BOSTON — A coalition of downtown Boston residents is ramping up the pressure on the Wu administration to reverse course on a “destructive” zoning plan that would clear the way for new buildings to tower up to 700 feet over the historic downtown.

The Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association blasted out an open letter it and other members of the coalition sent last Thursday to Mayor Michelle Wu, ahead of a vote the Boston Planning and Development Agency Board is set to take this week on the proposed zoning regulations.

“PLAN: Downtown was meant to reimagine the heart of Boston,” the coalition wrote in the letter. “Instead, your proposed plan reveals a striking lack of creativity, perspective and vision, and will not work. … Boston would be better off without this destructive plan.”

The BPDA board is set to vote Thursday on the downtown zoning plan, after opting against taking action at its July meeting. The delay, according to downtown resident Tony Ursillo, was designed to give the city and coalition more time to come to an agreement on the proposed zoning.

A subsequent meeting between the Wu administration, including the mayor, and downtown coalition stakeholders on Aug. 29 was not productive, however, in terms of pressing for the city to adopt the coalition’s recommended changes to the plan, Ursillo told the Herald.

“Essentially the administration said that … none of our ideas were feasible,” Ursillo said.

While the coalition supports additional towering in the Financial District east of Washington Street, where such heights have traditionally been allowed, it opposes zoning regulations that could clear the way for 500 to 700 foot buildings in what Rishi Shukla, head of the downtown neighborhood association, previously described to the Herald as “one of the most historic parts of the city.”

That historic area, per the letter, is the increasingly residential Ladder Blocks and Park Plaza neighborhoods to the west of Washington Street and adjacent to Boston Common. Such towering there triggers potential issues with the state’s shadow law, which was enacted in 1990 and restricts the creation of new shadows on the Boston Common and Public Garden at certain times of the day, the coalition contends.

Ursillo has said the proposed changes would end up producing the “Manhattanization” of downtown Boston, an assertion the city’s planning chief Kairos Shen pushed back on when speaking with the Herald in June, saying such a notion is “simply inaccurate.”

On Friday, Shen described the latest criticism to the downtown zoning plan as an “overreaction,” and said the city has adequately addressed all of the issues raised by the coalition since meetings between the two sides began last January. He told the Herald the city is prepared to move forward with a planning board vote on Thursday.

“This plan is a balance between the many different concerns that we have heard throughout this planning process and the drafting of the zoning process, and we think we’ve arrived at a really good plan that addresses the key issues that the downtown faces,” Shen said. “We’re very comfortable with where the current proposal is, and we think it will be great for the city to adopt this.”

The downtown coalition disagrees, according to its letter to the mayor, which, per Ursillo, is “an attempt to wake the administration up to the fact that the zoning plan that they’re proposing has severe consequences and there’s a better set of options available.”

The letter reiterates the coalition’s gripe that the public process with the zoning plan has been disingenuous, with the Wu administration purportedly ignoring all of its feedback.

“In squandering this multi-generational opportunity, the uncompromising approach you and Chief Shen are taking caters to a handful of developers at the expense of the broader community,” the coalition wrote in its letter to the mayor.

Shen said, however, that the regulations set forth in the proposed zoning plan would allow for towering that would be in line with height limits set by the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, and the state shadow law, in terms of the 500 foot limit that the city has now created and assigned to the Washington Street corridor.

The plan, he said, would limit heights to 155 feet in the so-called sky-low district to the north and west of Washington Street. The only exception to that limit, he said, would be along the Washington Street corridor, where predominantly residential development projects could be built up to 500 feet.

“This was a change from the January proposal, which created a whole zone of many more parcels that would have this provision to go up to 500 feet,” Shen said. “In response to some of the feedback that we heard, we have reduced the number of parcels that can actually go up to the 500-foot limit … to the extent that we believe that this also allows for us to create much more housing along this transit corridor.

“Overall, the plan is very much consistent in pushing Mayor Wu’s priority on housing, and we believe that one of the most appropriate places for housing creation is the downtown,” he added.

The coalition disagrees with that assessment.

Ursillo has said that developers paying top dollar to build 500- to 700-foot towers downtown would be more likely to contribute to a related fund that allows for the creation of affordable units elsewhere in Boston, rather than build those units on-site.

The changes recommended by the coalition, per the letter, would limit the baseline 155-foot height limit exceptions in the so-called “historically sensitive” sky corridor to 300 feet. The coalition is also pushing for the city to develop local shadow regulations that prevent future projects from violating the intent of the state shadow law to protect the parks, the letter states.

The city sought and was granted an exemption from the shadow law by the state in 2017 for the redevelopment of the Winthrop Square Garage into the Millennium Tower, a downtown luxury condominium building that stands at 685 feet. Wu, city council president at the time, opposed and voted against the proposed exemption.

In Boston, only three buildings exceed 700 feet: 200 Clarendon Street, which is better known as the John Hancock Tower, at 790 feet; the Prudential Tower, at 750 feet; and One Dalton, at 742 feet. All are located in the Back Bay.

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