Emerson College’s Samuels & Associates-Wu Campaign Committee Link: (2)

Emerson College Trustee Steven Samuels and his business partners at Samuels & Associates had donated thousands of dollars in individual campaign contributions to the campaign committee of the current mayor of Boston (one of the largest U.S. cities to have never elected an African American man as its mayor), Michelle Wu, since 2013, even before Wu authorized Boston Police Department [BPD] officers to invade Emerson College’s campus and arrest 118 antiwar demonstrators on April 25, 2024; less than 11 months before between 500 and 1,000 antiwar and Palestinian solidarity demonstrators later protested in Boston’s Copley Square, on March 16, 2025, against the Trump administration’s recent arrest, and attempt to deport, one of the student leaders of the antiwar and Palestinian solidarity encampment that was set up earlier in April 2024, on Columbia University's campus.

One reason might have been that, since 2013, Mayor Wu has been one of the elected officials in Boston who apparently allowed the Samuels & Associates real estate deal-making/development firm to gentrify, and profit from the gentrification of, Boston neighborhoods like the Fenway neighborhood and the Allston-Brighton neighborhood, where the average monthly rents charged Boston tenants have dramatically increased since Wu’s election as Boston mayor in November 2021.

And despite the early 21st-century call by U.S. antiwar Movement and Palestine solidarity Movement organizers for politically progressive politicians in the USA to endorse and support the BDS Movement, Boston Mayor Wu apparently supported the $700 million real estate deal of Emerson College Trustee Samuels’s Samuel & Associates, which constructed two high-rise building over the Mass Turnpike (across from the Hynes Convention Center MBTA Green Line station); one of which, a 20-floor building at 1001 Boylston St., is to house the U.S. North American Headquarters corporate offices of LEGO—which opened a store in Tel Aviv in 2022.

In an interview that was posted on the Leaders magazine’s website in the Fall of 2014 (in the year following the Wu campaign committee depositing its first campaign contribution from Emerson College Trustee Samuels), the Emmerson College trustee’s business partner, Joel Sklar (who, between the current Boston mayor’s election and Wu’s decision to send BPD officers to arrest antiwar demonstrators at Emerson College on April 25, 2024, made 4 contributions, totaling $2,050, to Wu’s campaign committee), had described both the history of the for-profit Samuels & Associates and its then-future plans for overdeveloping and further gentrifying certain Boston neighborhoods, in the following way:

“…Steve Samuels grew up in the real estate business, establishing Samuels & Associates in Boston as a real estate management company. He…did the management and leasing for his family real estate portfolio….They also owned a chain of national grocery stores.

“The sale of the grocery chain to a Dutch company offered the resources necessary to grow the real estate business…We viewed urban Boston as a growth vehicle…One of our…deals in Boston came from someone who had tied up a two-acre site a few blocks from Fenway Park to build a grocery store. This was the beginning of our work as a mixed-use developer…

“The area of the Fenway where we have been focused is…a triangle formed by Boylston St., which starts in the Back Bay and goes into the Longwood Medical Area, and Brookline Ave., which goes from Kenmore Square, past Fenway Park, and ends in the Longwood Medical Area. Previously, these two… thoroughfares were filled with one-story…buildings…To the Samuels team, it was…a huge missed opportunity.

“We…developed a vision for the future that was solidified into a rezoning of Fenway’s main corridors in the early 2000s. By allowing for greater density and height, we knew we could literally transform Brookline Ave….and Boylston with new mixed-use projects….

“That process mapped out the scale of the neighborhood to become, instead of one-story and three-story buildings, 23 to 25 stories at the highest zoned gateway parcel to as low as 12 or 13 stories.
“The work we have done over the past decade plus (and will continue for likely the next decade) has already begun to transform the area… To date, we have completed Trilogy, a 600-unit apartment building.., and 1330 Boylston, a 200-unit apartment building…

“The Samuels team has also begun to focus on…Barry’s Corner in Allston. We’ve partnered with Harvard University to create the first private development on Harvard-owned land…We hope this will be the first of several projects…to another…neighborhood.”

But in Boston, where over 60 percent of all residents are tenants, allowing for-profit real estate deal-making/development firms of local political campaign committee contributors, like Emerson College Trustee Samuels, to “Manhattanize”, with high-rise luxury apartment buildings, working-class neighborhoods in which zoning laws previously restricted heights of buildings, has—in the absence of municipal rent control and rent stabilization laws—led to a dramatic increase in monthly rents being charged Boston tenants during the 21st-century; and also has led to an increase in the property taxes which small homeowner-occupants, living in these gentrified neighborhoods, have been required to pay, as well as an increase in the hours in which traffic is gridlocked in these same neighborhoods. (end of article).