Public Housing Projects & Boston

I don't know much about Blackstone Square; can you expand on that a bit?
 
Blackstone Square in the South End is a nexus for several major housing projects and redevelopment of neighborhood institutions by the city. Cathedral Housing and Villa Victoria border the square, which was once the heart of the South End. Blackstone Elementary School takes up a long block along Washington Street. There was a municipal building which served as a branch library, some of the original Boston College buildings, the original Boston Conservatory, churches, a few schools, and the Boys Club. The housing projects wiped out most of the surrounding housing stock and did a lot to displace the neighborhood institutions. The demolition and creation of the low rise elementary school forced the library and city offices to relocate elsewhere. So the engineered "renewal" of the neighborhood did much to wipe out the established neighborhood and its institutions. Now at the time this was somewhat well intentioned to improve the neighborhood, when it was considered skid row, however the opposite is now true given the demographic renaissance the South End has seen and the static nature of what the city did leaves little hope for improvement.

Cathedral & Villa have awful street patterns isolating themselves from the rest of the South End. The quality of the architecture of the housing projects, new schools, and library, despite recent renovation money thrown into the bottomless pit, is horrible, and the density of all of these projects is decidedly suburban. Five to six story buildings were demolished for two story landscapers and three story vinyl sided townhouses.

The interventions in the South End are poster children for why large scale interventions by public entities which eviscerate the existing urban fabric are a bad idea. They often don't work and most certainly don't age well or have the ability to adapt as the surrounding neighborhoods change.
 
Cathedral is urbanistically awful, but Villa Victoria feels to me like it's just an ethnic enclave that overlays part of the South End grid pattern. Sure, some pieces of that grid are now closed to auto traffic, but as a pedestrian I don't care much about that. They need to try harder to attract businesses into what appears to have been designed to be a small commercial plaza at the center.
 
The problem with Villa physically is that the cut off streets discourage nonresidents from passing through there. I am not a fan of the low density suburban townhouses or the tower with meager retail at the base. It's an alien typology to the rest of the South End right in the middle of the neighborhood. Having the architecture directly clash with the surrounding neighborhood makes the project seem even more out of place and un-integrated.

As far as the ethnic enclave, that's a problem too since the project is an artificial and static construct in the neighborhood. The demographics can't naturally shift and the attitude of the people living there becomes quite insular. Compared to normal ethnic enclaves whose borders shift or co-mingle over time from block to block, this is a very divisive demarcation with the project, and fosters an us vs. them mindset. Couple that with a physical form which is already alien and it's easy to see how quickly this issue is compounded.
 
What was torn down and replaced with Villa Victoria?

As a pedestrian, I don't find the cut-off streets of Villa any more discouraging than the similarly cut-off streets that meet, but don't cross, the Southwest Corridor a few blocks further north. (People pass through, cars don't.) The area still 'reads' to me as a grid pattern. But maybe I'm not a typical walker.
 
http://www.mapjunction.com/places/Open_BRA/cgi-view/rest.pl?t=15348&p=11125

Between Villa, Blackstone Elementary, and Cathedral chopping up the street grid the city did a fine job obliterating the grain in the center of the South End. The treatment to the New York City Streets & Castle Square along with the wholesale slaughter of Lower Roxbury around Lenox & Camden Streets and Madison Square did more to erase urbanity in Boston than the leveling of the West End.

Ron, the average person when faced with what appears to be an insular housing project isn't going to cut through it. If the streets were actually streets cutting through instead of pedestrian only ways it would be more permeable.
 
My view of the place may be influenced by my mainly having visited it during outdoor concerts at O'Day Park (which I think was created by interrupting one of the former grid streets) and at the plaza on the other side of the development.
 
In regards to housing the poor, I think if you try to correct one thing, it then off-sets another thing. The first thought I have is basically give them a nice place to live. Seems simple enough, except if the poor get all of the amenities of the middle class, then what is their motivation to get off welfare. Point blank, somethings' got to give if your poor. Seems to me that projects can only get so nice before you completely negate the point of trying to succeed. I suppose it's heartless to say, but one should be motivated to leave government support. So while I'm all for making projects better than they are right now, at some point you do have to draw a line.


As far as getting rid of housing projects all together, I think no matter what you do eventually slums will form. I think poor people will always exist, and through the years they will eventually congregate together (exactly like the middle class and wealthy do). It probably starts out as: "hey this part of town is affordable." But eventually through the years the neighborhood will get dreary and decrepit as the people with some money go off to greener pastures. You can bull doze them, and eventually another area will get slummy.

As long as we're a free market capitalistic society, there will be two sides of town. Communism tried to address that, everyone gets a piece of the pie, but communism has its flaws, to say the least. Before we had projects we had tenements, they weren't any better and getting rid of projects will eventually lead to them again. The only thing IMO you can really do is give poor people the tools necessary to succeed and move up the economic latter, mainly an education and good parenting.
 
