Chrystal Kornegay has been a driving force behind the ongoing revitalization of Jackson Square, a neighborhood on the border of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. She won’t be there to see the completion of her handiwork, but she considers that good news.
The chief executive of Urban Edge is about to become one of the more unlikely members of Governor Charlie Baker’s new administration, which she joins Monday as the head of housing and urban development.
Kornegay is neither a Republican, a veteran of state government, nor a Massachusetts native. She and Baker met only recently, during the campaign, but once they started talking, they clicked. After their first meeting, he showed up at her office unannounced and listened as she explained the work her group does in and around Roxbury. They kept talking, until she realized she wanted to join the team.
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“I’m really excited that the Baker-Polito administration recognized the value that community development can bring to their vision of a great Massachusetts,” Kornegay said. “Now we’re figuring out what that means.”
Urban Edge began in the 1970s as an agency devoted to fighting some banks’ refusal to give home loans in poor neighborhoods. It has evolved into a nonprofit developer. It owns 1,250 units of low- and moderate-income housing, and 82,000 square feet of nonresidential property. It has placed special emphasis on helping develop 6.5 acres of long-vacant property in Jackson Square, which includes the once-troubled housing developments Academy Homes and Bromley Heath.
It’s a sign of the times that new apartments next to Academy Homes are now fetching rents of nearly $3,000 a month.
“They’re getting $2,800 a month across the street to live next door to Bromley,” Kornegay exclaimed. “I can’t afford to live there.”
More seriously, she said, the new construction — which will eventually include a recreation center and commercial space, as well as new housing — with transform the area. The project has been well over a decade in the making.
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“We thought holistically . . . we really thought about it as reknitting a neighborhood.”
Kornegay grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. A full scholarship to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology brought her to Boston, and she never left. She lives with an adult son in Mission Hill.
She started at Urban Edge in 1999, and succeeded Mossik Hacobian, its longtime head, a few years ago. It’s been her professional home for almost all of her career. “I grew up in Brooklyn in the crack era, but I got a full ride to MIT,” she said. “So I’ve got all that going on, and it’s not easy to find a place where that fits. It fits here. People here welcomed me with open arms. It’s a really, really special place. They’re my family.”
Kornegay is fairly obsessed with figuring out what stabilizes a neighborhood. The standard belief is that home ownership eventually creates thriving neighborhoods. But years of watching tenants fight for their neighborhoods — sometimes through decades of turmoil — has led her to a different conclusion.
“It’s more than just ownership,” she said. “I know people who have lived in Academy Homes for 40 years and they are more invested than many people who bought homes five years ago.”
Kornegay’s replacement at Urban Edge probably won’t be named for a while, but she said that a strong staff will ensure that projects move forward without skipping a beat.
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Now she’s heading to Beacon Hill, to see if the strategies that have helped revitalize Roxbury and Egleston Square can be replicated across the state. She believes they can.
“Cities are becoming a place where the very rich live and the very poor live,” Kornegay said. ”We have to tackle it in our time, because that doesn’t lead to good places.”
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @Adrian_Walker.