Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  Having scrutinized the demonstrators’ message, Colin and Joan did their best to sip champagne and dance gaily, but they began to feel profoundly uneasy. They’d heard charges from South End social workers before, revolutionary rhetoric from the People’s News, the outrage of black and Puerto Rican tenants against their landlords. But not until that night had they felt anger directed at them personally. Walking home past crumbling tenements and shabby rooming houses, they were acutely aware of the rage and resentment lurking in the darkened streets.

  For by early 1974, the gentrification battle had left the South End more bitterly divided than ever. From the beginning, the South End’s urban renewal plan contained an unresolved tension. On the one hand, it pledged to “protect and expand the city’s tax base, arrest economic decline, and by stabilizing property values, protect private investment.” On the other, it promised to ensure “the availability of standard housing at rentals that all displaced low-income residents wishing to remain in the South End could afford.” Thus, while the BRA committed itself to bringing middle-class families back to the South End, it pledged to safeguard the interests of all low-income residents. By June 1973, many South Enders had plainly concluded that those two ends could not be pursued simultaneously. That month, social workers, radicals, and their tenant clients won control of the South End Project Area Committee (SEPAC), the elected citizen review board which held a veto over neighborhood renewal projects. For years, the board had been dominated by middle-class homeowners and realtors. After the “people’s” slate took command, it adopted the “Zook Resolution”—named after its framer, the radical organizer Doug Zook—declaring that no further housing would be approved unless at least 25 percent of the units were reserved for low-income tenants.

  Coming hard on the heels of the anti-Goldweitz campaign, the Zook Resolution stirred consternation among South End homeowners, who feared they were about to be overrun by the minority poor. Angriest of all was David Parker, a young carpenter and dedicated traditionalist who had meticulously restored his nineteenth-century town house to its original condition. High windows, ornate moldings, and pine floors framed a collection of hand-rubbed antiques: a Morris chair, a Boston rocker, a Connecticut clock. “Thomas Jefferson would have felt at home in this room,” he said with evident satisfaction. But his house faced West Concord Street, a South End thoroughfare perilously close to the black “wilderness” and more vulnerable than the insulated blocks of Rutland Square, West Newton Street, and West Brookline Street. Parker deeply resented the “Gold Coast liberals,” whom he accused of grabbing all the brick sidewalks, sculptured streetlights, and ginkgo trees for themselves while shrewdly maneuvering the subsidized housing they ostensibly favored into Parker’s less privileged neighborhood.

  Together with a neighbor—an architect named Herbert Zeller—and fourteen like-minded homeowners, Parker formed the Committee of Citizens for a Balanced South End, which sought to stem the influx of low-income housing by shifting the burden elsewhere in the city as well as to the suburbs. On December 11, 1973, it called for an “immediate moratorium” on further subsidized projects in the South End and designation of remaining renewal parcels for “responsible market-level housing.” Two months later, committee members filed the first of several lawsuits to block low-income developments on the grounds that they would “perpetuate high-density ghettos of low-income blacks” and have a negative “environmental impact” on surrounding properties. Later, they joined the battle against new halfway houses and detoxification and drug treatment centers, arguing that the South End had too long been a “wastebasket of American society.”

  Although many South End homeowners felt uncomfortable with the committee’s vehemence, its protest clearly reflected a widespread anxiety. Always sensitive to such ground swells, Kevin White’s administration moved quickly to assuage it. In April 1974, the BRA announced that since it had exceeded its target of 3,300 low- and moderate-income units for the South End, it would no longer give priority to such housing. Henceforth, it would concentrate on “providing the ancillary amenities to make the South End a more attractive and liveable community.” The BRA report stirred a predictable storm of protest and the Mayor retreated somewhat, calling for a neighborhood review. In May, SEPAC named an eleven-member committee, representing all the South End’s factions and chaired by Joshua Young, the socially conscious banker from West Newton Street. After fourteen months of hearings, interviews, and statistical analysis, the committee released findings sharply at odds with the city’s.

