Time to deliver

Mayor Menino, with some justification, has been able to blame others for the racial problems that plague public housing. He can't do that anymore.

When it comes to spin control, Boston mayor Tom Menino is not to be underestimated. Over the past six months, his stage management of charges that the city's public housing is a hotbed of racial hatred has been nothing short of masterful. In February, he looked like part of the problem. Since then, he's worked assiduously to make himself look like part of the solution.

The question remaining is this: with the spotlight of federal scrutiny and a high-profile lawsuit fading, will Menino push to ensure that the city's public-housing developments are genuinely safe for all? Boston can't afford to wait for the next investigation by the feds, or the next lawsuit, to stamp out racism in public housing. This week, Menino said that he has "zero tolerance" for racism. Now he has to make sure that the message gets through -- not only to those who live in public housing, but to those Boston Housing Authority employees whose management practices suggest that they don't take racism as seriously as they should.

Menino's trials began in February with a Washington news conference by Andrew Cuomo, secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Charging the BHA with "systematic discrimination" for failing to protect minority families in South Boston and Charlestown, Cuomo said, "Housing discrimination is an ugly part of our nation's past that has no place in America today. We can't allow families to be terrorized by racial and ethnic harassment that prevents them from living in any home and in any neighborhood in this country."

The incidents cited by Cuomo were truly horrendous: bullets fired through the windows of a sleeping child's bedroom; white thugs threatening minority residents in the corridors of their apartment buildings; human waste hurled at doors and through windows.

Menino was furious -- not with the contents of Cuomo's report, but with Cuomo. By not having Menino appear with him, Cuomo cast Menino in the most negative light possible. Menino insisted that problems at the BHA had stopped in 1996, the final year of Cuomo's study, and asserted that he and his BHA chief, Sandra Henriquez -- herself an African-American -- had since cleaned house. "I think what he has done is unfair to the executive director of the housing authority," Menino said of Cuomo. "I don't think he understands that changes have been made."

Of course, Menino's support is important to the presidential hopes of Al Gore, whom Cuomo reportedly would like to serve in a future administration. In case Cuomo didn't get the message, Menino soon drove it home, letting it be known that he was, well, intrigued by Bill Bradley's campaign. And before you could say "New Hampshire primary," Menino and Cuomo were reading from the same page. In May, Cuomo, Menino, and Henriquez appeared together at Roxbury's Orchard Park development, where Cuomo praised the improvements that have taken place since 1996, despite ongoing problems at the projects in South Boston and Charlestown. "Today," Menino said at the event, "we reaffirm that racism has no place in our city and that the resources of this city will come down hard on anyone who disrupts peace in the community."

Then, this past Monday, the BHA agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by 13 black and Latino families -- the very families who were the subject of the original HUD report. Once again, Menino and Henriquez cited the progress they've made since 1996, with Menino saying the improved procedures he agreed to for responding to racial incidents merely formalized policies already in place.

In fact, Menino and Henriquez deserve credit for the steps they have taken to reform a long-troubled agency. A year and a half ago, for instance, they provoked the wrath of city-council president Jimmy Kelly, of South Boston, when they evicted three white families from the Old Colony project because family members had terrorized Latino residents. Most recently, following the settlement, Kelly again repeated his claim that the charges of racism are an unproven "bum rap."

But Menino's good intentions haven't always been matched by his actions. At the May love-in, for instance, Cuomo noted that serious racial incidents at Old Colony and Bunker Hill, in Charlestown, had continued to take place through 1998, and suggested that the BHA could have been quicker about changing the management of those two projects.

Implicit in Menino's persistent references to the improvements he's made since 1996 is the suggestion that he's merely dealing with the mess left by his predecessor, Ray Flynn. In fact, Menino has been mayor for six years now -- a lifetime in politics. Any remaining problems in public housing are now his, not Flynn's or anyone else's.

At a time when housing costs are skyrocketing and affordable rental units are disappearing, the city's public-housing stock is more crucial than ever, providing homes for some 15,000 families. Menino's -- and Henriquez's -- accomplishments to date are impressive, but they are incomplete. The political heat may have diminished, but the need to press forward has not.

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