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Emmanuel Research Review

Resources for the urban pastor and community leader
published by Emmanuel Gospel Center, Boston
Issue No. 12 — October 2005

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The Emmanuel Research Review is a publication of the Emmanuel Gospel Center. The Review features articles, papers, resources, and information that we believe are helpful and relevant to urban pastors, leaders, and community members in their efforts to serve their communities effectively.

In this issue: Urban Renaissance & Church Planting

Challenges and strategies for church planters facing new neighborhood development and urban gentrification

by Rudy Mitchell
Senior Researcher
Emmanuel Research Institute

The church needs to anticipate population changes in the city. Various positive and negative forces attract people into or away from the city and specific areas of the city. An understanding of these dynamics can be useful in preparing to counter the exodus of church members or, on the other hand, to prepare to meet the needs of new residents moving in.

In Boston, a renaissance of the city’s core and many neighborhoods has created strong forces attracting young professionals, empty nesters, and others to live in the city. Recently, an excess of office space, coupled with a hot residential real estate market, has steered many developers toward building and renovating more housing units. The potential continuing influx of thousands of new residents presents an opportunity for churches to plan ways to reach and minister to them. The culture and interests of new groups of city residents also may call for new forms and methods of ministry.

The increasing pressures of gentrification and high housing costs challenge churches to continue to work to promote affordable housing in the city. Churches can also be meeting places and bridges to build understanding among the city’s diverse cultures.

In this issue of the Emmanuel Research Review, Rev. Ralph Kee, Facilitator of the Greater Boston Church Planting Collaborative, a ministry program of the Emmanuel Gospel Center in partnership with Mission to the Americas, describes, in two articles, the renaissance and gentrification in Boston and surveys the residential real estate development being planned. This is one aspect of a larger work which Rev. Kee is currently writing on urban church planting and growth. In these selections, he plants some seed ideas for new church development. We trust his thoughts and research will inspire both veteran and aspiring church planters to adopt a Kingdom vision as big as the city and as fresh as tomorrow.

Boston is a changed city. In this article Rev. Kee keenly examines the new growth in Boston neighborhoods with an eye toward church planting.

In the second article, Beau Monde Boston, Rev. Kee considers how the church in Boston, thriving today because of unprecidented church planting among poorer and ethnic populations, will be able to impact the many new, wealthier neighborhoods springing up around the city.

An extensive list of print and online resources for this issue is found in a supplementary page on our website.

Boston is a changed city

by Rev. Ralph Kee
Facilitator, Greater Boston Church Planting Collaborative
a collaborative ministry of Mission to the Americas and the Emmanuel Gospel Center

One day, it must have been in the late 1970s, Janet Haggar of Mayor Kevin White’s South End Little City Hall phoned me at my home on Wellington Street. “Wellington Street will be getting new street lights, and you will be living on a street with faux gas lights.” (She didn’t say it, but I thought it: “…so much in vogue on Beacon Hill and Bay Village. They would add panache to our new brick sidewalks and our newly-planted curb-side trees.”) I thanked Janet and said an immediate “no.” It was class warfare in the South End in those days; I had come to work with the poor, and stood with them aligned against South End forces pushing wholesale gentrification, with its displacement of the poor which rampant gentrification would inevitably mean. Wellington Street instead got the (some would later call ugly) plastic lollipop streetlights. Well, of course Wellington Street gentrified anyway, even without the Paul Revere lanterns. Boston has become a changed city.

