Pine Acres Was the Place for Me
Sometimes achieving your dream of home ownership requires assistance from the highest and the lowest of places.
I’m not too proud to say this, but in the years after my parents divorced, Mom befriended a couple of low-level bookies named Bendo and Dino. When your landlord becomes abusive and stands in the way of your dream of home ownership, such connections can come in very handy.
My parents divorced in 1967, ending an acrimonious, fifteen year marriage that produced three children. Mom got the brand new house in Sunset Acres in Three Rivers, Massachusetts that they bought in 1961 only to lose it to foreclosure a year later. I remember that house as expansive and modern, with a great yard in a neighborhood filled with kids of all ages, but my mother made only about $60 per week in a local sweatshop assembling electronic regulators for missile launchers.
Carrying a mortgage, feeding the kids, and covering the myriad of other expenses would ultimately overburden my mother. The child support she collected from my father added only $45 per week, which apparently was not enough to keep my sisters and me in the middle-class lifestyle to which we aspired. We hardly lived the life of Riley. Money, or lack thereof, played its part in the dissolution of my parents marriage. My father always seemed to have a job, but rarely at the same place for very long.
In 1968, we left our brand new Levittown-like home for a run-down duplex apartment in an older part of town owned by an older couple living in the other half. Mom hated the place and the cigar smell, and eventually the landlords, who would later steal money out of our apartment, but we had to live somewhere. As a kid, I took the move in stride. We didn’t have to change schools, and it had a brook running through the back yard. For my mother, who spent a childhood with feuding, separated parents, dreaming of having her own house, I’m sure it was devastating. She had that house for a mere six years and then lost it.
After two years in the duplex, Mom reached the end of her patience. In the fall of 1970, she broke the lease and moved us into a temporary space in a very small single-family home, also in Three Rivers. During her search for new permanent home, she learned about a new 274-unit development planned for the Sixteen Acres section of Springfield. The homes would qualify for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s newly established Section 235 home ownership assistance program, which meant that Mom only needed $200 for a downpayment, and the program would insure and subsidize the mortgage.
Except that the landlords stood in her way of our new home. Despite the withheld rent, the landlords refused to serve an eviction notice, which she needed for approval to get the new home. Let’s just say that through the “help” of her mob connections, my mother got her eviction. I don’t think it involved beheading a favorite pet. From what I understand, the landlords got a good talking to.
We moved into our new home in January, 1971. We could still smell the paint on the walls. The L-shaped, three-bedroom ranch came with a brand new kitchen range, and for the first time, we could park the family car in its own garage.
The thousand square-foot home on a quarter acre cost only $20,000, about $5,500 under the median for 1971. It had few frills, little ornamentation, hollow bedroom doors, plain paneled kitchen cabinets, and no back door. But it was warm, snug, and fully modern.
She only needed to pay for it.
Section 235
In 1968, the Housing and Urban Development Act amended the National Housing Act to “add a new section 235. This provision authorized… subsidies to reduce mortgage interest rates to as low as 1 percent” for new homes built for those “who were unable to meet the credit requirements generally applicable to FHA mortgage insurance programs.”
HUD drafted guidelines for builders to qualify these homes for this program, and into the fray jumped Keddy-Vadnais, a home builder started by two returning WWII veterans that would go on to build thousands of homes all over the Connecticut River Valley in Western Massachusetts. They got in good with this particular program, building at least three Section 235 developments in Springfield alone.
Kay-Vee marketed this new development as “Pine Acres” after one of the streets that fed into the development a block off of the main arterial. They built it on former swamp land at the eastern extreme of city limits, beyond which was the sleepier but more prosperous town of Wilbraham.
The development did not come without controversy. The government’s “guns and butter” policies expanded social programs while simultaneously paying for a war in Vietnam. This largesse did not stop cities from burning or college campuses from erupting. Some might say it made matters worse. Nixon’s law-and-order campaign positions spoke to the concerns of traditional home owners in the suburbs and old-line cities like Springfield, so that any housing development with the mere whiff of government subsidy immediately sparked concerns of legacy homeowners fearing the spread of crime and declining property values.
The Section 235 program attempted to address this concern. Rather than corralling low-income families into stark, impersonal apartment blocks, it provided an opportunity to put their names on a deed, instilling a sense of pride and self-regulation, fostering more stable neighborhoods. It also bolstered Springfield’s tax rolls, which would soon need it. Within ten years, the city that made everything from Rolls-Royces to board games would step on the slippery slope of deindustrialization.
