Episcopal News Service: Press Release # 77-25

Spotlight on Blockbusting

Diocesan Press Service. August 10, 1969 [77-25]

Ernest Boynton

(The following article is by Ernest Boynton, a black writer of New York City who was assigned by the Executive Council to report on Boston's South End Tenants Council, a community organization funded by the General Convention Special Program. Mr. Boynton is on the staff of the Board of Missions of the United Methodist Church. The pictures are by St. Clair Bourne, a New York photographer, who is also a black.)

Theodore Parrish is a dynamic black social worker who has organized marginal income black families, home owners, ADC mothers, pimps, prostitutes and junkies into Boston's South End Tenants Council. At one time the South End had a population of 58,000, but it has since declined to 28,000 residents. While the area is predominantly black, there is a growing number of Spanish-speaking people, and poor whites.

Mr. Parrish and his team (two VISTA volunteers, two full-time and seven part- time workers) have also been conducting a public campaign against contract-holders of homes sold to black families at exorbitant rates. They are working to get real estate people to renegotiate their contracts with the black buyers.

Contract buying works in this way: A Mr. and Mrs. Allan Frazier (fictitious name) are buying a home in the South End on contract. Their contract shows that the sale price was $27,500, with $2,000 down and the $25,500 balance to be paid at the interest rate of seven percent per annum. Monthly payments are $184, with $160 of this applied to principal and interest. The purchasers would have to make this high monthly payment for 35 years before their contract is completed. Total interest charges will be $41,700, which makes the total purchase price for this two flat South End dwelling $69,200.

The 1959 appraisal of the property, the year the Fraziers bought it, indicated that its approximate value was $16,000. The Fraziers are paying $43,126 more for their property than they would have if a just price and a conventional mortgage had been available to them.

Mr. Parrish and college students from several institutions of higher learning in the Boston-Cambridge area did several months research in county and city records before launching their campaign against contract buying. Their methods include periodic night meetings with South End residents at the South End Settlement House, headquarters for the Tenants Council, picketing of real estate offices on Saturdays, distribution of fact sheets in the neighborhoods where the real estate agents live, and meticulous research in county records.

The issue here is moral rather than legal. The law does not provide a remedy for the type of injustice that is operative in these contracts. Many blacks in Boston are working at two and three jobs to meet the exorbitant monthly payments and still there is not enough money after payments for improvements and maintenance of the homes.

More important, perhaps, is the slow suffering and lack of family life which the evils of contract buying foster. In effect, the purchasers pay a race tax upwards of $20,000 when they buy their homes because it has been impossible for blacks to obtain mortgages. This is a striking example of how our legal system does not adequately protect black people or poor people. It stems from the fact that the law aims at protecting property rather than people. And this helps to cause urban unrest.

While both the black and the white communities blamed each other for the situation, Mr. Parrish said, the real villains were a few real estate speculators who frightened white families out of a changing neighborhood, bought their houses cheap, and then sold them at extravagant prices to black families seeking desperately to escape from the ghetto.

According to Mr. Parrish, many community institutions were involved in an exploitative process. The city's banks refused mortgages to blacks because they were "poor risks," yet they provided the speculators with the capital they needed to operate. The city government and the city housing commission knew of the situation but did nothing. The city's suburbs, despite Federal open housing legislation, knew how to evade those laws and effectively confine the black community within the city. Day after day, during the eviction proceedings conducted in the city's courts, lawyers and judges saw the suffering caused by this exploitation, yet took no action.

Government officials, Mr. Parrish pointed out, devoted their energies to prosecuting pornographers, while poor black people, oppressed by exorbitant weekly rent, lacked even the dollar needed to buy a pornographic magazine. The churches had failed, too, for they had not confronted their communities with the most important Christian decision of their lives -- whether to stay and build a real community of both whites and blacks, or to run in fear to the shelter of the suburbs.

Mr. Parrish quickly noted, however, that the Rev. William D. Dwyer, vicar of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in the South End and the General Convention Special Program of the Episcopal Church had been very helpful in aiding the South End Tenants Council's self-help program of organizing to negotiate effectively with city hall and the business community to improve housing conditions, create job and training opportunities. Established in July, 1968, the Tenants Council received a Special Program grant of $18,000 from the Ep scopal Church in the autumn of this year.

In response to the growing impatience and frustration within the black community and the fear that city agencies want to bulldoze them out of their lodgings in the South End community, the Tenants Council had undertaken a massive task of fighting the area's slumlord's slumlord. Joseph Mindick, a God-fearing Jew, named each of his family's ten corporations with Hebrew words, which, strung together, form a prayer. He gets some of his money from the 50 brick row houses in the South End, and from tax depreciation write-offs received while most of the buildings rot. Eighty years ago, these buildings were one-family homes. Now, each floor is divided into $12 to $22-a-week rental units. The boundary marker is any door that shuts.