In 1970, Boston stood at the lowest end of the healthy-unhealthy city continuum: “On a scale running from –4 to +4, the Brookings study rated the city of Boston –4 in terms of city decline. On the urban distress scale from –5 to +5, Boston ranked –5. The entire Boston SMSA (Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area) fared just as badly, ranking –4 on the regional decline index and –5 in terms of region-wide disparity. This put Boston at the very bottom of urban America, in the company of Jersey City and Paterson, New Jersey; Hartford, Connecticut; and Dayton, Ohio. Indeed, Boston ranked below Detroit, Gary, Newark, Miami, and Oakland. Boston and its SMSA were in the most disadvantaged third of all metropolitan areas on 22 of 25 individual indicators of urban life.”¹

In that distressed environment, church planting emerged with vigor: apparently a multiplicity of new churches helped meet perceived needs of a city in distress. Church planting thrived in the context of relative poverty.² And so it was prophesized: in 1990 the Boston Phoenix declared, “Christianity in Boston is changing dramatically. Urban ministries are growing, attracting people of color who thirst for institutions to accommodate their cultural and social service needs. Like their Third World counterparts, these ministries are Protestant and socially active. By the end of the decade these immigrant and poor-black churches could dominate organized religion in the city.”³ And so, to a real degree, they have.

Fin de millènaire (end of the millennium) Boston, on the other hand, stood at the highest end of the social spectrum.⁴ “Boston as a hub is not a worn-out idea. It’s back to the future.”⁵ In 2004, Boston is described by James Howard Kunstler as the most gentrifying⁶ city in America:

“…. the educated classes are gentrifying [Boston] at a faster rate than anyplace else in America, including San Francisco, Chicago, and Brooklyn, the runners-up. Neighborhoods that were the dreariest slums when I lived in Boston almost thirty years ago are now taking on a nearly European vibrancy, for instance, the old South End… My own prediction is that Boston will be America’s most habitable big city in the first quarter of the new century. It is way ahead of almost all the others. In Boston, there seems to be a new and clear consensus that city life can be wonderfully rewarding, and that we possess the means to make it so.”⁷

This new urbanism has of course skyrocketed urban housing costs.⁸ For the first six months of 2004, LINK, the Listing Information Network that tracks real estate activity in certain neighborhoods of Boston, reported 220 sales of residences to be in excess of $1 million, 171 of them being condominiums.⁹ “Through last week [Dec. 18, 2004], 374 condos in downtown Boston sold for $1 million or more in 2004, compared with 209 in 2003…. These figures don’t include ‘pre-sales’ in projects not built yet, such as The Residences at the InterContinental (The InterContinental, when it opens in 2006 near Rowe’s Wharf on the Waterfront, will have 130 condos priced between $600,000 and $6 million each. Thirty per cent have already been sold.)”¹⁰

Boston Homes (a publication of the Boston Herald; use link for current issue) reported in February, 2005, “The January [2005] median sale price in three sections of the city exceeded $750,000, the highest price point since Boston Homes began reporting sales data in 1997. Those sections include the Back Bay/Midtown, Beacon Hill and the West End, and Downtown, a loosely defined geographic area that encompasses Seaport and the benchmark in January. South Boston’s median sale price last month [January 2005] was $414,000, another record. (The median sale is that transaction where half of the sales exceed that price and half fall below that number.) The higher median sale prices reflect a continuing demand for housing in the city not only from Bostonians but from suburbanites and newly created households as well.”¹¹

Across the river from Boston, the city of Cambridge by law maintains 17% of its housing stock as subsidized housing. Cambridge, nonetheless, at the same time has more million-dollar homes per capita than any other large American city.

Real estate developments neighborhood by neighborhood

The emphasis below is largely on high-end development, since high-end development will be one of the great challenges, as well, perhaps, as one of the great opportunities for church planting in the years immediately ahead.

The South Boston waterfront or Seaport is called “the city’s last frontier for significant development”.¹² On those two hundred acres that is the Seaport district, the Boston Redevelopment Authority contemplates five or six new Boston neighborhoods. Two hundred acres is four times the size of Beacon Hill,¹³ yet do development plans include the setting apart of space or sites for public worship or for constructing new church buildings? When the Back Bay was laid out, building sites were set aside specifically for the construction of church buildings. The same question might be asked as to the city as a whole; in many parts of Boston, new neighborhoods or mini-neighborhoods are developing, yet it appears there is little interest in providing sites for public worship or for the construction of new church buildings to serve those new populations.

