‘They could have fixed it up. They didn’t have to tear it down.’
Every morning at 11, Frank Moroney and Ronnie Kilgallen, both now in their 80s, walk together from Frank’s two-family house in Brookline to nearby Jamaica Pond. They stride around it, two active older men remembering the neighborhood where they grew up together. “The farm,” says Moroney. “That’s all we talk about.”
The cold-water flats in three-decker houses where so many lived; the small corner stores that extended credit during hard times; walking up the train tracks to the town gym to take a shower; the great ballplayers and all the guys who “made good” in all sorts of professions, including Moroney, who became a regional labor leader. Neither has forgiven the town, or the federal government that provided financial help, for the demolition of Brookline’s Farm — and its replacement with high-rise luxury housing, along with a few low-income cooperative apartments and, later, public housing.
It’s hard to imagine that contemporary progressives would countenance the demolition of more than 300 low-income housing units and the displacement of more than 200 families. But government planners remain far too confident that lower-income communities can be effectively designed. “They could have fixed it up,” says Moroney. “They didn’t have to tear it down.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Boston Globe (paywall)
______________________
Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he directs the Tocqueville Project, and author of the new book, Who Killed Civil Society?
This piece originally appeared in The Boston Globe