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The economy and the Fenway

The Fenway Community Development Corp. ponders that question at its annual meeting on Monday, May 11.

Barry Bluestone from Northeastern, Beth Israel Deaconess COO Eric Buehrens and Amaad Rivera, the racial wealth divide initiative leader at United For a Fair Economy, will discuss.

It's 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the new Fenway Health Center, 1340 Boylston St.

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Comments

Sweet, so Section 8 and Luxury condos can get dumped on one of the few working class neighborhoods close to downtown in order to make some old hippies feel good.

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It's your clue - section 8 vouchers are valid statewide, not just in specified locations.

Thanks for playing.

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The CDC makes a point of making housing specifically available to special demographic groups. Work hard as a janitor all day, sorry no housing for you. Have a kinky sex life, a drug problem, don't speak English, or you're old and your family abandoned you... well we have a nice new shiny building JUST FOR YOU!

Luxury condos for New York City yuppie transplants or Sox fans? SURE BUILD EM HIGH!

Mid rise dense housing for working or middle class people based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, age, ethnicity, special social minority status or orientation, SORRY WE DON'T WANT YOU IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD ANYMORE.

MAKE WAY FOR THE RICH YUPPIES AND TOKEN CHARITY CASES TO MAKE THEM FEEL GOOD!

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Must be an 'interesting' laundry room in *that* building!

Seriously, though, to what demographic are you referring?

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In the 1970s Fenway used to have a large LGBT, or whatever acronym they use, population. Since Bay Village, South End, and Charlestown became safer and trendier most of them moved out except for a small dedicated bunch. Of that population many were and remained politically active and members of the civic association and CDC. As a result they're a bit biased towards trying to maintain or restore the population levels of their peers to the heyday. Mind you these aren't the weirdos off in the reeds, those creeps are a different population no one wants around.

Factor in the 'liberal', whom really aren't liberal, guilt crowd (usually the retired college professor types or the new yuppies in their cast concrete towers) and it becomes a problem where what 'affordable' housing stock is being built or maintained is geared towards trying to maintain or expand through importation of groups of a minority status in the name of diversity, forgetting the existing neighborhood is already diverse!

Private developers are coming in to develop all the parking lots and underutilized spaces. Understandably they want to maximize profit in what's been a steadily improving neighborhood for the last thirty years, so everything going up is luxury. Now when the CDC's construction and the existing fabric is being parceled out to choice groups, that's a pretty big squeeze on all of us old timers in the neighborhood whom don't fall into the favored categories.

Developers aren't going to build middle and working class stuff until it makes economic sense. The CDC has too much of a brownie point social activist streak running to care about everyone in the middle. Until that changes, everyone inbetween is screwed. They both should be building housing period, and leave all the quota, reserved for so and so, feel good bullshit out of it. But that doesn't work in a highly politicized city.

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I'm sympathetic to concerns about middle/working class people being forced out while low income people are welcomed. I don't know how much Fenway is like that, but I've seen it elsewhere, and I don't think we've found the best balance yet.

Kinky sex means whatever GLBT people do, then? I suspect that most of their bedrooms are as boring as most other people's.

Do you mean that there is housing in Fenway specifically designated by the gov't for GLBT people? How does that work?

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SNORE

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Somebody in the Fenway has a job?

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As a board member of the Fenway CDC, which is committed to promoting economic, racial and cultural diversity in the Fenway by developing affordable housing for all, I encourage and welcome all of you to stop by the Fenway Health Center on Monday!

What can I say--we do harbor the odd queer (myself included).

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