But back to the Waterfront, reiterating a little bit: in 1999 Boston issued a blueprint for development of the waterfront, calling for new neighborhoods of residences, commercial and office space. Development has been on-again, off-again, dragging more than expected. The Convention Center is completed, the Seaport Hotel and the World Trade Center are in operation. Importantly, the new Silver Line bus tunnel from South Station is open, the biggest expansion of the MBTA since the extension of the Red Line to Alewife in 1984. As Michael Mulhern, general manager of the MBTA predicted, “if you build it, they (the developers) will come. The development (of the waterfront) is inevitable, but it will be a few years downstream. The T’s key hub will eventually shift from Park Street to South Station” (which is near the waterfront), Mulhern predicts, “where Silver Line passengers can transfer to the Red Line, commuter rail, or intercity rail.”¹⁴ That prediction might catch the eye of church planters: Park Street Church, for decades one of the largest churches in Boston, has undoubtedly, over those decades, benefited from having its facilities at that Park Street hub of Boston’s subway system. If South Station becomes that hub, churches located near South Station might draw many people. And if residential development of the waterfront is moving slowly, that gives Boston missiologists and church planters some time, if we start soon, to develop plans for congregationalizing that emerging part of the city.

On the Waterfront, The Boston Wharf Co. owns 2.3 million square feet of space over 15 acres in mostly four- to six-story buildings close to downtown, and they are selling it off. Forty-four industrial-style buildings were for sale in the summer of 2004. Again, a primary use will be residential. As part of the larger development, it was reported in October, 2004, that eleven acres are to be developed as Waterside Place, a $400 million “retail shopping mecca,” the first such “mecca” to be built in Boston since Copley Place was built in 1984. Waterside Place will also be a mixed-use development, largely commercial retail but also including 200 condominiums.¹⁵ Battery Wharf, a $230 million project, will develop 224 condominiums, ranging in price from $975,000 to $4.2 million, plus condo fees of $10-$12 per square foot.¹⁶ The 25 acres owned by Frank McCourt are yet to be sold, as is the 16-acre Fan Pier site, next to the courthouse. Question: can an expression of the Christian faith be indigenous to a neighborhood like this? How can the church as a communal worshipping community be present and rooted there?

And it is still not clear, what will be built on the 27 acres that is the Greenway over the Big Dig!

Charlestown: The Navy Yard was given to the City of Boston by the U.S. Navy in 1977 for development. Between then and now, there have been 453 condominium units built and over 500 rental apartments with a residential population of 2,100 people. North of 1st Avenue was developed primarily as commercial space; as presently constituted, there is over 900,000 square feet of space occupied by Mass General Hospital, the MWRA, the Boston Redevelopment Authority and a myriad of smaller businesses employing over 5,000 persons. There are four restaurants, a yacht marina with 350 slips, parks and open space overlooking Boston Harbor. Over the last 10 years, Mass General Hospital has invested over $250 million dollars to develop a major research center in this part of the former Charlestown Navy Yard. This new research facility more than doubled the institution’s laboratory space.

Residential Development in Charlestown

In East Boston, 1400 units of luxury condominiums and apartments are planned for several waterfront parcels.¹⁷ The Porter 156 project, developing the long-vacant General Electric warehouse and Revelation Bra factory on the East Boston waterfront, has now completed its 217 lofts.¹⁸ Values have increased on fast-selling units, even before they are built. A condo that was $210K in May of 2004 increased to $230K in the fall of the same year and another at $475K in May of 2004 reached $650K the following November. “Winn-Development has proposed building a 400-unit luxury condominium development known as Clippership Wharf.”¹⁹ “With help from a $35 million Hope VI grant, Trinity Financial is creating a (mixed-income) neighborhood of handsome brick and clapboard houses set off by two stately midrise apartment buildings on the site of the dilapidated Maverick Square housing project.” The 426 units were completed in the spring of 2005.²⁰

