Affordable 
     Housing
  Development        Competition
    2002

The Students

Teddy Kapur

Teddy Kapur was a member of the Dudley Square Artspace team, which received first prize in the 2002 Affordable Housing Development Competition. Originally from Houston, Texas, Mr. Kapur is pursuing a joint degree in public policy and law at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and at the New York University School of Law.

Audio: Teddy Kapur (RealOne Player required)
Download the free RealOne Player now

My main interest is in community development. When I entered law school and this joint degree program, I wanted to gain skills to help improve distressed — primarily urban — communities. I also wanted to practice law to gain additional skills before focusing on community-development work.

I have participated in a few public-interest legal internships in urban communities. I've seen the great disparity between a lot of suburban areas and urban areas. I just realize how important it is to serve those urban communities and, in some way, help them improve.

Most of them have a lot of potential. People there have been underserved for so long. With investment in the right areas and maybe some creative ideas, we may be able to help many communities improve education, infrastructure, housing, employment opportunities, and other social issues.

During my time at the Kennedy School, I've grown a lot more interested in housing policy. Through the competition, I've become more interested in the development side of housing. I worked on housing cases with the Legal Aid Society in New York last summer. I enjoyed that experience but wanted to explore housing issues from the development side.

The competition has been a great experience for me. I realize how challenging and dynamic the whole development process is. We had to consider the interests of many stakeholders and address various challenges.

For instance, how do you finance a project that's not going to make much money, and what kind of financing can you get? How do you find the site, and how do you try to create an idea that has the support of the entire community — or at least the majority of the community — so it will be sustainable in the long term? I entered the competition to explore development challenges, and I've really enjoyed it.

The Team
We had a wonderful team. There were two other students from the Kennedy School: Alastair Smith and Fernando Rojas. Al is pursuing an urban planning and master of public policy degree. Fernando studied civil engineering in Chile and is now pursuing a master of public policy degree. We met two other students at the first introductory meeting. One was Ryunosuke Konishi, who studied architecture. He has an undergraduate degree from MIT and is pursuing graduate studies in architecture and real estate finance. Martina Johnson is the other member we met. She is on leave from the University of Melbourne. Martina studied urban planning and architecture. We all had complementary strengths and worked well together.

We started in February and met probably twice a week. Once or twice a week, we'd meet with different community-based organizations and leaders, such as people at the Boston Redevelopment Authority or representatives from a number of different community-based organizations.

For instance, Alastair and I met with the executive director of Boston Connects. We had a great conversation with her about the area's designation as an Empowerment Zone and how federal investment in the community has already sparked a lot of development.

Further along in the process, we spent many hours working together on the proposal. There were two nights at the end when we spent over 40 hours trying to put it all together.

Complementary Skills
I tried to focus mainly on the artists. We were building affordable housing for artists and trying to identify a market and show there was a demand for artists' live-work space in the area. We tried to illustrate that there was an artist culture and heritage in Roxbury, specifically in Dudley Square.

Section of Roxbury mural.

That was a difficult task because you don't generally think of artists being the most needy population. But we found a rich heritage there and a great demand. Other artists have been pushed out of different areas of Boston. So this would be a great way to help the community. Artists bring a lot of benefits to the community just by being there, by spending time in their galleries and being active in the community.

That was one part of the proposal I worked on. I also did a lot of the editing. I brought all the writing together and set out how we would present the entire proposal — our big-picture strategy. I also helped with some of the market studies.

A Valued Experience
I'll practice law for a little while and gain some real estate skills, but I do hope to incorporate my legal skills with development. I would like to identify places where good developments are needed to help communities and try to think of different strategies to make those visions a reality. I also hope to talk with community members and different organizations to bring them together.

The competition was a great experience — an intellectual challenge that was invigorating. It was really fun and exciting to bring a vision we had to reality, knowing that in the process we were helping a community get better services and continue its process of revitalization.

It's always hard to tell if the projects will be developed. Development costs for the Dudley Square Artspace were about $19 million. There were a lot of players involved: the city, the state, the owner of the current grocery store that we're trying to relocate, and community members. We feel like we took almost everyone's concerns into account when implementing our proposal.

I think there might still be some tension in the community and some people may have different views, but that likely will always be the case. Hopefully, that can be worked out. I know that the team project that won second place in last year's competition (The Hotel Dartmouth) is being implemented, so there's a precedent for that happening. We really hope that our proposal can help spark the request for proposals from the city and get the process rolling.

This competition is only two years old. It was great that the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston and Citizens' Housing and Planning Association were able to sponsor this. We learned about the development process and were able to apply skills we learned in classes to a practical application. We are really grateful for this competition.

We bonded through the experience. You never know — maybe 10 years down the road Team Dudley may reunite and try to help out other communities in the different cities where we live. We're all more committed now to building affordable housing and other developments to help distressed communities.

I think it's important to continue this competition. Other teams in the coming years will have experiences similar to ours. It helps us all if we have more people out there who are dedicated to revitalizing distressed communities.