  The BRA had found 6,015 subsidized units, or 46 percent of the South End’s housing stock; the committee identified only 4,439 such units, 30 percent of available housing. Even that exceeded the BRA’s goals, but the committee argued that it fell at least 3,000 units short of the community’s needs, largely because the trickle of young professionals had turned into a torrent, overrunning the South End’s tenements and rooming houses. A single new family could displace as many as four or five old ones, forcing them into subsidized projects or out of the neighborhood altogether. The committee urged that the community reaffirm an “absolute responsibility” to provide housing for all South Enders who wished to remain there. To achieve that end, it struck a compromise between its competing factions—proposing that 25 percent of future units be reserved for low-income tenants, 25 percent be rented at market rates, with the remaining 50 percent left undetermined. But David Parker and Herb Zeller found even that intolerable and angrily resigned from the committee, denouncing it for capitulating to a “narrow sociopolitical ideology.”

  Far from mending the community’s divisions, the report only exacerbated them. For housing in the South End had taken on heavy symbolic freight, beyond its function as shelter or even its value as real estate. It had become a tangible measure of class standing and of society’s willingness to reward or ameliorate that standing. Though the South End struggle was frequently framed as “white” vs. “black,” “majority” vs. “minority,” “New South Enders” vs. “Old South Enders”—and, to some degree, it was all those—it was principally a class conflict, a battle between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

  Its racial and ethnic dimensions were often misunderstood. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the worst victims of gentrification—those forced not only from their homes but out of the neighborhood altogether—were not overwhelmingly black and Puerto Rican. In absolute numbers, blacks declined as widespread demolition and rooming-house conversion cut the South End’s population by more than a half within two decades, but the black share actually rose from 39 percent in 1960 to about 44 percent in 1975. During that same period, Hispanics grew from a negligible 1 percent to 9 percent, while Chinese and other minorities grew from 2 to 6 percent.

  Meanwhile, despite the influx of thousands of young professionals, the white population sharply declined—from 58 to 40 percent. Many of the departing whites were aging “roomers” who, once their old lodgings had been appropriated, never found housing at rents they could afford. Others were remnants of the Irish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, Syrian, and Lebanese working-class communities who, as the South End became recognized as black and Hispanic “turf,” abandoned their traditional enclaves (the new gentry may have tolerated physical proximity to blacks because they enjoyed a social distance; white workers, with no social buffer, required physical distance). Within fifteen years, the South End largely replaced its white population, exchanging the poor, tired, and aging for the young, prosperous, and energetic. Not surprisingly, between 1960 and 1970, the median income of South End whites more than doubled, from $3,771 to $7,792.

  Nevertheless, affluent whites remained a small minority in the neighborhood. In 1970, three-quarters of all South End families still earned less than $10,000 a year. Whereas 45 percent of whites had incomes over $10,000, only 17 percent of blacks and 5 percent of Hispanics made that much, while 47 percent of blacks and 62 percent of Hispanics earned less than $5,000. The twin millstones of urban renewal and gent
rification had ground away most of the South End’s working class—both black and white—leaving the community deeply polarized between an overwhelmingly white middle class and a heavily black and Hispanic lower class.

  Because racial and class categories largely overlapped, it was difficult to unravel the roots of South End hostilities. Most white conservatives steadfastly disclaimed any racial animosity, attributing their position to distaste for “lower-class behavior”: noisy parties, blaring radios, squalid homes, littered streets, overflowing trash cans, vandalism, gangs, drugs, and violent crime. Those who sought to limit low-income housing projects (“publicly subsidized islands of crime and squalor”) often argued that the South End was laboring under an impossible liability. Racial and ethnic integration was unexceptionable, the time-honored “melting pot” of American history. But class integration, they contended, was something altogether different, a mixing of styles and standards which was “always a failure in American cities,” destroying any neighborhood which persisted in that “ill-conceived experiment.”

