How urban renewal shaped Boston Look at the past as city plans for future

Headnote

State Rep. Byron Rushing gives talk on suburbanization, the BRA, gentrification

Community members gathered at the First Church Roxbury last week to hear State Rep. Byron Rushing speak as part of a series on structural racism in Boston. His talk, "Urban renewal then, gentrification now," traced the history of Boston's urban renewal and how profiteering, topdown policy decisions and prejudice contributed to shaping the city's neighborhoods.

Today, the shape of Boston's growth again is focus. The Walsh administration is developing a citywide plan for 2030 and examining how to house Boston's growing population. Meanwhile, a 2014 Brookings report declared Boston the most unequal large city in America. Chief Resilience Officer Atyia Martin said at the event that, based on five months of community engagement, her department has selected tackling racial inequities and "promoting social cohesion" in the city as the guiding theme for its work.

The underlying theme of gentrification, Rushing said, is mobility inequality - that is, inequality in people's abilities to determine where they live, with the haves making choices and the have-nots subject to decisions imposed on them.

"What we call gentrification is in many ways the movement of people in a city," he said. "What makes some people find it objectionable is that the movement of those people doesn't seem equal."

Birth of suburbia

After World War II, people flooded into the cities, and as veterans returned, housing was in scarce supply, Rushing said.

The federal government provided veterans with subsidies to help them buy housing - an opportunity developers quickly jumped on. Developable land was expensive in the tightly-packed cities and rehabilitating the cities' old buildings to provide housing was a costly endeavor. So developers sought the greatest return on investment: persuading veterans to buy newly-built houses in areas that formerly was farmland.

"[The veterans] could buy that housing any place," Rushing said, "but, of course, developers realize the best way and most profitable way to sell them housing is to sell new housing. And so that's the beginning...