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Fordiani wages a self-conscious campaign in District Six
BY ADAM REILLY
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AS AN ACTIVIST, Francesca Fordiani is a cagey veteran: the 38-year-old Jamaica Plain resident has worked on issues ranging from tenants’ rights and domestic abuse to bilingual education. But in terms of electoral politics, Fordiani — a social worker who’s challenging incumbent John Tobin for the District Six seat on Boston’s city council — is an untested novice. As she knocks on doors in Jamaica Plain one evening in early October, Fordiani’s lack of experience shows. Dressed entirely in black save for a bright floral-print scarf knotted around her neck, Fordiani — who’s looking to introduce herself to high-frequency voters — has forgotten her flashlight and has trouble deciphering the numbers on the houses she’s approaching. "The key piece of equipment, and I left it in my car," she mutters. As she walks up to each new home, Fordiani squints at her voter list and murmurs the name of the targeted resident three, four, five times, trying to etch each person’s identity into her consciousness. At one point, as Fordiani waits in vain for someone to come to the door, a woman sidles up to a three-family across the street and takes an unusually long time to check her mail. Fordiani looks over, but seems frozen. "I should really go up and talk to that lady, but I didn’t," she says. "And there’s like a window of opportunity." This kind of self-referential analysis seems to be Fordiani’s default setting. At the same time she’s campaigning, she’s critically analyzing herself and the process. "I’ve been involved in issue politics in one way or another for more than a decade, but electoral politics in a lot of ways is really different," she says at one point. "When you’re working on an issues campaign, the ‘product,’ in quotes, is the issue. In an electoral campaign, while I’ve really been working very hard to keep the campaign about issues, in the end people are going to vote for the candidate, not the issues. Of course, intellectually, I know that. But in terms of self-perception, it’s a different way of thinking about yourself." Thanks, perhaps, to her inexperience and her out-of-body approach to campaigning, there are times when the candidate seems slightly tentative. On Ballard Street, a smiling middle-aged man with a neat moustache opens the outside door and lets Fordiani make her pitch. But because he doesn’t come outside or invite Fordiani in — and Fordiani doesn’t push for any kind of spatial resolution — the entire transaction takes place through a pane of glass. Fordiani identifies herself as a community activist and bemoans increased rental costs and real-estate prices while the man stands, illuminated from behind, his strangely static smile giving him the appearance of a wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s. After she finishes her spiel, Fordiani takes the plunge: "I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to think about who you’re voting for in November?" "Felix," the smiling man says, referring to at-large incumbent and progressive favorite Felix Arroyo. There’s an awkward pause. "Well, I’m not running against Felix. I’m running against John Tobin. So." Another pause. "I am a progressive like Felix ... " In the end, the interaction ends reasonably well: the smiling man takes some Fordiani literature and promises he’ll consider voting for her next month. But it’s easy to wonder if a more purposeful pitch might have helped convince this particular voter. Fordiani may not give voters the hard sell, but her message is fairly aggressive. She faults Tobin — and the city council as a whole — for failing to support the Fair Rent and Tenant Protection Act proposed by Mayor Thomas Menino last year. If elected, Fordiani says she’d press for the passage of the Community Stabilization Act, a revision of Menino’s suggested legislation that would guard against predatory lending and allow tenants to file grievances when larger commercial landlords raised rents more than 10 percent. She also accuses the council of failing to cut various programs of questionable necessity — like free cell phones for certain city employees — in order to mitigate recent attrition in the teaching staff of Boston’s public schools. And she’s already chosen sides in the most loaded issue currently facing the council — the debate over Rule 19, which allows the president to unilaterally halt discussion of issues deemed irrelevant to city business. "I support a change to Rule 19 that gives a councilor the right to doubt the ruling of the president and let the city council as a body make decisions about whether or not something is within the purview of the city council," Fordiani says. "Without speculating on what may be going on in the mind or the heart of [council president Michael Flaherty], from where I’m sitting — as a citizen and as an observer — it does seem to me that there is a pattern to whose voices get heard. And it seems the progressives on the council" — a group that includes African-Americans Chuck Turner and Charles Yancey and Felix Arroyo, a Latino — "tend to get shut down more often than the Young Turks." (All of said Turks, as the council’s younger clique is known, are white men.) Fordiani’s candidacy, and her frequent critiques of Tobin, have a strong personal element. She’s one of two leaders of the Lourdes Avenue Tenant Association, a group formed to fight rent increases instituted by Leonard Samia, who owns three buildings in Jamaica Plain. According to Fordiani, who lives in one of the buildings, the group attempted to arrange meetings between Samia and some of his tenants to discuss rising rents two years ago. No meeting took place. Fordiani (who blames Samia for the impasse) and another tenant, Frida Yoder, eventually refused to pay their rent increases in an attempt force the landlord to negotiate. Samia ultimately initiated eviction proceedings against the two; Fordiani lost her case in housing court, but is appealing the decision. While she acknowledges that Tobin made some calls on behalf of the Lourdes Avenue Tenant Association and introduced a city-council resolution urging Samia to negotiate with the group, Fordiani insists Tobin failed to help her — and Samia’s other tenants — as much as he could have. "Trying to fight these battles building by building is entirely impractical, which is why we’ve been urging Councilor Tobin to support the Community Stabilization Act," she says. "I’m an affordable-housing activist. We have a piece of legislation and a district councilor that doesn’t support it." Fordiani isn’t just running against Tobin because she feels she can do a better job than he has; she’s running against him because she thinks he let her down. (Reached for comment, Tobin — who also introduced a council resolution condemning Samia’s attempts to evict Fordiani and Yoder — says that while he opposed the Fair Rent and Tenant Protection Act, he has yet to take a position on the Community Stabilization Act. ) Fordiani faces long odds heading into the November 4 final election. In the preliminary, she received 1344 votes to Tobin’s 5463, a daunting margin of defeat. But she insists victory is still possible. While Tobin crushed Fordiani in West Roxbury, she held her own in left-leaning Jamaica Plain, topping the incumbent in four of 15 precincts and running a close race in several others. "If you look at where we were able to work, where we were able to talk to people, we did very well in those places, considering that I have no paid staff, I spent very little money, and I entered the race late," she says. "We’re going into West Roxbury now, we’re working hard there, and we’re continuing to work hard in Jamaica Plain. The results of the preliminary clearly show that the people we were able to talk to resonate with what we have to say."
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