To build housing, Boston gives away land once owned by Black and brown families

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.

GBH News found that most of the properties slated for the Welcome Home program — dozens of abandoned lots owned by the city of Boston — followed the same path as the Saucers’ property: Black and brown homeowners in the 1970s and ’80s lost their land to tax liens and overdue water bills.

Saucer-Richardson, 63, said the city made no effort to reach out to her or her family, and she doesn’t understand why a social services organization with no background in construction is basically being gifted land her father used to own. The city’s 2023 appraised value of the lot was $735,000.

“Why can’t we buy it for $400 and do something with it?” she said. “Why didn’t they talk to someone whose name was on it?”

City officials say they are providing subsidies to mostly small, local and minority-owned builders to build income-restricted housing on these vacant lots. The builders will be required to employ Boston residents for the construction and make the units fully electric and energy efficient, among other things.

But critics say not enough has been done to address what led the properties to be vacant: historic discrimination against Black and Latino residents by a racist real estate system.

A year ago, former state Rep. Dianne Wilkerson urged the city to put the Welcome Home program on hold until a city reparations task force completes its research on centuries of economic harm suffered by Black residents.

“It’s vacant because the city bulldozed Black people’s houses and businesses,” Wilkerson said last summer at a meeting of the city’s Task Force on Reparations. She warned that if Boston officials spend millions of dollars in federal relief and give away dozens of vacant lots, there will be neither cash nor land left to use to make reparations to Black families.

Joseph Feaster Jr., chair of the task force, told GBH News at the time that he thought Wilkerson had a good point. “I think that that’s something that I’m certainly going to bring to the forefront.”

Feaster did not respond to GBH News’ request to discuss whether he raised these concerns with the city. But others support Wilkerson’s concerns.

Rev. Kevin Peterson, who established and leads an alternative, grassroots “People’s Reparations Commission,” said “the city should not be handing over land to developers, land which were lost to Black families during urban renewal or even after that.” Instead, he said, Boston should “focus on how to repair its relationship with Black people. And part of that would be through returning land to Black people who lost it through discriminatory practices, predatory practices.”

Lots sat vacant for years

Not all of the vacant lots can be tied to a specific local Black family. Gail Latimore, executive director of the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation, which was granted two lots in the program, said she was told that some of the properties were abandoned by white landlords who allowed them to crumble.

“We’ve had a history of contractors and other folks from outside the city literally coming and dumping their trash on these vacant lots,” she said.

Most of the land slated for sale has been vacant for decades. All of the properties sit inside the borders that city banks had designated for federally backed mortgages for Black landowners in the 1960s and ’70s.

Once a predominantly Jewish community, white families around Blue Hill Avenue were encouraged by real estate agents to sell and move out, and Black families were given incentives to buy within these lines.

Once they owned the properties, Black families faced numerous hurdles.

KZ Builders won the right to build on several vacant lots on Nottingham Street in the area around Bowdoin Street and Geneva Avenue. Suffolk County property records indicate one of the lots sold in this tranche was last owned by George and Elmena Bynoe. PHOTO: PAUL SINGER

Russ Lopez, a local historian who has written several books about Boston, said Black or Hispanic residents could only buy in Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan. They would buy homes, he said, from white real estate agents who bought the properties below market price from departing white families fearing new neighbors of color, and then turn them around for a steep profit.

A lot of the buildings were old and left in disrepair as the prior owners evacuated, and buyers were given no “contingency” for inspections.

“The clue to all this is that people bought these places that were terribly run down without the resources to fix them up,” Lopez said. “I can only think of the emotional toil that these poor families went through. You know, the sleepless nights, right? The worry that the phone call was going to ring … and be somebody demanding money, or something would break and you couldn’t fix it.”

Suffolk County property records show James Saucer owned about a dozen separate Dorchester properties over the years, with a string of tax liens and city foreclosures. He bought the Erie Street property in 1983. His daughters say none of the properties have remained in the family.

The daughters say Saucer had his hands in all kinds of business ventures. He ran a carpet store and tried to buy and sell property. He married three times and died in 2018, leaving nine children and 28 grandchildren.

“My father was so well known in this community,” said Tracee Carter, 62, “People loved him. He was a mason. He had his own carpet business.”

“He has a legacy,” her sister Pam added. “He has children. You know, there’s nine of us children … and we should be able to try to reclaim some of that.”

The city moved in October to sell the land on Erie Street for $200 to a Roxbury social services organization called the African Community Economic Development of New England, or ACEDONE, to build affordable housing.

The group’s mission, according to its website, is to “to help African refugees and immigrants in Boston develop a self-sufficient and vital community by providing our youth with the education and life experience to thrive socially, professionally and economically.” The nonprofit has put together a team to begin building housing, but the group has no track record in developing housing yet.

A spokesman for the group expressed interest in discussing the project with GBH News, but then said the organization would not make anyone available.

