I would like to thank The Daily Free Press for its coverage of BUYAH’s participation in the Thursday, March 1 Fenway Task Force Meeting. Unfortunately, the Free Press’ headline, “Heated BUYAH protests wreak havoc at Fenway Task Force Meeting” and the picture that accompanied their article — while eye catching and almost funny — misrepresented BUYAH and what transpired that night. Accordingly, I want to take this opportunity to shed further light on the meeting and why we were even there in the first place.
The Task Force was chosen by the mayor over a year ago to make zoning recommendations to the mayor-appointed Boston Redevelopment Authority, one of Boston’s planning and development agencies and probably the most powerful agency in the entire city. Simply stated, zoning is what you can and cannot build in a neighborhood and is one of the keys to getting anything built, whether it is affordable or market rate housing, a luxury hotel or a new ballpark.
The Task Force is supposed to represent the neighborhood, but its overwhelming support of a new Fenway Park despite community opposition is proof that it does not. While this task force is working on many important issues, it was speculated from the start and has become overwhelmingly obvious in recent months that the group is nothing more than a way for the mayor to create a false image. He is using the Task Force to show that the community wants to see a new stadium built under the current proposals.
More than BUYAH members attended the meeting to voice our opposition to this undemocratic process, a process that will decide the fate of the neighborhood, the team and the financial security of the city. Our goals were to show support for our community — and I call it our community because students comprise half the Fenway neighborhood’s population. Our simple attendance was a statement in and of itself because students rarely get involved as a united group in Boston’s immediate social and political issues.
At the meeting, we stated our support for affordable housing and specified what we wanted to be included in the zoning recommendations. We also expressed our opposition to a new stadium’s inclusion in these recommendations. It is simply unacceptable that the mayor hand picked this task force in order to create an image. He is manipulating the public into thinking that the community supports an unethical, illegal and idiotic plan for a new stadium. The plan would use 213.5 million taxpayer dollars to take 10 acres of private land that has been targeted for a new park’s construction despite the city’s affordable housing crisis.
Where are the priorities here? And who is deciding them? To the members of BUYAH who attended the meeting and to our allies, the priorities are to see a few moneyed people benefit at the expense of the majority. The decision-makers in this issue are these same moneyed people, and they are who theTask Force really represents, not the community. Until this situation changes, the city’s most pressing problems will not be resolved.
What the Free Press calls “havoc” broke out only after members of the Task Force tried to interrupt and disrespect BUYAH speakers as we attempted to make the point that this entire process, and specifically the task force itself, is undemocratic and is a scam. As we spoke, a significant majority of the community members in attendance supported BUYAH all the way and even went further with their words and actions than BUYAH members did. BUYAH helped spark the energy of a frustrated audience and community that has been forced to endure this long, frustrating and undemocratic process. BUYAH is most definitely not alone in what we believe in nor were we alone in anything that we did at that meeting.
BUYAH is a diverse and broad based group of concerned, energetic and knowledgeable students who possess a desire to learn and to create practical solutions to Boston’s affordable housing crisis. We also promote democratic decision-making in all of Boston’s committees, including in our own Boston University community. We hope to improve the quality of life for Boston’s residents.
The “havoc” and the injustice is in the Task Force’s process and in the group itself, not in anything that BUYAH members did. What BUYAH did do was make a bold and unexpected statement by joining our fellow community members in demanding real democracy, solutions to serious problems that are not addressed and a change in our supposed political leaders’ priorities.
Mark Greenfield CAS ’02
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