Urban Edge is a Boston community development corporation based in Jackson Square, on the border of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. Originally started to combat urban blight, over the years the group has been involved with food pantries, youth outreach programs and health studies. It is currently helping to lead the revitalization of Jackson Square as one of the leading participants in a planned $250 million renovation of the area surrounding the nearby MBTA Orange Line stop of the same name, which will eventually include hundreds of housing units and a commercial development.

Mossik Hacobian and Chrystal Kornegay

Titles: President and Chief Executive Officer of Urban Edge

Experience: 36 and 19 years in community development; 33 and 11 years with Urban Edge

Mossik, you’ve been with Urban Edge since the late 1970s. Tell me a little about how you got started.

Hacobian: Urban Edge was started primarily as a real estate brokerage, to help people buy and sell homes regardless of income or race….After a period, they felt like brokerage wasn’t enough. This was a period where there was a lot of abandonment and arson for profit… and what we would do is buy vacant and abandoned buildings, either from private or from public sources [and refurbish them]. Some of the early houses that we did, it’s hard to believe now that they were there for the taking, given what’s happened to the market. A couple of years after we had started the Vacant House program, the city created a homesteading program that was kind of modeled after what we had been doing, [with Urban Edge’s involvement]. We have [since] developed altogether about 13,500 units of housing, 11,197 rental or co-op, the rest homeownership.

Along with real estate development, you’ve also been involved with youth programs, food pantries, an asthma study – is there a common thread to what you do?

H: We’re a solution looking for problems. We have the resources to solve problems, whatever the problem may be. [In the 1980s, at an Urban Edge sponsored community festival] I watched a woman drive up in her car, drop off three or four kids, and I hear her say, “I’ll pick you up at four.” And I’m standing here saying “what’s the matter with these people? They’re just abandoning their kids?” The light bulb went off and we started the after school program after that. That’s not what we were into, but that’s what people were telling us [we needed] to do. So the common theme is building community and meeting the community’s needs, and if that means pushing back against the power structure, that’s what we do.

The financial crisis seemingly affected every project under development, and every nonprofit – what was your immediate reaction? How did you react when you realized you’d have to change your plans?

Kornegay: I think that we had been looking at the organization before that, looking at the way we had organized ourselves and saw a future in which we would have to be different. Mossik and those other six guys walked into a neighborhood and a community that basically didn’t have any physical structures. Therefore didn’t have any families. Therefore, we’re now looking at a community that has 13,000 households, and these are 13,000 households that weren’t here 20 years ago. So, what are we doing about that? We had to look at the community differently because we actually were successful. And so we had to look at, what does that mean, and how do we prepare ourselves to respond to that so that we can be a nimble organization? I don’t know whether the crisis led to us thinking about it, but it certainly helped us focus on things they should be doing, like helping people stabilize their asset base…. It was one of the reasons we outsourced our property management company, so that we could focus more as an organization on the people that lived in those developments…. We really wanted to be good owners and good neighbors with our folks.

H: In the case of the Jackson Square project, we had to completely redesign. We were going to do a homeownership, 30-odd unit development on this corner. When the economy collapsed, it took us a year and a half to sell 13 homes in Roslindale that normally would have been snapped up in a month. Both we and the city and state agencies that fund homeownership looked at that and said, ‘It doesn’t make sense to fund homeownership projects anymore, until the foreclosed stock is used up and the market improves.’

So what was going to be a homeownership project as part of the first state of our development in Jackson Square is now going to be a rental building.… Some of the folks in the neighborhood were not happy with that change. They had their minds set on having market-rate homeownership. But when we were doing our first projects in Eggleston Square, people were saying to us, ‘we don’t want affordable housing, we have too much.’ Now, some of those same people are saying, ‘My god, there’s gentrification, people are being displaced!’ And private developers are building $300,000 condos in [Jamaica Plain’s] Eggleston Square, which would have been unthinkable….there’s things happening there that wouldn’t have happened 20 or 30 years ago, if we hadn’t stabilized the conditions there by creating affordable rental housing.

Hacobian and Kornegay’s Top Five Goals for Urban Edge’s Next Five Years:

• Complete the Jackson Square Project.
• Create a better balance between mission and money.
• Help put the foreclosure crisis behind us.
• Strengthen the ties between housing advocates and educators.
• Figuring out how CDCs can share resources while staying rooted in their neighborhoods.