Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Despite these flaws, Government Center still stands as testament to a certain moment in time when Boston’s urban renewers had faith that big government and the structures that housed it held the answer to the city’s economic woes. It also reflects their growing awareness of the aesthetic and political need to carefully weave the rising monuments of the New Boston into one of the oldest cities in North America. Critics of urban renewal often fail to recognize that, at least in Boston, urban renewers did not remain at odds with historic preservation, but learned on the job to integrate it into their planning tool kit, albeit sometimes turning an authentic structure like the Sears Crescent into a static museum piece. When the Government Center Urban Renewal Plan, as revised May 29, 1963, was submitted, it acknowledged this complex negotiation between present and past in calling for the “creation of a symbol of democratic government and its related institutions in the physical context of the surrounding historical districts, thereby continuing and improving the important role this area has played in the political, social and cultural history of Boston and America.”93

  Once Government Center was substantially completed in 1968, it would help foster greater prosperity for downtown Boston in the decades ahead. Logue did not pretend the achievement had been easy. He made no secret of the challenging negotiations he had faced in pulling off Government Center—whether between the BRA and the multiple-level government agencies involved, with key local players including testy city councillors, with private-sector interests requiring badgering to invest downtown, or between proponents of a new modern Boston and those who feared losing too much of the old. As Logue explained at one meeting in 1962, “The Government Center is difficult to execute, because the problem of negotiation was not anticipated … I spent the last God damn nine months to get the Pei plan to work. The problem is negotiation. Complicated negotiations.”94

  But Logue had seen nothing yet. When he turned to renewing Boston’s neighborhoods, heated negotiation would take place not only around competing visions of what revitalized neighborhoods should look like but also over questions of who should decide and through what processes. Logue had cavalierly promoted a philosophy of “planning with people” from his earliest days in Boston, but just how that collaboration should take place would become fraught with conflict, both between the BRA and the neighborhoods it targeted for renewal and within these communities themselves. Bostonians would teach the development administrator a thing or two about what it meant to plan with people. As one of his senior staff members bluntly put it, “When Ed turned to planning in some of the residential neighborhoods … war broke out. Ed was furious that his plan, which he fervently believed in, was being opposed by the very people he was trying to help. Ed knew how to swear and there was lots of swearing going on.”95 Logue may have left New Haven in time to escape the headwinds of participatory democracy there, but they would hit him with full force in Boston.

  6.   Negotiating Neighborhoods

  Logue brought his own ideal of what a healthy residential community should look like to his urban renewal of Boston’s neighborhoods. He described it to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on October 4, 1966, as “viable, stable neighborhood[s] in which people of all races and all creeds and varying levels of economic position can remain.”1 A city with a population decline as steep as Boston’s, Logue reasoned, desperately needed to create appealing neighborhoods with housing stock and facilities of sufficient quality to attract the social mix that would prevent any district from being written off as a slum or dismissed as too marginal. Socially fragmented Boston faced a choice, Logue posited, between a “path of economic and racial integration” or “we can keep going as we are going,” headed down “that path lead[ing] to segregation and second-rate status.”2

  Logue’s neighborhood urban renewal of the 1960s was not the brash and brutal “Negro and poor removal” that frequently prevailed in the 1950s, most starkly in Boston’s West End, and that many critics have assumed continued to underlie all urban renewal. It was more socially utopian than that. Outcomes, though, did not always match renewers’ intentions. And what Logue considered a desirable aspiration was, understandably, often not shared by those facing the BRA’s social reengineering on the ground. Logue’s blueprint for a good neighborhood as socially integrated space—rather than the Boston he condemned of isolated ethnic, racial, and low-income islands floating in a sea of discrimination, disinvestment, and dilapidation—held little appeal for those residents who had loyal, deep roots in neighborhood enclaves that had long defined themselves through ethnic and class exclusivity. Moreover, many feared that the BRA’s ideal of social integration would lead to their own dislocation.

  What emerged from these tensions was an interaction between the BRA and Boston’s neighborhoods that led to another form of “negotiated cityscape.” Downtown renewal had been shaped by compromises between the modern and the historic and the public sector and the private. Neighborhood renewal not only took its own distinctive form but also varied from one neighborhood to another in ways that challenge the assumption that one urban renewal formula fit all communities. Rather, the outcome in each neighborhood resulted directly from how the renewers and the renewed interacted with each other, making the process much more of a negotiation than Logue originally intended and many skeptical Bostonians ever expected.

  When Logue started investigating Boston’s neighborhoods in 1960, he said to the head of the still-separate Planning Department, “Let’s see what you’ve got.” He was presented with a master plan from 1950, what Logue described as “a foolish plan done in the Corbusier mood which was all the rage then, all about ‘towers in the park,’ a sick formula for rebuilding cities which has had a baneful influence all over the world.” Looking more closely at the South End and Charlestown district plans, he saw that they both called for total clearance, in the South End saving only the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the Cathedral public housing project, and Union Park; and in Charlestown, preserving Bunker Hill Monument (site of the historic Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775), Monument Square, the Bunker Hill public housing project, and a church or two. These plans, in the same vein as what had guided Hynes and Simonian’s demolition of the West End, would have required the relocation of thirty thousand residents from the South End and fifteen thousand from Charlestown.3 Logue knew this proposal was untenable and welcomed the opportunity to implement his newly awakened philosophy from New Haven’s Wooster Square of “rehab don’t demolish.”

  COMMON RENEWAL PATTERNS

  The BRA’s most substantial neighborhood renewal projects during the 1960s—in Roxbury, Charlestown, and the South End—shared many similarities. In developing neighborhood renewal plans to tackle the city’s extensive deteriorated housing, the BRA gave all targeted communities three options to consider in determining how much existing housing should be cleared for new construction—a low (15 percent), a medium (20 percent), and a high amount (30 percent)—aiming on average for about 20 to 25 percent demolition. As Logue testified to President Johnson’s National Commission on Urban Problems in May 1967, “As a rule of thumb we believe that 75 percent of the existing occupied structures must be kept and rehabilitated if you are going to do this on a large scale.”4 Where substandard buildings were kept, the BRA encouraged rehabilitation, to be achieved by offering advice, giving small loans, running a summer “work camp” for high school and college students to assist residents, and opening “pilot houses” to demonstrate affordable and acceptable methods of renovation.5 New community amenities—YMCAs, schools, police and fire stations, shopping centers, and the like—were on the drawing board for cleared land.

  Though Logue and the BRA were sincere in wanting to construct replacement housing for displaced tenants, they had limited tools at their disposal. A Ph.D. candidate at MIT who undertook research for her dissertation by working at the BRA for five months was convinced of “Logue’s strong desire to assist in changing the prevailing public image of redevelop
ment by erecting low income housing,” calling for as much of it “as possible, erected rapidly.”6 But providing sufficient relocation housing and making it available quickly became the BRA’s Achilles’ heel in Boston’s neighborhoods, much as it had been for renewers in New Haven. Years later, Logue admitted that the BRA “couldn’t keep pace with relocation.”7 Few if any federal funds existed beyond the 221(d)(3) program, which Logue had also made good use of in New Haven, where nonprofit organizations like churches and labor unions could secure low-cost, 100 percent financing as sponsors of small-scale housing complexes.

  Logue bragged that Boston had the largest Section 221(d)(3) relocation housing program in the country. In Roxbury, for example, Academy Homes I and II (named for its site on the former campus of Notre Dame Academy, a Catholic girls’ boarding school) were sponsored by the Building Services Employees Union Local 254. Marksdale Gardens I, II, and III were supported by Saint Mark Congregational Church. The largest project, Warren Gardens, was carried out by the Charlesbank Foundation. Charles Street AME Church created Charlame Park Homes I and II. Saint Joseph’s Co-op was developed by the Roxbury Catholic church of the same name.

  Though impressive, these efforts through the 221(d)(3) program proved inadequate to meet the great need for replacement housing, given limits in federal funding; the low density of the garden-type apartments that were preferred; and the challenge of attracting nonprofit sponsors or limited-dividend commercial developers as partners, who saw little promise of profit. (The average net profit on low- and moderate-income 221(d)(3) housing was in the 6 to 7 percent range, when the return on upper-income housing was at least twice that.) With all these obstacles, the “contagion effect” in new housing construction that the BRA hoped for never materialized in Boston, according to a close observer.8

  Moreover, rents in the replacement units proved more expensive than in tenants’ dilapidated former buildings. One calculation estimated that two-thirds of the 1,700 families being relocated in Roxbury’s Washington Park as of 1964 could not afford the new 221(d)(3) rents.9 Mayor Collins himself expressed frustration that a family with children might be paying $50 a month in a substandard apartment; “maybe it can afford to pay $75 a month—but not $95.”10 Inserting public housing into neighborhoods undergoing renewal was no solution either; Logue and the BRA were ideologically opposed to expanding this stigmatized housing type that would undermine, not advance, their vision of socially mixed communities.11 Instead the BRA worked to secure funding for a pilot rent-supplement program—extended in some 221(d)(3) projects to 10 to 16 percent of the tenants, whose identities were kept confidential—but its reach was limited.12 At every opportunity, whether testifying to a congressional committee or being interviewed by a reporter, Logue harangued about the inadequacy of government funding to create sufficient affordable housing.13

  Criticism of the BRA’s failure to provide a sufficient amount of replacement housing, which was forcing too many residents to leave neighborhoods where they had established roots, plagued Logue at every turn. He locked horns, for example, with the planner Chester Hartman, who excoriated the BRA’s relocation record in a major planning journal, prompting a defensive response by Logue in a later issue.14 Dislocation statistics are notoriously unreliable, but even the BRA’s own accounting in 1967 conveys the extent of the upheaval. Of the 2,380 traceable families forced to move during Washington Park’s renewal, 1,221 relocated within Roxbury, with only 581 remaining within the Washington Park area. One hundred and three Washington Park families headed for the suburbs, 35 families moved elsewhere in the state, and 36 moved out of state.15 Very likely most of the families who left Washington Park were low income.