One tenant, Mr. Walter Carpenter, told me, "The first ten months, I swept the halls, carried out the garbage and cleaned the bathrooms. Mindick promised to pay me, but he never did." Mr. Carpenter and his wife raise three children in the two rooms he rents from one of the Mindick corporations.

In a basement apartment, a young black mother pointed to where the ceiling was waterlogged and threatening to fall. She wanted to move, she said, because of the rats, and the fact that they can get into her baby's crib.

Between 40 and 50 percent of the residents of these lodgings are on general relief, receiving, individually, roughly $62.25 every two weeks. Because of the living conditions in the flats there is a high rate of turnover by the occupants, some moving as frequently as every two months.

One of the 20 building representatives paid $10 a week by the Tenants Council is Robert Quarles. (The representatives help organize tenants, so that tenants can act as a collective whole ("tenant power") to bring pressure to bear on their particular landlords. They also recruit and counsel new Tenants Council members.) For $80 a month Mr. Quarles and his wife have a roof over their heads. But they are forced to cook all their meals on a hot plate. The four-room flat once had a gas stove, but broken and eroded pipes can't convey gas.

They must take baths in friends' homes, because the only bathtub in the building doesn't work. And, they must sweat out an ever-present fire danger because the fire escape outside their window is merely a platform and goes nowhere.

Most of the 400 to 500 units in the Mindick properties are just as nightmarish. Appeals to the Housing Inspection Department, the District Health Unit, the mayor's office, and other official channels by the Tenants Council had been thwarted with technicalities and red tape. Because of failure to enforce housing codes and a landlord- oriented court system, the frustrated tenants using their organized "tenant power" planned a strategy for bringing positive pressure to bear on their landlords, one which they hoped would either get their case into Superior Court for final settlement or force the landlord to sell the buildings to the Tenants Council. The target: One of the Mindick brothers, Israel, a cantor. The idea was to embarrass him, let his congregation see the kind of cantor he is.

Father Dwyer called Rabbi Judea Miller, chairman of the Social Action Committee of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis, and confided the plan, asking the Rabbi to join them.

Rabbi Miller visited the tenants' apartments: "Disgusting! I was revolted." That afternoon, he joined the black pickets in front of Cantor Israel Mindick's middle- class home in the quiet Boston community of Mattapan.

Mr. Israel Mindick was out, but he came home to discomfiting questions from his neighbors. "Can you imagine," he asked me, "the experience -- for a cantor's home to be picketed?"

Then, Rabbi Miller presented a brief to the Rabbinical Court of Justice of the Associated Synagogues of Massachusetts. There are about two dozen such courts in the United States. They function as arbiters of disputes and as interpreters of religious law within the Jewish community. A Jew cited for contempt by a Rabbinical Court can be stripped of any position of authority within the religious community. To an Orthodox Jew, it can mean a public humiliation.

The result of the historic confrontation was a contract, signed by the Mindicks and the Tenants Council, and binding in civil court. The Mindick apartments were to be plastered and painted, the plumbing repaired, wiring installed, new locks put on the doors, the floors covered with linoleum.

What Mindick actually did in one or two buildings was strictly a "jive thing," or getting some students to put on the buildings about $25 worth of paint, says Mr. Parrish.

In a letter to the Boston Globe Ted Parrish, 34-year old doctoral student at Boston University, expressed his reaction: "The Jewish community has taken a significant step... courageous, concrete, and precedent-setting. "

Buoyed by its success, the Tenants Council's membership soared from 150 to 700 members in recent months, reports Mr. Leon Williams, 26-year-old chairman of the Council. An eighth grade dropout, Mr. Williams moved to Boston with his wife from Norfolk, Virginia, about two and a half years ago; his two children are still living in the South. A plumber by training, he found he couldn't get a job in Boston in this field because of union restrictions barring him from membership. Since his election in November 1968 as chairman of the Tenants Council he has gone far to becoming an effective leader, judging by the results of the Tenants Council. He is convinced that tenants acting collectively can force indifferent landlords to provide equitable returns for dollars spent in housing, or sell their property.

Prior to a final showdown in a Massachusetts superior court, Joseph Mindick on May 21st sold 38 of his 50 buildings to the newly-created South End Tenants Management Firm through the Boston Redevelopment Administration. The autonomous management firm, which has its own board of directors (two from the SETC and 2 from the Afro-American Maintenance Corp.) has a staff of six full-time workers, will work with the BRA to insure that the buildings are effectively managed up to the point where they undergo rehabilitation. After the buildings are rehabilitated by an indigenous black-owned and operated firm, the management firm will manage them up to the point where individual houses can be spun off to the effective management of the persons living in the houses. To minimize dislocation of or loss of residents during the rehabilitation period, Mr. Williams reports that only five buildings will be converted at one time. The occupants will live in temporary units.

