Home Ciy Development, Inc. (HCDI) is honored to continue a long and important tradition of providing safe, clean, affordable housing to Springfield residents. A tradition that was started in the United States by the YMCA in 1867. As many of you know HCDI purchased the top five floors of 275 Chestnut Street from the YMCA of Greater Springfield in 2015 and performed major renovations. We want to take this opportunity to celebrate the legacy we inherited from the YMCA, an organization with an extraordinary history of providing housing to those in need.
We interviewed Harry Rock, who had a remarkable 36-year career with the YMCA. Most notably he served for 16-years as the Executive Director/CEO of the Westfield YMCA and then worked on the national YMCA level with the YMCA Relations Office at Springfield College for nine years.
He was inspired to pursue this career as a young YMCA counselor-in-training at age 16. Rock found that working with the YMCA was a way to give back to his community and find a deeper purpose in life.
Rock explained that “In many cases, government is ill equipped to provide the services necessary in a community, and nonprofits step up and fill that void. Nonprofits look for societal needs and fill them. One of the very first needs when the YMCA was established in the United States in 1851, was the need for housing.”
Rock went on to describe the early years of the YMCA in the United States. The YMCA began their housing program during the Second Industrial Revolution (peaking from 1870-1914). Urbanization was growing faster than ever. Factories and mass production brought young men from the farms to lucrative opportunities in the cities. This great migration to rudimentary cities without a housing stock created a considerable shortage — that up to this point had not been addressed. Rock emphasized that attending to the housing demand was one of the YMCA’s original causes. For a time, the YMCA was one of the only organizations offering affordable housing to the underserved.
Most notably they provided safe, clean accommodations to young men newly arrived in the cities, to immigrants starting out in a new country with no existing support system, and to railroad workers who were constantly traveling across the country and needed some form of stability.
Eventually other housing organizations were established and the resources available met the need. By the latter part of the 20th century the YMCA’s mission was much broader (childcare, camping, swim lessons, and fitness classes) and their programming model was changing.
In 2013 HCDI was looking to expand their services, and the Greater Springfield YMCA did not want to leave their housing clients in the lurch. “It was a perfect evolution,” Rock explained, in describing the transition from a housing veteran with a changing program model, to an organization with resources to focus solely on housing and residents. Similar to the YMCA during the Industrial Revolution, Home City Development serves those who could not otherwise afford safe, clean, decent, housing.
Both organizations are working hard towards positive change on the community level, whether it is through housing, programming, or community leadership. In training future YMCA leaders at Springfield College, Rock’s aim was to “Create transformational experiences in the community…helping people create an inspired vision of the future…to help change the world in a positive direction.”
Rock himself resided at the YMCA during two critical times of transition in his career, once in his early twenties in Winsted CT, and again in his late thirties when he had accepted a job as Executive Director/CEO at the Westfield YMCA. His family needed time to transition out of New Jersey, so he rented a room at the Springfield YMCA for seven months (now Chestnut Crossing!).
On these occasions when he needed an affordable place to stay for a short period there were no other options: Hotels were much too expensive, and typically, renting a room in a house translated to a one-year lease. “I lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for 7 months,” Rock recalled with a laugh, “[The YMCA] gave me a safe clean place where I could lay my head…it was an important part of my life.”