Shelterforce The journal of affordable housing and community building

Summer 2008 » June 23, 2008

Home Again

With the help of its local community development corporation, a Boston neighborhood comes to terms with its transformation as a beloved church, long a treasured part of the community is reborn as housing. By David Holtzman

During the 1980s and the 1990s, the Archdiocese of Boston looked at consolidating some parishes. Blessed Sacrament, with its surrounding campus was, for some, ripe for redevelopment.

For Betsaida Gutierrez, the sight of the empty interior of Blessed Sacrament Church was overwhelming. For three decades she had come every Sunday to the Catholic basilica in Boston’s Jamaica Plain district to worship. Now, suddenly, the Virgin Mary was gone. The organ was gone. And so were the people who, like Gutierrez, had sought solace there in their faith and in each other.

“It was a place where we came together as a community, not just where we came on Sundays, but where we could get together to solve the problems of the community. It was a place we could call ours,” she says.

The announcement of the church’s closing in early 2004 came at a moment when Jamaica Plain was undergoing a wave of gentrification. The neighborhood has long been a destination for new immigrants, first German and Irish in the early 20th century, and more recently Dominicans, Cubans, and others from Latin America. Though it always had a few wealthier sections, much of Jamaica Plain was and still is working-class. But in the past decade, many affluent young families have discovered the area’s leafy streets. Their growing numbers have made J.P., as the neighborhood is affectionately known, one of Boston’s hottest real-estate markets.

Community activists had worked tirelessly for nearly three decades to revitalize the area, but their success was getting out of hand. Prices for housing and retail space had skyrocketed, making it increasingly difficult for nonprofit developers to build affordable housing and for small retailers to continue to cater to low-income residents. The Archdiocese of Boston was about to place a huge piece of real estate on the market, and private developers were salivating at the prospect of turning it into market-rate condos. The fate of the church and its surroundings promised to play a pivotal role in the community’s future.

Affordable-housing activists, many of them former church parishioners like Gutierrez, got organized. They helped the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation (JPNDC), a nonprofit group founded in 1977 that had strong support in the neighborhood, to organize residents in favor of its proposal to redevelop the Blessed Sacrament church as affordable housing. In the fall of 2005, the church accepted JPNDC’s purchase price. But then came an unexpected wave of opposition from middle-class homeowners who lived nearby. They claimed there was too much affordable rental housing in the neighborhood already. So residents had to rally again, to make sure this opposition did not make their initial victory hollow.

Whatever sense of denial Gutierrez might have felt about the church’s impending closure ended when she stepped inside its doors a few months later and saw it stripped of its stained glass and other wonders.

“We knew that we had no power and nothing could stop this,” she says. “The memories were gone.” But in its new incarnation as housing, she adds, the building will still have meaning to her. “The community still has control.”

The Activist Church

The massive dome of Blessed Sacrament, completed in 1917, towers over Centre Street and the two- and three-story homes of what has historically been a working-class neighborhood. The church served a largely German immigrant population that labored in the nearby breweries and a shoe factory. It was built as a boastful answer to another huge cathedral closer to downtown, constructed some years earlier to serve mostly Irish-Americans.

Jamaica Plain went through dramatic changes in recent decades, beginning in the turbulent 1960s. White residents moved to the suburbs in large numbers, and people of color often took their place. To help commuters travel in and out of the city faster, city and state leaders planned an interstate highway through the neighborhood that required tearing down hundreds of homes. The effect of these changes was that property values plummeted and the community became vulnerable to the ills familiar to many urban areas, from blockbusting to street gangs.

Given its power in Boston, a heavily Catholic city, the archdiocese had the ability to play a significant role in local affairs, if it chose to. Most often, however, whether an individual parish moved to influence its surrounding neighborhood depended on its own leaders, not that of the mother church in downtown Boston. During the late 1970s and through the 1980s, Blessed Sacrament was led by a priest, Richard Donahue, and parish staff who cared a great deal about the turmoil engulfing Jamaica Plain.

“They had a good understanding of all three [black, Latino, and white] communities that were there then,” recalls Sister Virginia Mulhern, who worked at Blessed Sacrament until a few years ago as a pastoral minister, helping the church with education and outreach to the community. “We tried to make one roof for all the different cultures.”

Beyond making the church hospitable to newcomers, the leadership addressed the community’s problems head-on. In response to the proposed interstate highway, Donahue and Francis Clougherty, another pastor, started Catholic Community Concerned About the Corridor. The group held a workshop at a nearby community college to educate residents about what might happen whether or not the highway was built. A backlash against highway building led the state to abandon the Jamaica Plain road in 1974, but by that time many homes had been demolished and a swath of empty land ran through the neighborhood.

The church also built ties to grass-roots neighborhood organizations forming to combat the same ills church leaders were concerned about. Mulhern recalls when JPNDC wanted to build affordable housing on scattered sites, it asked her to accompany one of the agency’s organizers to meet with local residents. The organizer got a gold mine of information about which land was available and who to talk to. Residents trusted the church and figured if JPNDC had its blessing, that was good enough for them.

“In a sense, Blessed Sacrament was the heartbeat of the community. I knew who was there, who was poor, which house had water and which one had heat,” Mulhern says.

When gang violence erupted in the neighborhood in the early 1990s, Mulhern and some parishioners and neighborhood activists founded a group to organize peace marches and other anti-crime efforts. The group was successful in encouraging gang members to talk with their rivals. The Hyde Square Task Force, a youth organizing group that fights for more affordable housing and services for young people in the area, emerged from this effort.

For Blessed Sacrament’s leaders at the time, these forays into community activism were among the most vital elements of their work as theologians, according to Mulhern.

The Decision to Close

However, not all church leaders shared Mulhern’s point of view. In the 1990s, a new priest took the helm at Blessed Sacrament who did not have the same interest in community outreach, at least not if it meant getting involved in social issues. He spent much less time attending meetings with other community groups. He also made several changes in church policy, like charging a fee for use of the parish hall to non-church members. The effect was that the church’s relationship with the community was diminished.

Meanwhile, the demographic changes in the neighborhood, and in the church, that had begun decades earlier had accelerated. There were now few people at the English-language mass. The people who filled the pews were mostly Spanish speakers with origins in the Caribbean. While their faith was as fervent as that of the previous generation of parishioners, their pockets were comparably empty. Most lived on low incomes, lower than the whites who had now moved out of the neighborhood. When the offertory plate was passed around during services, few residents had much to give.

Blessed Sacrament was vulnerable, not only because of the relative poverty of its parishioners. The church also needed physical repair. Though the building had undergone major renovations in the 1950s, it had to be closed for two years during the 1990s after one of its pillars collapsed. Nearly a million dollars was spent to try to fix the problems, says Kathleen Heck, a project manager for the Archdiocese. But even this hardly put a dent in the maintenance costs.

The church’s physical size almost certainly played a role in the Archdiocese’s decision to sell it. Beyond the sanctuary itself, the surrounding campus included two church schools, a convent, and a rectory. Three of the buildings dated from the 1890s and the fourth from 1926. All the buildings had historical significance and, in Boston’s then-blazing real-estate market, very high dollar value.

But what really doomed Blessed Sacrament was that the people who were its lifeblood, the people who came to worship, lacked political power. Mulhern has a unique perspective on this, having moved in 2002 to run the religious education program at a Catholic church in the nearby Roxbury neighborhood. When the Archdiocese announced a list of churches slated for closure, both Blessed Sacrament and her new home were on the list. People who attended the Roxbury church traveled there from various sections of the city and could urge a broad cross-section of political leaders to lean on the Archdiocese to keep their church open.

“We were able to go to the neighbors, the agencies, the mayor, our own constituency, and say, ‘we’re too important, you can’t close us,’ ” says Mulhern. “But Blessed Sacrament didn’t have that kind of clout. It had lost it.”

Keeping the Church in the Community

The JPNDC was the obvious choice of many people in Jamaica Plain to make a bid to buy the church and the other four buildings. Twenty-five years after it made its first major purchase, a shuttered brewery complex that it turned into retail shops and offices, the organization has a deep well of respect in the community. While its major work has been to acquire neglected property and redevelop it as affordable housing, it has also collaborated with other activist groups in the area to save subsidized housing properties from going to market rate.

JPNDC called on its core supporters to rally in support of the proposal to buy the church. Others in the community, including Hyde Square Task Force and a grass-roots tenant organizing group, City Life/Vida Urbana, lent their forces to the effort. It was by no means certain that the Archdiocese would be willing to sell to a nonprofit.

At a series of planning meetings, the developers invited residents to help determine what should be done with the church and adjacent buildings. Meanwhile, JPNDC’s Executive Director Richard Thal, and his staff mobilized to woo the media and city leaders, organizing a petition drive that gathered 1,400 signatures in support of JPNDC’s bid. The major Boston newspapers responded, publishing editorials and columns voicing strong support. The writers reminded church leaders of their social mission, as well as the Archdiocese’s public statements in recent years decrying the affordable-housing crisis in the city. These words surely influenced the Archdiocese’s decision, in September 2005, to sell the church to JPNDC.