  That position was anathema to the socially committed young professionals who had moved into the South End precisely because they sought a “truly mixed community,” integrated by class as well as race. They weren’t about to abandon that goal now. The struggle over subsidized housing divided the South End’s new middle class against itself, pitting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, sometimes even husband against wife. Block association meetings frequently erupted in angry shouting matches. Two young mothers who had been stalwarts of the Bancroft Parents’ Association stopped speaking to each other. A regular “boys’ night out” poker game broke up because the four men could no longer stand the sight of each other across the table. A homeowner woke up one morning to find a neighbor’s ax buried inches deep in the bright red veneer of his Victorian door.

  No slice of the South End was so roiled by this conflict as the “Gold Coast” blocks of Rutland Square, Pembroke, West Newton, and West Brookline streets. Rutland Square, in particular, with its stately old houses surrounding a park, had been among the first blocks to attract young artists, architects, and social workers. For years it—and its extension on Rutland Street—was the heartland of the social worker-radical alliance. Old residents like Tristam Blake, administrator of the South End Community Health Center, architects Henry and Joan Wood, and Martin Gopen, a manpower specialist at United South End Settlements, were principal spokespeople for the neighborhood’s poor and dispossessed. But Rutland Square’s amenities attracted others who saw the situation rather differently—among them, the two embattled landlords, Steve Wolfberg and Ferd Arenella. For years, they crossed to the other side of the square when they saw certain of their neighbors approaching. Indeed, Ferd Arenella suspected at least one of his neighbors of helping to firebomb his house.

  West Newton Street, which adjoined Rutland Square on the north, enjoyed a similar vogue in the late sixties and early seventies. In one four-year period, no fewer than twenty-eight middle-class families bought houses on the Divers’ block alone. And, like its neighbor to the south, it was sharply divided on social issues. At a 1974 hearing, one resident of the block cited Anthony Downs’s dictum: “The fundamental problem of cities is that they have too many poor people in them”—while another quoted John Kenneth Galbraith’s judgment: “The problem of the cities is capitalism and the only solution is socialism.” Some residents vehemently supported the South End for South Enders Committee, while 102 residents of West Newton, Pembroke, and West Brookline streets signed a petition backing the Citizens for a Balanced South End in their stand against subsidized housing. David Sprogis, a prominent West Brookline Street realtor, wrote a series of letters to his neighbors angrily denouncing “liberals who do not know anything about city neighborhoods.” A friend of long standing held a party at which he ceremonially burned the Sprogis letters.

  Appalled by the savagery with which their neighbors had turned on one another, Kathleen Crampton, wife of the state’s Commissioner of Community Affairs, Josh Young, and Joan Wood sought to defuse the situation. Forming the South End Citizens’ Association—its name deliberately bland so as to offend no one—they groped for a middle ground to which “all South Enders of goodwill” might repair. But, by then, their constituency had largely fallen apart. After a few stormy meetings, the association disbanded.

  Joan and Colin Diver watched the Citizens’ Association experiment with dismay. They had hoped that a credible “middle” might emerge, one with which they could ally themselves, for neither extreme offered much hope of the varied, vital; but livable urban community they sought in the South End. Their Mends were already arrayed on both sides. Whatever the Divers did, they risked alienating people they valued. But it was the opposing extremes which held them paralyzed, unable to enlist in either camp. One summer evening, sitting on their front stoop, Colin remarked sourly, “We’re being asked to choose between the self-righteous and the self-interested. What kind of choice is that?”

  He had no difficulty understanding the self-interest which drove Parker, Zeller, and their Balance Committee. Every cent the Divers had was sunk in their house and its costly rehabilitation. South End real estate had risen sharply since they had moved in, but the spread of subsidized housing and its pernicious by-products could threaten their investment. From his experience at City Hall, Colin knew how fierce was the resistance to subsidized housing in many Boston neighborhoods, not to mention the suburbs. Just as some suburbanites still drove their garbage downtown and dumped it on the South End’s streets, so they were happy to have the region’s social problems deposited there. But by taking the path of least resistance and concentrating so much low-income housing in the relatively liberal South End, the city was jeopardizing that neighborhood’s stability.

