BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 28, 2013
Listen to my conversation with a tenant from the Amy Lowell House in the West End of Boston during a rally to protest the sequester. I also interviewed housing lawyer Mac McCreight of Greater Boston Legal Services about current affordable housing trends.
BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 26, 2013
On Jan. 3, James “Jimmy” Fulmer, was found dead on a bench outside of the Crystal Fountain Church in Nashville, Tenn. Fulmer was a 50-year-old homeless man who was killed by the freezing cold. It was 25 degrees the night before Fulmer’s body was found.
Portrait and photo of Jimmy Fulmer side-by-side. Artist rendition done by Cecil Green. Posted on Homeless Funeral Procession Facebook page.
Homelessness is a major issue in Nashville. More than half of the homeless population in Nashville, which is an estimated 4,000, does not have access to shelters or churches that take in overnight guests.
Fulmer’s death brought on discussion about the lack of affordable housing in the city which could arguably open up more beds in shelters if better zoning policies or a housing trust fund were in place (read this article on why homeless people die in the cold).
Last week, a coalition of homeless advocates and community members held a funeral procession for Fulmer to protest the lack of affordable homes in Nashville.
The protest was organized through a Facebook event created on Jan. 14 by Brett Flener, an organizer for Nashville Advocates with the Un-Housed.
The event was referred to as a “homeless funeral procession” and led to a Metropolitan Homelessness Commission meeting with new director Will Connelly.
(Watch a video of the procession that was posted on the website Nashville Docujournal)
Many advocates for homelessness in Nashville are pressuring politicians to support a housing trust fund or an inclusionary zoning policy to fix the housing problem in their city.
This has been a topic of discussion for quite some time now. Boston has significantly made use of its inclusionary zoning policy which requires builders to set aside some affordable units in every housing complex they build or pay a fine.
Nashville’s zoning policy rewards developers who make 10 percent of their units affordable, but it does not mandate zoning like the city of Boston does with its inclusionary zoning provision.
This article posted in the newspaper The Tennessean last July explains how gentrification, which is defined in the article as a process where working families are pushed to cities’ outer rings, is present in Nashville neighborhoods.
The main argument made in the Tennessean article is that Nashville has ignored affordable housing options that other cities have embraced.
The Vanderbilt Law School even held a panel discussion about the lack of affordable housing in January of last year, centering around the support for establishing a housing trust fund.
BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 20, 2013
This morning I decided to visit the Department of Neighborhood Development page on the City of Boston website where I discovered a “Maps and Neighborhood Profiles” section. This can be located under the “Policy and Development Research” tab.
The site conveniently has a profile for each of the 15 major neighborhoods that make up Boston, which can be viewed as a PDF file.
The neighborhoods that I looked at were Back Bay – Beacon Hill, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, South Boston, South End and West Roxbury. I concentrated on three pieces of information: demographics (race and ethnicity), median household income and percentage of affordable units.
The most compelling piece of information that I found was the following:
Most of the information came from the US Bureau of the Census. The demographic information is from 2010. The median household income information came from results from American Community Surveys from 2005-2009.
I spoke with Kerry O’Brien, the Deputy Director at the Department of Neighborhood Development who deals with public relations. She informed me that federal cuts to the department have hindered them from having more up-to-date information on the neighborhoods. The department has less interns in the policy and development department to work on these profiles, but it plans to hire more in the summer.
She told me to take a look at the neighborhood profiles on the Boston Redevelopment Authority website. While these profiles are a bit more in depth and in some cases a little more up-to-date, I find the City of Boston page to be more accessible to easier to understand.
When I told her about the research I was doing, she told me that the city has done a lot to discourage gentrification over the past few years. She cited some policies that are in place that prevent gentrification throughout the city. For instance, Boston has an Inclusionary Development Policy that requires condominium developers to build affordable units into all of their projects or pay a fee to the city. This was made possible by Mayor Thomas Menino and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
I will get in touch with the Boston Redevelopment Authority to further explore their efforts to combat gentrification.
BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 19, 2013
Last Thursday afternoon, I ventured off to the Greater Boston Legal Services office conveniently located just five minutes from the North Station T stop. There I met with Barbara Zimbel an attorney from the housing department who explained the process someone goes through to get a lawyer to represent them.
Outside Greater Boston Legal Services. Photo taken from Google Maps Street View.
“You can’t just walk in and request a lawyer,” Zimbel said. Greater Boston Legal Services helps people find a lawyer after they fill out the appropriate paperwork. Lawyers do not directly come from Great Boston Legal Services, rather from the Legal Advocacy and Resource Center (LARC), which they match you up with.
LARC operates as a free legal hotline service since 1983 as stated on its website.
Nevertheless, she was able to connect me with Mac McCreight, the Housing Law Unit Lead Attorney at Greater Boston Legal Service who sent me an email this morning to see how he can assist me with my research. He focus is on public housing and section 8 vouchers and he primarily works with the Boston Housing Authority.
He was able to provide me with resources for my interest in gentrified neighborhoods. McCreight told me to try reaching out to the Department of Neighborhood Development since the City of Boston regularly monitors trends in rent levels throughout the city. He also mentioned an organization known as City Life/Vida Urbana
which also keeps track of post-foreclosure units that are sold at higher rent prices to investors and owners.
I will look into these resources as I continue to report on news for my blog. I will hopefully conduct an interview with McCreight sometime in the near future.
BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 13, 2013
“The Boston metro area is experiencing its strongest job growth in three years.” – We Are Apartments
PR Newswire’s study on apartment construction in Boston.
Yesterday, PR Newswire released a study report on how apartment construction has contributed 3.3 billion to the metro economy in Boston (read study here). This report shows that it has created jobs for the city, homes for its residents and almost $28 billion in revenue for the entire state. Read how the city and state compares to the nation as a whole in terms of apartment construction and its contribution to the economy.
Check out this interactive website WeAreApartments.org to see the progress in your area. Here is the link to Boston’s report.
We Are Apartment’s interactive map.
BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 12, 2013
A snapshot of the crime database on Universal Hub.
Neighborhoods in Boston can become very dangerous places to live in. Often, areas with low-income housing experience a lot of violent crime, as shown by this database provided by the website Universal Hub. This site shows a list of reported crimes in the South End over the past four years – as early as August 2008 and as late as December 2012. These crimes were reported by media and the Boston Police. Click on each incident to learn what was reported.
BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 6, 2013
Check out my idea for my next post: a sit down interview with a lawyer from Greater Boston Legal Services.
BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 5, 2013
Want to learn how I got interested in gentrification, specifically in the Boston area? Follow my journey on Storify and interact with the resources that have gotten me to where I am today in terms of learning more about affordable housing and communities that are fighting to live in Boston’s thriving neighborhoods.
OR
http://storify.com/jfrias1/affects-of-gentrification-and-boston
BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 4, 2013
This morning, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) hosted the two-hour event “Advancing Healthy Housing – A Strategy for Action” in Washington, D.C. (purpose of event here, read press release here). The event began at 9:30 a.m. HUD started the hash tags #StrategyforAction and #HealthyHomes in the Twitter-sphere which were used by other federal agencies throughout the event.
While most relaters, mortgage loaners and others involved in the housing industry were mostly Re-tweeting updates from the event and quotable moments, The National Center for Healthy Housing was the first to Tweet about radon and how it can affect a household when undetected.
The hash tag #radon caught on briefly after this Tweet and more news about radon detection was Tweeted alongside the hash tags #StrategyforAction and #HealthyHomes.
The Children’s Environmental Health Network then Tweeted about the correlation between radon and lung cancer.
The hash tag #LungCancer has been spread around the Twitter-sphere today alongside #WorldCancerDay which falls on February 4. “Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States,” according to the National Cancer Institute website.
It’s interesting that radon detection was mentioned on World Cancer Day. established by the Union for International Cancer Control, as a way to make all homes and housing units in the United States healthier.
Housed in Boston 