The neighborhood
that got it right
Gentrification is washing over America’s wealthiest cities. Here’s how Uphams Corner held back the tide.
BY David Scharfenberg
David Scharfenberg can be reached at david.scharfenberg@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @dscharfGlobe.
acquie De Los Santos has always been able to glimpse the affluence of the other Boston.
When she peeks through the blinds on the top floor of her home in the Uphams Corner section of Dorchester, she can see the city’s gilded skyline just a couple of miles away.
Lately, the wealth has crept even closer.
Luxury apartments at the nearby Southbay development are fetching more than $4,700 per month.
And just a few blocks from her place, a new restaurant on Columbia Road is serving jerk-roasted duck with rice, peas, pikliz, and parsley oil for $30 a plate.
But this isn’t the typical tale of boomtown development — white money squeezing Black and Latino people out of a neighborhood they’ve long called home.
Columbia Rd.
Massachusetts Ave.
Strand Theatre
Dorchester Ave.
Uphams Corner commuter rail station
Most of the better-off people who have moved to Uphams Corner in recent years look like De Los Santos. And even as the cost of market-rate housing soars — city data shows the median home price in her census tract more than doubled from $268,400 in 2013 to $550,000 last year — there are still plenty of places for lower-income people to live.
De Los Santos’s unit is in a subsidized co-operative that dates to the early 1990s — rows of duplexes, in beige and gray, nestled alongside the commuter rail tracks that split the neighborhood in two. She grows roses, calla lilies, and tulips in a little garden out front. And when her older sister visits, they watch movies in a second-floor sitting room decorated with family pictures.
“This is such a blessing,” De Los Santos says, over coffee on a recent morning. “People don’t understand.”
It’s called development without displacement.
And new research by Common Good Labs, a data science firm, suggests it’s more common than many imagine.
The study identified a small but significant number of high-poverty census tracts — 193 in metropolitan regions all over the country — that managed to slash poverty rates by 10 percentage points or more between 2000 and 2015 without dislodging the areas’ usually Black and Latino populations.
Downtown Boston
Uphams Corner
J
Arson devastated the Uphams Corner section of Dorchester in the 1970s. But in recent decades, the neighborhood has grown wealthier — without displacing the Black and Latino residents who have long called it home. New research shows it is one of a small but significant number of American neighborhoods that have achieved the community activist’s dream: development without displacement.
Erin Clark/
Globe Staff
Fires, including this four-alarm blaze on Dudley Street in December 1971, devastated the corridor stretching from Uphams Corner west to Dudley Square, now known as Nubian Square. George Rizer/Globe Staff
Uphams Corner in December 1981. A rebirth of the neighborhood was just beginning. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
In parts of Jamaica Plain, higher-income white people have displaced lower-income people of color. One of the most visible signs of the transformation was Whole Foods’ 2011 takeover of the Hi-Lo grocery store, which had been a fixture in the neighborhood for 47 years.
Kayana Szymczak for the Boston Globe/Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
Above: Jim Luckett saved antique bottles he found at a former dump on Magnolia Street that Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation turned into affordable housing.
Right: Luckett played a key role in the rehabilitation of burned-out buildings in Uphams Corner and in the creation of new developments. Here, he stands in front of the Alexander-Magnolia Co-operative, which rose on a string of vacant lots near the commuter rail tracks that run through the neighborhood. Photos by John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
Ronald and Kathleen Verna stand on the porch of their Uphams Corner home, where they have lived for over 20 years. Verna, who co-pastors a church with his wife, says he lives in Uphams Corner, in part, out of a sense of mission. It’s what he calls an “incarnational” way of life. You don’t just preach and teach. You live in the community. Erin Clark/Globe Staff
The Columbia Crossing development would turn an old Citizens Bank and nearby parking lot into an arts-themed mixed-use space, with a gallery and affordable housing. It’s part of an effort to grow the neighborhood while staving off gentrification. Rendering by Stull & Lee Inc.
Photo by Bob Haas
Edson DaSilva grew up on Monadnock Street in Uphams Corner and played baseball beneath the beech tree in neighbor Bob Haas’s yard. DaSilva is part of the DePina clan, a family of Cape Verdean immigrants who once owned houses up and down the street. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
Uphams Corner was a sleepy corner of Dorchester until the late 1800s, when a building boom transformed it into an urban center almost overnight. The trolley tracks that ran through the commercial center were torn up in the middle of the 20th century, around the time the neighborhood began a precipitous decline.