But small but vocal minority group came to meetings of the neighborhood council to protest JPNDC’s involvement. This group, made up largely of a number of homeowners from some of the adjacent residential streets, feared a new affordable-housing development on their turf. Given the chance to speak to the council before it voted to support JPNDC’s bid, some of these residents used the forum to claim the community had enough affordable rental housing already.

“They said that affordable housing brings down neighborhoods, that people who live there don’t choose to be actively involved in the community, that owners were the ones who were the backbone of any neighborhood. Some of those inflammatory statements did more to mobilize people than anything we could have said or done,” says Thal.

Neutralizing the Opposition

Once JPNDC had purchased the property, it began an intensive campaign of door-knocking and house meetings, as well as a few community-wide gatherings, to present its proposal to the community. It called for turning the church itself into market-rate condos, The two schools would continue to be used for educational and community programs by local nonprofits, while the convent would become single-room-occupancy housing for people who had been homeless. JPNDC also proposed two new buildings for the site, including one with townhouses for first-time homebuyers. The other was to be built at the corner of Centre Street, the artery on which most of the neighborhood’s retail stores are located. This building would have affordable limited-equity cooperative apartments, with retail stores on the ground floor and an underground parking garage.

JPNDC, and New Atlantic Development Corp., its for-profit development partner, considered the retail component essential to making the project economically feasible. But there was already a building at the corner of Centre Street: the church’s rectory. JPNDC proposed to tear it down.

At this point Historic Hyde Square, one of several historical preservation groups in the area, launched a loud protest to the media and at public hearings for the project, calling for the rectory to be saved. The JPNDC argued that the rectory had been altered so much over the years that its historical value had diminished, but historians disagreed. In March 2006, the Boston Landmarks Commission, which has an advisory role, advised the developers to keep the rectory if they wanted the city board’s support.

Another group, the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association, which represented mostly middle-class homeowners on streets close to the church, emerged to say that the project would add too many people and cars to an already crowded area. It called for reducing the number of housing units from 115 to around 75. Its members also argued that the community needed homeownership more than rental units. These arguments drew angry responses from some residents who were already upset by comments they had heard before JPNDC bought the church.

This appeared to put JPNDC’s plans in some peril. But JPNDC recognized that the majority in the community didn’t care much about the rectory. Nor were most residents particularly worried about the new building’s density. Their real concern was to save the church.

In response to the argument that the project added too much density, JPNDC countered that it had calculated the number of units it would need in order to give residents other things they wanted, including a green space in the middle of the site and room for businesses. As for the rectory, the developers decided to move it down the street, rather than demolish it. The effect was to neutralize much of the opposition, says Harry Smith, who was JPNDC’s director of organizing at the time.

“Some of their leaders came out publicly against the project anyway, but they had to speak directly against affordable housing, rather than talk about historical preservation,” he says.

The Role of the Parishioners

Had JPNDC not succeeded in drawing a significant number of residents and former church parishioners to the public meetings, the outcome might have been different. Initially many people in the neighborhood were so upset by the church’s closing that they showed little enthusiasm to be involved in what would take its place. JPNDC made a point of reaching out to these former churchgoers. “The ones who did get involved were crucial to our ability to win approval for the project,” says Smith. “They were able to speak forcefully about the need to redevelop the property in a way that would continue to benefit the local community.”

Many of the people who came to the meetings were outraged that the opponents claimed to represent the community, though many of them had only lived in the area a few years. “For me, if someone’s been here five years or more, they have a right to complain. But if they’ve only been here a year, they haven’t had enough time to see what the changes have been in the community,” says Clara Garcia, who had worshipped at Blessed Sacrament since she moved to Jamaica Plain in 1979.

Garcia was one of several former church parishioners who were appointed by Mayor Thomas Menino to serve on a community advisory board to make sure the project represented the neighborhood’s best interest. Strength came from other quarters, too, like the priest at another Jamaica Plain church who let JPNDC hand out fliers after services about upcoming community meetings.

With opposition to the project put aside, the developers have concentrated on finding money to complete the church’s overhaul. It will be the last of the five buildings to be renovated.

Some details remain to be worked out, including the community space that will be in the front section of the former church. Gutierrez refers to this community room as a plaza, using the word commonly used in Latin America for a central public square. She and other former parishioners are eager to be involved in planning this space, where they hope to display mementos of the church itself and of their organizing work in the community. Gutierrez has pictures of her daughter’s first communion and baptism that she intends to contribute.

She has been to many of the planning meetings throughout the process of turning the church into housing, before JPNDC purchased the church and during the acrimonious sessions that followed.

“I encouraged people to come to the meetings,” she says. “It’s really hard for people to sit down and talk about something different. They were hoping the church would re-open. You were crying inside, so it wasn’t easy. But it was a reality check.”

Published by the National Housing Institute