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_T� 4 , � � -�� � ..� - - .,\, \ 10c. ,� neu� . _. ��ral. "A lot of communities say we need a land trust like Dudley Street, but they don't have the resources to buy the land and do it properly," says Rick Jacobus, an affordable housing expert who has worked with a variety of community land trusts for years. "Even in that period of divestment they had real investment. You see a lot of very small organizations get created but they don't really have the resources they need to succeed. Then they are underutilizing the assets they do have because they are under-resourced and understaffed." Building a Neighborhood In the early 1980s, Dudley Square and Upham's Corner, redlined long ago, were horribly scarred by blight. Several chop shops were operated out of the neighborhoods. Abandoned cars dotted the back streets; in 1986 a Boston Globereporter counted 12 on stubby Monadnock Street alone. Rats were said to outnumber humans three to one. The neighborhoods were a part of Boston's arson belt, stretching across the city's predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods, where landlords tried to extract some return on their increasingly dubious investments with a matchbook and gasoline. In 1980, "the per capita income of the Dudley Square residents was one of the lowest in the nation, on a par with the poorest counties in Mississippi, or Indian Reservations of the West,"read a Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) report. "When I first came here there was a lot of trash and vacant lots," says Correa, who became involved with DSNI because her children attended the organization's charter school. "All of a sudden you would see the fire — you would see a home going up in flames and they would be like, oh, that was an insurance job." The plague of garbage became the rallying cry of the organization that would become Dudley Street Neighbors Incorporated. In 1986, the first meeting of the group's "Don't Dump on Us" campaign drew over 100 residents and prompted a visit from Mayor Ray Flynn (who arrived midway through after being alerted that a large group of voters were organized and angry). Soon enough, the city was removing cars and assisting in the cleaning of vacant lots and within several years, it had essentially gifted DSNI the lots that were in public control with the hope that the nonprofit would be able to develop them. A series of community meetings established a neighborhood vision for the blighted land, one distinctly different than a Boston Redevelopment Authority proposal that suggested hotels, high-rise offices and luxury housing. DSNI's neighborhood plan was fleshed out by architects and a planning firm hired to add technical details to the community's call for playgrounds, parks, a small business-oriented main street and 500 new homes. "We are not naive for taking this on. We live here, and if we don't look out for us, who will?" said Che Madyun, then-president of DSNI, in an interview with the Boston Globe. But privately owned lots were an even bigger part of Dudley Square's problem and here DSNI's land trust experience diverges dramatically from the norm. The community group pushed the Flynn administration to grant it the power of eminent domain over privately held vacant land in the neighborhood — and after some wrangling, the Mayor acceded to the demand. No other land trust in the nation enjoys such powers. "There's a common perception that'well, we'll never get eminent domain so [community land trusts] are not really as relevant to our situation,"' says Harry Smith, DSNI's director of sustainable economic development. "It obviously helped but one of the things people don't realize is that we never really used the actual power of