When it pays to know which neighborhood you live in

From the rest of the story, it indeed sounds like this person probably was using relatives' information or whatnot to get a license saying he lived in the city...

But I also have to say that a lot of the families my program works with in the Walnut Street/Elm Hill/MLK area think they live in Dorchester when they're actually on the Roxbury side of the line. Also, some of the folks in this area closer to Seaver Street think they're in Roxbury when they're in Dorchester. Same thing happens around the Dorchester/Mattapan line near Blue Hill.

Most of these families for whom this happens are renting in one of the smaller subsidized buildings (not one of the large projects where there's an office with brochures and whatnot saying what neighborhood it's in). If you have a building manager and a housing agency and everything, there's not really any reason to know what neighborhood you're in -- you wouldn't generally call city hall or anything or like a homeowner or out-of-pocket renter often needs to do.

When we're filling out forms, some of these folks have even told me they're not sure if it's Roxbury or Dorchester, because they get mail with both neighborhood names -- some places have computer programs that put the city name in by ZIP code, and other places go by what the person told them, or the WIC office or health center or Head Start or whatever figures it must be the same neighborhood as the family since they're right down the street.

(Of course, I've always wondered why Boston even continues using the neighborhood names in the addresses at all. We have ZIP codes now, so this eliminates confusion about duplicate addresses. The neighborhood-as-address thing is annoying, because then we run into stuff like my mortgage company telling me they tried calling Roxbury City Hall to get my tax bill and am I sure my house actually exists, or trying to book out-of-town presenters for my past employer with an address Brighton and being told there's an extra fee for being outside of a city served by an airport.)