Trump Should Take Over Boston’s South Station. It’s a Disgrace.
It encapsulates decades of urban policy failures. And yes, there's a Harvard angle, too.
The deputy secretary of transportation, Steven Bradbury, set off a backlash recently when he hinted that the federal government—that is, the Trump administration—might take over Boston’s South Station the way it has Union Station in Washington, D.C. “We need to address the cleanliness, the crime, the safety, and security of the station,” Bradbury said, “for the rail workers, for the passengers, because the people of Boston deserve that, all the people up and down the northeast corridor and Americans who travel on these trains.”
The governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, issued a statement denouncing Trump: “What the Trump Administration is doing in DC and now threatening to do at South Station is outrageous, wrong and has nothing to do with transportation or public safety. It’s more political theater, more political power grabs from Donald Trump. We don’t need or want his interference here. We’re not going to let the guy who went bankrupt six times take over our train stations.”
The mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, who is running for re-election this year (a preliminary municipal election is Tuesday September 9), accused Trump of playing a game of “authoritarian monopoly.”
“Don’t even think about it. This is what dictators do,” said Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, in a response directed at Trump’s implied threat to take over South Station.
Obscured by the power struggle among the politicians is the fact that South Station, the primary train and bus entryway to the city of Boston, is a disorderly place. Apparently homeless individuals are sprawled on the surrounding sidewalks.
Drug deals and injections are openly visible.
Graffiti mars the outside walls of the station.
Store windows feature large signs declaring “No Loitering, No Soliciting,” not exactly a warm welcome message to arriving commuters or tourists. If loitering and soliciting weren’t persistent problems, there’d be no need for the signs.
I publish the photos here not to embarrass any of the individuals pictured. I feel bad for them and wish them better health and shelter. It’s a failure of the people currently in charge of South Station to connect them with services that could lead them to more dignity. Maybe Trump could do better. It’s hard to imagine he could do worse. You’d think that Trump’s threat would catalyze a cleanup effort, but these pictures were taken Thursday September 4, days after all the stories about the threat. And it’s not like I had to hang around the station for hours to spot the issues. I’d seen them on previous visits and they were easy and quick to find this time, too. And I’m okay with urban levels of disorder; downtown Boston needn’t look as tidy as the nation-state of Singapore, or the Chestnut Hill Mall, or even Giuliani-era Bryant Park. But neither should getting off the Acela or a commuter rail train in South Station require passing through the 2025 Boston equivalent of a Dickensian opium den.
It’s a story with implications that go beyond Boston. The socialist who is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, has publicly named Wu as an example of the sort of progressive governance he wants to bring to New York. Some of the Boston station’s problems result from spending federal tax dollars in the pre-Trump years, and from other misguided, counterproductive national and local policies.
There’s even a China angle: A China-based real estate developer, Gemdale Properties, is a significant investor in a Ritz-Carlton condo tower being built over the station. That tower’s construction has made South Station even more chaotic, with temporary scaffolding obstructing visibility.
A political-science department or public-policy graduate school could teach an entire course on the missteps that turned South Station into what it is today. Here are eight factors—including “media bias” and a Harvard medical school professor determined to “decrease substance use stigma”—that helped create the problems:
A partial privatization South Station was built privately and opened in 1899. When the federal government started pouring money into highway construction to support automobile traffic and as air travel became more popular, the railroad that owned the station went bankrupt. South Station was sold to the Boston Redevelopment Authority and then to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. In 1988 the governor of Massachusetts was Michael Dukakis, a Democrat who was also running for president and eager to partner with business in a way that would increase his national appeal by making him look more centrist. The MBTA, which he basically controlled, sold a ground lease under South Station to a real estate company, the Beacon Companies, controlled by civic-minded and politically active Boston-area developers, Norman and Robert Leventhal (Norman’s son Alan, who was President Biden’s ambassador to Denmark, is reportedly himself now considering a run for governor of Massachusetts). At the time the term of lease was reported as either 65 years or 36 years with an option of two 15-year extensions.
Beacon Companies eventually became a public company, Beacon Properties Corporation. That merged with Equity Office Properties Trust (controlled by Sam Zell, who at one point also owned the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times), which was then bought by the Blackstone Group (Stephen Schwarzman and Jonathan Gray), which then, in 2017, sold the lease—by now described as 98 years—for $119 million to Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp. of New York. Ashkenazy is controlled by Ben Ashkenazy, whose wealth at the time was put by Bloomberg (“New York’s Plaza Hotel Is in the Sights of This Shy Billionaire”) at $4.1 billion. Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp. did not reply to emails from The Editors asking about the condition of the property.
The situation it reminds me of—a state-controlled transportation authority signing a long-term lease with a private developer—is the 99-year lease that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey approved in April 2001 for the World Trade Center with Silverstein Properties and Westfield America. The governor of New York, George Pataki, billed it at the time as “one of the largest privatizations ever of a government asset,” but a genuine, full privatization would have involved actually selling the asset, not merely leasing it.
The Big Dig An elevated interstate highway opened in 1959, I-93, sliced through downtown Boston. House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill and Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy used their seniority and political clout to win billions in federal funding for a 1991 to 2007 “big dig” state and federal project ($15 billion or $22 billion depending on how you count, large even by the standards of federal infrastructure projects) to “depress” the central artery and create a Rose Kennedy Greenway above it. The park is genuinely lovely and has opened downtown Boston to the harbor and, along with Justice Breyer’s $220 million courthouse and a new convention center, spurred development of the seaport neighborhood. But a lovely park rather than a loud highway has also turned out to be something of a magnet for homelessness and drug abuse.