In Mattapan, the 10-acre site of the former State Hospital, a site the Globe called “one of the last remaining large City-owned plots for affordable housing in Boston,” will provide 200 affordable two-family homes.²¹

In the Back Bay, “it is proposed that a host of office space along Stuart Street be converted to condominiums.” It is hoped that new zoning laws will encourage the development of hundreds of residential units along the Boylston Street corridor²² into the Fenway. “The Mandarin Oriental hotel-apartment-condominium complex near the Prudential Center…. 50 condominiums will be marketed at prices ranging from $2 million to $12 million.”²³

Residential Development in the Back Bay

West End: Beacon Hill’s West End will have new residential high-rises. The West End Residences at Emerson Place, approved by the BRA for the expansion of Charles River Park, will have more than 300 units in five buildings.²⁴ Two hundred thirty-one units are from-the-ground-up. One Charles, the $170 million development just outside Park Square on Charles Street South, has been “home” for its residents for almost a year.²⁵

The “Fenway is posed for renaissance” with 550 units of upper end housing being built at Brookline Avenue and Boylston. Kenmore Square is upscaling. Zoning adjustments along Boylston Street are intended to attract residential housing on three sizable parcels: 1284, 1369-1371 and 1380 Boylston Street. In September, 2004, Fenway Ventures began constructing a 580-unit residential complex between Brookline Avenue and Boylston Street near Kilmarnock Street, trumpeted as the beginning of Boylston Street revitalization. The company plans future development in the area.²⁶

Allston: Long-range, “the project that may exceed the Big Dig in cost could turn Allston—yes, Allston—into a sleek shopping and residential quarter, not unlike a certain square in Cambridge.”²⁷ Harvard University owns more land in Allston (344 acres) than it does in Cambridge (223 acres). “The map of Harvard’s holdings in Allston is breathtaking in its sweep.” The project that may cost more than $14.6 billion is a massive expansion of Harvard University into Allston over the next 30 years. That expansion has already begun, with the most visible so far being the new Spangler Center of the Harvard Business School on Western Avenue and the new Harvard Student Housing at 1 Western Avenue. By Boston law, 10% of whatever housing Harvard builds will have to be housing that is affordable to present residents.²⁸ On a more modest scale, Allston/Brighton Community Development Corporation has fifty new residential units called the Brian Honan Apartments.

The South End has seen extensive development, and development continues apace. Allis speaks of “the huge condo play” in the South End.²⁹ “Almost $1 billion in development money is being poured into the SoWa area (that part of the ‘deep’ South End boarded by Albany St., Plympton St./Msgr. Reynolds Way, Shawmut Ave. and E. Berkeley St.).”³⁰ Over 1500 residential units have been constructed on Washington Street alone. The largely vacant Allied Bolt and Screw Co. at Albany and Wareham Streets is slated for 86 condominiums.³¹ Parcel R-10 on Harrison Avenue (ArtBlock 731) is being developed³² to include 54 new residential condominiums.

In the part of the South End adjacent to the Back Bay, a four-block ½ billion dollar 1.3 million square foot air rights residential and commercial complex over the Massachusetts Turnpike has completion date of 2008. The Turnpike deck is to span the Turnpike from Tremont to Clarendon Streets. Named Columbus Center, the project will be built on Parcels 16, 17, 18 and 19, with 200 condominiums being built on Parcel 17, 343 condominiums in the whole project, plus a hotel, 917 parking spaces and 40,000 square feet of retail space.³³

Furthermore, there is the Southampton Street makeover with the construction of the SoCo Lofts and the additional development of 8,000 square feet at 263-265 Southampton St.

Residential Development in the South End

(See www.southend.org/construction for additional information and pictures of very recent and current development projects and see www.southend.org/construction/complete.php for developments completed in the last several years.)

