City Hall

The comeback trail

by Ben Geman

Paul Grogan and Tony Proscio don't buy the conventional wisdom about the inner city.

In their book Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival (Westview), Grogan and Proscio reject the idea that poor neighborhoods are hopelessly trapped in a cycle of capital flight, horrid schools, and high crime. Instead, they say these neighborhoods are overcoming their problems in a way that can't be explained by the strong economy alone. They point to four specific trends, each of which has been evident in Boston: renewed private investment, growing grassroots movements, better policing, and challenges to the public sector's education, welfare, and housing bureaucracies.

Comeback Cities also rejects ideological rigidity. On one hand, the authors call for increased investment in housing, and they celebrate the growth of community-development corporations -- born of progressive activism -- in tackling issues such as affordable housing. On the other hand, they also embrace more conservative trends in education (charter schools, for example) and welfare.

Grogan, who headed Boston's community-development efforts under former mayors Kevin White and Ray Flynn, is now Harvard University's vice-president for government, community, and public affairs. He spoke recently with the Phoenix.

Q: You call the recipe for inner-city revival "post-ideological."

A: This book is based more on 29 years of real experience than it is on book-learning or ideology, and if you put together the things that appear to be working, they do not follow any particular ideological path. It's a curious hybrid strategy, which draws from the right and left as community people put them together.

Grassroots leaders can be great direction-finders for politics and policy. One of the reasons national leaders have been very slow to see all this happening is because it does not follow either party's view of the world completely.

Q: Have you been attacked from the left at all?

A: The book is just starting to get out there, but I expect to be [attacked by the left] and I welcome that. We need to have a provocative discussion about the true path to doing more for the cities. One of the tragedies of the left in the last generation is that we have been trapped into defending failed programs as the only way to evidence compassion. If you are for the poor you have got to be for welfare, you've got to be for public housing, you've got to support our public schools.

Not only did that not help, but we made the case for the conservatives -- or helped them make the case -- that compassion was misplaced because there was no practical way to make it work. We strengthened the hand of President Reagan, who made his great two-term case against government doing anything at all. I do want to say that I hope the conservatives take some whacks too. The conservatives are absolutely blind to the need for massive public investment. That's how we built this country.

Q: What are some examples of places in Boston where the trends that you identify converge?

A: There is no shortage of them. Even some of the neighborhoods in Boston that are really hot right now, like Jamaica Plain, were absolutely on the edge in the 1960s and '70s and really going downhill. I think a big turning point was that the Southwest Corridor interstate [highway] was beaten back by community groups, and after that they formed some of the great community-development corporations, like Urban Edge and Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation. They began . . . building something by fixing up housing and creating first-time home buyers and building these sources of strength in the neighborhood economy.

Codman Square in Dorchester was an utterly devastated area in the '70s, just a bleak, grim, emptied-out place, with widespread housing abandonment. The commercial strip was absolutely dead. You go to Codman Square today and it is bustling. The commercial district is back, there is new and refurbished housing, there is life on the streets.