BRA and Roxbury Citizen Group Reach Urban Renewal Agreement

A controversial new concept in urban planning gained a foothold in Boston last night when Edward J. Logue, the powerful director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority signed a "memorandum of understanding" with a citizens group in Roxbury.

'Memorandums of understanding' outlining ideas and points of agreement between the Redevelopment Authority and the leaders in renewable areas are not new in Boston. Logue has signed a number of them in the past--but the agencies and methods which led to last night's agreement with the Lower Roxbury Community Corporation are novel and may play an important part in future attempts to renew neighborhoods not only in Boston, but also in other large American cities.

Standing in the background at yesterday's ceremonies at the Whittier St. branch of the Shaw Settlement House was a small group of planning professionals, mostly Harvard, M.I.T., and Brandeis faculty members, and have banded together as an organization called Urban Planning Aid.

These are the men responsible--some say to a dangerous degree--for the BRA Lower Roxbury Community Corporation pact.

The agreement signed by Logue is just a promise by the BRA to erect 400 units of housing on part of a 57.3 renewal site called Madison Park and to consult with the LRCC about development plans for the area. But that promise was at least six months in coming.

Madison Park has been slated for destruction since 1948 when it was first included in plans for the yet unbuilt Inner Belt. For nearly two years the BRA has had its eye on the dilapiated area, which houses about 300 families.

According to one official, BRA studies showed that Madison Park was "residual area." "The only ones left in this neighborhood," he said, "are the ones who couldn't get out." Original BRA plans suggested that the area would be best used for non-residential purposes.

Last winter the Boston School Committee was looking for a site on which to build an elaborate new campus-style high school. The BRA prepared plans using 35 acres of Madison Park for the high school and devoting a great deal of the remaining land to industry. The School Committee voted last February 22 to put the high school in Madison Park, but to devote all the area's acreage to the school.

Madison Park residents said little while these proposals were being discussed in City Hall and at School Committee headquarters. The lack of commotion, especially since people were going to be relocated, seemed to confirm BRA findings that Madison Park was a neighborhood but not a community.

During the spring months, however, a few people in Madison Park who wished to stay there, and who would soon become the nucleus of the Lower Roxbury Community Corporation, sought ways to protest the BRA's plans for the area.

Friends at settlement houses directed them to a non-profit organization which had been recently formed in Cambridge and which was urging a re-study of the whole idea of the Inner Belt.

The people at Urban Planning Aid were delighted and agreed to look into the situation at Madison Park.

Robert Goodman, president of UPA and an assistant professor at M.I.T., recently explained the thinking of the people who founded UPA.

"In the past few years, planners and others have become more concerned about the entire planning process," he said. "We began to wonder if those groups most directly affected by the planners: the poor, the Negroes, the people who have to send their children to inferior schools and suffer from inadequate city services, were adequately represented in the preparation and carrying out of programs for social and physical change."

Logue called the Harvard, M.I.T. and Brandeis professors "tinker toy boys" and suggested they were frustrated academicians exploiting the people of Madison Park in order to try out their own planning ideas.

The UPA says that it tries to act as an advocate for the poor by challenging existing urban planning proposals. It hopes to come up with plans and ideas which it feels represent the needs and desires of its clients more completely than do the plans of agencies like the BRA.

But just as the UPA does not trust the BRA, BRA officials frequently question the motivation of the people in UPA. Logue himself called them "tinker toy boys" and suggested that UPA was composed of frustrated academicians exploiting the people of Madison Park in an effort to try out their own planning ideas.

Others attacked the UPA as "mercenaries" interested not in the community itself but only in making a case for whoever retained their services.

UPA went into Madison Park and began to conduct surveys and studies. By the time the Boston City Council was ready to begin public hearings in November, UPA had compiled its evidence.

During the hearings the UPA personnel said they agreed the new Madison Park High School could easily be erected on a 35-acre site. But the BRA insisted that it was in the best interest of the people of Madison Park to devote most of the remaining land to housing, primarily for people currently living in the area.

At about the same time another one of Boston's overlapping governmental agencies and authorities--the Public Facilities Commission (which has the final say about public buildings) also decided that the Madison Park High School did not need all 57.3 acres on the site.

Under pressure not only from Madison Park residents but from other Roxbury civic leaders the BRA conceded that the rest of the land in the site could be devoted to housing rather than to industry.

After this important concession, the UPA produced a memorandum of understanding which they wanted Logue to sign. He refused.

The UPA people, rather the LRCC leaders themselves, had done most of the talking at the City Council public hearings. This confirmed Logue's worst fears--that there really wasn't any community or community leadership in Madison Park and that a few people there were being used by the UPA. According to the terms of the proposed agreement the LRCC (for which Logue read UPA) would have a veto over the BRA's plans for the neighborhood.

Since Logue had indicated that he would sign some agreement with the community leadership, if in fact there was some, he was invited to meet last month with the LRCC.

Logue came to an understanding with the LRCC and the UPA, but the terms of last night's memorandum are considerably different from those which the UPA and LRCC first proposed.

The UPA-LRCC lost on its two greatest demands. Under last night's agreement it does not have a veto over the BRA plans, although Logue has said he is willing to renegotiate this point in a few months if the LRCC shows itself to be a true voice of the community. Nor was the LRCC allowed to determine the percentage of Madison Park housing which will be low income.

The BRA insists that this percentage can not be arrived at without future planning, but it has promised to base its figures not only on its own surveys but also on surveys made by the UPA. Some observers feel that UPA will face its most serious test when the time comes to determine the amount of low income housing in Madison Park.

By getting Logue to come to an agreement with the LRCC, Urban Planning Aid has managed to prove, in a back-handed sort of way, that there is a community in Madison Park and the UPA is not a group of frustrated, teachers using a neighborhood as a laboratory. But BRA officers are sure to challenge the UPA's figures about the precentage of low income housing needed in Madison Park and charge that they do not represent the true situation but merely the wishes of UPA's employers