A People’s History Of The New Boston: Do-It-Yourself Community Development

May 9, 2022

(One in a series of posts on Jim Vrabel’s 2014 book, A People’s History Of The New Boston.)

Rule 12 of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules For Radicals” is “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Community development corporations (CDCs) are one of the lasting “constructive alternatives” to urban renewal across the US and in Boston. “(N)onprofit, neighborhood-based organization funded by both public sources and private investors…They were originally created to build and renovate housing but have gotten involved in economic development, job training, and social services as well.” Starting in the late 1960s, Boston’s residents created approximately two dozen CDCs that have “not only helped residents rebuild their neighborhoods, but also helped many of them remain in the New Boston, when they otherwise would have been forced to leave.” (p. 112, 122)

Vrabel highlights two extraordinary CDCs and the campaigns that led to their creation:

Inquilinos Boricuas En Acción (IBA): Rev. William Dwyer came to St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in the South End in 1963. Dwyer “had learned Spanish at Princeton and activism in his first parish on New York City’s Lower East Side….” St.Stephen’s was a mostly working-class, mostly Puerto Rican parish, reflecting the neighborhood around it, and Dwyer initially looked for “small victories”—getting a vacant lot cleaned up after a mock funeral procession, a rent strike that forced a landlord to make long-overdue repairs in his building. “(F)ortified by their small victories, the residents took on a much bigger campaign.” (p. 113)

In 1967 the BRA’s South End urban renewal plan identified the heart of the Puerto Rican community as Parcel 19 and “…called for dislocating all the residents, demolishing the four-story row houses where they lived, and building new, market-rate housing.” (p. 113)

St. Stephen’s led a door-to-door campaign that summer that resulted in over 400 people meeting and voting to create a community development corporation, the Emergency Tenants Coalition (ETC, later IBA). “Over the next few years, ETC’s membership would grow to more than 1,500 members, approximately 1,000 of them Spanish-speaking.” Israel Feliciano, ETC’s first executive director, took architect John Sharratt (from Urban Planning Aid) on a research trip to Puerto Rico, visiting small towns and village squares for inspiration to create their own plan for Parcel 19, “creating a central plaza like those in the Puerto Rican villages, and surrounding it with different kinds of housing that would be affordable to the people who already lived in the neighborhood.” (p. 113, 114)

Using “the ‘carrot’ of increased voter registration and turnout at the polls and the ‘stick’ of protest demonstrations”, in December 1969 ETC won designation by the BRA to be the developer for Parcel 19.

“ETC rebuilt the neighborhood in stages. First, it renovated the row houses. Then, it built a mid-rise building and a high-rise building for the elderly. Then it built some 200 townhouses. all painted in pastel, Caribbean colors, around a central plaza….The new community that ETC built came to be called Villa Victoria (‘Victory Village’). Today it includes more than 800 units of affordable housing, and has its own childcare center, credit union, closed-circuit television network, and arts center.” (p. 115)

Roxbury Tenants Of Harvard (RTH): Like their Puerto Rican neighbors in the South End, the mostly white and working-class residents of Mission Hill had years of experience protesting plans to displace them from their homes. In this case the threat came from an institution more powerful than City Hall: Harvard University.

Harvard had secretly bought up 20 acres of property north of Huntington Avenue and then announced an expansion plan for its medical school and seven affiliated teaching hospitals that would displace hundreds of Mission Hill families. Unlikely support for Harvard’s new tenants came from three Harvard students—Doug Levinson, Jeanne Neville, and Hayden Duggan—who’d been part of the university’s 1969 student strike, and had seized on one of that protest’s demands (“no black workers housing be destroyed at the site of future expansion of the Harvard Affiliated Hospitals in the Mission Hill section of Boston”) and started knocking on doors in the neighborhood, eventually recruiting leaders like Bob and Theresa Parks, and Henry Flynn. (p. 117)

Meeting at the Mission Church rectory because Harvard threatened to evict any tenants who held meetings in their homes, the newly formed Roxbury Tenants of Harvard first “was able to get most of the residents to sign a petition saying that they wouldn’t leave their homes,” and then when Harvard refused to meet with them, “began to hold demonstrations outside university buildings.” (p. 118)

Like IBA, RTH hired John Sharratt to help them create their own “constructive alternative”. First they released a report document Harvard’s failings as a landlord, and forced the university to “make the repairs, freeze rents, and halt any evictions until the proposed new housing was built.” Then they released a second report arguing “while every other university has turned its back on its responsibility to its neighbors, Harvard has the opportunity to set a precedent of cooperation.” (p. 119)

Somewhat to RTH’s surprise, Harvard accepted the proposal with only minor revisions. The new plan called for a scaled-down hospital (Brigham & Women’s), renovating 300 units of existing housing, and building nearly 500 new apartments in affordable mid-rise and high-rise buildings. “(I)t would be the largest single addition to Boston’s low-income housing stock in more than a decade. Best of all, from RTH’s perspective, the plan would enable most residents to stay in their homes and all of them to stay in their neighborhood.” Harvard owned the new development, Mission Park, but RTH would run it. (p. 120)

Then, in 1972, Harvard threw a wrench into the plans by announcing a separate plan to build MATEP (the Medical Area Total Energy Plant), “the largest, privately owned, power plant in the country across the street from the proposed new hospital”. Many neighborhood residents and environmentalists opposed the plan…but not RTH. After looking at the proposal, RTH agreed with Harvard’s analysis that “the only way for that housing in Mission Park to be affordable would be if the power plant provided it with free electricity, heat, and air conditioning.” As RTH leader Bob Parks said years later, “Giving 2,500 people a place to live seemed more important than a fight over a power plant.” (p. 120, 121)

It’s one of Alinsky’s unwritten rules for radicals: the price of a constructive alternative is the loss of ideological purity. As any building trades worker can tell you, it is literally impossible to build something without getting your hands dirty. It’s figuratively true, too. Cutting a deal with Harvard to save your homes, doing the tedious and compromising work of packaging construction financing, winning zoning changes, reworking development plans to fit the constraints of government programs—nothing you build will be perfect or pure. But as the IBA and RTH stories demonstrate, it can still be pretty darn good, and worth the fight.

Other posts in this series:

A People’s History Of The New Boston: Introduction

A People’s History Of The New Boston: What Was Wrong With The Old Boston?

A People’s History Of The New Boston: To Hell With Urban Renewal

A People’s History Of The New Boston: Community Organizers & Advocacy Planners

A People’s History Of The New Boston: A Rekindled Civil Rights Movement

A People’s History Of The New Boston: School Reform & Desegregation

A People’s History Of The New Boston: The Conflict Over The Vietnam Conflict

A People’s History Of The New Boston: The Media & The Protest Movements

A People’s History Of The New Boston: Mothers For Adequate Welfare

A People’s History Of The New Boston: The Illusion Of Inclusion & Assault By Acronyms

A People’s History Of The New Boston: Gentrification & The South End