The Erie Street land was part of a first tranche of properties sold as part of the Welcome Home project. Last month, Wu announced the selection of developers to purchase 15 more city-owned properties. “Their work will help make Boston home for everyone, as we create much-needed homeownership opportunities in our neighborhoods and reshape the industry building them,” the mayor said.

One of the developers is KZ Builders, LLC, a new company created last year by former Boston City Councilor Josh Zakim and Senam Kumahia, the director of development at a local firm called Rhino Capital. KZ Builders has never built anything, but Zakim said Kumahia has done a lot of development projects and they have put together a team of experienced architects and builders. Zakim said he brings expertise in dealing with the city on zoning and permitting.

“We’re confident we can get it built,” Zakim told GBH News.

KZ Builders won the right to build on several vacant lots on Nottingham Street in the area around Bowdoin Street and Geneva Avenue, a low-income Boston neighborhood with a high concentration of Black and Latino residents. Suffolk County property records indicate one of the lots sold in this tranche was last owned by George and Elmena Bynoe.

The Bynoes’ children told GBH News that their father’s story is different from the Saucers’ for one reason: George Bynoe was a carpenter by trade. He could fix up the homes by himself without needing financing — within limits.

“I worked with him a lot,” said 59-year-old Hayden Bynoe, the eldest of the children, who now lives in Michigan. “He was trying to just redo the houses and rent them out. There was a lot of issues that came about with the city and trying to do that on his own.”

Hayden’s sister Leontyne, 50, says her father succeeded in renovating and renting out several properties in Roxbury and Dorchester. One of the properties is still in their family: their sister, Gilian Bynoe Stinson, still lives in the family home that their father renovated himself.

“We realize how lucky we are,” Leontyne said. “Our story is not common. We get it. It’s not lost on us.”

But their father also owned properties, like those on Nottingham Street, that were taken by the city. Hayden Bynoe says it’s likely they were in such rough shape he could not fix them up himself, so he walked away. “He may have felt that … it was a larger project, and that with all that he had, he could not really do what he needed to do,” Hayden Bynoe said.

The Bynoe children say they are not angry that the city is selling their father’s former properties for a song. But Leontyne points out that if he had more access to capital, he could have done much more. “If he was able to do it over again today, it would have been way more profitable.”

In his downtown office across from City Hall, Zakim said the city program is all about bringing affordable housing to communities that have long lacked it. “We’re not turning this into a luxury property,” he said. KZ Builders will be building housing “for folks who are making middle-income wages, people who are going to be able to grow their families in this community, put down roots.”

Asked about whether the families like the Bynoes are owed some kind of reparations from the city, Zakim, who is white, demurred.

“As someone who looks like me and lives like me, I don’t think I’m in a position to say who is or, you know, what reparations would be owed,” he told GBH News.

Latimore, with the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corporation that will be developing two lots, says she would be concerned if people could show that their family lost a property because of racially discriminatory policies.

“We certainly — as an organization — definitely would welcome reparations, of any kind,” she said, “while also wanting to see lots get developed for the purpose of another form of reparations, which is, you know, affordable housing and in this case, affordable homeownership housing, which is what we’re going to build.”

Most of the properties in the Welcome Home program will be primarily for working people with a moderate income, not for the city’s lowest-income residents. The projects are being designed to sell to people earning 80% to 100% of Boston’s “area median income” — meaning that, in general, the units will be marketed to families earning between $90,000 and $190,000 annually depending on the size of the family and the unit.

Matthew Robayna, a principal with the local developer Boston Communities, says the units they plan to build as part of the city program will range in price between $200,000 and $300,000, while costs to build them are more than $600,000.

“We’re basically selling them for roughly half of what we’re building it for,” he said. This is only possible because of “really, generous financial assistance from the city and the state,” he said.

In fact, the whole Welcome Home program is based on a series of interlocking subsidies for both builders and buyers of the units.

Antonio Leite, a senior housing development officer in Boston’s housing office, said the city will provide “down payment assistance” for buyers and “we reserved a pot of money that goes towards subsidizing the development itself as well. So we’re both supporting the homeowner, and then we’re supporting the developer to make this deal happen.”

And since the city is trying to hand the projects to inexperienced local developers, the housing office has hired a technical assistance consultant to help them navigate the complicated process. “We knew going into it that it would kind of cause more responsibility on our end to be responsive to folks that are new to going through the process,” Leite said.

The ultimate goal, the city says, is to bringing housing — and its associated economic development — back to the communities that have suffered from decades of economic exclusion.

Alexander Sturke, a spokesman for the housing office, said many of the developers selected so far are local minority- or women-owned businesses.

“People want the opportunity to buy houses in their own neighborhoods,” he said. “But they also want the houses to be built by people that have a connection to the neighborhood or a connection to the city.”

The Saucer sisters, who still live in Boston, said the city could also just cut out the middlemen — they would be happy to build on the land their father lost.

“We just want something we can build on, to call home. Because we were all born here,” said Brenda Saucer, 61. “It don’t make no sense to strip my father of that and not to even reach out. I think it’s a travesty.”

Paul Singer is the investigations & impact editor at the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting.