Dorchester was actually founded first and it was way bigger than Boston - it once stretched all the way to Rhode Island. Adam Pieniazek fills in the gaps of our local historical knowledge and ponders whether Dorchester would ever try to secede.
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Probably not
By Stevil
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 10:53am
A separate "any" neighborhood in Boston probably wouldn't work outside of downtown. There is essentially no tax base outside of downtown - especially commercial. If any neighborhood seceded from Boston they would need to double or possibly triple their property tax rates to be sustainable - which would crush many homeowners and landlords and significantly devalue the real estate. Don't get me wrong - I like the neighborhoods and each one plays a role in the city although I must say I kind of consider West Rox and Hyde Park part of the suburbs - but when you force all your city employees to live in the city you have to give them somewhere to live if thay want that suburban lifestyle within city bounds. Whether you like the neighborhood system or not - Boston definitely has something for everyone - unless you want a sprawling multi-million dollar tudor mansion with amazing schools - but that's what our satellite neighborhood Brookline is for!
Your right and wrong...
By ShadyMilkMan
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 12:24pm
Your right and wrong... Other cities and towns around Boston seem to manage without downtown Boston. On the other hand Im sure they get lots of cash from Massachusetts in the form of local aide, much of which most likely comes from Downtown taxes. So yeah they need Downtown but they do not need to be connected at the hip to get the cash.
With a per capita budget a fraction of Boston's
By Stevil
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 12:56pm
you are correct - a big portion of other city's revenues is state aid (in boston it's only 19% for next year) - which is rapidly drying up. Most other cities also only spend 60-80% of what we do per capita.
Here's a stab at it - I believe I've seen that 15% of the population lives in what would be considered "downtown" - Fenway, East of Mass Ave and Charlestown-purely subjective definition. That's 100,000 people downtown and 500,000 in the neighborhoods. (available by zip code on the census site if anyone wants to do the tally)
Boston spends (operating budget only) about $4000 per person. If you give the neighborhoods 60% the property taxes, half the "other revenues" and all of the state aid - probably a very liberal allocation - they need to cut their budget from $4000 per person to $3000 per person with a much higher percentage of kids in the schools which are the costly part of municipal government-schools would eat up about 60% of the budget-actually on par with other cities. You could do it - but your services would be slashed mightily. Downtown residents would see their expenditure per resident (with no state aid) go to almost $7500 per resident - with almost none allocated to schools - but we'd have really clean streets.
Purely an academic exercise - but interesting to see the discrepancy - and definitely not in any neighborhood's financial interest to secede - which is a good thing - even as a downtown resident I think it works - but it did take me some time to come to that realization!
You're spot on Stevil. The
By AdamPieniazek
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 3:27pm
You're spot on Stevil. The Dorchester annexation supporters said:
At the time, Dorchester had a relatively small population that couldn't support all the public services the massive land area needed. The annexationists knew that by joining with Boston, they'd receive access to the public services that the downtown properties help pay for. They actually asked Boston for police and fire support frequently, and Boston would help but they were under no obligation to.
I tried to scour through the city budget to gleam some facts about the revenue cost breakdowns by city, and there were some interesting details about where the city gets its money from and how much is spent on neighborhoods, but no by neighborhood breakdowns. It might make for an interesting article to try to extrapolate how much Boston takes in from the various neighborhoods and state and how much it spends where, but it would all be extrapolation/estimates.
Oh, just what we need!
By SwirlyGrrl
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 11:04am
More local balkanization, when local balkanization is already sinking the entire state!
Boston is already puny by modern urban metro area standards. Local entities have way too much power and prevent the kind of comprehensive planning of land use and services that have helped a number of cities build their economies while this area has stagnated. So long as local areas retain so much power that they choke the entire region, the last thing we need is more of them.
Read the whole article
By adamg
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 11:36am
Because his answer to the question is: No.
Or you could just read the headline,
By Jonas Louis Prang
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 11:59am
Or you could just read the headline, because that gives the answer, too.
"Read the whole article"?
By People's Republican
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 1:21pm
Good God man, don't you realize how many topics there are to offer uninformed opinions? There's no possible way that people can comment on as many things as they do now if they bothered to inform themselves. Your traffic would plummet!
So Boston should look more
By NotWhitey
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 12:13pm
So Boston should look more like Los Angeles? Or Houston? Ahhh... life is so much better in Houston.
I like that Boston is tiny.
By AdamPieniazek
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 3:21pm
I like that Boston is tiny. Having lived in downtown LA (Fight on USC Trojans!) for a year, well, there's a reason I only stayed there a year. Love that I can easily bike around all of Boston in a couple hours and walk across the city core. Some of my fondest Boston memories are from just walking around the city without any final destination. To me, its size is a positive.
The Mandela Initiative in
By ShadyMilkMan
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 12:32pm
The Mandela Initiative in the article looked interesting, lets take the poorest part of the city and spin them off as a stand alone city!
While I am sure the initiative was rooted in looking to provide a greater voice to black and immigrant residents it overlooked the fact that those areas recieve a net benefit by virtue of being included in the Boston universe. People on Beacon Hill and the Back Bay are subsidizing those neighberhoods, if they were to split they would be at the mercy of the State. Im sure thats why the initiative went up in flames...
There was so much
By AdamPieniazek
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 3:18pm
There was so much information about Mandela and Dot history I just couldn't include it all, but an interesting point that came up in my research is that all of Dot voted on the Mandela initiative (at least the first time around). At the time (and some would argue today too), there was a lot of racial tension that Mayor Flynn's administration worried would push the white parts of Dot to vote for the Mandela initiative hoping it would fail.
Flynn's office actually spent a lot of time in the Dorchester areas talking to people and telling them not to vote based on race, but to vote in the best interests of Dorchester and Boston, which to many was to keep Dorchester together and completely part of Boston. The Mandela initiative had another appearance on the ballot two years later and included less districts and focused on those in Roxbury and immediately around the area. First ballot failed by 3 to 1, second ballot failed by 2 to 1, though Flynn and others said the second time they basically ignored it (and there were a lot more blank ballots for that question), so the data was skewed.
Another interesting footnote is that the Flynn administration claimed they did not track city revenues and costs by neighborhood and thus could not give the Mandela supporters that data, but did state that Mandela would have a budget shortfall of $100-$135 million.
It's quite a fascinating story.
For the record, I gave my
By AdamPieniazek
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 3:17pm
For the record, I gave my personal opinion on the story on my blog. Am proud to be from Dorchester, Boston, MA and am glad it stayed that way. But also think Dot pride, a lot of hard, hard work, an absolutely massive loan, and volunteer efforts from the community, might make a City of Dorchester viable. It wouldn't be easy by any means but think it would have a shot. But would much rather stay a part of Boston and work to improve the whole city rather than starting from scratch with a new city. The best scenario for Dorchester and Boston is to keep the status quo.
You don't want Dorchester to be like Brookline either...
By Pete Nice
Fri, 06/05/2009 - 3:44pm
Those bastards opted out and look what yuppie mess they turned into!
You can't beat boiled hotdogs and a draft beer at the Eire pub at 2 in the afternoon.