Youth violence, housing dominate at-large debate
South End News, Thursday, October 25, 2007
By Justin A. Rice

Debating for a Beacon Hill crowd at a gleaming elementary school with a pen full of Razor Scooters in the lobby, At-large City Councilor Michael Flaherty’s closing remarks deviated from his usual Obama-like campaign rhetoric about bridging “Two Boston’s.”

“We’re at 60 homicides,” the former Council President and At-large candidate said at the Park Street School Oct. 23. “Sadly I’ll predict we’ll probably exceed last year’s death toll.”

This wasn’t the time, he added, to be “putting windmills on City Hall Plaza” or talking about moving City Hall to “the South Boston waterfront.”

Even though none of the four questions posed to the seven candidates touched on the issue of youth violence, it remained an underlying theme of the second to last At-large candidate forum before the Nov. 6 election.

Challenger John Connolly, an attorney who is making his second run for an at-large seat on the council, said he would draw on his skills as a former schoolteacher of at-risk youth to help implement widespread after-school programs.

“We have kids getting killed,” Connolly said. “It’s a moral crisis for our city. The first thing I would address is that we need to feel it as a city as a whole. When a kid is killed in Roxbury it needs to be felt in West Roxbury, where I’m from. … I taught kids who nothing was expected [of] and 85 percent of them went to college. It doesn’t have to be too costly.”

Another contentious issue raised in the forum co-sponsored by the South End’s Eight Streets Neighborhood Association was dealing with universities expanding onto tax- exempt land, an issue current At-large Councilor Felix Arroyo has brought to the Council floor before. He proposed an ordinance last year that would force schools to go through a public process with the Council before they are granted the right to build.

“There are 75 universities in Boston and 200,000 students,” he said. “We benefit from them but at the same time we have to make sure the universities cooperate.”

While all the candidates agreed housing students on campus was a large part of the solution, challenger Marty Hogan noted that traditional commuter schools such as the University of Massachusetts Boston shouldn’t build dorms.

“Community, community, community,” Hogan said. “The neighborhoods are what means everything to the city but I feel it’s a balance for bigger universities or schools. There are a lot of dedicated people working hard [at those universities], at the same time we don’t need to lose neighborhoods to that. We don’t need families moving out or taxes going up.”

Incumbent Sam Yoon went on the record in opposition of Suffolk University’s latest dorm proposal saying that it would have a negative impact on a historic neighborhood. He said a large part of the problem is that developers and landlords gear the housing market towards students by marketing multiple two-bedroom apartments instead of three- and four-bedroom homes.

“What makes the neighborhoods strong is families,” Yoon said. “To take students out of the market makes sense.” Flaherty echoed that, saying schools should make it feasible and attractive to live on campus. “It’s less expensive to bunk down with three or four guys or girls in the neighborhood which affects your quality of life,” he said.

At-Large Councilor Steve Murphy, who has been on the council for 11 years, said over the next 25 years Harvard will have more property in Allston than it does in Cambridge, a function of the university buying up land.

“Northeastern comes at it differently, they’re buying property that’s taxable now and telling the [Boston Redevelopment Authority] they’ll leave it like that,” Murphy said. “Now they are sending letters of eviction out. So Northeastern doesn’t even have a footprint.

“We have to work together to slow [universities] down.”

All candidates agreed that students saturate the housing market and challenger David Wyatt said it would be helpful if all city employees lived in the city, like they are supposed to.

“The mayor has allowed certain city workers to live out of the city,” he said.

Connolly took that thought a step farther saying the city should offer lower mortgage rates for its employees and he advocated for rent-to-own programs, arguing people who live in the city for three to five years before fleeing don’t help the problem.

But Murphy noted that in the last five years the city has built more affordable housing units than the entire state. Flaherty said one of the reasons the city has created more affordable housing recently is because of his legislation in 2000 increased money allotted to the city’s affordable housing trust, which, hadn’t been done since 1983.

“It’s not like we’re not doing our share,” Murphy said. “Certainly more can be done. Not housing kids on campus is part of what’s undermining the market.”