Boston was ready for change when 16-year incumbent mayor Kevin White stepped down in 1983. South Boston populist Ray Flynn and African American "rainbow coalition" advocate Mel King reached a dead heat in the preliminary mayoral election. Flynn prevailed in the general election, then pursued a neighborhood oriented strategy through nine and one-half years. He emphasized the common interests of working class neighborhoods in redistributive issues, particularly housing costs, that were escalating, by taxing and otherwise extracting surplus from the city's booming office and upscale housing development.

Flynn had run as a "neighborhood mayor," and one of his first policy efforts was to protect or extend rent control; and when he was unable to get this through the city council, he implemented "linkage," which would attach fees to large office buildings in the downtown and provide an affordable housing trust fund. He succeeded in this, and in a series of related moves to increase the stock of affordable housing. In order to build the new units, his administration urged neighborhood organizations to become property developers. With the linkage funds and other help, the capacities of a number of these groups developed dramatically, some at the cost of their earlier protest functions.

Meanwhile in the neighborhoods there was interest in power sharing. There had been an advisory referendum recommending neighborhood councils, but the sticking point for Flynn was the demand for neighborhood council veto powers over development projects. He vacillated and ultimately withdrew support for the veto in one case; and later did not support a Coalition for Community Control of Development (CCCD) representing a wide and multiracial swath of the city, that sought at least a degree of control.