Federally funded “safe injection kits” and “fentanyl test strips.” Speaking of federal funding, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services funded a $2,710,074 project to reduce drug overdose deaths in Boston. The project included a website with a map: “Use the Boston Naloxone Map to find locations that offer free or over-the-counter naloxone.” The map includes the CVS inside South Station. The city offers “a range of service to active injection drug users,” including “free, legal, and anonymous needle exchange.” The state purchased 14 “harm reduction vending machines,” and gave four to the city of Boston, stocked with “harm reduction supplies including naloxone, safe injection kits, and fentanyl test strips.” As Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, the city’s commissioner of public health and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, put it, “The goal of our community-focused work is to decrease substance use stigma and distribute naloxone, a life-saving medication that can reverse an overdose. We’ve also established public health vending machines and kiosks across the city to improve access to naloxone and other harm reduction supplies. In 2024, over 23,000 doses of naloxone were distributed in Boston.”
This approach may well have reduced fatal overdoses. That is good. However, it has left South Station populated with live needle-users, which is less good for those of us non-Harvard Medical School professors who don’t think the entire solution here is “to decrease substance use stigma.”
Having the city pay drug addicts, which it calls “people who use drugs”: The Boston Public Health Commission in May 2024 issued a request for proposals to run what it called a “peer-based syringe removal team.” It sought an individuals or organizations with expertise in “peer-based programming for people who use drugs (PWUD).” Also, “a vendor who will operate a team or teams of PWUD who will identify and dispose of syringes and other used harm reduction supplies in high need areas of the City, including parks and playgrounds. The vendor will coordinate monetary compensation for the program participants.” The proposal notes that the Boston Public Health Commission has already supported a “Community Syringe Redemption Program…which provides stipends to individuals who return syringes.”
Media bias The Boston Globe had an online headline reading “Boston South Station Has Low Crime Despite What Federal Official Says.” The article reports, “a Globe analysis of police incident data and resident complaints shows that crime at Boston’s bustling transit hub is relatively minimal, especially in contrast to other major hubs like D.C.’s Union Station.” You have to scroll way down to the final paragraphs of the article to find out that from January 2023 to August 2025, there were 138 complaints to the city’s 311 about discarded needles at the station. Those were just the people who called to complain.
Silly police tactics In the middle of the main hall of South Station is a desk labeled “transit police.”
This is where the police sit. That may be less work for the police than walking around the station maintaining order. It may be someone who isn’t a police officer’s idea of a good idea—“hey, let’s put a police station right in the center of the terminal, that will make people feel safe and reduce crime.” The effect is that all the bad guys know precisely where the police are—sitting behind the desk in the terminal. The bad guys conclude that they can safely go to places that are out of sight of the police desk to create disorder. No need for criminals to worry about getting surprised and caught by the police when the police are safely trapped behind the police desk.
The downside of landmarking This is a tricky one. Train stations are a hot-button issue for landmarks preservationists. The old Penn Station in New York was lost and replaced with a subterranean nightmare; my friend Frank Brandeis Gilbert was a landmarks preservation lawyer who helped to win, at the Supreme Court, the Penn Central Transportation Co v. City of New York opinion that upheld the constitutionality of New York's landmark law and that effectively saved Grand Central Terminal. I’m a historian and have happily lived in landmark districts in Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. That said, South Station is no Grand Central. Maybe Boston would have replaced it with something worse, or maybe Boston would have replaced it with something better. The downside of placing South Station on the National Historic Register has been to slow the dynamism and development that might have otherwise more rapidly cleaned the place up.
The Covid lockdown and hybrid work Boston office populations are reportedly 40 percent below where they were before the pandemic. The Back Bay area has recovered quicker and better than the Financial District that is served by South Station. There are slow efforts to convert some of the office space to residential and of some of the office tenants to reduce their occupancy footprint. But for a shoeshine guy or a cookie baker or a bookstore in South Station who was just making a living after paying the rent, it’s hard to adjust to 40 percent fewer commuters, or to customers just coming into the office three or four days a week instead of five. When those businesses inside South Station get boarded up and closed, it makes the whole place less vibrant, and gives commuters more reason to stay in the suburbs, where plenty of new coffee shops have opened to serve the work-from-home crowd. Wellington Management, whose headquarters are on Congress Street near South Station, rented 106,000 square feet in Needham. The high-end office space move from downtown Boston to the suburbs, particularly Waltham, has been happening for decades, but the pandemic reversed whatever return to downtown had been under way. Other nearby large commerical tenants include the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Fidelity, and Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard’s endowment and is based in the Federal Reserve building directly across Summer street from South Station.
One could go on about bureaucratic approval processes—zoning, environmental regulations—that create barriers to new construction, constricting housing supply and driving up the cost of shelter. And some of the same factors that drive homelessness elsewhere—slum clearance that destroyed single-room occupancy housing, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, epidemics of imported drugs, the economic and social factors driving “deaths of dispair”— also apply in Boston.
A Democratic mayor or governor who successfully cleaned the place up (or cleared the even worse open-air drug-use and homelessness encampment at Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Blvd.) might use it as the basis for a run for higher office. As for those politicians who fail at it, their bellyaching about the chance that the federal government might step in would be more credible if South Station and the sidewalks around it were in better shape.
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You would have been as supportive of Biden or Obama doing the same here in Boston, Chicago or in red state counties with high rates of violent crime?
Why should the federal government take over Boston’s South Station unless it will also do the same thing for similarly situated stations throughout the country?