Dot Block | Dot Ave, Greenmount St, Hancock St | Dorchester

Wow, 637 units across the state's flagship city, what an incredible "commitment" by Mayor Wu!

For reference (to be fair it's an AI Overview thing) google is telling me there are approximately 160,000 people on the waiting list. So wow, after Mayor Wu solves all of our problems with her forward thinking pro-development agenda, the rest of the state will only need to cover a paltry 159,363 applicants! Boston sure is leading the way with this one!

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I mean the real outcome is that no one will cover this and the list will grow and housing affordability will get worse. There’s no obligation that falls to a larger entity. The state doesn’t NEED to do anything.

More affordable housing (through market or interventional means) is good, and if it is use of allocated capital to finalize affordability requirements it’s all the better. This project is clearly not enough but if for < $60k per unit they can lock in affordability it seems…fine?
 
You don’t live in the city so your opinion is completely irrelevant
I know it’s more complicated than the snark, but 64 million is a lot of money for a small city like Boston. And I think it’s a fair question, especially when the city has throttled development for decades and continues to do so, to ask how much sense it makes to simultaneously prevent development
and also demand endless concessions from developers, and thereby driving up construction and housing costs, then pumping tens of millions of dollars to come to a rather minuscule rescue of the problems city policy created in the first place. While unrestricted development and no height limits perhaps (at least in the short term) not solve all the local housing problems, that really is the root cause here. So I agree with the cynicism because unless the city is actually going to make visionary-level changes to its zoning policies, we’re just gonna be stuck with endless high costs while feel-good, seemingly progressive micro-interventions like this get trumpeted as some sort of huge victory. Yes, it’s something, but we are so obscenely far from what’s actually needed I think it’s a valid point to draw attention to the fact that this project, like basically every single thing that gets done in Boston, contributes collectively very little in terms of overall numbers and needs of the citizens. Just like everything else in 2025–we are in desperate need of truly revolutionary changes, yet nobody wants to budge and the outcome is always, in reality, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
 
I got a notice for an abutters meeting concerning Chilacates moving into one of the vacant spaces at Dot Block. That would join the (still under construction) Dot Block Diner and Sweet Teez.
 

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