--- title: "Boston Is Giving Blue Hill Avenue a Makeover. Its Shopkeepers Fear It Is for Someone Else" description: "A multimillion-dollar rebuild of the city’s main Black business corridor promises better buses — and, its tenants say, higher rents" author: "Arthur Wren" published: 2026-09-29T09:00:00Z modified: 2026-09-29T14:38:03Z url: https://rews.cc/a/boston-is-giving-blue-hill-avenue-a-makeover-its-shopkeepers-6ea426 language: en tags: ["infrastructure", "housing", "displacement", "boston", "transport", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Boston Is Giving Blue Hill Avenue a Makeover. Its Shopkeepers Fear It Is for Someone Else *A multimillion-dollar rebuild of the city’s main Black business corridor promises better buses — and, its tenants say, higher rents* By Arthur Wren · September 29, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/boston-is-giving-blue-hill-avenue-a-makeover-its-shopkeepers-6ea426 ## In brief - More than 1,100 mostly locally owned businesses sit along the 3-mile stretch of Blue Hill Avenue slated for redevelopment - 65% of residents in the corridor’s Census tracts are Black, 23% Latino; nearly 40% of households earn under $40,000 - Boston does not conduct economic impact studies before such projects, so effects on jobs and prices are unknown - Warren’s Blume on the Ave project sells condos below market and commercial space at cost to keep local ownership - Retail property in Roxbury and Dorchester averages $2.8 million, 43% less than in Allston/Brighton, per CoStar Boston is about to spend millions remaking Blue Hill Avenue, the three-mile stretch through Mattapan that is the most important commercial corridor for the city’s Black population. The plan is the latest attempt to better the traffic and the bus travel on the road. Officials say it will draw investment and new visitors to an area long stigmatised as run-down. The people who trade there fear the same thing in different words: that the avenue is being made over for someone else, the *Boston Globe* reports. The facts they point to are not complicated. The corridor holds more than 1,100 establishments, almost all of them locally owned, some barely hanging on. Construction will take years and may keep customers away. When the work is done, property values will rise — and so will the taxes on the buildings. An owner facing a higher tax bill can raise the rent or sell to the highest bidder. Either way, the Globe reports, mom-and-pop shops go, and the chains that can afford the new avenue come in. More than 45,000 people live in the Census tracts along the avenue. Sixty-five percent are Black and 23 percent Latino; almost half were born abroad. Nearly 40 percent of households get by on less than $40,000 a year. “This is a very economically vulnerable part of the city,” said James Jennings, a professor emeritus at Tufts University who has studied the area. Fatima Ali-Salaam, president of the Greater Mattapan Neighborhood Council, calls Blue Hill Avenue the most important corridor in the city for Black Bostonians. With proper support, she said, it could become the “Black Wall Street” of Boston. That is the prize. The risk is a repeat of the pattern seen in any city that polishes a poor street before it protects the people on it. The city, for its part, does not conduct economic impact studies before such projects. So nobody can say whether the rebuild will create jobs or destroy them, raise sales or only raise prices. The city will collect more tax either way. That, if you watch who benefits, is the one sure return on the investment. The characters along the avenue are of a kind that does not survive a rent review well. Sami Salameh opened Salameh Jewelry in Mattapan Square 30 years ago with his father, a Palestinian tailor. He once kept a gold chain and bracelet on layaway for 13 years for a customer who went to prison, and let the man have it near the original price when he got out. Danielle Johnson moved her Black-owned digital radio station, Spark FM, to a second-floor room over Blue Hill Avenue — “Location, location, location” — so a station airing the neighbourhood’s worries about the planned centre-running bus lane would sit in the middle of the neighbourhood. With the rent climbing, she is already looking for a new home and trying to save for a purchase before the rebuild pushes prices higher. “We’re going to be displaced in droves,” she said. The street’s troubles did not start with this plan. Indianola Walker watched the neighbourhood turn from white to Black after she and her husband moved into their triple decker off the avenue in 1967. A federally insured loan programme aimed at Black buyers remade the area within a few years, from majority-Jewish to majority-Black. Many of those loans required no down payments and no thorough inspections. By 1974 more than half the borrowers had lost their houses. Parts of the corridor have been run-down ever since: boarded shops and empty storefronts between the corner markets, tire shops and churches. Some locals are trying to beat the newcomers to it. C’shae Warren is building three buildings on what was vacant city-owned land, a project called Blume on the Ave, developed by Dariela Villon-Maga, who grew up in Roxbury. Condos there sell below market rate and the ground-floor commercial spaces are sold at cost, so that locals can own them. “When we talk about ‘buying back the block’ and we talk about ensuring generational wealth in our communities, that’s what this project,” Warren said. She held fund-raisers and applied at three banks to finance her own retail space. The banks are part of the problem. Black- and Latino-owned small businesses judged a low credit risk are less than half as likely to be fully approved for financing as comparable white-owned firms, according to a 2021 survey by the Federal Reserve Banks. Ernst Guerrier, a 57-year-old real estate lawyer whose parents drove cabs and cleaned houses in Mattapan, has just bought his second commercial property in Mattapan Square and plans a restaurant, eight condos, and 110 housing units above the fish market where he worked his first job. He gives every tenant the right to make the first offer if he sells. “It’s a quiet storm,” he said of the local effort. “Within 10 years, I guarantee it, you won’t even recognize Mattapan Square.” The numbers behind the vulnerability are worth setting down, because they describe a trap. Commercial real estate in majority-Black ZIP codes is valued 7 percent lower than comparable property in whiter areas, Brookings Institution research found — buildings earn less rent than they should, and investors can buy them cheap, claim the depreciation against tax and let them rot. In Roxbury and Dorchester the average retail property is worth $2.8 million, 43 percent less than in Allston/Brighton and 10 percent less than in the South End, according to the analytics firm CoStar. And many of the avenue’s shops deal partly in cash, unreported, with no lawyers, no insurance and sometimes no lease — fine in the lean years, fatal when the grants are means-tested and the rents jump. The bus lane is not the quarrel, the Globe makes clear. The worry is that when the buses run well and the frontages shine, the jeweller who kept a chain for 13 years and the radio station that broadcasts the street’s complaints will no longer be able to afford the street.