L. Duane Jackson

L. Duane Jackson brought real estate experience and training in architecture and city planning at MIT to public decision-making in Boston. The HistoryMakers records that he was born on October 13, 1949, in Brooklyn, New York, and earned both a master's degree in city planning and a master of architecture at MIT. He later held a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. By 2017, when the Boston Globe's Spotlight series examined race and power in Boston, Jackson was serving on the Massachusetts Port Authority board.

His development career took shape before the board seat. An early profile described him as an MIT-trained architect developing small and midsize housing and retail projects in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Massachusetts. He is the managing member of Alinea Capital Partners, a real estate development and investment company, and he served on the Massport board as its vice chairman, chairing the board's real estate and strategic initiatives committee.

At Massport, Jackson initiated a policy that made diversity account for one quarter of the evaluation score for contract and development bids, alongside design and financing. The board approved it unanimously. The approach emphasized participation by firms owned by women and people of color, addressing who could join development teams as well as who worked on construction sites. A Bay State Banner report in March 2015 described the push as it was gathering support, with the 25 percent goal firmly established and bids arriving under the new standard.

Jackson, Massport executive Kenn Turner and then-chief executive Tom Glynn built the model together, supported by investors. The Globe reported that an Omni hotel project approved that spring was the first to proceed under the approach, with Black investment teams and firms among its participants.

His own development work continued in the same vein. MassHousing closed $16.4 million in financing for an affordable housing development in New Bedford with Alinea as the developer, a 52-unit project on a former registry site that Jackson described in terms of working families getting convenient, attractive and affordable housing.