Roxbury: “After years of work and months of anticipation, the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan Oversight Committee (RSMPOC) held its first public meeting last week [Feb. 2005] and unveiled preliminary procedures for the future development of major land parcels in Roxbury…. RSMPOC is responsible for dealing with seven parcels of land in Roxbury, many of them near the border of the South End….” The process of putting these seven parcels out to bid is part of the overall Roxbury Strategic Master Plan, which took years to complete. The master plan seeks to foster development and economic growth in Roxbury while maintaining the character and values of the neighborhood. Because Roxbury sits in the geographic center of Boston and has large amounts of undeveloped land, it is seen as a prime location for growth. Much of the master plan deals with harnessing this growth so it doesn’t get out of hand or drive residents out of the area.”³⁴

“Roxbury revival is taking hold”: so proclaims the Boston Sunday Globe on Feb. 20, 2005. “Roxbury is on the cusp of a revival, real estate agents say. With housing costs soaring, many first-time buyers are seeing Roxbury as an affordable alternative to other neighborhoods…. According to the 2000 US Census, the latest data available from the city, Roxbury’s population was 47,517. About 65 percent of that number were African-American, 24 percent were Latino, and 10 percent were white. One reason newcomers are looking at Roxbury is because of the housing stock. There’s quite a few brownstones and Victorians and there’s a lot of revitalization in Dudley Square. That’s certainly lending itself to the desirability of Roxbury.” The Dartmouth Hotel is being restored, with affordable housing on the upper floors. “According to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, nearly 1,000 housing units, many of them condos, have (either) just been completed, are under construction or renovation, or are in the planning pipeline. About 40 percent of those units are designated as affordable. Price… is a big part of Roxbury’s draw. The 2004 median sale prices in Boston’s downtown neighborhoods were $1.26 million for a single-family and $463,000 for a condo…. For Roxbury, the medians were $370,000 for a single-family and $399,000 for a condo. Washington Commons’ first of its 22 market-rate single family homes and condos should be available later in 2005.³⁵

As the new Boston continues to rise around us, as new neighborhoods are constructed, and urban populations continue to shift, move and migrate, is the church community prepared for these new realities? Rather than being reactionary, which may be a euphemism for “Johnny-come-lately,” can we instead be prophetic and futurists in our strategies for the Gospel?

In the following article, “Beau Monde Boston,” Rev. Ralph Kee explores another aspect of this question. Can sequential church planting in Boston/Cambridge, which for decades focused primarily on poor, lower-middle and middle class populations, extend and adapt to include church planting among the economically well-to-do? The new Boston is now home to increasingly higher economic classes. How should the church community prepare and respond to this changing economic geography?

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Endnotes for this article: (see also resources)

[1] Barry Bluestone and Mary Huff Stevenson, The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space and Economic Change in an American Metropolis, (Russell Sage Foundation, New York City, 2000), p. 3.
[2] It is interesting and instructive to compare the simultaneous development and multiplication of new urban churches and the development and multiplication of new urban community development corporations (CDCs) in the same struggling neighborhoods in the same decades. [See: Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio, Comeback Cities, (Westview Press, CO, 2000), pp. 7, 1.] Murray also notes that historically there has often been a flurry of church planting at the end of centuries: “the recent emphasis on planting many new churches was in line with the rather frantic mood that characterizes the closing years of most centuries and millennium. This mood was designated as ‘premillennial tension’.” [See: Murray, Stuart. Church Planting: Laying Foundations (Herald Press, 2001), p. 258.]
[3] “The Third Coming,” Boston Phoenix, 1990.
[4] Bluestone and Stevenson, The Boston Renaissance, p. 4.
[5] Douglas Foy, Chief of Commonwealth Development for the Romney Administration, quoted by Sam Allis in The Boston Globe, Aug. 22, 2004, p. A2.
[6] Gentification was a term coined in the early 1960s by Ruth Glass to describe changes occurring in Greenwich Village in New York, Glebe in Sidney, and Islington in London, where long-neglected Victorian-era housing in poor inner-city neighborhoods was being restored to an earlier splendor by “pioneer” (as they were called) restorationists for their own elegant habitation. Within a decade or so the phenomenon had spread so that “by 1976 one study concluded that nearly half of the 260 US cities with a population of more than 50,000 were experiencing gentrification… Gentrification today is ubiquitous in the central and inner cities of the advanced capitalist world.” Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, (Routledge, 1996), pp.37, 38. By the 21st century the meaning of the term gentrification had expanded well beyond its original meaning and now describes “a much larger endeavor: the class remake of the central urban landscape” (Smith, p. 39); i.e., urban development or redevelopment.
[7] James Howard Kunstler, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, (Free Press, 2001), pp. 222, 224. Grogan and Proscio add “The American inner city is rebounding – not just here and there, not just cosmetically, but fundamentally.” They speak of “open vistas for the inner city not seen in nearly fifty years, before the great postwar exodus and decline.” They say the whole idea of the American inner city has changed. Grogan and Proscio, Comeback Cities, pp. 7, 1.
[8] Who is it that is reurbanizing Boston? Empty nesters from affluent suburbs, young well-paid professionals, Bostonians moving from one intown address to another, more desirable address. Marilyn Jackson, Boston Homes: The Complete Guide, Oct. 30 – Nov. 5, 2004, p. 16. For the most part reurbanizers are not suburbanites moving into the city; the suburbs themselves continue to grow.
[9] Marilyn Jackson, Boston Homes: The Complete Guide, August 21–17, 2004, p. 1.
[10] Chris Reidy, Boston Sunday Globe, Dec. 19, 2004, p. H1.
[11] Marilyn Jackson, Boston Homes: the Complete Guide, Feb. 12, 2005, p. 1.
[12] Marilyn Jackson, Boston Homes: the Complete Guide, Oct. 23-29, 2004, p. 1.
[13] Kunstler, The City in Mind, p. 216.
[14] The Boston Globe, Nov. 22, 2004, p. B6.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Marilyn Jackson, Boston Homes: The Complete Guide, Oct. 30 – Nov. 5, 2004, pp. 1, 16.
[17] “Community Snapshot,” Boston Sunday Globe, August 31, 2003, p. H2.
[18] Marilyn Jackson, Boston Homes: The Complete Guide, Nov. 13-19, 2004, p. 1, 30.
[19] Michael Rezendes and Beth Healy, The Boston Globe, Feb. 14, 2005, p. A5.
[20] The Boston Globe, Feb. 22, 2005, p. A10, editorial.
[21] The Boston Globe, March 22, 2002.
[22] The Boston Courant, Oct. 4 – 10, 2004, Vol. X, No. 2, p. 1.
[23] Michael Rezendes and Beth Healy, The Boston Globe, Feb. 14, 2005, p. A5.
[24] Jason Burrell, The Boston Courant, Nov. 1-7, 2004, p. 1.
[25] Marilyn Jackson, Boston Home: The Complete Guide, Nov. 13 – 19, 2004, p. 1.
[26] Adam Martignette, The Boston Courant, Nov. 1-7, 2004, pp. 7, 22.
[27] Michael Ryan, The Boston Globe Magazine, Oct. 24, 2004, p. 26.
[28] Ibid pp. 30, 43.
[29] Sam Allis, The Boston Globe, Aug. 22, 2004, p. A2.
[30] Carole Winkler, The Improper Bostonian, Nov. 7-20, 2001, pp. 26-28.
[31] Jeff Gilbride, South End News, Nov. 18, 2004, p. 1.
[32] Chris Orchard, South End News, Nov. 18, 2004, p. 7.
[33] Thomas C. Palmer, Jr. The Boston Globe, Feb. 21, 2005, p. D1.
[34] Chris Orchard, South End News, Feb. 10, 2005, p. 1, 3. Many details about each of the seven parcels are in the article.
[35] Chris Reidy “Roxbury revival is taking hold,” Boston Sunday Globe, Feb. 20, 2005, pp. H1, 4.
[36] Source: The Warren Group, Boston Sunday Globe, Feb. 20, 2005, P. H1.

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