South Waltham Represent
from Daily News Tribune

South Waltham is poor? That's great reporting. Somebody get this guy a Pulitzer.

Split personality: Many of those who live in the Southside live in poverty, as compared to the rest of Waltham...South Waltham's 11,500 residents have the lowest median family income of anyone in Waltham, a city of about 60,000, according to the 2000 Census. Nearly 40 percent of the city's recipients of public assistance income live in the area bordered by the Charles River to the north and Pine Street to the south, with Crescent Street and Calvary Street to the west and east, respectively.

And, one two-acre section on the northwest edge of South Waltham, known to the government simply as Track 3685, is officially the city's poorest, according to Census figures. On any given street, no fewer than 20 percent of the 3,500 people live below poverty level, and on some streets, every single person has trouble providing even the basic essentials.

Track 3685?

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Split personality: Many of those who live in the Southside live in poverty, as compared to the rest of Waltham

By Josh Mrozinski / Tribune Correspondent
Thursday, December 11, 2003

This is the first of a two-part series about Waltham's Southside.

WALTHAM -- It's 6 a.m. on a weekend morning and Gloria Sanchez tiptoes around the cramped kitchen of her Myrtle Street apartment to make some instant coffee for breakfast.

She has to be quiet because the sound of closing cupboards and clanging pots will wake her daughter, who is sleeping soundly in the next room, or husband or son.

Or her sister and two young nephews, who, short of cash, live there, too, in a three-bedroom apartment in the heart of South Waltham.

Although Sanchez loves her family, she complains that the apartment is too small. There's no room to be alone. Even the bathroom, shared by seven people, isn't an escape. "Sometimes it's uncomfortable," Sanchez, 44, said. "Because we are moving around we are always touching each other."

This is life for her family and so many like them who call South Waltham home. It's just steps away from the town's center, which has been given a facelift in recent years and has become the proud home of "restaurant row," including many high-end eateries. But it's a world of difference for residents of this crescent-shaped swath of land.

South Waltham's 11,500 residents have the lowest median family income of anyone in Waltham, a city of about 60,000, according to the 2000 Census. Nearly 40 percent of the city's recipients of public assistance income live in the area bordered by the Charles River to the north and Pine Street to the south, with Crescent Street and Calvary Street to the west and east, respectively.

And, one two-acre section on the northwest edge of South Waltham, known to the government simply as Track 3685, is officially the city's poorest, according to Census figures. On any given street, no fewer than 20 percent of the 3,500 people live below poverty level, and on some streets, every single person has trouble providing even the basic essentials.

So what's left is a neighborhood with a sort of split personality? On the one side, there are the young urban professionals who flock to Moody Street for drinks after work, or dinner at one of many restaurants to set up shop in the last decade. On the other side are residents, people who might catch a whiff of what's cooking, but likely can't afford to stay for dinner.

City officials say there's a simple reason why this section of Waltham is so poor.

"They're trying to find housing at the lowest possible price," said City Councilor Robert Logan, who has represented South Waltham's Ward 9 for 14 years. "The less expensive is on the Southside. I think you have a lot of older housing stock and you have a lot of things that aren't in good condition as in other parts of the city...which means that basically the rents are lower."

Lower earning power, lower standards, lower rents, he said.

Sanchez knows that equation well. Once a month she has to ask her landlord to fix something in her apartment. Her porch sags and has holes in the floor. In April, just a month after they moved in, tiles started falling off the bathroom wall.

Still, it's an upgrade from the apartment, just down Myrtle Street, her family had before. The plumbing was shot, and the landlord refused to fix anything. In the winter, cold air rushed through cracks on the window frames. In the summer, they couldn't open their windows because there were no screens.

Once the price of Waltham

South Waltham was once the epicenter of the city's proud and illustrious watch-making industry. Some of the buildings date back to the 19th century.

The Waltham Watch Company, located on Crescent Street and the first manufacturing plant in the city, bought all the land on the west side of Moody Street in the mid-19th century to lay out hundreds of housing lots. By 1880, most of the company's workers -- then 16 percent of Waltham's total population -- lived on the Southside.

Today South Waltham is a mix of condominiums, townhouses, single-family and multi-family homes and assisted-living centers. And while the newer properties don't show up much in the city's complaint files, the older stock, most of which are not owner-occupied, are repeat violators.

In fact, while South Waltham accounts for only 20 percent of all residences in the city, it has up racked up -- since 2000 -- half of Waltham's structural and illegal room zoning complaints. The examples fill many file folders down in the basement of Government Center -- an illegal unit built into a house on Taylor Street; an illegal rooming house on Ash Street; a crumbling rear deck and staircase on Brown Street; a two-family house being used as a four-family house on Beech Street.

Building Commissioner Ralph Gaudet doesn't blame only the landlords. He says it's also the fault of careless or irresponsible renters.

"There are not as many violations in the north because there's more single-family housing up there," Gaudet said. (The median property value is also 61 percent greater in North Waltham than in South Waltham.) "Most of the violations are in the center of the city and Southside where we have multi-family housing."

Perhaps also contributing to the blight is, according to the Census, more than half of the property was built before 1939.

Yanira Rivas, a social worker for The Salvation Army, knows many of the people -- a large percentage of whom are single parents, she said -- who call South Waltham home. They are often in her office asking for help to pay rent and utilities.

"If they pay their rent, they don't pay their gas bills," Rivas said of the group of people who live near the Salvation Army on 33 Myrtle St. "If they pay their gas bill, they don't pay their rent."

The Salvation Army also provides meals for those who can't afford it at its Hope Kitchen.

Tough to get out

The Lara family once fit the profile of what Rivas talks about.

Until recently, Leticia Lara, 31, lived with her husband and two daughters in a $600-a-month, one-bedroom South Waltham apartment on Moody Street. After the Laras had taken care of rent, food, and bills, they had about $25 a week to spare. So while they lived in the area for 10 years, they never quite considered it home because they couldn't afford to do anything there.

Today, Moody Street has an eclectic mix of stores that the city's poorest simply can't afford. Many work in some of the low-wage service industry jobs available in the area, but they have to go elsewhere to buy what they need, an additional hardship if they don't own a car.

"In some circumstances there is a reinforcing quality to the geographic concentrations of poor people," said J. Larry Brown, director of The Center of Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University. In other words, he said, once you're there it's becomes extremely difficult to save money and access services to help you get out.

The Lara family did, though. Last year, when they were told rent was spiking to $1,000 because the landlord renovated the property, they had no choice but to search for another home. They had scraped together enough money to buy a reliable car, a 1998 Corolla, which meant they could flee South Waltham to a more affordable place.

They bought a two-family home in Marlborough, half of which they rent to another family. And though Carlos Lara's commute to Waltham has grown to 45 minutes each way, the family finally feels as though they've found a home.

"My husband and I feel that it's so big for us," Leticia Lara said of the new place.

"Remember when we didn't have space?" she said to her 6-year-old daughter, Diana, who was standing next to her.

"You mean when we slept together in one room," Diana said, "squished?"

Tomorrow: What services are available to the residents of South Waltham, and how are city officials trying to turn the area into a more desirable place to live?

posted by prof_booty | 08:49 AM