{"id":17266,"date":"2024-02-20T11:01:51","date_gmt":"2024-02-20T16:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ioc\/?p=17266"},"modified":"2026-03-18T10:47:46","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T14:47:46","slug":"an-pham-reflecting-on-my-2022-2023-nlc-menino-fellowship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ioc\/2024\/02\/20\/an-pham-reflecting-on-my-2022-2023-nlc-menino-fellowship\/","title":{"rendered":"An Pham: Reflecting On My 2022\u20132023 NLC Menino Fellowship"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I had a fantastic experience being the 2022\u2013<\/strong>2023 National League of Cities Menino Fellow<\/a>. I went in with a summer\u2019s experience from another IOC Fellowship<\/a>, half of an economics degree, and scattered convictions about cities. I\u2019m leaving as a staunch urbanist after exploring those convictions and finding names for the ones that made sense by the end. This is a glimpse into my year-long dive into urban policy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fall Semester: My Directed Study<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The first half was a Directed Study under Professor Loretta Lees<\/a>, the Director of the Initiative on Cities. I studied Boston\u2019s history of housing policy from the post-World War II era to the 1990\u2019s. Instead of a dry look at zoning codes, I got a crash course on how the era\u2019s rapid social changes shook Boston\u2019s institutions, communities, and residents.<\/span><\/p>\n

Car culture enabled sprawling suburbs, demanded highways that essentially split Black communities, and shifted economic activity to car-based cities. Boston was already suffering as manufacturing left the Northeast and Midwest in the 1930\u2019s. Boston bled tax dollars as the federal government financed cheap mortgages for single-family homes and as white families and private investment moved to the growing suburbs.<\/span><\/p>\n

The racist idea of urban blight also took hold. Through the 1950s, federal policies like the 1949 U.S. Housing Act allowed cities to buy \u201cblighted property\u201d at a discount and sell it to developers. Boston used eminent domain to evict thousands of low-income Black residents. Redlining prevented them from taking loans that could have repaired their \u201cblighted\u201d homes or let them move stably to other neighborhoods. Once they were evicted, Boston didn\u2019t have enough public housing and private, affordable housing for them.<\/span><\/p>\n

In short, Boston joined other cities pursuing \u201curban renewal.\u201d The approach was to bulldoze and displace poor communities while denying anyone who remained the investment needed to escape poverty. Just as every federally supported suburban home created generational wealth for a specific class of Americans, every locally-driven displacement added to the national racial wealth gap. Racist selling practices and covenants sealed the picket fence. Policymakers across the country tore the economic and social fabric of Black urban communities, using increasingly racial images of poverty and crime to justify further discrimination. It shapes any discussion of American urban poverty and policy to this day.<\/span><\/p>\n

Specific to Boston, though, I studied how four institutions shaped the era.<\/span><\/p>\n