Above right: Charnice Charmant, left, and Chidinma “Chichi” Osuagwu, co-directors of AfroBeats Dance Boston, teach a class at the Alexander-Magnolia Co-operative in Uphams Corner in January 2019. Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff
Below right: In June 1993, Officer Robin DeMarco encountered 5-year-old Rosyana Cardoso, who was just returning from her preschool graduation exercises in a dress made for the occasion by her mother. The officer’s graduation gift to the child was a ride on the horse. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Above: Ashley Rose Salomon hosts a counter-inaugural event called Together We Rise at the Strand Theatre in January 2017, shortly after President Trump took office. Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe
‘It was a horrible night’
Parts of New York and Los Angeles pulled off the trick.
And here in New England, it happened in the Federal Hill section of Providence, R.I.; in the Fair Haven neighborhood of New Haven, Conn.; in an oddly drawn Boston tract that includes the Financial District and a sliver of Chinatown; and in De Los Santos’s stretch of Uphams Corner.
Common Good is not the first outfit to identify places like these; a study with similar findings got some attention a few years back.
But the firm has pushed the research in an intriguing new direction — using machine learning to churn through millions of data points and identify a series of factors these neighborhoods have in common.
That means the story of a place like Uphams Corner is not just a curiosity.
It could be a map to the urban planner’s Holy Grail: growth that benefits everyone.
For the longest time, it was a country idyll.
Some farmland, a colonial cemetery, and a dry goods store owned by the Upham family.
But after Boston claimed the area when it annexed the town of Dorchester in 1870, a building boom transformed the place.
A group of handsome Victorian homes took shape on the hillside. Triple deckers filled the spaces in between. And in the fall of 1918, Boston’s new million-dollar movie palace, the Strand Theater, opened with a double feature: “Out of a Clear Sky,” starring Marguerite Clark, and “Queen of the Sea” with Annette Kellerman.
By mid-century, Uphams Corner had turned into a bustling, mixed-income community.
But that wouldn’t last.
The trolley tracks that ran through the heart of the neighborhood were torn up. And the Irish Catholics who’d filled the pews at St. Kevin’s joined in the white flight that decimated much of the city.
As the banks pulled back, properties fell into disrepair.
The 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s brought a devastating rash of arson, with landlords from Uphams Corner west to Dudley Square torching their apartment buildings for the insurance money.
John Barros, who grew up in that corridor and would later wage two campaigns for mayor of Boston, was only five years old when a neighborhood fire killed a family friend and her children. But he can still hear the wailing and the frantic phone calls.
“It was a horrible night in our house,” he says. “Horrible.”
As the fires multiplied, a grim ritual set in.
Nearby homeowners would hose down their roofs to protect against drifting embers. City contractors would show up as soon as the next day to level whatever remained of the blackened house. And then the scavengers would pick through the doorknobs and mantels looking for something to sell.
But not everyone can move to Newton. Not everyone wants to.
And that means something must be done to ensure a healthier mix of incomes in the neighborhoods that so many poor people call home.
White professionals can provide some economic balance. But the arrival of too many can tip a place into full-blown gentrification and force Black and Latino residents to leave in search of more affordable rents.
It’s happened in Boston.
The South End is a classic case. And more recently, white money has helped nudge families of color out of parts of Jamaica Plain.
The replication question
Concentrated poverty is one of the most damaging forces in American life.
Not because of any one injury it inflicts, but because of an accumulation.
Kids who grow up in poor neighborhoods are twice as likely to live near a source of toxic emissions. They have fewer trees on the block and fewer neighbors with professional jobs.
Their streets are more violent, their schools more likely to fail.
And in recent years, economists have used millions of census and tax records to show that they earn less money as adults.
As the true toll of concentrated poverty has come into view, some policymakers have made efforts to open up better-off places to poor families — advocating for more income-restricted housing in well-to-do neighborhoods and helping Section 8 voucher holders find apartments in suburbia.
Renovating Uphams Corner
That’s not to say that everyone in the neighborhood found his way. Far from it.
Uphams Corner was awash in heroin and cocaine. And there was too much violence. The murder of a troubled young man known as Zaduca — shot in the head execution style — was an especially traumatic moment on Monadnock.
