Langley Keyes, an expert on urban planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told stories of urban "saints" armed with networking skills who were able to remove drugs from several inner city housing developments.
Keyes spoke before an audience of about 70 people in 105 Dartmouth Hall, as part of the Master's of Arts and Liberal Studies summer symposium. The speech, titled "Strategies and Saints: Fighting Drugs in Subsidized Housing and Building Foundations: Housing and Federal Policy," is named after a book Keyes authored a few years ago.
Keyes said after choosing six success stories from Boston, New York and San Francisco he soon realized the people who successfully managed low income housing in the inner city were extraordinary.
Keyes noted five capacities that allowed the housing managers to successfully remove drugs from their developments: networking skills, a shared vision, the ability to deal with stress effectively, a non-adversarial stance and the ability to deal with the media.
Keyes said people "realized that in order to make it work they had to make contacts outside the development."
He pointed out that many managers had lived in their cities for a long period of time and had a "sustained set of relationships with people in the city."
"They are people who trust people and are trusted by others," Keyes said.
Another capacity the managers shared is they were part of a community that had a shared vision of the future.
Keyes is the Ford Professor of City and Regional Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at M.I.T., where he has taught since 1987.
Outside of the academic world, Keyes also worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1967 and has spent three years at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Communities in Boston in the mid-1980s.