  Many South End projects struck Colin as disastrous failures of public policy, doomed from the start to bankruptcy, destined to spawn social problems. Methunion Manor was a striking example of everything he hated about such projects—mind-numbing ugliness, the social stigma of “poor people’s housing,” litter, noise, and crime. “No more Methunions!” had become a South End rallying cry, a sentiment to which the Divers subscribed.

  Methunion wasn’t the only subsidized project which concerned them. Nearby was a four-story building rehabilitated by the Tenants’ Development Corporation, an outgrowth of the South End Tenants’ Council. Intended for low- and moderate-income families, several of its apartments were leased to the Boston Housing Authority as “scatter site” public housing. Most of its tenants were sober and responsible, but one family was involved in all sorts of strange activities. Suspicious characters hung about their apartment day and night, apparently dealing drugs and soliciting for prostitution. Colin wished the TDC was more conscientious about tenant selection and, to that extent, he welcomed a suit the Balance Committee had brought against the corporation.

  Yet he couldn’t give the committee anything like wholehearted support. The argument about a target set seven years before struck him as beside the point. Thousands of poor people had been displaced by government action—the city had a moral obligation to see that they were adequately rehoused, as close as possible to their original homes. Moreover, he was unsettled by the committee’s extremist rhetoric and meat-ax approach. Regarding all projects as slums in the making, it made no distinctions based on design, management, or tenant selection.

  One evening in late 1974, the Divers’ friend Sandra Perkins, the Balance Committee’s treasurer, invited Colin and Ferd Arenella to meet with the committee’s lawyer at her house. Sandra had begun to feel uneasy with her colleagues’ head-on approach and she wanted Colin and Ferd, as neighborhood lawyers, to review the committee’s lawsuit seeking to block a new project slated for Tremont Street. But from the plans Colin saw that night, Concord Homes struck him as infinitely preferable to Methunion Manor. Instead of trying to block it, he urged the committee to negotiate a deal for lower densities and a guaranteed number of mark
et-level rents.

  Whatever differences he had with the Balance Committee, he was even less impressed by the South End for South Enders Committee. After sitting through dozens of neighborhood meetings, he found the radicals’ self-righteousness exasperating. At times, they could be downright demagogic. One week the People’s News asked, “Have you seen the rear of the row house on Rutland Square that has a ‘big-assed’ picture window that covers the top two stories?” To Colin that was an open invitation to smash the window, outright incitement to violence. He was irritated, too, by his middle-class neighbors who talked so glibly about halting gentrification. Now that they had theirs, they wanted to be the last middle-class whites allowed in. He didn’t understand how such hypocrisy served their interests, but of course they claimed to represent the “underprivileged.” As time went by, Colin felt more comfortable with those who frankly represented their own interests than with those who spoke on behalf of “the people.”

  Joan shared Colin’s irritation with radical rhetoric and liberal hypocrisy, but she remained more committed than he to public altruism. In part, that reflected her natural generosity; she couldn’t parse the respective positions quite so methodically as Colin. In part, it reflected a professional disposition. Her experience at the Hyams Trust left her convinced that if institutional altruism was well conceived, adequately financed, and properly managed, it produced results. She was more sympathetic than Colin to the vast tribe of South End social workers. Though distrusting firebrands like Mel King, she respected many others who labored patiently and quietly on behalf of the poor, and during her tenure Hyams Trust had supported a host of agencies operating in the South End. Largely at Joan’s urging, Hyams had made annual operating grants to the Emergency Tenants’ Council since 1971. Despite her friendship with Ferd Arenella and her distaste for the way the council had wrested his properties from him, she admired its work in rehabilitating South End tenements for low-income housing. She was even more impressed when it began building a whole new community just across Tremont Street. Villa Victoria’s attractive apartment towers and town houses were ranged around a graceful shopping arcade and plaza. Built primarily for the council’s Hispanic clientele, it also housed blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians, Syrians, and Chinese, carefully selected and supervised by conscientious management. To Joan, Villa Victoria was subsidized housing at its best, tangible evidence that the poor could be housed humanely without injury to the neighborhood.