But the neighborhood persisted. There was “a real sense of ownership and pride,” says DaSilva.
And in time, it would pay off.
DaSilva’s grandfather, who worked on the assembly line at Polaroid and at a milk distributor in Chelsea, planted cabbage, collard greens, and strawberries behind his triple decker. And he spent endless hours fixing up the place.
Appreciation came slowly. And then it was quick.
Recently, the house sold for over $1.1 million.
But if the story of Uphams Corner is, in part, a story of immigrant striving meeting a hot housing market, there is something else, too.
Something bigger.
The formula
By the mid-1980s, there were 1,300 vacant lots in one stretch of the neighborhood, and illegal dumping was rampant — trucks rolling in under the cover of night to drop toxic chemicals, busted refrigerators, and rotten meat in the weeds.
But if much of the city gave up on Uphams Corner, a group of newcomers, many from Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, saw opportunity.
Property could be had for cheap. And one family, the DePinas, bought so many houses on Monadnock Street that it came to be known as “Rua de DePina.”
Like other Cape Verdeans in the neighborhood, the DePinas rented out their apartments to newly arrived friends and family at below-market rates.
And because there were so many aunts and uncles and cousins in one place, a certain level of familiarity — and accountability — permeated the place.
Edson DaSilva, a member of the DePina clan, says if one of the kids cracked a windshield during a baseball game and wouldn’t fess up, they were all grounded.
The optimum fate for low-income neighborhoods of color, then, is poverty reduction without displacement. And the Common Good researchers identified 193 neighborhoods in metropolitan America that have pulled off the feat in the last couple of decades.
Each started with 30 percent of residents or more living below the federal poverty line in 2000. And each was able to slash that poverty rate by 10 percentage points or more by 2015 — say, from 35 to 25 percent — without a significant decline in any of the racial groups that were present at the start.
That means the low-income people of color who lived in the neighborhood grew wealthier. Or more middle-class Black and Latino families moved in. Or it may have been a bit of both. Whatever the change, it made for a more vibrant, mixed-income, stable neighborhood.
The researchers used a pattern-recognition algorithm to identify what these places have in common, and they landed on eight factors. None does much on its own. But if a large number of them are present, the neighborhood is significantly more likely to thrive.
“You can think of the indicators the same way you might think of biological indicators that give us information about our health,” says Rhett Morris, a partner at Common Good and co-author of the paper. Like a low resting heart rate or a healthy cholesterol level, these factors “are associated with positive change” and are “things we can measure and track.”
Three of the factors are external.
One is economic growth in the surrounding metropolitan region; low-income people tend to work in service sectors like retail and hospitality and are especially sensitive to the state of the local economy. Low homicide rates in the county matter, too — likely because violent crime can be a significant source of anxiety for young people, crimping their academic performance and knocking them off track. The third factor is low risk of displacement in nearby areas; a high-poverty census tract that abuts one with large numbers of 25- to 34-year-olds earning $100,000 or more is more likely to gentrify.
These external factors are enormously important — 93 percent of neighborhoods that cut poverty without displacement had all three in place. And that means the phenomenon is more likely to occur in a flourishing area like Greater Boston than in, say, Akron, Ohio.
But if outside help is necessary, it isn’t sufficient.
Researchers identified five internal factors, too: higher rates of home ownership (ownership builds wealth); lower vacancy rates (vacancy is associated with crimes like burglary and arson); higher rates of self-employment (entrepreneurship can be a path to mobility and set an example for younger people); increases in housing density in the decade leading up to the study period (more units mean low-income people have a place to live even as higher-income people move into the neighborhood); and the presence of community-building organizations (which can put up housing and strengthen social ties).
The indicators are no guarantee of success. Just 17 percent of high-poverty neighborhoods with all three external factors and at least four of the internal factors managed to develop without displacement.
But these places had a distinct advantage over other poor neighborhoods; they were 3.7 times more likely to achieve the desired state.
And if they had a shot, it was often because a handful of committed people helped will it into being.
Bob Haas fell for the grand old Victorian on Monadnock Street the first time he saw it.
There was a sweeping porch and a big beech tree out front.
And while most of the windows were broken and boarded up, the sunshine still streamed through a bit of exposed stained glass, casting exquisite red-and-blue patterns on the floor.
