Tags: Long-time residents list small family home lots near South Bay for $6 million, as developers compete to invest in the neighborhood ahead of the shopping center’s massive expansion.
With its tidy homes and overgrown lots, the little pocket of Dorchester hardly looks like the city’s next hot address.Beyond a chain-link fence is the busy South Bay Shopping Center, and the few modest residences are hemmed in by a hodgepodge of low-grade industrial businesses — auto repair shops, junkyards, a small concrete plant.
Yet on Baker Court and Fields Court, two narrow paved paths so tiny they could hardly be called streets, some longtime property owners believe they are sitting on a real estate goldmine. They are offering three small homes and an adjacent lot as a package for developers.
Asking price? $6 million — for four properties with a combined assessed value of $871, 200.
“They know they got something that’s hot,” listing agent Steven Mathieu said of his clients.
Indeed, like many old residential areas of Boston, this pocket between Massachusetts Avenue and Boston Street is on the cusp of a wholesale redevelopment. It is a microcosm of the changes transforming Boston from a city stocked with humble homes where workers of limited means could raise families to what’s becoming in many areas an expensive metropolis of upscale residences.
Earlier this year a dilapidated three-family home on neighboring Willow Court sold for $1.175 million to a developer proposing a nine-unit building. Across the street are two new apartment buildings, where units rent for $2,500 to $2,900 a month. Baker Court, meanwhile, is overrun with construction workers finishing two other buildings, where condos will start at $500,000.
Top of Form
Read Full Article: An early sign of gentrification: $6M listing in “forgotten” Dorchester neighborhood – The Boston Globe