To dramatize the readiness of the residents and Tenants Council and management firm staff to move into this grass roots undertaking, initial capital for development will be raised locally, Mr. Parrish said in a telephone interview. "If all goes well, we plan to approach a bank in August-September for a substantial rehabilitation and development loan to meet the expenses of managing and rehabilitating these buildings over a two-year period. "

It is estimated that it will cost approximately $16,000 to rehabilitate a South End building. The South End Tenants Management Firm is confident that Mr. Mindick will sell his remaining ten buildings shortly. Two buildings purchased by the Tenants Council the early part of this year have already been turned over to management-control of the residents. Purchase of these buildings was made possible by a $19,000 loan from Boston's Black United Front at five percent interest repayable over an eight-year period, along with a $700 donation from Rabbi Miller's synagogue and $600 from St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, which has been instrumental also in getting the religious community to help undergird the work of the Tenants Council.

Realizing that human development means more than just fighting for equitable mortgages and rent for the poor but the development of the whole person, the South End Tenants Council has set up a mental hygiene clinic for some residents living in the tenant group buildings. Currently, a Boston University Medical Center psychiatrist, on a voluntary basis, meets with persons individually and group sessions recommended by the Tenants Council.

In other areas, the Tenants Council has helped two residents in the six-block area become involved in a one-year housing inspector trainee program, for which they are paid $115.00 a week. If successful in completing the program, they could earn $179 a week.

Bright young black students, one of whom was in a correction school, are now attending a first-class school in a suburban community. Each lives with a white family during the school week and returns each weekend to his South End home.

General welfare recipients thought to be unemployable are now performing well in employment situations. One lady, who previously worked as a building caretaker, is now a medical worker at Boston City Hospital. She says: "It was great to learn a skill. Now I can help people who are sick. "

Twice a week staff members attend black studies classes at a Roxbury Center.

Some of the ongoing expenses are met through the sale of box candy by volunteers at work and at the black-owned and operated-Freedom Foods Supermarket in nearby Dorchester.

To cut down crime rate, the Tenants Council has been instrumental in the formation of a civilian patrol, which operates during the peak crime hours of 4 p. m. to 1 a. m. Since the patrol went into operation the early part of the year there has been a sharp reduction in muggings, molesting of women and other crimes.

Realizing that art can help develop pride and understanding, the tenant group encourages local artists whenever possible to paint on the exterior of buildings "Walls of Respect" depicting black history, culture and heritage. These murals, Council officials say, help make the community a more pleasant place to live in -- in addition to giving talented artists an opportunity to win greater recognition.

Like all professionals in the nitty-gritty field of urban development, Parrish feels: "If money were more readily available, many of the problems could be solved; and we could do much more. There is tremendous competition for the dollar, which purchases buildings, equipment, and, most important, helps people who have been psychologically scarred by foul living conditions to learn how to live in the world and a society caught up with rapid development, change, and tensions."

Expenses for running the Tenants Council are met by grants from religious, educational, civic and government organizations and agencies, Parrish says. The tenants give what they can in manpower and finances.

Mrs. Mary Longley, a widow and a resident of the South End for 19 years, says, "Ted has the ability to make people feel he has nothing else to do but sit there and listen to them. " But he does have many other things to do.

As a former Director of the Division of Youth Development, Department of Health, Education and Welfare's Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Development, he supervised a central staff of 25 people and supervised the handling of between $6 and $9 million dollars a year for programs in the Washington, D. C., area. After three years as an anti-poverty administrator, he came to Boston where he has been helping to develop local leadership and one of the country's most unique black community development programs. He says: "Then I tried to help people who were already in trouble; now I want to keep people out of trouble. "

Beside his many public responsibilities, according to Mr. Willie B. Johnson, a 24-year resident of the community and who has just completed half of a four-year training program in operating printing presses and equipment, Parrish has done even more behind the scenes to solve human problems. "To appreciate the magnitude of his work, you would have to interview every resident he has helped to find employment, everyone he has helped to train, all the people who come to him with personal difficulties. "

Whether he is addressing a Boston civic group or the officers of the Boston Redevelopment Administration or a slumlord, whether he is flying to New York to ask a Foundation for money or telling black and Spanish-speaking students to stay in school and getting them to smile and agree to it, Theodore Parrish is, as a Boston journalist once put it, a man who projects "the deepest, most dynamic meaning of black power."

--Ernest Boynton