Post Script

As housing prices soar in urban areas across the country, more needs to be done to protect the cities’ low-income residents and the vibrant life that diverse committees offer, says Boston Housing Authority head Kenzie Bok ’07.

By Kenzie Bok ’07
Illustration by Verónica Grech

Each day as I arrive into work at the Boston Housing Authority, I’m greeted by a sign with the face of a smiling public housing resident and the words: “We are people, not buildings.”

Sometimes the sign makes me chuckle to myself, as so much of what takes up my day is buildings: repairing roofs and elevators on a shoestring budget, retrofitting heating systems to be fossil-fuel-free, financing redevelopment of old structures, or determining where in the City of Boston we could build new affordable units. But if I could print many thousands of copies of that sign and hang it everywhere in America, I would.

I like to say that I run the most important public institution in Boston. Those could be fighting words in a city so proud of our public institutions— the home of America’s first public library, first public school, first public park, first public transit system (admittedly creaking with age!). But my point is that we could make all Boston’s other public goods as sparkling and high-quality as we like, and the accomplishment would mean little if we had locked all the people who most benefit from those public goods out of the city due to a lack of affordable housing. Cities are concentrators of opportunities, jobs, and public services; they should never become playgrounds only for those who have already won life’s lotteries.

We are lucky in Boston to have built public housing at its zenith, when the program had the momentum to take hold in every neighborhood. Among America’s cities, we are unusual in how spread out and well-located that housing is: from Charlestown to the South End, East Boston to Dorchester, Roxbury to Roslindale. This history means that, whereas other housing authorities in America struggle to break into exclusive enclaves of opportunity, much of our task within the Bos- ton city limits is to endure. These days, a high proportion of the families raising kids in Brighton live in our housing, because families can no longer out-compete students for the area’s market housing stock. The seniors able to stay in South Boston live in our housing. The average income of Jamaica Plain, which has increased immensely over the past two decades, would be stratospheric were it not for our housing. To know the people who live in our buildings is to love them: kids who are curious and funny and kind, elders who have nurtured the communities they now just want to be able to stay and age in, parents who are feverishly seeking jobs good enough to cover the cost of childcare.

For those who think of public housing as moribund, I like to remind them that the market has come up with no other way to keep a place for these low-income community members in our city; we are still relying on the buildings we built 70 or 80 years ago. And there are 42,000 families on our waitlist. That’s why it means so much that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has used city funds to back an ambitious program of ren- ovations and green retrofits in our public housing buildings, along with the construction of 3,000 additional units over the next decade.

Many of the people on that over-long waitlist, however, are not just from Boston proper: They also hail from hundreds of surrounding towns. And even as we make these investments in Boston, we continue to see those suburbs turn a cold shoulder to creating the housing these families and seniors so desperately need. As a housing authority that administers vouchers usable throughout the region, we made a major change five years ago to allow those vouchers to pay enough for participants to access pricier suburban towns. That gave a lot more households a lot more options, but usually only where the towns have permitted multifamily dwellings.

Never does one realize how unnaturally and intentionally the persistent residential segregation of our region is extended by contemporary policy decisions than when you try to help families and seniors find homes they can afford.

Sometimes I wonder if it would help if we talked less about “units” and more about “homes.” What “character” of a neighborhood matters more than welcoming the vibrant life that people from every stage of life can bring to it? Is there anything less natural than communities with no place at all for even a double-earner median-income family raising kids, or an elder on a fixed income, or a person with disabilities who wants to live independently but close to relatives, or the 20-somethings who grew up down the street but can’t now stay? When I think of what I hope today’s Milton Academy students will have enough life experience to learn, it is this: All our communities are made up of people, each one of whom starts as a dependent child and hopes to end up as a retired elder, and for those people to thrive at every stage of life, we need decent, safe, affordable buildings for them to live in.