The Rebirth of America's Urban Neighborhoods

House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS BOSTON AND THE POWER OF COLLABORATION In 1971, Bob Haas, a twenty-seven-year-old engineer and classical piano player, moved to a commune in a large broken-down Victorian house in a section of the Boston Dorchester district known as Upham's Corner. Haas loved the his tory and vitality of Dorchester—a streetcar-era place where first the Irish and then other ethnic groups had made their home in “Baahston”—and a few years later bought the old house from his roommates. Upham's Corner, however, was a neighborhood in crisis. M any poor Afri can Americans and Puerto Ricans lived there. Houses caught on fire and were abandoned. Stores, including the neighborhood supermarket, closed. During his first ten years in Upham's Corner, Haas's house was burglarized twenty- three times. Children on his street grew up, joined gangs, took crack cocaine, and murdered or were murdered. At first Haas naively thought that if he repaired his house, others would do the same, and the neighborhood would come back. When that did not work, he organized a neighborhood association. That did not stem the tide either, and in 1979 he and members of three neighborhood associations founded the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation (Dorchester Bay EDC). Excited by its potential, Haas in 1985 gave up his other careers to become a full-time staff member and spent sixteen years as director of planning. It took a few years, but this last effort began to show tangible results. Since its founding Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation has devel oped more than 500 dwellings, restored a major commercial building, brought in a new grocery store, coordinated anti-drug and crime watch groups, st arted a children's summer camp, and instituted annual neighborhood meetings and festivals for the Upham's Corner neighborhood.1 Upham's Corner's revival is not unique. All over Boston's inner-city dis tricts of Roxbury and Dorchester, neighborhoods are experiencing rebirth. Old apartment buildings sparkle, and newly built houses st and on formerly vacant lots. Businesses are returning to the empty storefronts. The areas of abandoned and graffiti-scarred buildings and vacant lots have shrunk, and crime has dwindled to pre-Vietnam War levels. Landmarks and Significant Places ▲ Dudley Square ★ Upham's Comer ® Cod man Square # Lithgow Building $ 102 Columbia Rd. + Dorchester District Court m Dudley Square Neighborhood Initiative Triangle Boston Neighborhood Map (Facing page, top) House in disrepair, Monadnock Street, Upham’s Corner neigh borhood. Courtesy of Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation. (Facing page, bottom) Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation’s Youth Arts and Crafts Summer Camp, August 1995. Courtesy of Dorchester Bay Economic 78 Development Corporation. BOSTON AND THE POWER OF COLLABORATION * > Some of the credit for the transformation of Boston's inner city must go to the thriving economy and real estate market. Boston, like San Francisco and Seattle, is an American city that has benefited from surging high-technology and service industries. And like other high-market cities, an influx of affluent professionals from the suburbs and elsewhere has created a real est ate boom that has raised prices even in the inner city. But in Boston, perhaps more than any other city, the community develop ment movement took advant age of economic good times to shape an urban revival. Through years of trial and error, the city's nonprofit organizations and public agencies developed remarkable skills in collaboration. Sophisticated community development advocates and daring government officials — includ ing some clever police officers — forged alliances to develop attractive hous ing, revive commerce, and end crime in the inner city. At first they measured progress in odd ways: a bewildering financial spreadsheet, calls to the Roto- Rooter company, and the silence of a policeman's pager. Eventually, their success became so obvious that now visitors from other cities and countries come to learn about Boston's spectacularly effective community development and anti-crime programs. The Long Decline Despite its grandiose nickname, the Hub of the Universe, Boston is small, compact, and old. Dating from colonial days, its streets wind through the town's rolling hills and valleys. Where three or four major roads converge, they form irregularly shaped “squares,” which are the commercial and institutional cen ters of the neighborhoods around them. Isolated by topography, these neigh borhoods, sub-neighborhoods really, inspire strong feelings of loyalty among their residents. Boston's inner-city neighborhoods are located outside the city's colonial boundaries in the former towns of Roxbury and Dorchester, and parts of the neighboring South End. