“I love showing people what we’ve done,” announces our fast-moving, fast-talking tour guide, Jeanne DuBois, director of the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation, “because it’s really exciting.”
A 52-year-old soccer mom with blonde-brown hair, DuBois does not at first seem like the type who enjoys prowling the back streets of Boston’s inner city. “I grew up in Arcadia,” she jokes, describing a youth spent playing volleyball year-round on the southern California beaches of Pasadena. But DuBois is no laid-back Californian. She radiates the energy of a New Yorker and the fervor of a ’60s radical.
We hop into a mini-van parked in the Upham’s Corner section of north Dorchester and set out to understand the changes in Boston’s inner city. We are lucky to have DuBois for a tour guide; the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation, which she has led for three years, has developed more than 500 units of housing and plans to develop 200 more units in the next two years in north Dorchester and Roxbury.
Like any good guide, ours has a lot to say. As she points out the organization’s housing projects and other sights, DuBois mixes stories of Dorchester residents who have struggled to take back their neighborhoods with reflections about her own adventures as a community organizer and the inspiration she takes from a swashbuckling grandfather who went out to the California frontier at the turn of the century to build railroads and bridges.
But the important lesson DuBois has to teach is this: Creating affordable housing is not an end in itself, it is the starting point in turning neighborhoods around. The innovative community development organizations that have contributed to the rebirth of Boston’s inner city over the last 20 years have learned to develop housing opportunities because they believe good homes are a key first step toward having the sense of safety, the shopping conveniences, and the jobs that characterize a healthy urban district.
As we head down Columbia Road, one of the great boulevards that winds through Boston’s old streetcar neighborhoods, DuBois waves at early 20th-century apartment blocks, calling them by exotic names nowhere to be seen on the buildings–Red Hazel I and II, the Granite properties–terms that it turns out represent the financial packages that made their renovation possible. The buildings resemble upscale commercial properties, not stereotypical low-income housing. “See, look down the street,” she says with evident pride, “the nice-looking buildings are ours.”
DuBois points out the pristine and graffiti-free brick Bird Street apartment building, part of the $5.5 million Upham’s Corner Apartments project that renovated 36 flats in four buildings. We drive down streets filled with typical Boston residences–one- and two-family houses and three-deckers–until we stop at a construction site on Bowdoin Street. We enter a three-decker whose interior is in the process of being rebuilt. Among the new joists and beams, DuBois consults with her project manager, Andrew Sedensky; architect Mark Duluk steps forward to point out the room layout; and Bertram Alleyne, a Dorchester electrician sizing up the security system, regales us with stories of community protests back in the War on Poverty era. This building, the site of three drug-related murders in 1996, made it to the city’s Ten Most Wanted Drug Dens list, whereupon the government seized it and turned it over to the nonprofit Dorchester Bay organization for rehabilitating. When the rehab is done, the house will be sold on reasonable terms to a low-income first-time homebuyer.
The Bowdoin Street house and a number of others in the area, DuBois explains, are being rebuilt under a new program for renovating abandoned one- to four-family houses and reselling them to first-time homebuyers. It is an old tradition for Dorchester Bay, however. Since it was founded in 1979 the organization has been fixing and reselling abandoned houses first on its own and later under the auspices of Boston’s Homesteading and Stabilization Programs.
Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation is one of the many small locally based nonprofit organizations that have been formed in Boston and around the country since the 1960s to improve low-income neighborhoods. Known variously as EDCs or CDCs–community development corporations–these groups have been especially successful at developing low-income housing, creating tens of thousands of dwelling units annually since the mid-1980s. The work is not easy. For each housing development, groups such as Dorchester Bay must acquire the real estate–usually a badly deteriorated and foreclosed property–and painstakingly assemble funds for rehabilitation from as many as a dozen different government and philanthropic sources.
“Here,” DuBois announces as we turn down Magnolia Street, “Dorchester Bay EDC is building a whole new neighborhood.” On Magnolia and Alexander, two long parallel streets, gleaming new duplex homes with back yards have replaced the traditional three-deckers and brick row houses of Boston’s neighborhoods. Dorchester Bay EDC developed the Alexander-Magnolia project as a limited-equity co-op, which means that the occupants become share-holding members who are charged according to the income they earn and can cash out for only a small percentage above what they have paid in. The families who live here either earn a low income–defined as below 50 percent of the median income for Boston–or a moderate income–between 50 and 60 percent of the median income; in other words, over the amount that qualifies for Section 8 rental vouchers but not enough to afford Boston’s overheated real estate prices.
“Dorchester Bay set itself apart in the late ’80s and early ’90s as an incredible production engine of affordable housing,” observes Matthew Thall, the program director for the Boston office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a national nonprofit community funding organization. “In the last few years, it has continued to produce a lot of housing for the Upham’s Corner neighborhood,” Thall explains, “but at the same time, it has become deeply involved with its community. Dorchester Bay now pursues a much broader agenda–including community policing, youth programs, computer training, and business development. Boston’s leading nonprofit housing developers are moving in this direction now.”
