Photo: Three daughters of James Saucer — Brenda Saucer, Tracee Carter and Pamela Saucer-Richardson — visit a property that their father used to own that the city of Boston has now given to a nonprofit organization to build affordable housing.
On a spring afternoon, Pamela Saucer-Richardson stood in a grassy vacant lot on Erie Street, a block from Franklin Park in Dorchester, and remembered when her father owned the property more than 30 years ago.
“It was a beauty salon here,” she said. “My stepmother used to do hair. It was a building … a building with storefronts.”
In 1992, the city of Boston notified her father, James Saucer, it planned to take the two-lot property because he owed nearly $5,000 in unpaid taxes and interest. Four years later, the city boarded up the buildings and then bulldozed them — and sent Saucer the bill — leaving the urban landscape abandoned for years.
Now, the city is planning to sell the land for $200 to a nonprofit as part of a program called Welcome Home, Boston meant to fast-track construction of affordable housing in some of the city’s lowest-income areas. It’s part of Mayor Michelle Wu’s landmark effort to build affordable housing backed by nearly $60 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding.
Continue Reading: https://www.wgbh.org/news/housing/2024-07-29/to-build-housing-boston-gives-away-land-black-and-brown-families-once-owned
SOURCE: GBH News, September 9, 2024