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Menino has one of his worst weeks ever

City Hall by Ben Geman

Call it the perfect storm -- February 15 to 19 was the worst week in a lousy month at City Hall, with a one-two punch from federal officials that left the city scrambling for damage control and Mayor Tom Menino clearly pissed off.

Menino leapt ahead of national Democratic officials on Tuesday, February 16, to announce that Boston's long-shot bid to host the 2000 Democratic National Convention was all but dead. But it was the stiffer and more surprising shot, from federal housing officials, that really made the week horrendous.

On Tuesday night, word spread of the findings by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in a three-year probe of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA), an inquiry sparked by civil-rights complaints filed by 13 families alleging racial intimidation and assaults in South Boston and Charlestown housing projects between 1992 and 1996.

The report's findings are so free of ambiguity that they're unspinnable: the BHA, according to HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo, systematically failed to respond when offered evidence of racial harassment and assaults in the Old Colony and Bunker Hill developments.

The good news? Last week's devastating report by federal housing officials may have been bad news for the mayor, but it could prove an ironic blessing to a group of South End and Lower Roxbury housing activists. About a year ago, the South End-Lower Roxbury Housing and Planning Coalition filed a complaint with HUD's Fair Housing Office alleging discrimination in the way the city awards development rights on publicly owned land. The coalition -- which includes state representative Byron Rushing and state senator Dianne Wilkerson -- argued that white neighborhoods are afforded a more thorough and democratic community process when it comes to development of public land. The case sprang from protest over Northeastern University's plans to build a mix of dorms and affordable housing on several parcels of city-owned land in Lower Roxbury. Residents -- along with elected officials such as Rushing -- savaged the school's scheme for offering too little affordable housing to neighborhood residents. Lower Roxbury leaders also decried their lack of input into the original agreement. Eventually, after months of protest that gave rise to several demonstrations and negotiating sessions, a deal was struck that upped the amount of affordable housing in the planned complex, among other provisions. Now, with HUD keeping a close eye on Boston, the activists may be in a stronger position as they push the city for a more comprehensive community process. According to a HUD official, a meeting between the coalition and the city to discuss the discrimination complaint could take place within the next couple of weeks. The official, who declined to be named, said a deal could be close, but notes that "nothing has been signed and it has not been agreed to in writing." Coalition members declined comment.

What's really bugging the Menino administration, though, is what the report didn't say -- and how the whole thing played out over two days last week. The events left some city officials feeling "blind-sided," "cheap-shotted," and, most colorful of all, "Cuomoed," according to one top Menino aide. Officials are angry that the findings were made public at the same time that the city learned about them. Press calls asking for comment on the report started flowing into City Hall Tuesday night.

Even worse, according to the administration, was that the report never mentioned the BHA's efforts since 1996 to crack down on the types of incidents detailed in the HUD findings, which showed black and Hispanic tenants subjected to beatings, epithets, and other intimidation.

Not long after the report was released, City Hall's e-mail network lit up with copies of a letter that BHA administrator Sandra Henriquez sent to Menino expressing her "outrage" at the report's failure to cover what the city has done over the past three years. "It was our understanding that in earlier drafts there was acknowledgment that progress had been made," laments one senior administration official. "In the end, they decided not even to grant us that."

Henriquez's point-by-point memo highlights such initiatives as the agency's three-year-old Civil Rights Protection Program, which creates guidelines for recognizing and addressing civil-rights issues. The BHA head, appointed in 1996, says she looks forward to showing HUD the "real story" about the "new" BHA. And HUD will indeed explore what progress the city has made in preventing more awful incidents such as those detailed in the agency's report: children being beaten, BBs fired through a tenant's window, racist graffiti, and more. A 30-day review, announced last Wednesday and begun, HUD says, this week, will look at the BHA's efforts since 1996 in responding to racial harassment. But from the administration's point of view, the PR damage has already been done.

As bad as the whole debacle sounds for the city, it gets worse. The release of HUD's findings got play across the nation -- papers from Florida to Ohio picked it up. And this comes at a time when Menino has identified housing as one of his two top priorities. Last month, in his State of the City address, the mayor pledged to dramatically boost the city's housing budget, and announced the hiring of state representative Charlotte Golar Richie as his new housing czar.

Not everyone believes the HUD report was a "cheap shot." Certainly the city was aware of the investigation and the severity of the charges levied against the BHA, notes Ozell Hudson, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, which represented families that brought the complaints and a federal lawsuit against the BHA. Hudson isn't ready to believe that there is a "new BHA," calling reforms minimal. "Obviously there have been some improvements," he says. "But that does not mean those improvements have affected the quality of life for people of color who live in BHA developments."

The timing of the scathing HUD report -- released just as it was becoming obvious that Boston would not host the DNC convention -- brought speculation that DNC officials wanted to create a rationalization for denying Boston the event.

That conspiracy theory seems far-fetched, though. The reality is that federal officials hardly needed new reasons to rule out Boston. Menino rightly notes that California trumps Massachusetts in electoral votes. And then there's the matter of the Big Dig, which could have created too many aesthetic and logistical problems to carry the convention off smoothly at the FleetCenter.

The silver lining in the rejection? At least we'll be spared the surreal dissonance of Democrats crowning the NAFTA-loving Al Gore after days of New Democrat blather about commitment to working people in a building named for a bank.

That's not the consensus view, though; the Menino administration and others saw the convention as a chance to legitimize Boston as a "world-class city," a rather abstract phrase that nonetheless has plenty of local currency. Of course, for the families who filed suit against the BHA for failing to respond in the face of racial hatred, Boston looks like anything but.

Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.