As the van winds its way through north Dorchester, DuBois talks about the value of organizing people. She developed her perspective while working for the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by pioneer community organizer Saul Alinsky, and later at Massachusetts Fair Share, a citizens group active in the 1970s. Before coming to Dorchester Bay EDC, she used her organizing skills in her Boston neighborhood of Roslindale in a difficult eight-year campaign to bring in a supermarket after the only grocery store closed.
Thus, Dorchester Bay EDC systematically organizes the residents of all its housing developments and assists other North Dorchester citizens who wish to form block clubs. Some of this energy is channeled into community celebrations and festivals. As well, there is the more arduous work of taking control of the streets. A shooting a few years ago on Brook Avenue, for example, galvanized the residents on the street and in the renovated Cottage Brook Avenue apartments to take action. They began an aggressive crime watch to monitor the comings and goings of drug traffickers and held a candlelight vigil in which the neighborhood clergy conducted a ritual blessing of the street. The block party thrown in 1996 by Brook Avenue residents was the first ever on the street–in years past, the residents would have been too frightened to contemplate such an event. This year more than 500 people joined the celebration.
Our tour returns to Upham’s Corner, the traditional commercial center of north Dorchester. From its early days, Dorchester Bay EDC has been concerned with commercial development. As businesses were deserting the historic commercial corridors, the organization stepped in to save the S.B. Pierce Building, a late 19th-century neo-Georgian edifice whose curving form anchors Upham’s Corner. In the mid-1980s, Dorchester Bay EDC formed a for-profit limited partnership which developed the building and brought in a Payless shoe store as the ground floor tenant. Upstairs are offices, including those of Dorchester Bay itself. The organization has made loans to more than 55 small businesses, one of which is a Cape Verdean bakery soon to open in Upham’s Corner.
But our tour guide will not let a visitor leave Upham’s Corner without first seeing Americas’ Food Basket, a bustling store whose shelves hold not only typical groceries, but also such unusual items as yuccas, plantains, and enormous sacks of rice. The story is that when the neighborhood lost its last supermarket, the community turned to Dorchester Bay EDC for help. Defying the conventional wisdom that supermarkets need at least 25,000 square feet in which to operate, the organization worked with the city to establish Americas’ Food Basket, which serves Dorchester’s immigrant population in a 10,000-square-foot space near the Pierce building. Today Americas’ Food Basket has been so successful that it opened a second store in Hyde Park and Harvard economist Michael Porter uses it to demonstrate the profitability of inner-city retailing.
Eye-opening as the tour has been, it is just as striking to realize that the broad approach to inner-city revitalization taken by Dorchester Bay EDC exists all over the city. In the neighboring district of Roxbury, for example, Nuestra Comunidad has built Stafford Heights Cooperative, 41 units in 17 handsome frame buildings; and in Jamaica Plain, Urban Edge Housing Corporation has developed the graceful Stony Brook Gardens. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, which gained fame for winning the power of eminent domain to carry out its community-based renewal plan for the Dudley area of Roxbury, has long made community organizing the center of its operations. Its director, Gregory Watson, asserts that in the short term you fight crime by organizing neighborhood sentries and in the long term you “build crime out” by replacing vacant lots and abandoned buildings with homes occupied by engaged citizens. In south Dorchester, the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation restored the Lithgow Building, and Nuestra Comunidad has tackled the rehabilitation of historic Palladio Hall in Roxbury’s Dudley Square–and runs a micro-loan and assistance program to help entrepreneurs get started or expand their small businesses.
Boston’s small nonprofit organizations do not exist independently, of course. A powerful array of government departments and private institutions stand behind and support them. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the City of Boston coordinate to disburse federal funding in the form of Community Development Block Grants (for housing or other urban redevelopment projects), low-interest HOME loans (for housing development), and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (earned by developing low-income housing that is sold to investors). The Ten Most Wanted Task Force, which shuts down drug-trafficking houses, involves seven government agencies – including the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the Boston Police Department.
Today, the government frequently works in tandem with private organizations to support local housing and community development. The Boston chapter of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation has been particularly helpful to the city’s nonprofit organizations by giving grants to hire skilled staff, making loans to carry on projects, and helping to collect investment funds. For many years, Boston Community Capital, a community development financial institution, has lent to community development corporations. The Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership, a consortium of major banks, insurance companies, the City of Boston, and the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency, was the major conduit of funds for two large-scale apartment rehabilitation campaigns with which Dorchester Bay and other CDCs gave a new face to inner Boston during the 1980s. The banking industry has created the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation to handle its community development investments.
Recently Matthew Thall of LISC conducted a tour of Roxbury and Dorchester for a top executive of a foundation who had not visited these areas since their days of blight and despair. “I see your work in Boston is almost finished,” the visitor observed. Thall and the fervently busy staff members of Boston’s CDCs feel that the assessment may be premature. As these neighborhoods recover, there are setbacks. Absentee landlords buy properties from speculators and let them deteriorate. Occasionally violence breaks out. The schools still need fixing. But the tide has turned. The momentum is on the side of the citizens who have banded together to drive out the gangs and drugs. Houses are homes again, and the homes are part of a larger community. Jeanne DuBois is right. It is exciting.
Alexander von Hoffman is a historian and Senior Research Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. He is writing a book about the community development movement and efforts to revitalize America’s inner cities.