Holes in the heart
A lot of people are mighty mad about the giant pit where Filene's used to be, and rightly so. Ditto the fenced-off disaster that was to have been the South End's Columbus Center. The stalled megaprojects are ugly gashes in the heart of the city.
But there are other holes in Boston that are just as damaging to the city. They lie at the center of lively and struggling neighborhoods. They are not high-rise luxury hotels or ritzy condos. They are less ambitious than that and more important.
On Blue Hill Avenue, between Dudley Square and Grove Hall, a crater sits where the Kasanof Bakery used to be. It was bulldozed to make way for a complex of 48 affordable apartments, to be developed by community bulwark Nuestra Comunidad. The largest undeveloped parcel on a street with too many of them has been dormant for months.
On Monday morning, Mauricio Santana looked out the window of his struggling Central Convenience store at the dead space across the street, where tires and hay bales sat atop a pile of dirt.
"I need it to come here," he said. "The more people live here, the more traffic, the more business."
In Chinatown, a forlorn shell of a building stands between two sets of ugly steel bracing on Essex Street. This is supposed to be the new Hong Lok House, replacing the old, run-down Hong Lok on the same street. There, elderly Chinese men and women live in 28 run-down units, and 20 senior citizens descend to the basement to the adult day health program, for meals, nurse visits, workouts, and bingo.
The new Hong Lok House, conceived by the Chinese Golden Age Center and its partner Rogerson Communities, will house 74 elders who would otherwise be squeezed out of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. It will bring the health center above ground, and include a comfortable seniors' drop-in center.
The waiting list for Hong Lok's current units is years long. Ruth Moy, who runs the center, says the seniors keep asking her why the new Hong Lok is taking so long.
"I try to explain," she said. "We just don't know when it will start."
On Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, plans for the site of the old Blessed Sacrament Church are also stalled. That project was a huge victory for the local community: locals rallied behind a project that would give low-income residents housing and the neighborhood a place to gather, instead of pricey condos in a primo location.
The development, which was supposed to be underway last summer, will include 81 affordable rental units, 16 condos for first-time buyers, and places for 29 formerly homeless men and women.
The JP Neighborhood Development Corporation, which heads the project, is also developing the corner of Centre and Lamartine streets. But those 30 affordable units are also frozen, a yellow earth mover stranded atop a mound of dirt in a fenced-off lot.
Why are they all stalled? Large chunks of the funding were supposed to come from tax credits, which the federal government gives to developers of affordable housing. The developers then sell the credits to profitable companies looking to reduce their tax bills. But the companies' profits went away, and so did the market for tax credits. It's a different side of the economic meltdown that has frozen the luxury condos across town.
In this case, help may be on the way. Recently, the federal government announced it would buy up the credits. Community leaders are ripping their hair out waiting for the money to arrive.
Because here, the delays do damage that goes beyond unfilled jobs and rising construction costs. Vacant lots make communities feel gutted. Stalled renovation projects leave residents feeling abandoned. Trophy buildings like Filene's and Columbus Center get ink and outrage, but this is where the real hurt is.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com. 
