see non-profits benefit from Maloney’s new role, as he has demonstrated a good working relationship with key players in that area, being the Chair of the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency’s Community Services Advisory Committee and a member of that agency’s Inner City Task Force, where he chaired the Social Services sub-committee. Ed Shanahan, CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, said he was "optimistic that his [Maloney’s] historical exposure to housing indicates a heightened focus by the mayor on the importance of generating new housing production. We look forward to working with Mark in his new role." 
 

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