By the summer of 1971, Colin was growing uneasy in the Mayor’s employ. It wasn’t for lack of responsibility. With the departure of Frank, Cowin, and Merrick, Colin’s role had expanded rapidly; he took over some of the substantive policy making from Frank, most of the speech writing from Cowin, some of the federal liaison from Merrick. Advancing into the inner circle of advisers, he spent nearly as much time in the Mayor’s spacious office as he did in his own cubicle down the hall. Indeed, so shorthanded were they in City Hall that year that he became a jack-of-all-trades, with a hand in almost everything that passed through the Mayor’s office. Bob Weinberg, the Mayor’s new majordomo, would shout down the corridors, “My God, let’s do something. Get Colin!”
But the closer he got to the center of power, the less it appealed to him. Three years before, he had enlisted in Kevin White’s crusade against racial injustice, poverty, and urban decay, and they had accomplished some fine things during those years. But now the Mayor was so preoccupied with his political ambitions that he had little energy left for the substantive issues. Increasingly, White seemed to regard blacks and other disadvantaged groups as political liabilities. Colin found the Mayor’s new priorities dismaying and frustrating.
There were other frustrations as well, which could hardly be blamed on Kevin White. For three years now, Colin had spent most of his time contending with demands from the resurgent neighborhoods. In one sense, he knew, that was as it should be; government ought to respond to the legitimate complaints of an aroused electorate. The trouble was that Boston’s white neighborhoods seemed primarily concerned with stopping things. Colin, who had joined the White administration to act on behalf of the disadvantaged, was becoming, instead, an expert in blocking action. And even when he or the Mayor took positive action, Colin was no longer confident that it would produce the intended results. He knew now that even the best-intentioned programs sometimes produced dubious social consequences.
A prime example that summer of 1971 was the “B-BURG” program, an effort by a consortium of twenty-two Boston savings banks (the Boston Banks’ Urban Renewal Group) to provide mortgages for the city’s low-income black families. B-BURG had been founded in 1963 to answer Ed Logue’s appeal for rehabilitation loans, and during the next six years the program had puttered along, committing only $2 million. Then, after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Boston’s business community was galvanized by fear of retaliatory violence and by anxiety over the alliance struck by the militants of the Black United Front and FUND’S suburban liberals. When Kevin White appealed to banks and insurance companies to come up with a counter-program, the savings banks hastily agreed to revitalize B-BURG, pledging $20 million in new mortgage money, most of it for low-income blacks. Indeed, when the commercial banks and insurance companies largely defaulted on commitments they had given at the same time, B-BURG became the only segment of White’s program to bear fruit, its member banks providing $29 million in mortgages to more than 2,000 families over the next three years. Here, it seemed, was an example of effective government–private sector activism on behalf of the black and the poor—precisely the sort of program for which Colin had been pressing all along.
But by early 1971, the unintended consequences of B-BURG began to crop up—and they didn’t look positive at all. Unbeknownst to most Bostonians, the consortium had granted mortgages to blacks only within a narrow zone stretching from the South End through Roxbury into Dorchester and Mattapan, for nearly a century the route of black—and, earlier, Jewish—migration, a path that generally skirted the Irish Catholic neighborhoods on either flank. The Irish neighborhoods had resisted Jewish encroachment and were likely to repel blacks even more adamantly. By taking the line of least resistance, B-BURG had done nothing to help blacks break out of the ghetto. It had merely enlarged and reinforced the ghetto.
That was only one of the unintended consequences. The combination of heavy black demand for the newly available mortgages and the sharply constricted B-BURG district created a classic breeding ground for blockbusting. As the first blacks bought houses there, unscrupulous real estate people warned Jewish families that they had better sell quickly before their property lost its value. Speculators snapped up the homes at panic prices, then resold them at huge profits to incoming blacks. Real estate agents made big commissions on the rapid turnover. Once begun, the process fed on itself. In a few years, the Jewish population of Mattapan plummeted from about 90,000 to barely 1,500—an abrupt shift that was accompanied by fierce social conflict. Through much of 1970 and 1971, Boston’s newspapers were filled with stories of murders, rapes, and muggings, many of them committed by young blacks on elderly Mattapan Jews. The Jewish Defense League patrolled the area, armed with rifles and baseball bats. One Defense League pamphlet warned: “We will not run from Mattapan. We are determined to fight to the finish these elements and enemies of our people. If need be, we will fight in hand-to-hand combat that our Jewish blood shall be avenged.”
In May 1971, a Senate subcommittee announced that it was coming to Boston in September to hold hearings on the B-BURG program. Assigned to develop the city’s position, Colin discovered that the B-BURG zone had been no secret to city, state, and federal officials. Fortunately, several city officials had protested to the banks, drawing a curt reply that the banks weren’t interested in the city’s suggestions but were simply advising it “what we are and are not willing to do.” This starchy attitude allowed Colin to disassociate the city from the worst aspects of the B-BURG fiasco; the statement he drafted, and which the Mayor submitted to the subcommittee, insisted that the city had always preferred a program which would allow blacks to purchase housing anywhere in the metropolitan area.
Although the White administration managed to escape B-BURG’s worst fallout, the episode had a profound effect on Colin. He may have taken its lesson particularly to heart because it echoed the theme of a book he was reading that summer—Urban Dynamics, an unlikely volume to find favor in Kevin White’s City Hall. Its author, Jay Forrester, was a professor of management at MIT, where he had formed an alliance with White’s old adversary, former Mayor John Collins, and Forrester’s thesis reflected Collins’ suspicion of liberals who thought they could solve the urban crisis through social activism and welfare programs. Using computer language, Forrester argued that most of man’s intuitive responses developed from “first-order, negative feedback loops” For example, when a man warmed his hands by a stove, the only important variable was his distance from the burner. If his hands were too far from the burner, they wouldn’t get warm enough; if they were too close, they’d get burned. Cause and effect were closely related. Such intuitive responses—which governed the way we perform most daily tasks—were accurate and reliable.
But, Forrester warned, the modern city didn’t function like a simple, first-order loop. Instead, it had a multiplicity of intersecting feedback loops, each with many complex variables. Thus, such systems were “counter-intuitive.” If one looked for a cause near in time and space to the symptom, one usually found something plausible, yet it was generally not the true cause, but merely another symptom. Conditioned by our training in simple systems, we applied intuition to complex systems and were led astray. “Very often,” Forrester concluded, “one finds that the policies that have been adopted for correcting a difficulty are actually intensifying it rather than producing a solution.”
When applied to urban systems, Forrester’s analysis suggested that “humanitarian impulses coupled with short-term political pressures lead to programs whose benefits, if any, evaporate quickly, leaving behind a system that is unimproved or in worse condition. Job-training programs, low-cost housing programs, and even financial aid, when used alone without improvements in the economic climate of a city, can fall into this category.” Forrester’s prime example was subsidized housing. Intuitively, projects such as Methunion Manor might seem a mandatory response to the needs of the poor and the near-poor for standard housing at rents they could afford. In fact,
Forrester argued, such housing generally made things worse for everyone, including those it sheltered. First, the availability of subsidized housing—along with other welfare services—attracted the needy to the city, building a constituency for even more such housing and further straining city services. Then, the housing took valuable land, reducing the land available for non-subsidized housing and business enterprises which produced both jobs and tax revenue. The result: the growth of a dependent welfare class, the exodus of productive businesses and tax-paying employees, and a fiscal crisis for the city.
By 1971, Urban Dynamics had become the bible of the “conservative caucus,” which was urging the Mayor to retrench his social programs and concentrate on improving delivery of more traditional services, such as police and fire protection, sanitation, street paving, lighting, and recreation. Colin wasn’t ideologically predisposed to the Forrester thesis, but his experience with B-BURG and other misfired programs prepared him for the notion of unintended consequences. All that summer, he brooded over the book, wondering whether government was making things better or worse in Boston. And yet he clung to the values which had brought him to City Hall in the first place. What had changed were not his beliefs but his expectations. After three years in the Mayor’s office, he no longer believed that government could establish racial justice or eradicate poverty; those problems, it now seemed to him, were too complex, the resources too limited, the instruments too imprecise, the competing interests too intractable. Money could probably be spent more effectively on improving conventional services. But that didn’t mean government should retreat to mere housekeeping; even with diminished expectations, one should do what one could to reduce social injustice. To that degree, Colin was still an activist—and inevitably that brought him into conflict with the increasingly cautious Mayor.
Rockland Towers was an eleven-story public housing project for the elderly which the Boston Housing Authority planned to build in West Roxbury. When announced in 1970, the proposal stirred vigorous protests from neighborhood groups, for it was the first low-income project ever designated for that last bastion of the city’s Irish middle class. With its single- and two-family homes set well apart on tree-lined streets, West Roxbury looked more like suburbia than like an urban neighborhood. With the exception of Beacon Hill, it was Boston’s wealthiest community, and it was certainly one of the whitest; only a handful of blacks had managed to find homes there. Not incidentally, it was Kevin White’s birthplace.
But West Roxbury hadn’t showed much loyalty to its native son. In his 1970 race for governor, it gave him his lowest percentage anywhere in the city—a meager 31.6 percent. To win reelection as mayor he had to do better than that; so, although he had initially endorsed the West Roxbury project, as soon as opposition developed he began to back away.
Some of the opposition was directed against high-rise apartments of any kind—residents had blocked two other apartment projects which they feared would destroy the suburban feel of their community. “These people wouldn’t approve a ten-story palace for the Pope,” argued one City Hall lobbyist. But Rockland Towers was no ordinary apartment project. It was “public housing”—a code phrase for the black and poor. Much of the opposition was grounded in West Roxbury’s determination to remain as affluent, and as white, as possible.
Early in the summer of 1971, Larry Quealy, the mayoral aide who kept in close touch with Irish neighborhood groups, brought a West Roxbury delegation in to see Kevin White. Colin, who had been arguing forcefully in support of Rockland Towers, was asked to sit in, as were Bob Weinberg and the Mayor’s housing adviser, Andy Olins. After the delegation had made their pitch and been ushered out, the Mayor asked his four aides to stay behind for a discussion of the issues. Larry Quealy, who himself lived in West Roxbury, led off by scornfully dismissing the project. “It’s bad for these people, it’s bad for the neighborhood, it’s bad for you,” he told the Mayor. “That’s three strikes against it. In baseball and politics, that means it’s out.” As Quealy spoke, the Mayor leaned back in his leather desk chair, eyes half closed, nodding his head in apparent agreement.
Colin could see the Mayor’s mind closing down. If he gave in on this one, it would be just another in a series of capitulations to aroused neighborhoods which opposed his programs. How often was he going to let them exercise their veto? Shouldn’t the Mayor stand up for citywide interests, not to mention those for whom nobody else would speak? As Quealy finished, Colin broke in: “I can see which way this thing is going. I’m sure this serves no useful purpose other than to vent my spleen, but I’m going to say it anyway.” He could feel his face burning, the way it did on those rare occasions when he lost control. In three years with the Mayor, he had never exploded like this. Indeed, he struck his colleagues as the quintessential man of reason, so much so that some of them, behind his back, called him “the iceman.” Sometimes Colin himself worried that all the passion had gone out of his commitment to the city, that he had bogged down in a mechanical cost-benefit analysis. Well, he might be making a fool of himself now, but he didn’t care. He plunged on.
“I don’t think the reasons those West Roxbury people gave are the least bit convincing,” he said. “Does anyone really think they’re concerned about height and density? Do you believe that, Larry? I can only conclude that their real reason for opposing the project is a cynical combination of fear and bigotry. And let me say this, Kevin, the city will be displaying the same kind of fear and bigotry if it caves in to them.” Then he got up and stalked from the room. As he closed the door, he could see the Mayor gaping after him.
Soon afterwards, Colin resigned. He hadn’t lost faith in government, merely in the relentlessly political administration of Kevin White. And he had an intriguing job offer. Bill Cowin—who had left the Mayor’s office two years before to take a post with the state—liked Colin and admired his “astonishing intelligence.” When Bill was given a new job—Secretary of Consumer Affairs—he asked Colin to be his assistant secretary.
Colin’s resignation prompted no recriminations. The Mayor threw him a going-away party and presented him with a Raleigh bicycle. That fall Colin ran two South End precincts for the Mayor, helping him win reelection over Louise Day Hicks.
Early in October 1971, Colin rode his bicycle to the State Office Building to begin his new job. As Secretary of Consumer Affairs, Bill Cowin concentrated on improving the work of the state’s regulatory agencies. As his principal assistant, Colin helped implement the state’s new no-fault insurance law and set up a cable television commission. It was interesting work, but just as Colin got the feel of it, he changed jobs again. Bill Cowin was the rising star of the Sargent administration. In September 1972, Sargent asked him to leave Consumer Affairs and take over as Secretary of Administration and Finance—the principal fiscal, budgetary, and administrative officer in state government. So important was the A & F Secretary that he was sometimes called Deputy Governor, and as Under Secretary, Colin became, in effect, the Deputy Governor’s deputy.
Colin had less contact with the Governor than he had had with the Mayor. His job was to manage the huge A & F department while Bill concentrated on liaison with other state agencies and on advising the Governor, as a member of Sargent’s “kitchen cabinet.” Yet as Bill’s trusted deputy, Colin was sometimes included in those sessions, which gave him an opportunity to observe the Governor at close hand.
In some respects, Frank Sargent and Kevin White struck Colin as remarkably similar men. To be sure, Sargent was a classic New England Yankee. A great-grandson of the legendary Brahmin banker Henry Lee, he had used a Cape Cod sporting goods store called the Goose Hummock as a stepping-stone to a fifteen-year career as a professional “fish and game man” (director of the state’s Marine Fisheries and Natural Resources departments). But if many Yankees were parched and parsimonious, Frank Sargent was an ebullient, natural politician. His personal magnetism reached across party, ethnic, and class lines. To many of Boston’s Irish, he was an honor
ary Irishman.
Though he was a lifelong Republican, Sargent’s stance on most issues wasn’t very different from Kevin White’s. After Martin Luther King’s assassination, as lieutenant governor, he pledged to “make the changes that King dreamed of—the change of heart, the change of mind.” In 1970, as acting governor, he ordered the State House flag flown at half-staff in memory of the students killed at Kent State. He was frequently criticized by other Republicans for straying from the party line and for appointing too many Democrats. If anything, Sargent was more liberal than White: no Republican could be elected statewide in Massachusetts without appealing to Democrats and independents.
Colin discerned one major difference between them: White carefully calculated most of his moves, but Sargent governed from the gut. Compared to White, he wasn’t a particularly strong leader: his staff pulled and hauled him in different directions. Yet when he had to make a decision, he invariably came down on the humane side. Indeed, the essence of Sargent’s liberalism was a human response to human needs. He and his progressive appointees improved conditions for the retarded in state schools, expanded the Public Welfare Department’s human services, closed many of the worst youth detention facilities, and carried out a sweeping reform of the archaic prison system.
Common Ground Page 34