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THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
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I helped youths see light in Boston - but for what?
By Teny O. Gross, 2/6/2001
The calm of city streets has helped fuel the city's housing crisis. As a former city youth worker paid to counsel young people and help put a lid on the violence tearing at Boston neighborhoods, I now feel I was an unwitting accomplice to this cruel consequence of the widely heralded ''Boston Miracle'' of decreased urban crime.
City teenagers told us that if they could only find decent jobs, they wouldn't resort to crime. City leaders and law enforcement officials took up the challenge. Many of the young people kept their part of the deal. They got jobs, but now they can't afford to rent homes - never mind buy them - in their own neighborhoods. To speak out against this state of affairs is not to make a plea for mercy; it is a call to honor a contract.
Those of us who labored to stem urban violence believed deeply that city residents deserved to enjoy a better quality of life and that young people, who were falling victim daily to violent crime, deserved a chance to focus on achieving their full potential.
But many of my colleagues and I have been pained to realize that our efforts have instead contributed to a different kind of new urban reality, one in which residents who remained loyal to the city through hard times have suddenly become dispensable, with many facing eviction to make room for those of greater means who are now drawn to city life.
This quandary of urban revitalization has played itself out untold numbers of times in different cities. That makes no less compelling, however, the case for doing everything possible to mitigate the toll such ''renewal'' exacts on those on the bottom rungs of the city's economic ladder.
When I speak with people about the issue of housing and justice - and suggest that the two should have some relation to each other - many roll their eyes and say words to the effect of, ''You can't mess with the market; it's a force of nature.'' But people believed the same thing about crime 10 years ago.
Crime was largely reduced by nonmarket intervention, however - by city-paid police and youth workers, federally funded university researchers, and grant-supported churches. It was an active, determined, morally informed, complex, and educated war on violence. The current crisis of affordable housing demands no less concerted an effort.
A report issued earlier this year on the region's housing crisis by the Archdiocese of Boston and authored by Barry Bluestone and colleagues at Northeastern University was a welcome acknowledgement of the seriousness of the regional housing crisis. But its prescription - an increase in housing production - will come far too late for most of those now facing this crisis.
There should be no return to overprotectionist rent control laws, which were repealed by state voters in 1994. But neither can we allow the securing of shelter to be a Darwinian survival of the financially fittest.
Parts of New York, London, and other vibrant urban centers have successfully staked out a middle ground in which rents are stabilized according to neighborhood averages, fair arbitration, and concern for both landlord and renter.
The moral vision that informed many of us who love the city and have worked to better it was predicated on Joseph's dream in reverse: Those who suffered and endured through the impoverished, violent ''seven years'' will then enjoy the seven good years.
I would like to enjoy and celebrate the revival of Boston's neighborhoods, but morally I feel that I betrayed the young Bostonians whom I convinced that there is another way besides crime and destruction.
This summer, as many before, I taught a group of youth at the Ella J. Baker House in Dorchester. It turned out, not surprisingly, that all were the children of renters. Where will they live next year? Judges and lawyers in the Housing Court concede that only political pressure will free their hands to act more humanely.
Friends in city government, law enforcement, and the churches say they share my concerns but that in the current political climate I remind them of Don Quixote.
Perhaps they are right. Still, I can't help but wonder, in the words of the state's anti-tobacco campaign, ''Where's the outrage?''
Teny O. Gross is a student at Harvard Divinity School. He worked for nine years as a youth outreach worker based at the Ella J. Baker House in Dorchester.
This story ran on page A13 of the Boston Globe on 2/6/2001.
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HE DECADE OF the 1990s witnessed an unprecedented decline in crime in Boston, a turnaround so dramatic that the city life many middle-class residents were fleeing only 10 years ago is now attractive, pursued by everyone from rising young professionals and dot-com entrepreneurs to suburban empty nesters. However, there has been a painful and largely unrecognized irony to the city's comeback saga. The young people of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, who in huge numbers swore off the crime-filled ways of the early 1990s in favor of more productive pursuits, have helped make the city so livable that many of them and their families can no longer afford to live here.