Madison Park Development Corp.
Danette Jones, Executive Director
Peter H. Chapman, Director of Economic Development
122 DeWitt Drive
Roxbury, Mass. 02120
(617) 445-1061

Boston's Lower Roxbury neighborhood just south of downtown stands to this day as a horrible example of the worst abuses of Urban Renewal, demonstrating why advocates typically called it "urban removal." During the mid-1960s, a move to build a highway through what had been a good, multi-ethnic, multi-income neighborhood, despite sturdy local opposition, ultimately resulted in what had once been a vibrant urban streetscape turning into a dumping ground for garbage and debris and then a ghost town.

But Lower Roxbury's good news came when the remaining residents banded together into a community organization that eventually grew into one of the most effective multi-purpose community economic-development groups around. Lower Roxbury Community Corp., later renamed Madison Park Development after a public park that was long a center of the community, boasts a 30-year track record of innovative, pragmatic redevelopment that has made it a national model for the kind of good work that CAN be done to restore inner-city neighborhoods ravaged by bad public policy and poverty.

As the first non-profit group ever given development rights in Boston (and one of the first in the nation), Madison Park leveraged federal and city money to build its first two housing complexes, using the high-rise design then in vogue, in the early '70s. Smith House, a 12-story, 132-unit senior citizen building, rose in 1973, with the seven-story Haynes House for 220 low-income families following in 1973. Following them came the visual centerpiece of Madison Park Village, a two-phase apartment development featuring a total of more than 260 attractive brick and wood-frame townhouse units on attractively landscaped property, with lawns and trees, a well-kept residential community that has the look -- but not the rental prices -- of a luxury urban development.

Managed in partnership with a for-profit property-management company that returns approximately $110,000 in rental fees to its non-profit partner annually, these complexes provide excellent housing and a high quality of life to more than 525 low-income families, with rental subsidies facilitating rental payments as low as $194 a month in Smith House, and using a combination of federal programs like Section 8 and HOME along with interest-earning endowment funds to hold rents throughout the development to a humane 30 to 35 percent of income -- which may be as little as $80 a month for some of the poorest residents. More housing is coming soon in a 20-unit limited-equity cooperative; and residents whose income rise to the point where rent approaches $1,000 a month are guided toward credit rehabilitation programs and counseling aimed at making home ownership a reality.

Using pragmatic, entrepreneurial principles refined over three decades of success, Madison Park views its properties as assets to be nurtured, and has made creative use of changing federal programs and incentives to generate rehabilitation money to keep the properties in top condition and up to date; during the week of my visit in April 1996, it won a national award from the National Assisted Housing Management Association (NAHMA), honoring the competence and effectiveness of its management. It also won a city contract, against heavy private-sector competition, to undertake the $50 million rehabilitation and expansion of nearby Orchard Park, one of the city's most blighted public-housing projects.

For its housing efforts alone, Madison Park would stand as a national model. But as all the most innovative grassroots programs do, it has not limited its efforts to housing alone but has sought to address the needs of its community through multiple approaches.

For years, Madison Park has added social-services and human-services elements to its housing programs, including: