This Is What Thriving Communities Look Like: Insights from Residents of Four Boston Neighborhoods

Amisha Kambath, Noor Toraif, and Sandra Susan Smith

At the end of this session, focus group moderators introduced residents to the photovoice method, a form of visual ethnography and a participatory research method that combines photography and narrative to center the perspectives of marginalized people and communities with the goal of effecting social change. [...] Through improvements to the quality and quantity of the built environment, like greater access to green spaces, residents imagined individuals, families, and communities being emotionally fed, healed, and rejuvenated by gathering, connecting, just being, and sharing with others – the very activities that also facilitate the development of community cohesion and collective efficacy and that create. [...] Housing In a recent poll of Boston residents,28 37% reported that they had considered moving from their community in the past year, including 43% of residents of Roxbury and neighboring communities;29 40% of Dorchester, 37% of South Boston and neighborhood communities,30 and 35% of East Boston and neighborhood communities.31 Of those reporting a wish to move, 55% did so because of unaffordable hou. [...] Indeed, Boston is the third most intensely gentrified city in the country, with each of the four neighborhoods at high risk of gentrification in the coming years.33 In the past decade, the cost of a single-family home jumped 226% in East Boston – one of the neighborhoods most at risk of gentrification – and 214% in Roxbury. [...] For instance, one formerly incarcerated Roxbury/Dorchester resident argued that the police “need to get out of the cop car and walk the beat again like they used to back in the day… Nobody wants to engage with the community.” An East Boston parent recalled that “police officers, they used to be on the streets, and now I don’t see them a lot.” Reflecting on the apparent shifts in police-community r.