Word: urbane
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...architect at Professional Designs Incorporated. The Christian Science Church and its world headquarters, Boston's answer to the Vatican, focus the contradiction between collective needs and private purpose: a corporate monument rising symbolically above the decaying tenements of the poor and turning its back on the human needs of urban working people unable to buy a decent human environment. Pollock is an architect who must deal with contradictions like that--his firm is employed by E.F. Hutton and Company, the second largest stock brokerage in the world, to plan its offices across the United States...
Through projects like the waterfront, Boston has successfully avoided the fate of cities like Cleveland and Detroit, whose center cores become armed camps and lifeless ghost towns after dark, but it still has not begun to meet the basic need of every person for decent shelter. Urban renewal and restoration have become codewords describing upper class conquest of lower class territory. The leveling of the West End, once a solid working-class community of ethnic neighborhoods, and its replacement with the luxury apartments of Charles River Park--drab highrises with acres of parking covering former working-class homes...
...South End, on the other hand, attempts are being made to renovate the existing housing stock rather than clear it away. The Department of Housing and Urban Development in coordination with the BRA sponsors programs to provide federally guaranteed low-interest mortgages for housing stock renovation. Unfortunately, these efforts have proven largely unsuccessful because such a large amount of capital is needed for adequate renovation that only upper middle class "pioneers" can afford to move in. As they do so, land values rise and remnants of the old community are driven out like squatters...
...there is no place for the displaced to go, the homeless urban working people--often unemployed--cannot run to the suburbs. Most float on the rough seas of an already turbulent housing crisis, landing in worse conditions or waiting to enter the hell of projects like Columbia Point, Bromley Heath, and D Street. Politicians and city planners have found no suitable solutions, often not even recognizing the existence of the "secondary effects" of urban "improvements"--the homelessness of the poor, who are forced to find alternative forms of housing when the class composition of a neighborhood is upwardly transformed...
...interests, BLD members will try to slow down the inplementation of land reforms, particularly the Land Ceiling Acts which limit the amount of property an individual may own. However, rural India will benefit from the decentralized administrative policies and the small-scale village industries which the Janata party advocates. Urban private industry will find the new government more cooperative, with H.M. Patel, a firm believer in free enterprise, as Minister of Finance. Of course, the Socialists would oppose any conservative trends, espcially those which impinge upon the rights of labor and the urban poor. Whatever the case, the ideological diversity...