GW2500 said:
In regards to housing the poor ... The first thought I have is basically give them a nice place to live. Seems simple enough, except if the poor get all of the amenities of the middle class, then what is their motivation to get off welfare....As far as getting rid of housing projects all together, I think no matter what you do eventually slums will form. I think poor people will always exist, and through the years they will eventually congregate together ....As long as we're a free market capitalistic society, there will be two sides of town.... Before we had projects we had tenements, they weren't any better and getting rid of projects will eventually lead to them again. The only thing IMO you can really do is give poor people the tools necessary to succeed and move up the economic latter, mainly an education and good parenting.
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GW -- While statistics can mask many things (e.g. put one foot in near boiling water and one in ice and your average foot temperature is quite tolerable) -- they can in some cases do the "1 picture is worth 1000 words" compression process with raw numbers.

Here's what I consider a telling statistic about poverty (US Census 2010):
a) for those households with two working adults the poverty rate is about 5%
b) for those households headed by a single mother the poverty rate is in excess of 40%.

That simple statistic does a lot to explain the problems in the projects -- the challenge is to reform the public assistance process so that the % of single mothers drops back to those of the pre-Lyndon period
 
You think that changing the public assistance incentives would suddenly put an end to single motherhood? I think this is much more about how our society as a whole treats its urban underclass. For example, the fact that so many males from "the project" end up incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses might also tell you something about why the incidence of single motherhood is so high (and self-perpetuating).
 
You think that if the average drug peddling street thug wasn't in prison they'd be loving father's to the multiple illegitimate children they've sired? No, they'd just bang out more kids with more women.

The problem is that welfare is subsidizing mothers and fathers to have children but not be parents. The children provide otherwise work averse women a means of income, food, and housing. The biological fathers aren't responsible for raising the children because the state is picking up the support tab and offering all kinds of child care services. The fathers know they can knock up as many women as they want, and not be liable for a dime, because the women want to live off the benefits through their children. Generations of kids then grow up as nothing more than revenue securing entities, without any kind of loving or working parents, and repeat the same behavior.

Making father's responsible for their children by requiring mother's to state praternity in order to claim benefits (allowing the state to slap dad & any of his benefits for support instead of taxpayers footing the bill) or in the case of unknown praternity, requiring DNA submission to a database which then would be compared to anyone incarcerated, would end a lot of this crap overnight. The second your typical street thug has to actually pay for all the kids they've sired they'd stop impregnating every woman wanting a government check. That would break the cycle of children born for and cared for only as a revenue stream. Crime and illegitimacy amongst the 'poor' would plummet back to pre-"Great Society" numbers.

The past three decades have focused on the problem of single mothers without focusing on the real problem of deadbeat fathers leaving taxpayers on the hook for child support through welfare.
 
You think that if the average drug peddling street thug wasn't in prison they'd be loving father's to the multiple illegitimate children they've sired?
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If their enterprise were made legal, they'd become the equivalent of package store owners or microbrewers, and therefore would be better and more reliable providers for their families.
 
Drug dealers aren't interested in being financial providers to anyone but themselves. They aren't family men, nor would they ever be if their enterprise was legalized.
 
Ron Newman said:
If their enterprise were made legal, they'd become the equivalent of package store owners or microbrewers, and therefore would be better and more reliable providers for their families.
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Naive much?
 
Shepard said:
You think that changing the public assistance incentives would suddenly put an end to single motherhood? I think this is much more about how our society as a whole treats its urban underclass. For example, the fact that so many males from "the project" end up incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses might also tell you something about why the incidence of single motherhood is so high (and self-perpetuating).
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I'd have a simple rule for the single mother who wants assistance:

a) identify the father of each of your offspring and explain why is he / they are not financially responsible for your kids well being
or
b) submit to temporary (reversible) sterilization such as Norplant or some other readily monitorable means of contraception

The temporary assistance should be in the form of products and services which are not easily convertible into cash

No more multi-generational subsistence on the public dole
 
Just what we need, another expensive and corrupt government program. Yeah right. It'd just be most efficient to kill them.
 
It would be cheaper and more efficient to not reward deadbeat fathers and mothers with taxpayer money for irresponsibly breeding children they have no intention of parenting in the first place.
 
You know there were still quite a few unwed mothers / deadbeat dads prior to the New Deal, right?

Just because it wasn't talked about or reported doesn't mean it didn't happen.

This belief that the problem will magically go away if we stop caring for the people who have to deal with it is naive at best, myopic at worst.
 
It cost me a lot of time and money to raise and care for my children. Why is it fair to ask me to pay even more money to raise some deadbeat's children in an environment which more often than not will cause those children to repeat the behavior of their biological parents? Since the government start subsidizing out of wedlock births and deadbeat dads with taxpayer supported benefits the rate of illegitimacy has exploded.

I find it funny that for all the people that complain about spending on the Cold War, War on Terror, and War on Drugs, seem to forget the War on Poverty has been one bottomless quagmire since its inception.
 
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