 We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These words from the Declaration of Independence are familiar to many of us, and yet it took 143 years for women to get the right to vote and 189 years for black people to get the right to vote. And still today, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are still only words for many people. Here in Boston, life expectancy varies by 30 years depending on where you live. In Roxbury, with many poor and black people, life expectancy is 59 years. In the back bay, wealthy and mostly white life expectancy is 91 years. It's tough to have liberty when you are in prison. The United States incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 people. Our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most countries in the world. Millions of people in our country don't have health care, a decent job, good education, a home they can afford, and that makes it pretty hard to pursue happiness. So on this show, you are going to meet people who are making it possible to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. People today who are making the words of the Declaration of Independence come true. Hi, I'm Michael Brown, your host for We Hold These Truths. And today we're really lucky to have as our guest Charlie Gargiulo. Charlie Gargiulo is the founder of the Coalition for a Better Acre in Lowell, Massachusetts. And now the author of a book soon to be published in the spring of 2022, Farewell to Little Canada, a book about his life growing up in the neighborhood of Little Canada in Lowell, Massachusetts. We're going to watch a five and a half minute clip from a movie for forging affordable housing partnerships that describes Charlie's work in the early 1980s building and founding the Coalition for a Better Acre. So take a look at this video or part of it. This neighborhood had a very bad reputation. It's not that way anymore. Things are very different from what they used to be. I think, you know, everybody's trying to do their best to have a better neighborhood. By flight and arson throughout the 1970s, the Acre Triangle was easily the most decimated neighborhood in the city of Lowell, perhaps even in the state of Massachusetts. The Triangle's housing stock and infrastructure was suffering from years of neglect. Its streets and alleyways were a haven for crime and drug trafficking, and its people were disenchanted, disillusioned and dispirited. You take your worst visions of what a slum is, and that was the Acre Triangle. A massive program of historic renovation in the nearby downtown area of the city created a stark and dramatic contrast to life in the Triangle, fueling real estate speculation and causing rents to skyrocket. This neighborhood, with its rich heritage as a gateway for new immigrants, stood abandoned and isolated, left behind in a city whose revitalization was becoming a national success story. People who lived here for many years or the people who had to persevere when the city wasn't hot and now the city was going to be turned around, we felt that they should benefit from this revitalization. To say whether people had worked the factories that worked, that make this economy work, they should be benefiting from the revitalization, not being victims of that revitalization. It was when plans were announced to demolish the Triangle to make way for high-rise housing, but the coalition for a better Acre was formed. Everyone was convinced that the best thing for the Triangle was knocking everything down and starting over again. That had been their answer in Little Canada and we know what occurred there and it was going to be their answer in the Triangle and that too would have been disaster. This neighborhood belongs to the people that live in it. People here are working, people. We are proud to live here. We are very proud of our community and we want to work and make it better every day. The way to preserve a community is to involve its members and not for an outside plan to come in and tell people in a poor community what's best for them, but to allow poor people themselves to be part of the decision making that goes on with how to save and preserve their communities. The vision of the coalition for a better Acre was to assemble a revitalization plan for the Triangle that would improve and increase the area's housing stock without displacing current residents, at the same time affecting a change in the spirit of the neighborhood by getting residents involved in planning their own destiny. We felt that's always been a missing ingredient among urban planners attempts to try and save communities in the past is that it was always other people trying to put down and impose plans for people who lived in a particular community. We wanted to stop that, save the neighborhood and empower people. The coalition began empowering people by mobilizing them in a fight to save the Acre Triangle from mass displacement and gentrification. Early on it wasn't an easy task because no one wanted to listen to what we had to say and we had to literally fight in order to even be heard. But the coalition would make itself heard, taking its case to the steps and council chambers of City Hall. We got a clear message from the neighborhood that they wanted to have something happen in the Triangle but that families should not be displaced. Jim Milanozzo was director of the Lowell Division of Planning and Development at the time of these early negotiations. We were convinced by the coalition that in fact you could do the Triangle project without displacing any of the families in the neighborhood. We felt that at one point that if we went in there with a large urban renewal project, if you want to call it that, that we would have been able to provide yes new buildings but probably different families, families that did not have a stake in the neighborhood. As the coalition developed its own