The opponents maintain they want a safe place to live and raise families. The BHCHP staff and the JPNDC chose 461 Walnut Ave. for exactly those same reasons.
The families of residents and the residents themselves who will live there want the exact same things as the homeowners who live around them: a stable community where they can live. They don’t want crime any more than the homeowners. They want to use Franklin Park, too.
Egleston Square has not been ignored; it just has not changed in ways satisfactory to the Montebello advocates.
The existing multi-family housing in Egleston Square was preserved by Urban Edge using project-based subsidies over the past 20 years. This provided stability for a long-existing working class community and prevented their displacement by the post-elevated-Orange-Line-demolition gentrification that has swept up so much of the housing of Egleston Square.
It is the same stability and economic diversity that JPNDC and the BHCHP desired when they chose 461 Walnut Ave. for housing residents with few resources and fewer options.
Richard Heath
Jamaica Plain