Preservation In Practice: A Recontextualization Of The Washington Park Urban Renewal Program

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This paper discusses how Black families converted upper Roxbury’s single-family housing stock into multi-family homes in the postwar era—a process of "filtering down" normally associated with deterioration—and argues that this additional income from rent allowed owner-occupants to build equity and maintain their houses despite exclusion from traditional funding sources. This adaptive reuse process introduces a complicating backstory to the Washington Park Urban Renewal Program of the early 1960s, which is usually framed around the condemnatory narrative of how the Black middle class worked with the BRA to oust lower income residents from their neighborhood.