plan for the Triangle, it scored an early and very significant victory. Through involvement with the National Training and Information Center, the coalition secured the support and financial backing of Aetna Life and Casualty. At Aetna's corporate headquarters in Hartford, Vice President Sandy Cloud recalls the decision to include the Triangle in Aetna's National Neighborhood Investment Program. Hi, we're back and wow that was a powerful video and we're really lucky to have Charlie 35 years later still with us, still strong, still organizing. Hey, it beats the alternative as my grandfather said. That's true. With us and Charlie, so I wonder you've now written a book about your experience growing up in what was then Little Canada and I know that had a big impact on you as a young boy, as a 13-year-old and you tell the story in farewell Little Canada as a 13-year-old boy and wondering about what's going on. I wonder if you can describe your background and what you learned then or what you felt then. Sure, yeah, I know. The book is basically my memoir growing up as a child. Between 11 and 13 years old and 63 to 65, we moved into the Little Canada neighborhood of Lowell, which my mother had grown up in as a child and most of her family had grown up in because French Canadians had moved to Lowell in the around the 1880s, so my family had been on my mother's side in Lowell. You know, around that time period they came to work the mills of Lowell and it was a really tight-knit community, but it was a very poor community and it became slated for a demolishment, urban renewal so-called, urban removal of poor people in that neighborhood of the acre in Lowell which I grew up in and it was a devastating experience and that's what I try to write about instead of like saying why urban plan was bad, basically to try and see through the eyes of a child. What does it look like when this outside forces that you don't even know can come in and basically literally take your home and the homes of all of your neighbors and just remove you like you don't even exist and I try to describe that experience and because it was a devastating one, it destroyed a lot of people. My Aunt Rose, you want to tell us what real effect quote urban renewal has on real people like your Aunt Rose? My Aunt Rose literally died from the experience. I mean she was 65 years old, had lived there all, literally all of her life. She was disabled, she had a club foot and her partner was her life and she loved it there. It was a tight-knit community and she lived there all her life and I remember shortly before when it became clear that they literally were going to be taking us out and throwing us out and destroying the neighborhood, overhearing her one night talking while she was praying, with saying her rosaries and praying you know dear God please you know don't take my home because it will kill me and it did you know a week after, literally a week after she was forcibly removed, she died and I try to convey that whole experience because she was an amazing woman you know people don't understand the kind of people that you never hear or you never see you know every famous people you know this woman could have been a saint you know she was such an influence over me and nobody you know even though she's existed she was thrown out like she didn't you know she didn't even matter when the plans came through and I remember thinking why isn't anybody doing it? So 20 years later when something similar was happening in the acre this was what in the early 60s when your aunt rose dies 20 years later when you're a young man you saw what was happening again and you actually organized to do something about it I wonder if you can tell us I mean the movie shows a little bit about that but I wonder if you can tell us more about the details of what you actually did and what were some of the organizing lessons you learned there? Yeah no I think what I learned was at the time was wondering you know as a child like you have to understand what the concept must have felt like you know growing up and I remember hearing people you know like my aunt and everything my mother when we asked her stories this is going to really happen is this can't happen here this is America you know it's not like you just come in and destroy your home you know and everything and then slowly but surely you know you find out it actually did and I was haunted by that whole experience like I said wondering who did this and it was it was just a sting called every new we didn't even know who the people were you know and and all my life I wanted to know so I mean as I you know fortunately you know I was lucky I got well I shouldn't say we're lucky but I did when I was in the army I was able to use a GI bill and I went to school and one of the things that when I went to school was to try to find out like what happened you know the urban plan how do you stop these kinds of things from happening how do you get people to know about these things and I realized it wasn't an accident this was actually somebody's plan to do this and you know and I realized that there were forces of you know that that at play and when people are poor and it was generally you know these were urban renewal plans all over the country you know we were just one of them it was literally called black removal because it was mainly aimed at African-American communities were mostly the ones that were victimized by this we just happened to be one of those few additional like you know sometimes it hit poor white communities and as French Canadian community was happened to be the place where the land was of value and we were no longer you know we needed to be in their way so I wanted to find out how to stop this and you because you were a U.S. Army veteran you were able to use the GI bill to go to college and learn something and and what did you actually do I mean you talk about the need for the people who live there to be actually involved in the planning and implementation of the solution and allowed to come back and live there what did you actually do and what was some of the actions and lessons you learned you know in in that work I know it's a success story now but it doesn't just happen no the irony was like in the late 70s or so you know like the urban urban you know urban national park came to Lowell in the late early 80s you know there was it had been talked about for a while and now all of a sudden Lowell was going to be just focused you know in a bit of dying city kind of a military that that plan had never worked for the people and but now there was going to be just urban national parks all of a sudden I knew from that whole experience and what I had learned in school about how these things work that all of a sudden the people the poor people who lived around downtown where all of these new changes were going to be coming when you know uh you know buildings were left to go for a number of years that now that land was valuable and now they were vulnerable and I could sense oh is there going to be another plan coming that's going to want to remove people out of here and you started to see inklings about that so I started to ask questions about that you know what's what's the plan what's the plan and everybody was just like koi and and and uh it was clear something was going on but nobody wanted to talk about it but this time I had known from the experience my own experience and uh as a kid this could happen and so um we started to see arson fires start to happen in the acre neighborhood which which bordered right on that area and we could sense that something was happening those people were being like leaving anybody who could afford to leave were wanting to get out because they were afraid they were going to die in a fire at night if they didn't so it was only the poor sort of poor that were left um but these are people who really wanted to stay in the neighborhood it was primarily a Puerto Rican neighborhood at the time it was a Latino neighborhood uh which I happen to live nearby and and uh you know I was in public housing right next door to it and all my friends lived there uh and and so I said you know what happened to me and little Canada and I told the story now it's being aimed at you and and you know this is an opportunity to do something about this you know and we organized the the the stop this plan and how did you do that what was like the first thing we basically we had to convince people this was going to happen you know uh because it sounds like this highfalutin plan gentrification you know you can't come in what terms like that we basically we finally got the city so angry because we kept getting in all the national stories that came in on Lowell's revitalization and started saying yeah but what about uh the acre you know what about four people in the acre so we finally got the city manager at the time who was somebody like Trump is now basically who's just like a you know uh uh an egotist so we got under his skin enough that he kind of like blurted out and admitted that they were planning to take down that neighborhood how did you do that how did you get under his skin because we were in the good morning America would come and do a story on Lowell and it was supposed to be this great story about what an amazing revitalization it is but then it had this little butt about we get on camera and say and we'd be talking about well in fact uh it's not so great in the acre you know to take all the money on sorry from Trump how did you get that how did you get on good morning America I mean that's that's such an easy thing to do well the first thing was we actually got a news week first it's because we had this reporter Charles Glass at the time we ended up working for ABC and then a number of years later but he came through and he said he actually found us out because I had worked with the group called fair share before that which was an organizing group yeah and he got the sense that something was up because he was he called it a dog and pony show he was being led so effectively from in one person to another about what a great story Lowell was he thought there must be another side to this and then he found out about uh about us because we had been fighting about you know some of the issues about us and in the city and and uh he came in and he did a story like he did a little paragraph about us and that just gave us the legitimacy to start getting into all the other national stories when they came into the city and we became an irritant to the city manager who blew his top and admitted that they were coming that it even shows in that film tully to raise an acre triangle so we were able to go to people door to door so we had a team Spanish and English team of people going door to door literally every house in there to let people know you know this is coming and it's coming primarily because you know they wanted there was a plan that they wanted to remove the Puerto Rican community out of the city they wanted to sanitize you know uh for tourists they wanted to make it a likes you know a nice white middle class area that you know it was a clearly racist plan that they were uh they wanted to clear that Puerto Rican neighborhood out like in our past they wanted to clear the French Canadian community out of the time so we basically went door to door and we got people to to fight back against this and who was going door to door well we got uh basically my friends uh you know people who live there not people like out of town or no my people my friends you know i had my Puerto Rican friends my white friends basically we had we put teams together to show that we were all united you know and uh against us and and there were some even greek old greek families there i remember going through at the time there was a woman who was about 80 years old and when we told her what was going to happen her daughter was whether who was probably like 50 and she had lived there all of her life because it had been a greek neighborhood primarily before and you remember her saying to me at one point oh if this happens i'm going to die i you know i've lived her all my life i would kill me if they moved me out of here and i knew that she wasn't kidding because of my rosa's experience because there were a number of other people that would happen to so that you know gave us a determination to to fight pretty strongly about that and we got people like father obon and the church you see in the other pastor rest his soul he's no longer with us a great man but he was involved with a church that had not done nothing to stop little candor from being destroyed in fact they've probably been on the side of some of the developers back then he knew the history he wasn't involved with it then but he felt an obligation to make sure that never happened again and he you know he put the institution behind us when they were trying to dismiss us as a bunch of local radicals and everything else you know and you know he was some you know we started to organize people like that friends that had some influence that would back us up while we were trying to buy time right so what would you say you know if you look looking back on it and the coalition for a better acre or cba is still around and very vibrant what are some of the lessons you would want to pass on to younger people whether they're involved in urban renewal or any kind of organizing whether it's urban or rural or wherever well again i think the the lesson is like you take a look at the experience of little canada where people weren't involved in the planning process then it didn't work for their benefit we worked for somebody else's so if you're serious about trying to revitalize a community for all of the residents and not just for the most powerful then you're involved the people who are going to be the most impacted by that like you say in the movie like you say you do and as we did when we got in here when we were able to get the funding we created a community development corporation which is with coalition for a better acre is right which were which involves all the people on the planning of how we develop all the buildings in the neighborhood people have you know we have people you know explain the process of how you develop and everybody you know was able to be included in the planning process so that neighborhood worked to the benefit of everybody nobody got displaced that was our slogan was revitalization without displacement right i saw the sign in the movie yeah we were determined nobody's going to be removed from here right if you're seriously low or serious about revitalizing this community for all of its residents then the residents are going to have to be involved with that planning process and and nobody's going to be impacted and we were able to do it nobody was displaced we were able to develop that housing and then later on north canal apartments we found out we're going to be lost and the same issue was at place but because we succeeded in developing the acre triangle and we now had a track record we went in there and we stopped another development plan that was going to come in and just turn it into market rate housing right which was actually built on little right it was actually built it was supposed to be a replacement housing for little canada which was built five years after we were removed and it was done by lousy developers who basically let the place run down had you know holes in the ceiling before the person moved even moved in it was designed to fail and that's one of the biggest issues that we had is that we got hardly turned over to us for a dollar because we had to do 20 million dollars of renovation to be able to keep that place you know not only affordable but quality housing for the people who live there and so we were able to preserve that with the tent by creating a tenant council in north canal all the tenants who are involved with the planning and the process and one person was removed and it still remains as low-income housing for people today and you know so the combination of building a coalition for a better acre and your book told through the eyes you know almost now what is it 60 years ago almost you know through the eyes of a 13 year old and your book which is coming out soon farewell little canada by loom press and lol in the spring of 2022 I think that's a great combination to for people to learn what it's actually like for real people to go through this process of quote urban renewal and also what it's like to actually have to build a successful community development corporation as coalition for a better acres still alive now is working and I think that's a really important story and I'm really glad you took the time not only to write it but also to build CBA Charlie and so you know we have some important lessons there and I'm really glad you were able to come on this this little program we hold these truths so I'm my pleasure thank you for yeah well we're really honored to have you here and so we're really glad to have Charlie Garjulo author of farewell little canada his book about growing up in a little canada in lol massachusetts and what that did and how it affected real people and I hope you'll take the time to watch the video about the coalition for a better acre which tells the story of building a community that was about to be displaced that brought in the involvement and the voices of the people who live there so they could continue to live there build a neighborhood and not be displaced so thanks a lot charlie it's great to see you again and uh hope you'll tune in next week or whenever we have this show again and thanks a lot for coming charlie