What do people in crime-ridden Boston neighborhoods really want?

There's something sorely lacking in our society when things like this are allowed to go on. Addressing the root causes of this horrific situation, which are many, and are complex, would go a long, long way towards dealing with and hopefully eradicating this problem, which, I believe, is the longterm result of people being confined to ghettoes and not being allowed access to housing in other parts of the city.

In the spring of 1968, shortly after MLK's assassination, then-Mayor Kevin H. White announced a program, B-BURG(Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group), which was ostensibly geared towards helping low-income first-time African-American buyers obtain FHA (Federal Housing Admn.)-insured mortgages and attain the responsibility of home ownership for the first time. B-BURG was a consortium of some 20 Boston-area banks that operated in partnership with Real Estate Agents. For the B-BURG experiments, the Jewish areas of Roxbury, North Dorchester and Mattapan were chosen and effectively "red-lined", in many cases denying black homebuyers decent housing that they'd found, which were just afew blocks outside the "redlined" B-BURG areas.

Real Estate Agents frequently warned Jewish family to "sell and get out now before property values declined". With the advent of threats, arsons, break-ins and fire-bombings, most of the remaining Jewish families residing in the "redlined" B-BURG areas fled, as a consequence of the panic-induced blockbusting. Because of the overtly racist campaigning on the part of the banks and real estate agents affiliated with the
B-BURG program, B-BURG was nothing short of a disaster. I believe that had B-BURG allowed blacks and other minorities access to housing throughout the city, instead of engaging in the "redlining" of the Jewish areas, that neighborhoods and schools alike would've been much more integrated, much safer, and there would've been better schools for both non-white and white Boston public school students alike.

Far from helping people break out of the ghetto, B-BURG had only enlarged, expanded, extended and reinforced it, resulting in an impoverished, crime-and-drug-infested ghetto, which still exists today. In the late 1960's, then-Illinois governor Otto Kerner
warned "that the nation was developing into two nations, one black, one white, separate and unequal" Had efforts gotten underway to dismantle the ghettoes and create integrated neighborhoods, including here in Boston, there would not be so many problems and the crime rate would not be nearly as intense. I also believe that, had the B-BURG program been carried out differently, there would've been a far better chance of neutralizing the late Louise Day Hicks and her cronies on the Boston School Committee, thus derailing her/their crusade(s), thus eliminating the need for divisive policies such as mandated school busing, which made many people more angry, fearful and suspicious of each other.

Jules Witcover's book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 Here in America, points this out very succintly by the following quotation "These kids don't understand that when they're killing each other, it's because thirty years ago, nobody did anything to alleviate the problems in their neighborhood(s)" This particular quote, I believe, says it all, in a nutshell.