Article by Judi Barrett
My husband and I have lived in the same home since March 1977. We were kids with no money when we bought this place, but even though he’s the older, much smarter, and more worldly partner in our relationship, my husband didn’t know what I learned the day I stopped here to get the keys from the real estate agent.
The head of a Cape Verdean family of cranberry farmers built our home “between the wars.” It has a small kitchen wing off the back of the house and a small, detached garage. His initials and “1942” are etched into the garage floor and the cement that holds together a fragile stone wall along one side of the driveway. The house is modest by today’s standards, with 1,600 sq. ft. of living space tucked into two stories. A long time ago, the neighborhood had several homes a lot like ours, most of them built by members of the same Cape Verdean family: small, wood-frame ranch houses or Cape-style buildings with shed dormer additions to create a little more space, all on generous lots lined up along the road. Back then, gardens and landscaping equipment could be seen out back because many people who settled here ran small businesses on the side. Ocean Spray by day; entrepreneurs by night.
The day I picked up the keys, I knew nothing about the neighborhood. My husband had chosen the house. (I confess: I was wimpy back then.) Oddly enough, the realtor had already stopped by, left the keys in the front door, and moved on to her next appointment. The woman who lived across the street in an even smaller house stepped outside to meet her new neighbor. She was funny and sociable and a bit gossipy. Within a few hours, I had met almost everyone who lived nearby. My neighbors were Cape Verdean, Black, White, and Japanese. My mother called me mid-afternoon to check in. I said I hated the house (true confession), but I told her about our neighbors and how nice they had been. Dead silence on the other end of the call. In so many words, my mother said the realtor sold us a house in the ghetto. White kids with no money had just moved into a minority-majority neighborhood. At the time, I didn’t know we had joined a movement: the Whitening of “the other side of town.”
Where I live today is nothing like where I landed in 1977. Decades later, I grew to love this place, but no demolition delay bylaw will keep my home standing when I finally have to move. Several homes have been altered, renovated, and expanded beyond recognition to the people who built them almost a century ago. The last member of the original Cape Verdean family that settled here sold the house he grew up in after his father died. He couldn’t afford to keep it. Almost 30 years ago, a young couple bought the nineteenth-century farmhouse across the way and doubled its size. When they sold it in 2023, another young family paid $1.7 million for it, moved in, and built yet another addition. Stories like this abound in Greater Boston suburbs, but this is my neighborhood, my town, and when I moved in, a semblance of diversity existed here – however fragile it was.
On my street, the loss of homeownership choices for people of color is not accidental. Racial covenants don’t exist on this side of town (I researched it). However, when growth accelerated south of Boston because of busing and discord in the city, it transformed communities here with money, privilege, and attitudes. It catalyzed racial and economic displacement. In towns like mine, the market accomplished what no upstanding Massachusetts politician would have openly condoned: legalized discrimination. Racism in the penumbra.
Unfair housing policies affect me and you, too, even if you’re unaware of it (something you may want to consider). The absence of safe, affordable, well-managed housing for people with severe disabilities means that most of them will not be able to live in their hometown when they reach adulthood. In the suburbs, the official “text” for resistance to multifamily housing is the impact on public schools, but scratch below the surface, and the subtext consists of jumbled angst about race, disability (special education), and class. In one of our communities, the racial makeup of the population and that of the public schools paints a disturbing picture: 29 percent minority population overall, 60.3 percent minority K-12 students. Where have all the White children gone? Gone to private school, every one … when will they ever learn?
I was 14 when James Earl Ray shot and killed Martin Luther King, Jr. Congress mustered the votes to pass the Fair Housing Act a week later. It has taken decades of persistent, difficult, and sometimes dangerous work to make the civil rights of fair housing more than a promise. Our work is not done. Today, laws, regulations, policies, and programs designed to prevent discrimination are under assault by the politics of revenge in Washington. Fair Housing matters to me for personal, professional, and religious reasons. If you hire us, please understand that our work will be guided by the founding principal’s commitment to basic social fairness. That would be me.