Ed Brooke’s two terms of service as a US senator from Massachusetts (1967-1979) had a substantial impact on Dorchester in terms of housing.

He sponsored the Brooke Amendment that capped the rent public housing tenants had to pay at 25 percent of their income (today it’s 30 percent).

This law was of great help to residents in Franklin Field, Franklin Hill, and Gallivan family public housing and in the many elderly developments around our community. This standard also was used for federal and state-subsidized housing and rent certificates. It’s likely that close to 20 percent of residents in Boston live in such housing where the tenant’s share of the rent is kept at this affordable rate and public funds subsidize the additional operating costs.

And Sen. Brooke stepped up to help three-decker owners in Dorchester and Mattapan. In the period 1968-1972, a program called BBURG (Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group) operated in the two neighborhoods. While the program’s stated purpose was to spur an increase in minority homeownership, it rapidly became of tool for blockbusting and foreclosures that accelerated deterioration in some sections of the neighborhoods and increased racial divisions.

One of the scandals of the BBURG program here and in cities across the county that had similar programs was the failure of federal housing inspectors from the FHA (Federal Housing Administration) to do the work required when a home was sold to a new owner with an FHA-insured mortgage.

The inspectors were supposed to require that the seller fix any major building systems before the house could be sold to a new owner with an FHA-insured mortgage. However, inspectors back then routinely skipped the inspections, infamously doing what were called “window inspections,” where they looked out the window of their car at the house and approved it for sale.

This led to major problems for the new, predominantly black, homeowners, who faced major repairs in the first years of owning their own homes, which led to a significant number of them not being able to pay their mortgages on time.

Banks were allowed to foreclose quickly on delinquent homeowners with FHA- insured mortgages and get the whole amount of the mortgage back from the FHA, and they did. The foreclosed houses were abandoned and most had to be torn down at some point, leaving gaping holes along neighborhood streets.

The banks would never have foreclosed so quickly on those with a conventional Mortgage with no FHA insurance because the bank then would have been stuck with the building.

Community groups across the country, including the Dorchester Community Action Council that I worked for back then, worked to get a law passed that would allow homeowners with FHA-insured mortgages to file claims against the government for major repairs they had to make that would have been caught if the home inspections had been done fairly. It was called the FHA 518 (b) Program.

The initial law only covered one- or two- family homes. But because there are so many three-family homes in these neighborhoods, we went to Senator Brooke about the problem. He responded by managing to get an amendment to the law passed that allowed owners of three-deckers to be eligible for this program, too.

In 1975, we held a community meeting attended by over 200 residents on this program at the Grover Cleveland School in 1975 where the HUD Area Office Director of the time, Marvin Siflinger, agreed to give us access to the files of the FHA-insured homes. We went to his office and copied down the owners’ names and addresses and invited them to meetings to fill out forms for the program.

The result: Some 600 Dorchester-Mattapan homeowners received payments for the cost of repairs due to the faulty inspections.

Senator Brooke’s willingness to listen and then to act were key to enabling many of these homeowners to get this help. His legacy on housing in Dorchester and in cities across the country is a large one.

Lew Finfer is a Dorchester resident and currently the director of the Massachusetts Communities Action Network.