At the corner of Dorchester Avenue and Adams Street, one can hear the muted sounds of the Neponset River. At night, the walk over the bridge from the Mattapan Trolley stop to here is peaceful in Dorchester’s Lower Mills neighborhood. On the evening of 11/30, the chants of protesters and supportive car horns liven the intersection, breaking the stillness.
Before, the building located at this intersection was a chocolate mill. Bizarrely and in the way of the zeitgeist and the market, the complex’s current owners, Chartwell Holdings, LLC, now capitalize on this history by selling the whimsical novelty of living in a refurbished chocolate mill. These apartments at the Baker Chocolate Factory are hardly a unique case of redevelopment in the city; capital from speculators and developers has flooded Boston’s real estate market. Via this influx of investment, the city’s’ past is scrubbed, refurbished and rebranded for a new kind of tenant, one in need of a zen garden or Amazon locker to fulfill a hyper-convenient urban life, two of many listed amenities on the apartment complex’s website.
Through these changes, entire livelihoods have been displaced into what has manifested into a full crisis in Greater Boston. Developers purchase buildings in “up and coming” neighborhoods with the goal of flipping properties, increasing rents to levels that are untenable or clearing buildings of tenants that have lived in the neighborhood for years. It’s a familiar story in Black and Latinx neighborhoods like East Boston, Dorchester, and Roxbury. Residents who sought to ameliorate the harms of racist housing policy and historic disinvestment in their neighborhoods have seen hard-fought improvements perversely presented as added-value assets for opportunistic developers.
The protestors lining the corner are here to chant their support for Rosa Poincy, a 60 year old Dorchester grandmother who may be evicted from a unit in this apartment complex. Her rent had previously been capped and subsidized via a Section 8 voucher, a Federal affordable housing subsidy. Reporting via Boston University News Service describes that earlier this year, Poincy received notice that her lease would not be renewed, and that her housing subsidy would be terminated; paying the market rate rent would be the only way to stay. The evening’s vigil was organized by City Life Vida Urbana, an anti-displacement organization that has been active in Greater Boston since the 1970s.
Today, the organization finds itself on the front lines, teaching tenants to learn their rights and the roots of the housing crisis, while taking developers to court and shaming them via demonstrations like this one. They have been materially successful in helping tenants negotiate to stay in their homes, but also in creating a community consciousness surrounding displacement, making public and visible what was once considered a private and shameful process. Other organizations such as Right to the City, Dorchester Not 4 Sale, and many others make up a growing movement in the city and nationwide for tenants rights and affordable housing.
At the scene, candles and traffic lights cast a spotlight glow over the 100 people who have turned out. In neon City Life Vida Urbana -shirts, organizers hand out flyers to passersby and cars stopped at the light. They hold signs asking for corporate greed to end, for an end to the displacement crisis and the practices of unscrupulous speculators. Students and young reporters clutch their cameras and videography equipment, seeking to capture the resistance to these forces in the faces of protestors.
Displacement in the City of Boston is as much a crisis as it is the bending of reality, where developers paper over evictions, building clearouts and the disruption of livelihoods with pristine architectural renderings and saccharine depictions of urban living. Protest shines a light on the practices of landlords who evict tenants below the surface of this placid branding. The housing market as it exists today is not a spontaneous or organic outcome, nor is it an inevitability that tenants must simply accept as “the market,” as if a two-dimensional model of profit maximization could conceivably sum up what the real estate industry owes communities. Today, demonstrating as such becomes ever more valuable.
To support Poincy and City Life’s efforts, you can sign the petition located here.