BY JORDAN FRIAS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 20, 2013
This morning I decided to visit the Department of Neighborhood Development page on the City of Boston website where I discovered a “Maps and Neighborhood Profiles” section. This can be located under the “Policy and Development Research” tab.
The site conveniently has a profile for each of the 15 major neighborhoods that make up Boston, which can be viewed as a PDF file.
The neighborhoods that I looked at were Back Bay – Beacon Hill, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, South Boston, South End and West Roxbury. I concentrated on three pieces of information: demographics (race and ethnicity), median household income and percentage of affordable units.
The most compelling piece of information that I found was the following:
- The South End has the highest percentage of affordable units at 41 percent to Boston’s 19.4 percent
- Back Bay – Beacon Hill had the lowest percentage of affordable units at 6 percent
- This information was posted on July 1, 2011.
Most of the information came from the US Bureau of the Census. The demographic information is from 2010. The median household income information came from results from American Community Surveys from 2005-2009.
I spoke with Kerry O’Brien, the Deputy Director at the Department of Neighborhood Development who deals with public relations. She informed me that federal cuts to the department have hindered them from having more up-to-date information on the neighborhoods. The department has less interns in the policy and development department to work on these profiles, but it plans to hire more in the summer.
She told me to take a look at the neighborhood profiles on the Boston Redevelopment Authority website. While these profiles are a bit more in depth and in some cases a little more up-to-date, I find the City of Boston page to be more accessible to easier to understand.
When I told her about the research I was doing, she told me that the city has done a lot to discourage gentrification over the past few years. She cited some policies that are in place that prevent gentrification throughout the city. For instance, Boston has an Inclusionary Development Policy that requires condominium developers to build affordable units into all of their projects or pay a fee to the city. This was made possible by Mayor Thomas Menino and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
I will get in touch with the Boston Redevelopment Authority to further explore their efforts to combat gentrification.
Housed in Boston 