“When we create affordable housing, we need to build places where everyone wants to live,” said Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy and field organizing at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “That means access to healthy food, access to public transportation, access to health care, access to community resources. It’s about treating people like people and not just nameless renters.”
The community is home to about 2,200 people, spread across apartments, condos, townhomes, and multifamily housing. Aside from a few units in the recently constructed Mosaic Tower, almost all of the housing is for low- to moderate-income renters, largely achieved through Section 8 vouchers and fair market rates. It is also an ethnically diverse community—40 percent of residents are Asian, 31 percent white, 30 percent Hispanic, and 24 percent black.
Services are plentiful: a supervised pool, a library with free printing service, and scholarships for students who want to attend vocational or post-secondary school. There is a fresh food delivery service, a fitness center, and classes in several languages on everything from administering Narcan to properly setting a thermostat.
It’s a model that exists virtually nowhere else in America, and it seems to be working. The current average wait time for an apartment is eight years. And when people finally get to move into the complex, they stay an average of about 24 years, according to RTH’s property management company.
“People move here and leave the city in a body bag,” says Jacquie Boston, 60, who moved to RTH more than 30 years ago and plans to stay as long as possible.
RTH was originally formed by tenants who lived in houses purchased by Harvard Medical School, which planned to evict dozens of residents and build a new hospital on the property. Along with some Harvard students, the residents – who called themselves RTH – fought back. They ultimately forced the university to build over 700 units of affordable housing as part of its expansion plan.
Gradually, RTH expanded its scope, elected a resident board of directors, and built a library, a swimming pool, and a gym.
Justin He, 51, lives with his wife and two children in Mosaic, RTH’s newest building constructed in 2016. Mosaic offers market-rate and affordable housing in one building and also offers the opportunity to own one of the homes.
He says his family, who moved to Mosaic in 2017, was able to purchase their condo for $200,000, while he would have had to pay over $800,000 at market price.
“If I had the opportunity to live here later, I would definitely do that,” says his 13-year-old daughter Athena. Her favorite places include the pool, the gym and her friends on the neighboring floors.
Roxanne Haecker, who has lived in RTH since 1988 and now works as director of community education and workforce development, bought a condo in Mosaic for $250,000. The apartment has floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Emerald Necklace, a view Haecker, 73, calls “simply the best.” Haecker lived in Mission Park when RTH was founded. Although she said she was initially opposed to the idea of living in a development, a few years later, when home prices rose, she changed her mind and got on the years-long waiting list to move to Jamaica Plain in the meantime.
“It really can’t be topped,” she said. “It’s a great social experiment and it’s a lot of fun. I think we’re doing really valuable work.”
But no place is perfect. While they don’t plan to move anytime soon, some residents have expressed concern about how development has changed over the years.
Boston, for example, said the complex suffers from racial and class tensions. When she moved in over 30 years ago, she said it was a “community” where her six children – all of whom she raised in RTH – walked to school with their friends.
“Now we are so divided,” she said, pointing to programming that she said is geared more toward older adults and certain ethnic populations, as well as a condescending attitude toward market-rate renters toward their counterparts renting public housing.
“It’s not a bad place,” she said. “When racism rears its ugly head, you have to cut it off quickly. And we don’t do that. We just let it fester.”
Haecker responded to these allegations: “People have the impression that some people get everything, when that’s not the case.” She pointed out that similar complaints had been made decades earlier, when the ethnic makeup was different and Spanish-speaking residents were just moving into the complex.
But the mere fact that these services exist at all, says Stephen Fulton, RTH’s chief program director, is more than what can be found anywhere else in America.
Fulton, 59, who previously worked on affordable housing projects in Baltimore, Florida, Washington, DC, and Portland, Oregon, called RTH “the perfect marriage of housing and health benefits.”
However, it remains difficult to create more housing complexes like RTH, partly because it is too expensive, says Saadian of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“Policymakers are always faced with a decision of whether to spend money or take a holistic approach to housing or spend money to build new housing units,” she said. “I see a lot of pressure on policymakers to focus on more housing units rather than taking this more comprehensive approach.”
Sheila Dillon, the director of the city’s housing department, agrees, noting that “good resources mean better services for residents.” But she believes Boston’s affordable housing developments are all about connecting residents to services, even if the services on the properties are less extensive. And there are a few Boston communities and nonprofits that have a similar model to RTH, albeit on a smaller scale – Madison Park, Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción and Urban Edge, to name a few.
Unlike similar communities, RTH does not rely primarily on federal money to fund its services and facilities. Instead, RTH has partnerships with the various hospitals in the area, receives grants, and owns retail space and the Mission Park Garage, which it rents to nearby hospitals. All of this brings what Fulton calls “good money with no strings attached” to the community.
“I have never seen a model like this before,” he said.
Madison Hahamy can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @MHahamy.
