'We Can't Wait Another Year': Dorchester and Jamaica Plain Residents Sound Off on Wu's Housing Crunch

Boston's housing crisis has a Fourth of July soundtrack this year: not fireworks, but a packed community meeting in Dorchester where residents told city officials, point-blank, that they are done being asked to be patient. Roughly 80 people filled the Ronan Community Center on Morrissey Boulevard Tuesday evening, most of them renters, many of them second- and third-generation Bostonians watching their neighborhoods price out their own children.

The timing matters. Mayor Michelle Wu's administration is six months into her revised Affordable Boston Housing Agenda, a plan that set a target of 22,000 new units citywide by 2030. Halfway through 2026, the Boston Planning Department's own figures show fewer than 6,400 permitted since January 2024. That gap — more than 15,000 units — is not abstract to the people sitting in folding chairs on Morrissey Boulevard on a 97-degree afternoon.

The Numbers Behind the Anger

Median asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Dorchester crossed $3,100 in May, according to the Boston Rental Market Report published by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. In Jamaica Plain, the same unit now lists at an average of $3,400 — a 19 percent jump since 2023. Both neighborhoods were once considered relative affordability refuges inside the city limits. They are not that anymore.

The Walsh-era Community Preservation Act funds, which voters approved in 2016 at a 1 percent property tax surcharge, were supposed to backstop affordable development. The Community Preservation Committee allocated $28 million toward affordable housing in fiscal year 2025. Residents and housing advocates say that money, while real, is dwarfed by the scale of displacement happening block by block. The Fenway Community Development Corporation, which also operates in Jamaica Plain, has a waitlist of more than 1,200 households for its below-market units — a list that has not meaningfully shortened in three years.

At Tuesday's meeting, tenant after tenant described versions of the same story: a landlord sale, a lease non-renewal, a rent hike they could not absorb on a teacher's or hospital worker's salary. One woman said she had lived on Bowdoin Street for 22 years and received a notice in April that her rent would jump from $1,850 to $2,600 in September. A father of three from the Codman Square neighborhood said he commutes from Brockton now, having moved his family out last fall. Neither wanted their full names used for fear of landlord retaliation.

What City Hall Is — and Isn't — Doing

The Wu administration points to several active initiatives. The BPDA approved a rezoning of the Newmarket industrial corridor in May that is supposed to unlock up to 3,000 units over a decade. The city's Office of Housing Stability, operating out of 43 Hawkins Street, fielded more than 14,000 calls in fiscal year 2025 from residents facing eviction or displacement. Wu has also pushed the state to expand Chapter 40B protections and lobbied Beacon Hill to advance rent stabilization legislation, which remains stalled in the Senate Ways and Means Committee.

Local advocacy groups are not content to wait for Beacon Hill. City Life/Vida Urbana, based in Jamaica Plain, has organized tenant unions in 14 buildings across Roxbury and Dorchester since January and is pushing the city council to pass a stronger tenant opportunity-to-purchase ordinance before the August recess. The council voted 8-5 in June to advance the measure to a second reading; a final vote is expected before September.

For residents at Tuesday's meeting, the immediate practical question was simpler: where do you go if you get a notice tomorrow? The Office of Housing Stability advises tenants to call 617-635-4200 before signing anything or vacating. Legal aid through Greater Boston Legal Services, which runs a housing hotline at 617-603-1700, is free for income-eligible residents. Community meetings on the rezoning pipeline are scheduled for late July at the Gallivan Community Center in Mattapan and at English High School on Avenue Louis Pasteur. Organizers say showing up is still the most direct pressure residents can apply.