The New Bostonians and Their Poverty

No. No. No. I will not be a Boston Booster. The maiden aunt of American cities may well have discovered a fountain of youth, but rejuvenation has not made her more attractive. It is not so much the appearance of the New Boston that grates as its spirit. The planners seem more intent on building an "All-American City" than in living up to John Winthrop's hope of creating a "City on a Hill."

Boston's burst of energetic reconstruction began in 1960 with the inauguration of Mayor John F. Collins and the importation soon after of New Haven's Edward Logue as Development Director. Faced with the nation;s highest real estate tax ($101 for every $1000 assessed valuation) and a tax base that declined in the 1950's, they sought, in President Pusey's words, "to give a new spin to the Hub." Together--Collins pacifying, convincing, gently forcing; and Logue pushing, sometimes so hard and with so little grace that critics have come to regard him as a tin-horn Robert Moses--they formed an alliance for progress with Boston's major business and civic leaders--Charles Coolidge, president of the Chamber of Commerce; Gerald W. Blakeley Jr., head of the real estate management firm of Cabot, and Forbes; and James McCormack Jr., vice-president of MIT and an active force in the Chamber of Commerce.

From this combination of government and business, fortified by expert advice, came the 1965-1975 General Plan for the City of Boston, a formidable document that outlines the proposed of redevelopment--some of which has already begun. By 1975 the program should have altered 25 per cent of the city's 31 square miles and have affected 50 per cent of its 700,000 population. The plan's comprehensive scope, its thoughtfulness, and its bold promises of progress are all calculated to impress. But the intent seems wrong. The spirit behind it appears more concerned with maximizing business opportunity than with creating a humane, liveable city for the poor as well as the rich.

The great irony of the New Boston is that those who will benefit the least are also those who must suffer the most. Urban Renewal promises to repeat a process that has happened before--uprooting the poor and then failing to provide adequate housing for them, leaving them either to form new slums in the outlying regions or aggravate condition in already existing ones. The General Plan calls for the construction of 34,000 new housing units by 1975. According to the most conservative estimates, 25,000 to 30,000 families (over 100,000 people) will be displaced before 1970 to make way for the new construction. The vast majority of these families (with an average income of $3,400 a year) now lives in the 50,000 units of housing officially declared substandard.

Where to Go?

They face the immediate prospect of finding new homes in a city where the vacancy rate is substantially below what housing experts consider necessary for adequate mobility and where there is an insufficient supply (less than 2,000 units yearly) of publicly supported, low cost housing. Additionally, more than one-fourth of the poor cannot even afford the rents in low cost projects.

Even when the New Boston has finally been built, the poor will still suffer; while they will have been the most uprooted, they will receive only 5,000 units (or 14 per cent) of the new housing. Significantly, this group comprises 26.5 per cent of Boston's present population. In contrast, by far the largest portion of new housing (41 per cent) will be designed for families with an income of at least $9,000, who comprise only 18 per cent of the population.

Of course, the General Plan additionally calls for the rehabilitation of some 32,000 units, but here again the poor will benefit least. Rehabilitation consists of encouraging people to improve their own houses with the aid of bank loans insured by the Federal Housing Authority and, thanks to 1964 legislation, some direct federal loans. The process itself is lengthy. As one observer said, "The FHA places each request in a bureaucratic labyrinth so involved that approval come only after endless delay." Despite much local prodding, banks and, to a lesser extent, the government still remain reluctant to grant loans to low-income families.

More important, apartments once rehabilitated have higher rents. In Boston's Washington Park rehabilitation program, as The London Economist's correspondent noted, "most of the poor who lost their homes cannot afford the new flats and have been rehoused eleswhere." Rehabilitation, though a worthy concept and useful weapon in fighting the spread of blight, neither benefits the poor directly nor does it increase the overall supply of housing.

Indeed, housing is but one example of the planners' indifference to the poor and their problems. Only four pages of the General Plan discuss the "disadvantaged," while ten assess transportation problems and another ten present an essentially trivial bibliography. Despite the glib slogans--"planning for people," "urban renewal without human renewal cannot work"--the problems of poverty and discrimination rest in a stratosphere of generality. The New Boston's designers outline a series of thoroughly acceptable and thoroughly unoriginal goals: "Break down discriminatory barriers that waste talent, inhibit motivation, limit educational achievement..." or "Eliminate adult illiteracy." Very nice. Very necessary. But never do they say how these are to be accomplished.

A Meaningful War

While elaborate plans are drawn to transform the waterfront into a residential paradise and Scollay Square into a glistening Government Center (as one cynic remarked, replacing one kind of vice with another), nowhere do they outline a meaningful war on poverty.

Although the planners beat the drums and man the mimeograph machines to announce their belief in human renewal, so far they have remained silent on the demands for educational equality proposed by the Kiernan commission, appointed by the State to investigate segregation in the Boston public schools. The only official voices to be heard have come from the Boston School Committee headed by Mrs. Louise Day Hicks who says, "We have in our midst a small band of racial agitators, non-native to Boston, and a few college radicals...who have joined in a conspiracy to tell the people of Boston how to run their schools." Her fellow committeeman Joseph Lee shares the same viewpoint, but with a twist of his own. White children, he declares, "do not want large numbers of backward pupils from unprospering Negro families shipped into their schools." Surely Mrs. Hicks and Mr. Lee do not represent the New Boston. But where are its leaders?

Occasionally the New Boston's planners properly realize a problem but somehow avoid resolving it. "The City must provide more basic jobs for its disadvantaged, low income residents," they say, "by encouraging the development of institutions and industries capable of providing the greatest employment and economic return in relation to their use of land and public services." Apparently, they

have realized that Boston, like most other northeastern cities and the economy in general, faces a steady decrease in blue-collar, low skill jobs and that government action is necessary.

What is the Answer?

But they only ask the question. Certainly the $555 million to be spent on construction through 1975 will provide substantial employment opportunities for those with minimal skills. But what then? As both Logue and Collins have repeatedly pointed out, the fastest rate of growth has been among and will continue to be among office workers in government and insurance. "Other personal and business services located mainly in the Downtown, including banks, utilities, law firms, securities and investments dealers, credit agencies, and architectural firms, handle a steadily growing volume of business." Now that's all very nice, but, at the risk of being tedious, I would once again suggest that the planners have avoided the problems of the poor.

The poor alone do not make up Boston's population, nor must their problems be the sole concern of the New Bostonians. But until they confront the problems of poverty, discrimination, and education, their attempt to rebuild John Winthrop's "City on a Hill" will remain a futile experiment. Their symbol will be the Prudential Tower, graceless, sterile, out-of-scale, but nonetheless a tribute to Boston's ingenuity and progress, though hardly its humanity