As he would later write in a memoir partly published in the Dorchester Reporter, “I felt as if I’d entered a church.”
Haas spent years meticulously renovating the place — lugging his 6-foot-6-inch frame up a 40-foot extension ladder to replace the shattered windows and paint a long-neglected gable.
And after he’d made a certain amount of progress, he turned his attention to his adopted neighborhood.
The lumbering white guy with the sputtering engineering career had led a very different life than the people around him. But he was sincere. And when he started a new neighborhood association, he was able to reach across racial and cultural lines. There were Latinos and African Americans; the DePinas and other Cape Verdean immigrants were involved from the start.
And in the summer of 1978, the association sponsored the first of several block parties. Haas ran an extension cord out of his house for the DJ and people got to know each other over plates of roti and Cape Verdean pastries stuffed with tuna.
But Haas and his neighbors also had their eye on a physical transformation of their pockmarked neighborhood.
And in 1979, they joined with activists from nearby Jones Hill and Savin Hill to form a nonprofit developer called the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation.
The group started small. One of its first projects was fixing up a house on Monadnock with a revolving turret — spin the tower and you could peer into different reaches of the nighttime sky. Dorchester Bay was keen on giving this signature feature prominent play in the for-sale listing. But apparently the Globe’s classified advertising representative had never heard of a turret; it went into the paper as a “revolving toilet.”
The gaffe may have helped to drum up interest. Several people turned out to see the place and it quickly sold.
Soon, Dorchester Bay was on to bigger projects.
One of the most consequential sprouted on a series of weed-choked lots on Alexander and Magnolia streets in the early 1990s.
Haas had studied the parcels for years; that’s what he did.
“He was always thinking 15 moves ahead,” says Jim Luckett, another key player in Dorchester Bay’s early days.
A trained economist, Luckett was the doer to Haas’s visionary.
And when the Alexander and Magnolia properties were finally assembled, he joined with another get-it-done type — Sheila Dillon, a Dorchester Bay receptionist-turned-project manager who would later serve as the city’s housing chief — to replace the blighted lots with the handsome, blocks-long Alexander-Magnolia Co-operative.
De Los Santos, who can see the city skyline from her top floor, was among the first to move into the development.
And she can still remember the first time her siblings visited.
The grass hadn’t grown in yet, but she was able to show off the grill on a patch of dirt out back. And her family was impressed to learn that, if anything broke, she could call on the co-op’s maintenance crew to fix it free of charge.
“They were like, ‘girl, you made it,’” De Los Santos says.
She felt the same way.
Dorchester Bay has remained the primary nonprofit force in the neighborhood. But other groups have made valuable contributions, too.
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, best known for a sweeping revitalization of the burned-out Dudley Triangle to the west, has worked with Dorchester Bay on a number of projects. A social services agency called Project HOPE Boston is a mainstay. And in the 2010s, the Planning Office for Urban Affairs, a nonprofit developer affiliated with the Archdiocese of Boston, turned the shuttered St. Kevin’s school into Uphams Crossing, a sprawling apartment complex with 80 subsidized units, a residents lounge, and a fitness room.
The first batch of tenants included cooks, janitors, and warehouse workers.
This was the formula the Common Good Labs researchers would identify so many years later — a strong local economy, a cluster of community-building nonprofits, and plenty of housing. Between 2000 and 2015, Uphams Corner’s poverty rate fell from 35 to 24 percent.
But a healthier economic mix was only possible because the neighborhood was able to attract professionals of color like Ronald Verna.
Verna, an information technology specialist, says he had some sentimental reasons for moving to Uphams Corner. As a kid, he’d attended St. Kevin’s school and walked up the hill to friends’ houses for lunch.
But when he bought a house on Sayward Street with his wife Kathleen, it was the diversity of the place that appealed.
He’d have a handful of white neighbors. More from Cape Verde and Latin America.
And when he stopped by Brother’s Supermarket on Dudley Street, he could pick up large Caribbean-style mangos and a favorite brand of West Indian hot sauce.
If Uphams Corner has managed to avoid displacement until now, some locals worry it could still come.
And City Hall has taken those concerns seriously.
It has included subsidized housing in plans for a new library branch in the neighborhood.
And a few years ago, it steered ownership of an old Citizens Bank building to a community land trust run by the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. Plans approved in November call for a glassy, community-friendly art gallery known as the “Glow Box” out front, with up to 48 income-restricted housing units behind.