  Realistically, the BRA’s best relocation strategy took advantage of the city’s severe population decline—of 172,000 between 1955 and 1965—to move dislocated families into available housing elsewhere in the city. This approach, of course, ignored the ties people felt to particular neighborhoods and contributed to their general sense of vulnerability.16 According to one community activist, “There was an element of fear. People didn’t know they could hold out for relocation to the place of their choice. They were told, ‘Take it or leave it,’ and they didn’t know they could leave it.”17 With his eyes pinned on the prize of revitalizing neighborhoods, Logue chose not to dwell on those traumatized in the process.

  The rehabilitation strategy came with its own limitations, even though it could make use of two additional federal programs—the Section 312 and Section 115 loans and grants.18 As Logue had discovered in New Haven’s Wooster Square, rehab inevitably favored homeowners over tenants, who often found themselves facing eviction during renovation and higher rents upon completion. And progress was slow. It was often hard to motivate private property owners to undertake rehabilitation. In Charlestown, a BRA project director recounted that many residents were too suspicious to take advantage of the 3 percent loans offered: “New heat, electricity. You’d be surprised how many people I couldn’t convince to take it … They said we don’t trust you.”19 Owners also felt little peer pressure from neighbors when much of the renovation went on inside.20 The BRA’s encouragement, advice, and small grants could help only so much. By May 1967 Logue had become so frustrated with the difficulty of getting landlords to rehab their buildings that he floated the idea of calling a one-day meeting of real estate professionals, tax lawyers and accountants, and Harvard Law and Business School professors to explore the possibility of imposing “tax penalties for failure to keep up rental properties.”21

  But even when property owners wanted to rehabilitate their property, they faced a huge problem: all these struggling neighborhoods were redlined by fire insurance companies and mortgage lenders, including the Federal Housing Administration, which provided crucial backing to banks extending loans. And owners needed to borrow, as the small-grant programs of the BRA were rarely sufficient for the major renovations required of seriously run-down properties. One of Logue’s proudest achievements became taking on the FHA to reverse its discriminatory practices and become more lenient in its lending practices. He then pressured the Boston bankers who claimed to support the city’s urban renewal to join forces in a consortium where each of twenty-one banks and thrift institutions would take a turn offering government-insured loans.22 But still, it was not always easy for borrowers to get financing, and older residents were often reluctant to risk increasing their monthly carrying costs, even when the BRA insisted that, with FHA financing, many people’s monthly expenses would decrease.23

  Sadly, starting around 1968, after Logue had left Boston, this progress would backfire, as the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (known as B-BURG) shifted its willingness to lend in previously redlined neighborhoods to a rigid restriction limiting its lending to minority applicants in these areas only. The effect was to confine minority populations to certain Boston neighborhoods like Roxbury, parts of Dorchester, and Mattapan, predominantly Jewish neighborhoods now unprofitable to banks because so many mortgages were paid off. The B-BURG policy also encouraged blockbusting—scaring homeowners into selling cheaply out of fear that prices would plummet further when a minority racial group entered—and the resulting white flight. Unintentionally, Logue’s aspiration to get mortgage money into the hands of marginalized homeowners to improve housing quality in socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods ended up contributing to the hardening of racial, ethnic, and economic lines within and between neighborhoods.24

  The fate of the B-BURG program suggests the difficulties Logue faced in achieving his goal of greater class and racial mixing in Boston’s neighborhoods undergoing renewal. Even beyond all the structural obstacles, Boston residents tended to reject the BRA’s efforts to introduce diversity, whether they were middle-class black homeowners in Roxbury’s Washington Park who resisted low-income housing as a threat to property values; or the working-class Irish in Charlestown who feared that urban renewal would open the floodgates to blacks; or low-income South Enders who equated a soc
ioeconomic mix with the arrival of middle-class gentrifiers. Moreover, Logue’s initiatives to place low- and moderate-income housing in stable neighborhoods not targeted for urban renewal failed as badly in Boston as they had in New Haven.

  Publicly, Logue painted a rosy picture of neighborhood renewal as enjoying “a broad base of citizen support” and “the warm endorsement of most of the community’s leaders, except for a few people in the local community who believe they can get some mileage by opposition.”25 The reality, however, proved much more complicated. Fortuitously, a participant-observer account provides an in-depth look at Boston’s neighborhood urban renewal much the way Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? did for New Haven. Langley Keyes, a Ph.D. candidate in planning at MIT, attended hundreds of community meetings and undertook dozens of interviews between 1962 and 1965 to understand what actually happened in Roxbury, Charlestown, and the South End. He published his findings four years later as The Rehabilitation Planning Game: A Study in the Diversity of Neighborhood.26 Keyes concluded that each neighborhood engaged in negotiations within its own community and then with the BRA in a “game” where the victor was the group that mobilized sufficient support to position itself as chief negotiator with the BRA. The BRA, in turn, he argued, recognized that its best prospects for success depended on cooperating with the winning neighborhood team. As The Washington Post’s Nicholas von Hoffman explained: “[Logue] had to find a widely based group in every community that he could enfranchise as that community’s bargaining agent with the Authority and which he could count on to support the project when it came time to shoot the rapids of City Council hostility.”27