When does the first broker start calling Dudley the Lower South End?

Well it looked like the South End until housing projects, arson, and highway clearance carpet bombed it into suburban levels of density and scale.

Not so simple. Three of the four new spots in the Boiling Building - Dudley Dough, Dudley Cafe, and the clothing store - are all locally-owned by Dudley residents for one. That's keeping money in the community. Having money spent in an area by workers is healthy, regardless of where they are from.

The real key to which way Dudley will go is the number of empty lots in the middle and around Dudley that are city-owned and privately-owned. Residents are right to lean on the BRA to do something there that aren't luxury units. What happens there will determine what happens in Dudley.

Businesses don't move into a neighborhood as a "gift" to the neighborhood. They move to areas where they will make a profit. Rather than telling "white people" (apparently synonymous with middle-class) to go to local markets, why not tell the current residents to spend money there to show potential new businesses that it's a profitable place to set up shop?
Which business does this guy own? I'm sure, for all his talking, that he owns the most popular store in the neighborhood, right?

The area surrounding Dudley is incredibly dangerous (and that includes the lower section of the South End). I highly doubt gentrification will hit that area (if at all) for at least 20 years.

Isn't he standing in front of a heavily subsidized building built by the city. Is the point that the city is causing this?

Instead of complaining about how dirty things are, and how that don't have anything goo, why doesn't he rally the people in that neighborhood to clean things up? If more people in that neighborhood actually cared about their surroundings and didn't openly throw trash in the streets, then maybe good things would start to happen. It is all about the Broken Window theory.

The hours of the stores are the giveaway - nobody dares walking there after 8. It takes an extremely gullible person to even rent there. The Silver Line is great, but renting in Chinatown will save you a lot more than the bus fare,

Speaking as a minority, I find this man's outlook does a kind of violence to the people of our community; it is very reductive to reduce people to a color or a class. His way of looking at the situation just makes people into objects, stereotypes. He does not treat people as people. People are more complex than a color or an income bracket. It is as assault on people's dignity to reduce them to a label.

He has an idea that we should be just given a bunch of nice restaurants and shops and that somehow nobody from outside would want to move in once the neighborhood is so nice? What do we live in, some kind of reservation where only we can have these benefits? That's not how the rest of the city works, so why should we get a separate neighborhood all to ourselves? Essentially he is asking for a gated community that keeps all the nice things to ourselves. It seems unrealistic and it excludes a lot of people in an unfair way.

People speak about gentrification, but it deflects from the real issue. The real issue is not that rich people choose where they want to live. The real issue is that our society allows poverty to continue. We should not be fighting about where rich people should live. The real struggle should be to eliminate poverty. We should not be worried about nice restaurants popping up. We should be worried about making sure that everyone can enjoy a nice restaurant meal. We should not be struggling to make a lot of low-income housing that just perpetuates poverty. Instead, we should be making a standard of living that is good for all people in all places. The fight is to eliminate poverty. The talk about gentrification is just a distraction to avoid dealing with the more difficult problem of poverty.

I do find it interesting the comment above about Grove Hall being like (or better) than Cambridge in terms of architectural quality. This is very true and goes mostly unrecognized by people who do not live in the neighborhood. Take a look on at the house that recently sold at 11 Wayne Street for an idea of the high quality of homes in the area. I'm proud of where we live.

http://www.thewelshgroup.com/real-estate/11-wayne-st-boston-ma-02121/720...

In my opinion, gentrification has hit all races quite drastically over the past 50 years. It seems to have originally involved more of a class-related population overhaul for a neighborhood, whereas now it appears to be a bit more mixed of a race-related & class-related population overhaul.

Much of the modern-day housing construction seems to yield...wait for it....LUXURY apartments and condos. Who are these developments geared toward? Executive upper class folk who make a minimum of $100K per year. Class-wise, this obviously benefits those in the upper class almost exclusively. Race-wise, it seems many non-white populations comprise the hosting neighborhoods where these towering new developments end up.

The concept of "dirty" or "old" anything in a neighborhood seems to be so taboo these days, that any opportunity to gentrify and get those "oh so wonderful" $2K per month luxury residences in its place seems to be embraced quickly. Never mind the racial or neighborhood history, rough edges & all...just get the upper class in (and make a few residences "affordable" as a bone to the lower class).

Sadly, it's both non-white neighborhoods that suffer for accommodating properties geared towards upper class (almost exclusively) & lower-to-middle class neighborhoods that are left without accommodating options post-gentrification. I'm waiting to see the new apartments & condos in neighborhoods that cater to all races who make $30-$60K that aren't brick bunkers echoing 1960s public housing construction.

FYI, I am a mid-30s white male manager of a biosciences company (for fuller disclosure of where this opinion is coming from).