Michelle Wu (born January 14, 1985) is an American lawyer and politician who has been the mayor of Boston since 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, she is one of the youngest mayors in the city's history, and is the first woman and the first Asian American to be elected to the office.
The daughter of Taiwanese American immigrants, Wu graduated with honors from Harvard University and Harvard Law School. From 2014 to 2021, she was the first Asian-American woman to serve on the Boston City Council and was its president from 2016 to 2018. While on the Boston City Council, Wu authored several ordinances that were enacted. This included an ordinance to prevent the city from contracting with health insurers that discriminate in their coverage against transgender people. She also authored ordinances to have the city protect wetlands, support adaptation to climate change, enact a plastic bag ban, adopt Community Choice Aggregation, and provide paid parental leave to municipal employees. As a city councillor, Wu also partook in a successful effort to adopt regulations on short-term rentals.
Wu was elected mayor in 2021. During her mayoralty, Wu has addressed climate change and other concerns through a municipal "Green New Deal" (the Boston Green New Deal) and signed an ordinance to divest city investments from companies that derive more than 15% of their revenue from fossil fuels, tobacco products, or prison facilities. A supporter of fare-free public transportation, Wu has funded a pilot program of fare-free service on three MBTA bus routes, expanding on a single-route pilot program that had previously been started under Kim Janey's preceding acting mayoralty. Wu succeeded in using contract negotiations with the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association as a means to create significant reforms related to police accountability. The union later endorsed Wu for re-election, the first time they had endorsed a mayor's re-election in more than three decades. She also emerged as a prominent opponent of the second Trump administration, with the Trump administration targeting the city over the Boston Trust Act. During her first term, Boston experienced a substantial reduction in gun violence and murders that resulted in multiple record-low years. She was re-elected to a second mayoral term in November 2025.
Early life and education Michelle Wu was born on January 14, 1985, on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, to Han and Yu-Min Wu. Her parents are Taiwanese American immigrants. They were Taiwanese waishengren; Han and Yu-Min were born and raised in Taipei, while Wu's grandparents had left mainland China during the Kuomintang retreat to Taiwan.
Her father, Han Wu, was admitted to the Illinois Institute of Technology for graduate studies; however, neither he nor his wife spoke much English. Raised with Mandarin Chinese as a first language, Wu often interpreted between English and Mandarin for her parents. When Wu was in high school, her parents separated and her father began living apart from the family; they later divorced.
One of four children, Wu graduated from Barrington High School in 2003 as the valedictorian of her class. Wu received perfect scores on the SAT and ACT and in 2003 was selected as a Presidential Scholar from Illinois. Wu's parents hoped that she would pursue a career in medicine; in part due to their experiences of the Chinese Civil War, they discouraged her from a career in politics. Wu has also recounted that prior to university, she had not known whether she aligned with the Democratic or Republican parties.
Wu moved to the Boston area to attend Harvard University. In 2007, she graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Harvard College. As an undergraduate, she tap danced and taught classes on citizenship in Boston's Chinatown on the weekends.
After graduation, Wu worked as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. When her mother began to suffer from mental illness, Wu resigned, moving back to Chicago to care for her mother and two youngest siblings. To support her family financially, Wu started a teahouse business in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago. In 2009, she returned to Massachusetts with her mother and youngest siblings to earn her J.D. from Harvard Law School, from which she graduated in 2012.
Early career In 2010, Wu worked in Boston City Hall for Mayor Thomas Menino in the Office of Administration and Finance and later as a Fellow at the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy under Menino's chief of staff, Mitch Weiss. In this position, she both designed a streamlined process for restaurants to receive licenses and established a food truck program. Also in 2010, Wu graduated from Emerge Massachusetts, a training program for women who aspire to elected office. The following year, she worked at the Boston Medical Center-based Medical Legal Partnership, where she provided legal services to low-income patients.
In her first semester at Harvard Law School, one of her professors was Elizabeth Warren. After Wu explained her family's situation to Warren, a long friendship developed between the two women. Warren later reflected, "Michelle was doing something in law school that, in 25 years of teaching, I never knew another student to be doing."
In 2012, Wu worked as the constituency director for Warren's successful senatorial campaign against Scott Brown. In this position, Wu coordinated outreach to all constituency groups, including nonwhites, nonheterosexuals, veterans and women. Wu is considered a protégé of Warren.Multiple sources
City Council
Wu, a member of the Democratic Party, became a member of the Boston City Council in January 2014. Wu was the first Asian American woman to serve on the council, and only the second Asian American member to serve on the council. In late 2014, Wu became the first city councilor in Boston history to give birth while serving on the Boston City Council. From January 2016 to January 2018, she was president of the council, the first nonwhite woman and first Asian American to hold the role. When she took office as city council president, Wu was only the third female president in the then-106-year history of the Boston City Council. Wu was regarded as a progressive on the City Council.