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centu ries, Roxbury and Dorchester sprouted solid brick commercial blocks along the avenues, small factories in the lowlands, and houses — ranging from el egant mansions to working-class three-decker apartment buildings — every where else. Their population was similarly eclectic, including Protestant Yankees, Catholic Irish, and everyone from the well-to-do to the ne'er-do- well. As the century wore on, upwardly mobile white ethnics, especially the Irish and Jews, inherited these neighborhoods and filled them with small shops, pubs, delicatessens, churches, and synagogues. In the late twentieth century, dramatic population shifts undermined the prosperity of Roxbury and Dorchester. Between 1950 and 1980, as the city of Boston lost more than 238,000 people, the population of Roxbury fell from 122,000 HOUSE HOUSE BY HOUSE, BLOCK BY BLOCK to 58,000 and that of Dorchester dropped from 118,000 to 83,000^ The vast majority of those departing the city were white working- and middle-class ethnics moving to the suburbs. In the 1970s, many fled to escape the federal court's 80 school busing program, the rising crime rate, and the collapsing real estate market. During this three-decade exodus, minority racial groups moved into the industrial belt of northern Roxbury, then into southern Roxbury and Dor chester. Roxbury experienced the greatest change in racial composition as its population changed from 80 percent white in 1950 to 10 percent white in 1980. Blacks had been living in Roxbury as early as the 1940s — when Malcolm X stayed there with his aunt—and by 1960 Roxbury became the capital of black Boston. In the 1960s African Americans began moving to western Dorchester. In the 1970s Puerto Ricans, and some Latin American immigrants, followed the blacks to northern sections of Roxbury, Dorchester, and the adja cent neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. In 1970, whites comprised almost 90 percent of Dorchester's population; twenty years later their share had dropped to just over half the population.3 Many of the newcomers were significantly poorer than their predecessors. By 1979 the percent age of people below the poverty line had risen to 30 per cent in Roxbury and 17 percent in Dorchester. Single-parent households made up over a third of all households in Roxbury and over a quarter of those in Dorchester. Thirty-three percent of Roxbury's households received public as sistance, as did 20 percent of the households in Dorchester.4 The transition to a poorer, more racially diverse population did not go smoothly. In the 1970s the school busing program, which required racial inte gration of the public schools, exacerbated racial tensions throughout the city. Increasing numbers of crimes in Roxbury and Dorchester contributed to a sense that order was breaking down. As in other cities, where property values collapsed, buildings were liable to burn. For evening entert ainment, people in Roxbury and Dorchester watched the fires from their porches and roofs and hoped that the blowing embers BOSTON AND THE POWER OF COLLABORATION would not set their own houses ablaze.5 Some fires arose from carelessness and even revenge. Others, perhaps most, were set intentionally to collect in surance or get rid of a property that was bleeding money. Rapid change was particularly devast ating to the south Dorchester neigh borhood of Codman Square. The population west of Codman Square changed from middle-class Jewish to low-income African American during the late 1960s and 1970s, and the surrounding community all but collapsed. Real est ate val ues plummeted to zero, vandals stripped the copper and radiators from build ings at night, and hundreds of houses burned. In 1969 fires emptied the Lithgow Building, the prominent commercial block of Codman Square. Once Codman Square had boasted 150 stores; by 1977 only thirty remained. Drug dealers shot out the branch library's windows because they suspected the librarian of snitching. One night someone attacked the gift shop with a chain saw. During the blizzard of 1978, which shut down Boston for a week, hundreds of rioters smashed windows and looted the remaining businesses, including the major supermarket, until the National Guard was called in. The supermarket closed soon afterward.6 By then, large stretches of Roxbury and Dorchester resembled the depressed mill towns of the New England countryside. The wooden shingles and clap board on aged homes were faded and cracked or covered with cheap t ar paper 81 Abandoned three-deckers and vacant lots in the Codman Square neighborhood, mid-1970s. Courtesy of William Walczak. and asphalt shingles. Broken windows and t attered shades made many build ings look like haunted houses. Graffiti and boarded windows scarred apart ment blocks and factories. Empty storefronts desolated the neighborhoods' once busy commercial boulevards and squares. Few, if any, banks would issue a house mortgage or business loan in these forlorn neighborhoods. To make matters worse, the Hub's government seemed to withdraw from the inner city along with the grocery stores and bank branches.

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