No need to slog through Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s ghost-written autobiography, now piling up in a bookstore near you, to grasp the legacy of Boston’s builder-in-chief – just take a look at all the shiny new towers on the Hub’s skyline, many of them luxury towers with multimillion-dollar condos and sky-high rents.

But through a combination of virtue and economic necessity, current Mayor Marty Walsh, with the release of his big 2030 housing plan, has staked his legacy on a much different and potentially riskier path.

With a disinterest verging on disdain for all those luxury towers, Walsh has sketched out an ambitious plan to spur housing construction for the increasingly beleaguered middle class, with plans to build or free up 20,000 badly needed homes, condos and apartments.

And Walsh is not looking to require downtown luxury tower builders to set aside “affordable units,” a popular tactic during the Menino years and as effective as smearing lipstick on a pig. Instead, he is looking to spur construction in the city’s often insular neighborhoods, a doubly challenging prospect given that Boston’s neighborhoods are every bit as NIMBY as the often roundly criticized, housing-phobic suburbs.

It’s easy to be a skeptic here, but bet against Walsh at your peril. From his emergence more than a year ago as a dark-horse candidate to his election as mayor, Walsh has confounded his critics by refusing to live up to various stereotypes and instead forging his own path.

Walsh is certainly up to the challenge, but he’s got his work cut out for him.

“We will get pushback, sure, but not as much as people think,” Walsh said, rather optimistically, in an interview after rolling out his 2030 housing plan.

An Honest Appraisal

First off, Walsh scores points right off the bat by not only recognizing how middle-class homeowners and buyers are getting squeezed, but looking at it in a serious way.

The 2030 report provides a clear and in-depth look at Boston’s housing challenges, with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, the respected planning group led by former Lt. Gov. Marc Draisen, powering the research.

It doesn’t sugarcoat the problems out there, with a revealing graphic showing that even families pulling down $100,000 struggle to find anything within their price range in several neighborhoods.

“In Dorchester, the price of housing is going to $600,000 to $700,000 for a single-family,” Walsh said of the neighborhood he grew up in and lives in today. He said report is about how “we stabilize the middle class, and how do we give them the option to stay in the city?” The report attempts something few, if any, other mayors have tried to do – offering up a potential road map for construction of middle-income units.

Sounds easier than it actually is, given there is no ready set of state or federal programs, which are often geared towards helping low-income residents. Walsh wants to entice developers with tax incentives, low-cost city land, and a streamlined approval process.

Menino certainly spouted off a lot about “affordable housing,” but that is essentially code for “subsidized” housing that is often unavailable to middle-class buyers. Too often, the message from Menino was not about the dire and growing crisis of housing unaffordability, but rather a simple declaration of “look at all I’m doing here!”

Sadly, the old mayor’s rhetoric was undercut at times by quiet side deals in which favored developers were released from the obligation of building the units in the first place, something I am doubtful made it into his not-exactly tell-all tome.

The housing crisis didn’t show up when Walsh took office, and he gets credit for tackling it full on. But speaking honestly about a problem and actually taking effective action to deal with it are two separate things. And this is where the new mayor’s next big challenge can be found.

Housing Haters

Let’s be real here. Walsh faces an uphill battle getting his plans through neighborhood opposition, with intense NIMBY sentiment in many Boston neighborhoods.

There is no a major project in Boston that hasn’t spawned a group of die-hard opponents, from Harvard’s massive Allston expansion to plans for a 52-story tower at Copley Place, which critics contend will cast a long shadow over bejeweled Copley Square. Even little projects – plans to add a dozen or two new condos or apartments – can spawn equally nasty, and politically draining, NIMBY spats as well.

No sooner had Walsh released his plan than I got a call from “Bob,” a Dorchester homeowner who has spent years trying to develop an adjacent lot he owns into badly needed housing.

He started off with plans for 16 units and had been forced to cut that number down. The last straw was when the local civic association got into the act, demanding he build no more than eight units. Now Bob is thinking of bailing on the whole project, and the neighborhood as well.

In South Boston, a proposal to convert the now empty Gate of Heaven School on East Fourth Street into 31 condos has sparked an uproar. Some in Southie are even pushing for a building moratorium.

Walsh, for what it’s worth, has hardly been a housing zealot when confronted with neighborhood residents angry over plans for new housing, preferring to slow things down and find a way to work things out.

Maybe that’s a bad sign; I don’t know. But maybe it’s also a signal that Walsh knows how to pick and choose his battles. Even as he shows caution on projects like Gate of Heaven, the new mayor, in a recent interview, was speaking favorably of the work of a task force pointing to the potential for several thousand new condos and apartments in one of Dorchester’s most overlooked commercial corridor.

The Morrissey Boulevard corridor is packed with potential, with The Boston Globe preparing to sell off its long-time headquarters and the University of Massachusetts Boston still pondering uses for the sprawling Bayside Expo center site. The Red Line is just down the street.

Walsh and city housing chief Sheila Dillon, head of the Department of Neighborhood Development, have made it clear they are looking at focusing on a number of transit-orientated sites with big development potential around the city, though we will have to wait until early next year to get a full list.

Tellingly, Walsh noted that Steve Samuels, the mega Fenway developer who also built the South Bay shopping center just down Morrissey from the Globe, is among those developers “pumped up” about building middle class housing.

Don’t Bet Against Him

Walsh has been written off repeatedly by the “wiser” among us from the time he kicked off his campaign for mayor just 18 months ago. The former head of the Boston Building Trades Council, Walsh was initially pegged as some sort of union hack who was supposedly sending shivers up the spine of Boston’s business leaders.

No matter that one of his core constituencies – union hard hats – have a vested interest in seeing big projects get approved, and in Boston’s business community to keep building them.

Once elected, Walsh faced the rub that he would be some sort of union boy toy, ready to empty the city coffers on lavish pay packages for public employees. Then he negotiated a fairly decent deal with Boston’s firefighters, winning some qualified praise from the Boston Municipal Research Bureau.

In fact, Walsh, with his combative stance against Steve Wynn’s casino proposal – obviously a union favorite given the thousands of jobs it would create – is clearly growing fast into his new role as mayor.

And as Walsh pushes forward with his housing plans, here’s hoping for more such surprises ahead.