Conscious Choice: The Dudley Street Example

June 2000 | Citizen at Large

The Dudley Street Example

by Jay Walljasper

There’s an oddly out-of-place Norman Rockwell feel to Dudley Street, an avenue winding through Boston’s hard-hit Roxbury district. The neighborhood surrounding Dudley Street is one of the poorest in Massachusetts with per capita income about half that of Boston as a whole and unemployment almost twice as high. Forty percent of families live below the poverty line and it’s not hard to spot crack dealers slinking past shabby, neglected apartment buildings on the side streets. But you also see kids skipping along the sidewalks, singing and waving to folks as they wander home from school. Old ladies tend flower patches in their side yards, and neighbors chat over back fences behind tidy white woodframe houses. The town common hosts a farmers’ market and bandstand for concerts. Nearby is Davey’s Market, which serves as a gathering spot for anyone seeking the latest neighborhood news. Conversations may be in Spanish, Cape Verdean, or the melodiously-inflected accents of the Caribbean, but you still sense something of the idealized America found on old Saturday Evening Post covers.

Yet this is Roxbury, the place where Malcolm X launched his career as a small-time hood before embracing Islam and opening a mosque on nearby Intervale Street — not Stockbridge, the postcard-perfect village across the state where Norman Rockwell lived and painted local scenes. What’s going on here?

The answer to that question can be found just down the street from Davey’s Market in the office of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in a remodeled furniture factory. During the afternoon hours, it stands in for the corner soda fountain as kids wander in for no real reason but to say hi and see who else might be around. The busy staff usually finds time to talk and joke with them, and when there really is a reason for the kids’ visits, they listen carefully. One afternoon I was there, Ros Everdell, a DSNI organizer, counseled sixteen-year-old Jason Webb what to do about an algebra class with no regular teacher. "Get all the kids in the class to go with you and say you need a real teacher, and that you need to make up all the material you’ve already missed."

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative has been at work in this corner of Roxbury since 1985, when neighborhood residents rose up to reject a charity’s proposal to come in and revitalize the area for them. They demanded, and surprisingly were handed, the money to take charge of their own renewal. In the ensuing years they beat back the city’s gentrification plans, halted illegal dumping in the area, gained the right to develop vacant land, chased drug dealers from the local playground, established sports and youth programs, founded a parents’ organization to bring improvements to local public schools, built more than 250 units of affordable housing, created a new town common at the center of the neighborhood, and enthusiastically pursued their vision of making Dudley Street into an urban version of a close-knit village. This year a new community center opens with a gym, childcare center, and rooms for adult education, as well as a community greenhouse.

All the decisions about redeveloping Dudley Street have been in the hands of residents, and that explains why the neighborhood feels different from many inner city renewal projects. Instead of modern apartment blocks and strip malls, there are old-fashioned houses and storefront shops. "This has been like a small New England town," says Gus Newport, the former Berkeley, California, mayor who was executive director of DSNI from 1988 to 1992. "No major decision has been made without a vote of the community."

From the start, DSNI looked at the neighborhood as more than a collection of problems to be dealt with. The group’s members devoted considerable time and energy to envisioning what they wanted for Dudley Street, which is how the idea of the urban village was born. More than 150 people met to plot out the future of their neighborhood in an eight-month series of meetings that were conducted in Spanish and Cape Verdean as well as English. They came up with a wide-ranging plan that emphasized building community spirit as much as erecting new houses. Bike paths, apple orchards, outdoor cafés, community gardens, fountains, arts programs, and a town common with concerts were identified as goals alongside pressing economic needs like jobs.

"The only way to make things happen is to dream," explains Gertrudes Fidalgo, who participated in the original visioning process as a youngster and came back to Dudley Street after college to become a DSNI organizer. "Dreams are your best resource."

This visioning process has gone on for more than a decade, with results from each round taped to the wall in DSNI’s conference room, testifying to people’s powerful yearning for community — and ice cream. An ice cream parlor figures in many of the scenarios of Dudley Street’s future that were jotted down on big sheets of paper, along with dreams like this: "People Walking. People Talking. People Laughing. Saying Hello to Everyone We Meet." Another reads: "I want affordable housing and schools with beautiful green playgrounds."

"A lot of these urban programs do only housing," Gus Newport points out. "But that’s not all there is to a community. Where’s the culture? The commerce? That’s why we have community gardens here, why we have flowers. I think planners take it for granted that poor people don’t need culture, vital businesses, or beauty. If you had those things in inner cities, you’d have a lot less crime. You have to get inside the heads of people who live here, see what they want. They want more than houses. Beauty — no matter how small it is, just a few flowers — is what matters most.

"What you have here are a lot of people who grew up in the rural south, and the Cape Verde Islands, and the Caribbean," he says. "They want to work with the land. They want open spaces for kids to play. They don’t want to live in tall buildings. They want to know their neighbors and say "hi." They understood all by themselves that they wanted to get back to the village."

Besides working to build affordable housing, DSNI has been busy with numerous other projects and partnerships. An annual neighborhood clean-up was launched along with the planting of dozens of community gardens and the establishment of a multicultural festival. When drug dealers set up shop at the playgrounds in Mary Hannon Park, the community retook the park by establishing a regular round of youth activities and sports programs. Working with planning professionals, residents translated the ideas of a sociable, walkable urban village into a master plan that was accepted by the city as the official zoning code for the area. More than 300 units of housing in the area have been rehabbed. Government money was secured to construct the lovely town common. DSNI has sponsored regular job fairs and classes for low-income people who want to buy homes.

One of the people signing up for the home buying classes was Debra Wilson, a forty-one-year-old caseworker for the welfare department. That’s how she heard about Winthrop Estates, where she now lives with her two teen-aged sons in one of the 225 new housing units rising from what was vacant land in Dudley Street. Walking me through her townhouse, which is modeled on traditional New England homes with clapboard-style siding and a bay window that looks out one of the new parks, she says, "When I first came here it was all overgrown with weeds, old tires, abandoned cars everywhere. I couldn’t imagine this as a neighborhood like it is now. It still surprises me."

"The whole village idea is fascinating," Wilson says. "We didn’t just want a structure thrown up. We wanted a sense of community."

Gus Newport emphasizes, "The chief lesson from Dudley Street is that communities need to have complete control over the planning process. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use professionals. But you must remember that the people living there are the experts. Community people are usually taken for granted. But here they look over everything and analyze it. They ask a lot of questions. Even people with little education. There are people with little education who have great ideas. "

As Debra Wilson says, "This is how we can get what we want, not what someone else thinks we want."

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