Boston Housing Authority

The BHA was established on October 1, 1935 by the mayor and city council of Boston under Massachusetts General Law allowing cities and towns of Massachusetts to establish housing authorities. According to Massachusetts law, its mission was to be responsible for providing decent, safe and sanitary housing for families unable to afford housing without public subsidies. BHA was also charged with clearing substandard, decadent or blighted open areas and urban redevelopment, although this responsibility was later transferred to the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) in 1957.[5]

The first BHA housing projects were opened between 1938 and 1942.[6]

Under the tenure of Boston Mayor John F. Collins (1960–1968), the BHA segregated the public housing developments in the city, moving black families into the development at Columbia Point while reserving developments in South Boston for white families who started refusing assignment to the Columbia Point project by the early 1960s.[7] In 1962, upon receipt of a lawsuit filed by a civil rights group, the West Broadway Housing Development was desegregated after having been designated by the city for white-only occupancy since 1941. In the same year, the Mission Hill project had 1,024 families (all white), while the Mission Hill Extension project across the street had 580 families (of which 500 were black), and in 1967, when the city government agreed to fully desegregate the developments, the projects were still 97 percent white and 98 percent black respectively.[8]

The management and governance of the BHA is different from that of other housing authorities since 1975, when BHA was sued in Boston City Housing Court by a group of BHA tenants, represented by Greater Boston Legal Services, regarding poor conditions in housing projects under the authority's control. As a result of the ruling which was in favor of the tenants, a court-appointed master prepared a report listing recommendations that provided the basis for a consent decree signed in 1977 by BHA, Greater Boston Legal Services and the Boston Public Housing Tenants Policy Council. The decree listed a series of improvements that BHA was supposed to make over the course of three years. The master, responsible for monitoring BHA's compliance with the consent decree, gave approval for all major decisions made by the BHA board and administrator.[5]

In 1979, the judge ruled that BHA had failed to satisfactorily fulfill the terms of the consent decree and BHA was placed in receivership, with its board of commissioners and administrator replaced by a court-appointed receiver. Since 1990, when the receivership ended, BHA has been directed by an administrator whose activities are reviewed by a nine-member monitoring committee appointed by the mayor of Boston.[5]

Kathryn Bennett was named Acting Administrator in July 2019.

As of 2014, the BHA oversees 70 developments across 13 Boston neighborhoods. Of them, 38 are designated for elderly and disabled housing (two of which contain additional family units) and 32 are designated for families (one of which contains additional elderly and disabled units).[9]

• List of public housing developments in the United States
• Property management
• Public housing in the United States

• BHA, PHA 5-Year and Annual Plan: Boston Housing Authority, July 14, 2010
• Vale, Lawrence J., From the Puritans to the projects: public housing and public neighbors, Harvard University Press, 2000.

• Vale, Lawrence J., Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002.

• Boston Housing Authority (official site)