Dudley Street: 'How Many of You Live in This Neighborhood?'

By the early 1980s, arson-for-insurance and disinvestment had left about 1,300 vacant parcels — a fifth of the land — in Boston's Dudley Street neighborhood, which outsiders used as an illegal dump. Foundations and agencies arrived with a revitalization plan. At an early meeting in 1985, resident Ché Madyun stood up and asked the planners: 'How many of you live in this neighborhood?'

The question restructured the whole initiative. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative rebuilt itself around a resident-majority board — 35 seats, elected every two years, with mandated parity across the neighborhood's four communities: African American, Cape Verdean, Latino, and white. Madyun became its president the next year. The first campaign was 'Don't Dump On Us' (1986): residents forced the city to close the illegal trash-transfer stations, tow the abandoned cars, and clean and fence the lots — a winnable first fight that proved the muscle.

Then the structural move: DSNI formed its land-holding arm, Dudley Neighbors Inc., in August 1988, and on November 10, 1988 the Boston Redevelopment Authority approved its application — making DSNI the first community group in the United States to win the power of eminent domain over vacant private land in the 62-acre Dudley Triangle. The land trust today holds about 30 acres: 225 permanently affordable homes, a community greenhouse, an urban farm, parks — the neighborhood's own phrase is 'development without displacement.'

What it teaches: governance design is a power question, not a formality. A resident-majority board with ethnic parity wasn't process decoration — it was the difference between a plan for the neighborhood and a plan by it. And the sequence matters: dumpsters before land trusts; a visible win before a structural one.

Details

• era: 1984–present
• place: Roxbury / North Dorchester, Boston
• illustrates: launch-a-team, campaign-timeline-peaks, tracking-down-the-power
• source note: Madyun's question and board structure per the National Park Service and DSNI's own timeline; eminent-domain approval dated by the BRA's Report and Decision of Nov. 10, 1988 (cited in Medoff & Sklar, 'Streets of Hope', 1994; DSNI's timeline agrees — some later retellings misdate the vote to 1989).
• practice kind: story