Wu was first elected to a Boston City Council at-large seat in November 2013. She finished in second place to incumbent Ayanna Pressley, with the top four finishers being elected to the council. She was re-elected in 2015, 2017, and 2019, placing second behind Pressley in 2015 and placing first in both 2017 and 2019. In 2021 election, Wu decided not to seek a fifth term on the City Council and to run for mayor instead.
Paid parental leave In April 2015, the Boston City Council passed a paid parental leave ordinance that was authored by Wu. The ordinance provided city employees with six weeks of paid parental leave after childbirth, stillbirth, or adoption. Mayor Marty Walsh supported Wu's ordinance prior to its adoption and signed it into law in May. Wu had conceived this legislation after her own first pregnancy when she learned firsthand (after giving birth in December 2014) that municipal employees were not being offered paid child leave. In 2021, Wu proposed the idea of expanding this paid child leave policy to also provide leave for the broader category of pregnancy loss, rather than strictly for stillbirths. In September, by voice vote, the Boston City Council passed an ordinance written by Councilor Lydia Edwards and co-sponsored by Wu and Annissa Essaibi George that changed the wording of her earlier ordinance from "stillbirth" to "pregnancy loss", and also extended paid family leave to those welcoming a new family member or acting as a caregiver. The ordinance was soon after signed into law by Acting Mayor Kim Janey.
Environmentalism and proposal for a municipal Green New Deal
In October 2017, the Boston City Council voted to unanimously approve a resolution by Wu and fellow councilor Matt O'Malley, having the city adopt Community Choice Aggregation. In November 2017, the Boston City Council unanimously passed an ordinance written by Wu and fellow councilor Matt O'Malley, which implemented a plastic bag ban. In December, Mayor Walsh signed it into law, despite his administration having previously opposed such a ban when it was previously debated by the Council in 2016.
In December 2019, the Boston City Council passed an ordinance that Wu had introduced with Matt O'Malley that protects local wetlands and promotes adaption to climate change. Mayor Walsh signed it into law later that month. For years, Wu spearheaded efforts to have the city divest its financial resources from fossil fuels.
In August 2020, Wu released plans for "Boston Green New Deal & Just Recovery" program. The proposal aims to achieve carbon neutrality (net-zero carbon footprint) for the municipal government buildings by 2024, running the city on 100% renewable energy by 2030, and achieving citywide carbon neutrality by 2040. The proposal calls for creating "just and resilient development" through the establishment of affordable green overlay districts and standard community benefits agreements; priority planning zones informed by urban heat island maps, in order to expand the urban tree canopy; and a "local blue new deal" for coasts and oceans, using coastal and ocean resources for clean energy generation, sustainable food systems, carbon capture, and jobs.
Housing Wu was the leading force in efforts to regulate short-term rentals of housing units. Wu pushed for increased restrictions, including the elimination of investor units, and faced targeted criticism from short-term rental platform Airbnb for this. Boston adopted an ordinance, supported by Wu, that restricted short-term rentals to owner-occupied housing units, required hosts to register with the city, and required the city to collect and publish data on short-term rentals.
Wu, since at least 2019, supported the idea of reviving rent stabilization in Boston, which would first require a change to state law. She argued that it would assist in preventing nonwhite people from being pushed out of Boston. While Wu and some other Boston City Council members came out in support of the idea of rent stabilization in 2019, it was a contentious issue in the city government, with other council members and Mayor Walsh voicing opposition to it.
Law enforcement In June 2020, Wu, alongside fellow city councilors Lydia Edwards and Julia Mejia, introduced an ordinance that would establish an unarmed community safety crisis response system, moving the response to nonviolent 9-1-1 calls away from the Boston Police Department, and instead transferring the response to non-law enforcement agencies and trained health professionals. In 2020, Wu was one of eight city councilors to sign a letter urging Mayor Walsh to decrease the Boston Police Department's annual budget by 10%. Activists had been calling for such a cut, in order to instead allot that money to COVID-19 pandemic relief, housing and food access, and other programs that would benefit nonwhite people. In June 2020, Wu was one of five members of the Boston City Council to vote against Mayor Walsh's 2021 operating budget for the city. While the budget made $12 million in cuts to the overtime budget of the police department, Wu argued that the city was still contractually obligated to pay for every hour of overtime work, meaning that it was inconsequential what the line item in the city budget proposed.
Wu voiced her desire to "demilitarize" the city's police department. She led an effort to take account of the Boston Police Department's military equipment. She also advocated for closing loopholes in the policy of the Boston Police Department regarding body cameras.
Advocacy for free public transport