Pine Acres began with a hint of back-room subterfuge. Thanks to a loophole in city zoning, Kay-Vee could purchase the already-approved development rights from another builder proposing larger, more expensive homes not approved for Section 235. Denied another hearing, residents could only write letters and make a lot of noise. It did lead to the founding of the Sixteen Acres Civic Association, but the protestations delayed construction by only a couple of weeks.
Additionally, Section 235 required purchasers have at least one child. This requirement certainly manifested itself in Pine Acres. The neighborhood’s early years teamed with toddlers and teens.
Your Tax Dollars at Work
In November, 1974, shortly after Kay-Vee drove the last nail in Pine Acres, HUD produced an analysis of the program entitled “Housing in the Seventies”. Its authors analyzed the Federal Government’s policies for meeting the nation’s broader housing needs. It focused on several ongoing assistance programs, not just Section 235.
The report is nothing if not comprehensive. Sadly, it does not specifically cite the performance of Pine Acres, but in 1971, the total number of new subsidized units nationwide built exceeded 367,000. These included rentals as well as mortgaged single-family homes like my mom’s.
According to the report, successes include (today’s dollars in parentheses):
The government insured $7 billion ($49 billion) in mortgages, at a median amount of $18,000 ($126,000)
Median annual income of the buyers was $6,500 ($45,500)
Construction costs for subsidized home vs. privately produced were roughly equal
Foreclosures did not exceed expectations, keeping the insurance program “actuarily sound.”
Housing quality of its recipients improved by 35% and non-housing expenditures increased by 8%.
The racial makeup of residents reflected the country as a whole — 66% white, 22% black, 11% Hispanic, 2% other. (From personal observation, I’d say that Pine Acres started with a significantly higher percentage of white residents.)
On the other hand:
The program did not make “significant progress toward achieving equity”
Benefits were not equally distributed across the country. “A household is five times more likely to be served it it resides in the South than in the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic regions.”
Subsidies actually increased when gross family income increased
Total government costs were ten percent greater than the cost of the subsidy thanks to forgone taxes and overhead.
The estimated average direct subsidy in 1972 was $948 ($7,014).
Administrative efficiency hampered the program as well. The report acknowledged that such programs never recover the full costs expended, but it cites costs of a program ten percent greater than the cost of the subsidy. In other words, had the government simply dispersed cash, it could have saved $66 million ($488 million). Additionally, Section 235 homeowners were “also entitled to deduct the interest and property taxes that the Government pays by means of the subsidy.”
HUD shut down Section 235 in 1988 after a growing number of foreclosures and other abuses forced its hand. Today, HUD’s total budget is almost $17 billion, but it offers no direct mortgage subsidy program.
Beyond the Numbers
I spent my teens and early adulthood in the neighborhood. I didn’t know everyone, but my impressions informed mostly through the grapevine describe a community of mostly nuclear families and gainfully employed parents. Divorcees like my mother represented a very small minority of residents in the early years.
Breadwinners had jobs and careers in diverse companies. On our block, I remember police officers, teachers, utility workers, auto mechanics, and trades people. Some commuted as far away as the Hartford area to work in the insurance companies or at Pratt & Whitney. I suspect the pattern continued on the other blocks.
Unlike the problems that affected other government housing projects, especially those in the inner cities, Pine Acres enjoyed a reputation as a tight-knit community and apparently still does. Most residents consistently maintain their properties, and despite its location in a city losing population and relevance, property values have kept ahead of inflation. Sixteen Acres in general remains a desirable part of the city, and keeps it from sinking into default (although it must be said that equivalent houses just over the line in Wilbraham fetch prices of 30% more).
The HUD study performed a cost/benefit analysis that considered sociological and financial impacts which included what economists call “opportunity costs.” Would the money be better spent elsewhere or not spent at all? In my mother’s case, before hearing about Pine Acres, she had a chance to buy another house in Palmer. We were pretty excited about it at the time. It was in many ways a return to Sunset Acres — a newer house with all modern amenities, but she couldn’t qualify for the mortgage due to the landlord problem.
I’ll be frank here and say that my mother, for as much as I love her and cherish her memory, made many avoidable mistakes in her life. She was by no means the dutiful child or the most faithful wife, but she too came from a broken home with parents who married out of necessity. That said, others overcame similar circumstances and worse. I believe my mother could have found a way, even without the mob connections.
Life dealt Mom a bad hand, but she fought her way through it. There was money in the family, but she never asked for it, and it was never offered. She ultimately pulled herself up to enjoy a happy, relatively easy second half of her life spent in that home, and this program played a part.
Had HUD sought a poster child for Section 235, they needed to look no further than my mother.
Special thanks for their help in my research go to Colleen Moynihan at the Sixteen Acres Civic Association and Margaret Humberston, Curator of Library & Archives at the Wood Museum of Springfield History.