AARON GORNSTEIN – ‘Work on both fronts’

The South Bronx may be 200 miles from Boston’s Back Bay, but last week a nationally acclaimed author gave local housing advocates an intimate and captivating glimpse of families living in the poorest section of New York.

At the same time, some housing leaders were surprised when the author – a longtime advocate of inner-city children – took a swipe at a prominent firm that has developed housing for many of South Bronx’s low-income families.

The housing [in the South Bronx] is about the worst I’ve seen outside of nations like Haiti, said Jonathan Kozol, speaking to 1,300 affordable housing advocates, lenders and city and state officials at the 34th Annual Dinner and Meeting of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association.

The event, held in Boston’s Copley Marriott, featured Kozol as its keynote speaker. Kozol, a former public school teacher in Roxbury, has spent most of the last decade helping families in a South Bronx neighborhood that’s been called the poorest Congressional district in the nation.

Many of the CHAPA dinner guests were moved by Kozol’s candid descriptions of the plight of inner-city children, and some were also visibly shocked when he criticized housing in the South Bronx developed by Continental Wingate. Continental is a regular financial supporter of CHAPA and was even noted as such in a booklet printed for the evening event.

Continental Wingate officials did not return a telephone call from Banker & Tradesman seeking their response to Kozol’s comments.

CHAPA leaders acknowledged after the event that Kozol offered a startling and sobering message about housing problems in America.

The general tone of the speech was certainly what we expected, said CHAPA President Peter Gagliardi. I expected that we would be challenged and I think we were … We were challenged to re-look at issues of [racial] segregation and the impact it has on families and children.

Gagliardi said he feels Kozol’s speech focused on a policy that encourages affordable housing development only in low-income, inner-city neighborhoods that are more receptive than suburban communities to those types of housing proposals – not on attacking a particular housing developer.

Gagliardi said he is not familiar with the housing development that Kozol mentioned in his speech and couldn’t comment on it specifically.

However, Gagliardi added, Any of us that has done housing development in an urban setting could have a project that didn’t turn out as anticipated – sometimes due to forces outside of our control.

CHAPA has had many senior policy advisers and lawmakers speak at its annual meeting, but CHAPA leaders said Kozol was probably one of the most provocative and gripping speakers ever to appear at the event.

This certainly was more direct, than past speeches, said Aaron Gornstein, CHAPA’s executive director.

Kozol transfixed the audience with his vivid descriptions of children living in 12 blocks of South Bronx. Most suffer from asthma. All are trapped in segregated and unequal schools. And all struggle to survive in a community where the median household income is less than $10,000.

The children face challenges no child should ever have to face in this advanced age, said Kozol, who has written several award-winning books about struggling children and their families.

‘Permanent Cancer’
To illustrate the stark differences between children living in the South Bronx and those living in other parts of New York, Kozol explained how much is spent to educate them.

New York spends about $8,000 a year, per pupil, to educate children in the South Bronx, while spending $12,000 in some New York suburbs and $18,000 in the wealthiest neighborhoods in the state.

We go to our churches and synagogues and talk about how all our children are equal in the eyes of God, said Kozol. In reality, Children … come into our school system with price tags stamped on their foreheads, he said.

Kozol also may have touched a nerve when he talked about the latest trends in affordable housing. While he praised the efforts to revitalize Dudley Street in Roxbury, Kozol maintained that most cities are replacing high-rise ghettos with garden-style, handsome and charming ghettos.

The ghetto as a permanent cancer on the body now seems to go unquestioned, he said.

Kozol explained that there has been increased focus on the aesthetics of new housing but not on location. The newly built housing still segregates poor and minority families from affluent, non-minority households and neighborhoods.

What we build is far less important than where we build it, he said.

Gornstein said Kozol’s message was sobering, but he also stressed that affordable housing is needed in both the suburbs and cities.

We think we need to do work on both fronts – open up the suburbs for more affordable housing to serve a variety of people of different incomes, but we also need to focus on revitalizing urban neighborhoods, said Gornstein.

Kozol spoke after CHAPA leaders honored Cardinal Bernard Law, who has called it a moral imperative to create more housing in the state. Law and the Archdiocese of Boston commissioned a study released last year that called for the creation of 36,000 housing units over five years. The archdiocese has been behind the production of 1,700 housing units during the last three decades in communities like Boston, Andover, Lexington and Scituate.

Kozol praised Law, who was unable to attend the dinner, and the archdiocese for its affordable housing efforts.

Community Service Awards also were presented to Jane Wallis Gumble, director of the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development; Joseph Flatley, president of the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corp.; and Nueva Esperanza, a community development corporation in Holyoke.

Jane has been a consistent and strong advocate for affordable housing within the administrations of Govs. [William] Weld, [Paul] Cellucci and [Jane] Swift, said Gornstein, adding that Gumble has overseen the start-up of several state housing programs.

CHAPA leaders also recognized the efforts of Flatley. Under his leadership, MHIC has invested over $500 million in 160 housing developments, creating more than 7,500 affordable housing units.

In honoring Nueva Esperanza, established in 1982 by Latino leaders in Holyoke, Gagliardi praised the CDC for saving a city that was once plagued by arson, housing abandonment and tenant incomes which could only support very depressed rents.

During the last 25 years, Nueva Esperanza has created nearly 400 rental units in the city, promoted economic development and offered various social service programs.

Nueva Esperanza has heeded the ambitious scope of its mission as a CDC, said Gagliardi.