Affordable Housing Institute : US

A recent Boston Herald cover story on Charlestown Apartments (more commonly known as Bunker Hill), sets a record:

 

Boston Herald cover, Thursday, May 24

 

1. The headline is oxymoronic.
2. The story is inflammatory.
3. The story’s wrong in every major particular.
4. If the story has done anything, it has done damage.

 

Rarely have I encountered journalism as irresponsible, as reprehensible.

 

1.         The headline is oxymoronic

 

If the buildings are ‘crumbling,’ why would the alleged ‘fat-cat yuppies’ be dumb enough to buy them and bail out the Boston Housing Authority?

 

 

2.         The story is inflammatory

 

As far as I can tell, the Herald’s enterprising reporter got his facts jumbled (next section), or jumbled them purposely, hopped in his car and from the safety thereof had his photographer snapped a pic:

 

A boy rides his bike on Carney Court in Charlestown’s Bunker Hill housing development. (Staff photo by Mark Garfinkel)

 

Then he went looking for residents to outrage and be outraged:

 

 

He found them, producing this gem as paragraph two:

 

“They need to stick that plan up their (rear),” said Sandy Wilcox, 49, an Army veteran and 12-year resident. “You’ll be putting out people who can’t afford to live anywhere else.”  [...]

 

Standing next to Wilcox under a shade tree on Monument Street, Nancy Martinez, 36, a disabled woman with chronic arthritis along her spine, said she worries about the sick and elderly, and if moving them would harm their health.

 

“I’m a disabled person and I don’t want to be jumping from house to house,” she said.

 

So there you have it: Boston Herald, entrapper of the passerby.  For even the Herald’s short story makes clear that neither of these fears is remotely possible.

 

3.         The story is wrong in every substantive particular

 

Consider the lead sentence:

 

Residents of the Bunker Hill projects yesterday blasted a proposal [1] to turn a third of their neighbors out of their homes [2] so the properties could be sold to private developers [3] and the proceeds used to repair [4] the remaining buildings.

 

In one sentence, I count three material mistakes, arguably four:

 

[1]        There is no ‘proposal’ — even the Herald acknowledges “the plan is in its early stages.”  Rather, the BHA is almost certainly exploring the possibility of lowering the density at Charlestown Apartments as a step in its renovation.  The complex is much too jam-packed on its site:

 

If it goes through, it would drastically change the geography of 19.6 acres of Bunker Hill, where the project has stood since the late 1930s.

 

Eleven hundred walkup apartments on 19.6 acres is 56 apartments per acre, roughly five times what we would consider normal garden-apartment density.  These are family flats (including many 3-BR, 4-BR, and 5-BR), so at a guess one may speculate there are 1,500 children at the property, with few places to play.

 

See any play areas?

 

[2]        No one would be turned out of his or her home.  A precept of public housing redevelopment is “No involuntary displacement” for lease-compliant residents.  Other HOPE VI redevelopments, such as Orchard Park and Mission Main, have gone to extraordinary lengths (and resulting increased costs) to accommodate residents’ desire to remain on-site during redevelopment.   Indeed, as the Herald’s third paragraph concedes:

 

The city would relocate those residents to a development of their choice or provide vouchers for federal rent subsidies.

 

            In other words, if this nefarious scheme is effectuated, the residents may have three choices:

 

1. Stay at Bunker Hill, in a renovated apartment.
2. Relocate to another BHA property.
3. Take a portable Section 8 voucher and move where you like.

 

Like — that’s so — yucky!

 

            [3]        “Sold to private developers” is not precisely a falsehood but is misleading in the extreme.  HOPE VI and other public housing redevelopment transfer the property to a private-public partnership with significant oversight and resident representation.  In both Orchard Park and Mission Main, for instance, resident councils oversaw the selection process.

 

Good gracious, just look at all that exploitation.

 

4.         If the story has done anything, it has done damage

 

“Repair” is a mild word for what needs to be done to one of Boston’s oldest (nearly seventy years!), least-renovated public housing properties.  Major overhaul is long overdue.

 

For at least thirty years, Charlestown Apartments has been a problem property.  Like many public housing properties of this vintage, it is too old, too dense, too basic ever to be pleasant, much less appealing.

 

Consider for instance this WGBH documentary from 1977:

 

Marjorie Arons interviews John Vitagliano (check out the hair!)

 

V:  Shots of boarded up windows in a housing project building in Charlestown; of other housing project buildings.  A street sweeping vehicle passes slowly in the street.  The cameraman jokes about the rarity of seeing a street sweeper in Boston.  A police cruiser drives slowly down the street. Shot of a housing project building at 90 Decatur Street.

 

90 Decatur Street is amidst Charlestown Apartments.

 

 

Shot of a boarded up window on the building.  Obscene graffiti is written on the board which covers the window.  Shots of broken windows in an apartment in another housing project building.  Shot of a young white boy playing with a garden hose outside of the building at 90 Decatur Street.  The bottom windows of the building are all boarded up.  Shots of a nearby housing project which looks to be in better condition.  Shots of the housing project building with broken windows.  Trash is visible on the ground around the housing project buildings.

Ten years later, in 1987, things were barely if at all improved, when the BHA was finally desegregating its public housing, including this property:

 

At Bunker Hill there are 875 white households, 20 Asian, 5 black and 3 Hispanic.

 

This is twenty years’ past, and the 1,108 apartment property was almost 20% vacant then — and, as you can see, virtually all white.  Not acceptable: not acceptable.

 

Doris Bunte, the housing authority’s administrator, testified at Congressional hearings last year that segregation of public housing had led to ”a lower level of services for minorities,” who make up 48% of the tenants and 78% of those on the authority’s waiting list of 1,400 households.

 

In 1987, the BHA was making concerted efforts to integrate and racially mix its properties:

 

The first units will open in the mostly Hispanic and black Mission Hill and Franklin Field developments and the mostly white Bunker Hill project in Charlestown, an area known for its anti-busing sentiment in the 1970’s.

 

There was plenty of demand, not just in the abstract but specifically for Bunker Hill:

 

Two hundred non-white families have signed up for Bunker Hill, and Ms. Bunte said the authority was trying to attract white families to Mission Hill and Franklin Field, where few are on the waiting list.

 

Notice the same Mission Hill?  That’s the property we saw above, redeveloped under HOPE VI and today a model of income mixing.  Granted, vast Federal, state and local resources went into its redevelopment, but the point is that it has been improved, even as Bunker Hill has not. 

 

Now, in 2006, have things improved?  They have not, as even the Herald’s article states:

 

A block away, Abby Torres, 25, the working mother of two children, 2 and 6, said her building is in shambles. But she wonders if improving it is worth the cost of uprooting her family should she be one of the people chosen for relocation.

 

“They really need to do something with this project,” she said. “My bathroom ceiling leaks, there’s mold all over, it’s just ridiculous.”

 

Ms. Torres’ pragmatic quote in fact does not reinforce the worry words the Herald placed in her mouth.

 

Thus the Herald, under the self-righteous mantle of defender of the oppressed, has if anything obstructed the prospects for genuine improvement.

 

Sounding like a broken record?

 

Summing up

 

Thus we have the Herald, in an article of only 355 words, manages to accomplish four journalistic lows:

 

1. Oxymoronic headline.
2. Inflammatory, unjustified story.
3. Numerous errors.
4. Doing damage to the cause (housing) it purports to endorse.

 

 

Which ones of these is the problem?

 

Author O’Ryan Johnson, who has apparently done good work elsewhere, should be ashamed of himself. 

 

Can the Herald be awarded an anti-Pulitzer?

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