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March 10, 2005

Jamaica Plain residents spar over affordable housing

Yawu Miller

Ann Marie Joseph walked to the front of the auditorium at the Kennedy Middle School, stood before a microphone and made her pitch for affordable housing in Jamaica Plain.

“I’m a recent recipient of affordable housing,” she said. “I am not a drug dealer. I am not a prostitute. My only crime is that I take care of my mother and my baby sister.”

While nobody at the meeting last week accused Joseph of criminal activity, the conversation at last week’s Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Council covered the topics of urban density, crime, affordable housing and accusations of race and class prejudice.

At issue is the neighborhood council’s desired land use for the site of the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, which has been closed by the Boston Archdiocese. While some Jamaica Plain residents called for affordable housing on the site, others were dead against it.

“We need people that are home-owners,” said local home owner Ginger Parker. “It’s not a stable neighborhood where you can bring in affordable housing and it’s okay. When you add too many people to a neighborhood, it brings us back to where we were.”

Parker and others at the meeting recalled the Jamaica Plain of the early ’90s when they said crime was more of a problem.

“Our neighborhood is still at risk,” Parker said.

While white Jamaica Plain residents argued both for and against affordable housing, many at the meeting said they felt race and class tensions came to the surface during the meeting when residents argued against affordable housing.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the neighborhood is 57 percent white, 17 percent black and 28 percent Latino. The white population has historically been concentrated in the southern parts of the neighborhood with a heavier concentration of Latinos in the streets around Hyde, Jackson and Egleston squares.

In the ’80s and early ’90s, before an influx of white renters and owners came into the neighborhood, the residents of the Hyde Square section were predominantly black and Latino.

When rent control was lifted in 1994 and rents and home prices in the Greater Boston area began their precipitous rise, Jamaica Plain and other Boston neighborhoods became more attractive to affluent whites who were priced out of the South End and other downtown areas.

Former Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Council member Caprice Taylor Mendez, who has lived in Jamaica Plain since the early ’90s said the population changes have been marked.

“It used to be there were only Latinos and African Americans on the 39 bus,” she recalls. “My co-workers were afraid to come to this neighborhood.”

Now the side streets surrounding the Hyde Square section of Jamaica Plain are dotted with new buildings featuring $500,000 condominiums. Although the white population in that section of Jamaica Plain has visibly increased not all of the white residents have the same comfort level. One man said he was still uncomfortable walking to the Jackson Square MBTA stop.

“He said he wouldn’t walk his dog to Jackson Square,” said Neighborhood Council Chairman Nelson Arroyo, who made an impassioned speech against bigotry at the end of the meeting.

“I was very offended by the remarks a lot of people made,” he told the Banner. “Some of the comments were insulting. I grew up in affordable housing.”

One resident, Marc Guertin, compared affordable housing to the institutions that Hyde Square — the Veterans Administration Hospital, Blessed Sacrament and the Angel Memorial Hospital. Guertin argued for retail space for small businesses like Purple Cactus and JP Licks — upscale businesses from the predominantly white Pondside neighborhood. He advocated studio apartments and one-bedrooms with underground parking.

“Institutions already have a strong presence in this neighborhood, architecturally as well as socially,” he said in remarks given at the beginning of the meeting.

Others who spoke at the meeting objected to Guertin’s apparent characterization of affordable housing as an institutional land use.

“What, you don’t like hospitals?” asked Thomas Fiori. “You don’t like the VA?”

Fiori said he currently lives with four other adults in an apartment said he cannot afford to buy a home in Jamaica Plain, where the average home is worth $448,000.

“There really is a battle going on here in the city as to whose Boston this is,” said Steve Backman. “Is the city going to remain a place where the people who grow up here can afford to stay here?”

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