But if getting ahead of gentrification is a critical task, so is figuring out how to replicate what Uphams Corner has already done.
That will be tricky.
Even with all the right pieces in place — a strong economy, reductions in crime, active nonprofits — neighborhoods can stagnate.
And pushing one button too hard can backfire. Lots of affordable housing in a single neighborhood can concentrate poverty, with all the attendant effects.
Morris, the co-author on the Common Good paper, says these sorts of challenges have contributed to what he calls a “can’t-doism” in urban planning circles.
Too many government officials and community activists, he says, are pessimistic about growing poor neighborhoods of color — and believe that, in the rare instances when it can be done, displacement is inevitable.
Morris says that’s misguided.
With a more precise understanding of the factors that make a difference, he says, policymakers should be able to make fine-tuned decisions about what any particular place needs; maybe it’s more housing here, maybe it’s more capital for budding entrepreneurs there.
And with 193 examples of success — in Los Angeles and Baton Rouge, La., and Boston — there are plenty of places to look for guidance.
“Positive change,” he says, “is possible.”
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A sitting room inside Bob Haas's house.
A photograph of Bob Haas sits atop a piano inside his home. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
The first time he visited the house, Haas was mesmerized by the sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows.
The home of Bob Haas in Uphams Corner.
Photos by Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
The view from the front porch looking out onto Monadnock Street.
A detail shot of the carved fireplace mantle and tile work inside a sitting room.
The house was built in 1880 for the son of George W. Smith, whose company supplied decorative cast iron.
The summer of 1978 saw the first of several block parties on Monadnock Street in Uphams Corner. Bob Haas, who lived on the street for decades, took a series of photographs that captured the joy of the gatherings. A long-time community activist, Haas played a pivotal role in the revival of the once burned-out neighborhood. He died last year at age 76. Photos by Bob Haas
Editors: Brian Bergstein and Kelly Horan Designer: Heather Hopp-Bruce Project manager: Abbi Matheson
Data analysis: Andrew Nguyen Audience engagement: Deanna Schwartz
The neighborhood has its problems. It’s still scruffy, even after all the improvements. And Uphams Corner has a higher crime rate than much of the city.
But Verna, who co-pastors a church with his wife, doesn’t shy away from any of that. To the contrary, he feels called to live in a neighborhood with its share of poverty and struggle.
He calls it an “incarnational” way of life. You don’t just preach and teach. You live in the community.
There are a lot of people in the neighborhood who take a similar view, he says. His old friend Haas, who was a devoted Catholic before he died a few months ago, was among them.
“We’re missionaries,” Verna says. “It was an important thing for us to be here.”
In this footage from the 1990s, a series of weed-choked lots is turned into the the Alexander-Magnolia Co-operative. Video courtesy Jim Luckett
Left: On June 15, 1999, a pre-dawn six-alarm fire destroyed the abandoned Sister Clara Muhammad school building on Magnolia Street, just as Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation and another neighborhood group, now known as Quincy Geneva New Vision, were planning to convert it into subsidized housing. George Rizer/Globe Staff
Erin Clark/Globe Staff
Above right: Charnice Charmant, left, and Chidinma “Chichi” Osuagwu, co-directors of AfroBeats Dance Boston, teach a class at the Alexander Magnolia Co-op in Uphams Corner in January 2019. Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff
Below right: In June 1993, Officer Robin DeMarco encountered 5-year-old Rosyana Cardoso, who was just returning from her preschool graduation exercises in a dress made for the occasion by her mother. The officer’s graduation gift to the child was a ride on the horse. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
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Above: Jim Luckett saved antique bottles he found at a former dump on Magnolia Street that Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation turned into affordable housing.
Right: Luckett played a key role in the rehabilitation of burned-out buildings in Uphams Corner and in the creation of new developments. Here, he stands in front of the Alexander-Magnolia Co-operative, which rose on a string of vacant lots near the commuter rail tracks that run through the neighborhood. Photos by John Tlumacki/Globe Staff
Above: Jeanne DuBois was the executive director of Dorchester Bay when the fire struck and pleaded with city officials to leave the building standing. Today, she stands outside the Sister Clara Muhammad Co-operative, which includes 15 residential units in the original school building and 10 units nearby. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff