Letter to City Council

Good Day – and I mean that with all my heart, I do wish you a good day. It is not a good day for me though, nor my neighbors, and I know in the days to come, there will be very few good days for us.

We are the Wellington-Harrington neighborhood. I know a few of you know who we are, we have met, and have had the opportunity to fill you in on a little of our lives. We have sat and talked, and tried to portray to you what we are feeling. Unfortunately, although you have heard our words, I don’t believe you heard our meaning.

You heard us tell you of our overly dense area. What you took out of that was let’s fix the crime in your area, let’s fix the open area in your area, don’t worry about parking, it won’t be an issue. You are putting a finger in the damn, and not fixing the damn. The only way to fix all these things is to work on the density issue. Density is the umbrella, under which falls crime, rodents, trash, parking issues, pollution, destroyed quality of life. You stop cramming more and more people into an already overcrowded area, then the crime will stop rising, the parking, trash and rodent issues won’t get worse.

We know our area of town is the dumping ground. Just put more and more people in our area of town, there won’t be any complaints. They never complain. Why, you ask? Part is because 90% in our area of town are Portuguese, who have English as a second language and don’t feel comfortable speaking out. A percentage of the others are people who are those living in affordable housing already, they aren’t going to speak up, it would be like biting the hand that feeds them. Still more are the elderly, who feel their time for fighting the system is behind them. They lock themselves in their homes and shut their blinds, prisoners in their own homes. I ask you, have you driven around our area lately? You will find that almost every home has their shades drawn, even on the sunniest of days. Why, they are afraid of what is outside.

Just-A-Start is putting in at least two, probably three more affordable housing developments in our little part of town. We were told to “get real” and accept it. They use those two little words “Affordable housing” and boom, they get what they want. Nothing to say about the already overcrowding in our area, nothing to say about no parking in this area already. It has been said that the new units will be “beautiful”. Quite honestly, who cares how nice they look. They are still dumping more and more people into the densest area of the city. We have been told that there will be no increase in the parking issue. I beg to differ, because these are not college students that will be moving into these units, these are families. Families have cars. Families have friends who have cars.

So, I woke up this morning depressed. Knowing that my quality of life isn’t as important as the quality of life of others in other parts of this city. The property my husband and I purchased will be worth a fraction of what we bought it for, and isn’t that a nice inheritance to leave my children. I thought I was buying them a piece of the future, but their future is being taken from them. One day in the near future, my daughter can tell her daughter “When I was little, I was able to walk these streets without fear, there was a beautiful church here, there was a community and a neighborhood, but those are extinct now”. A new kind of global warming.

I don’t think we are asking too much. We are asking only to stop any more building in our area, look at the density issue in our part of town. We are not asking to stop affordable housing, we are asking to spread it around. Don’t just stop more affordable housing in our area, stop more housing period in our area. We are asking that Just-A-Start is investigated for their poor practices and management of projects and how they deal with neighbors. We are made to feel like dirt beneath their feet, that they can walk all over us. We have been told by them there is nothing we can to do, they will build and that is the end of it. We have been told to “get real”, treated like children by telling us when, what, how long we can talk, what we can and can not say, and who we can say it to. They are making a bad name for themselves, and for the Affordable housing cause.
I feel the worse for us, but unfortunately I also feel bad for those families that will be moving into these units. They will be moving into an area that doesn’t want them. We will be shutting our blinds to them, and turning our community into a virtual prison, and we are the prisoners.

I hope you took our words for their meaning, I hope you are hearing the cries of the community you are here to represent. I think the concern should be over the people who already are living in this city, in this area, not the ones that may move in. We are drowning here, in a sea of housing units, and the developers like Just-A-Start are holding us under, and the Cambridge Historical Commission and the Planning Board are enabling them to do so.
Thank you
Marion Figueiredo
Windsor Street