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August 4, 2005

Jeremy Schwab

Diana Robins says she moved out of the Mission Main housing development in Mission Hill after a girl a couple doors down was raped. The crime at the development was just too much for Robins.

It took her and her husband seven months on the waiting list at another subsidized development, High Point Village in Roslindale, until they finally secured the home in which they thought they could raise their three children in peace.

“Moving here was like a godsend,” said Robins. “I felt it was a decent place for my children to live, on the outskirts of the inner city.”

But just three months later, Robins fears she will have to move out. First Realty Management reportedly plans to raise rents on hers and 218 other moderate-income households at High Point after the building’s 40-year HUD mortgage contract ends next August.

Meanwhile, the 320 low-income households will continue paying subsidized rents, as they will receive so-called enhanced vouchers from HUD. But even the subsidized voucher program may not be secure, as the Bush administration has reportedly tried to eliminate it.

So tenants from the development and housing activists across the city poured into the basement of the St. John Chrysostom Church in West Roxbury last week for a hearing on legislation that would protect developments like High Point Village from switching to market rate rents after their HUD mortgages expire.

Supporters say the legislation would help protect more than 8,000 units of housing in Boston that are at risk of converting to market rate by 2010 as their HUD contracts or mortgages expire.

The bill would give the city of Boston leverage to force building owners to renew their HUD contracts or otherwise keep the buildings’ rents affordable. Currently, the Department of Neighborhood Development has been successful in keeping building owners from shifting their units to market rate once their contracts or mortgages expire.

As of December, not a single one of the 22,268 housing units under HUD Section 8 contracts or low-interest mortgages had been transferred out of the HUD programs, according to the DND.

But supporters of the home rule petition point to the situation at High Point Village as evidence that not all owners will be willing to keep their rents affordable. They also warn that the government vouchers that low-income residents receive to keep their units affordable may not always be there.

“For eight or nine years now, I have heard legislators stand up and say, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll get vouchers,’” said housing activist Steve Meacham of City Life/ Vida Urbana. “The government will never cut back on vouchers. Well, the government is cutting back on vouchers.”

After a hearing in June on the bill, supporters were dismayed to see the Joint Committee on Housing propose another round of hearings instead of moving the bill forward for a vote.

“The thing we were surprised about was this creation of a subcommittee to review the bills again,” said tenant organizer Pat Coleman of the Massachusetts Alliance of HUD Tenants. “It has been an eight-year struggle to get the bills to pass, and from our perspective they have a lot of support. Our position is tenants in buildings like this don’t have the luxury of time. Why are we delaying?”

 

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