Our Neighborhoods: Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester

• 22% (44,413) of residents in these three neighborhoods live under the federal poverty line
• 64% of all foreclosure in Boston in the past year are in these 3 neighborhoods
• The unemployment rate in Dorchester is 20% higher than Boston as a whole, and 60% higher in Roxbury
• Mattapan has very few job opportunities in the neighborhood---only 6 jobs for every 100 residents
• 74% of all homicides this year have happened in these 3 neighborhoods
• 69% of residents in these three neighborhoods rent---and the median rent for a 2-bedroom is about $1200


Boston's Inequality

• Today, a wealthy family has the income of seven poor families
• 64% of all businesses will not hire anyone with a criminal record (CORI) no matter how minor, unrelated or old the offense
• A typical household today makes less money than in 1989
• Boston is now the most expensive metropolitan area in the country
• Someone making minimum wage can only afford a monthly rent of $360 and 75% of low-wage workers spend more than 1/3 of their income on housing
• The average cost of a home in Boston is almost $400,000--this means over 79% of Bostonians can not afford to buy a home.
• Nearly 1 in 4 people receiving food support were actually working

The Hourglass Economy
The economy of Greater Boston has steadily shifted away from a manufacturing base towards service jobs. After decades of extremely difficult, but successful union organizing that had resulted in better pay and working conditions in many factories across the country, we began to see as early as the 1960’s many of these same unionized factories move out of the city to nearby suburbs, and later to other countries, in search of cheaper, non-unionized exploitable labor.

Today, production and manufacturing has been globalized and decentralized, but the management of production is extremely coordinated and centralized. Corporations are now looking to cities to build huge central headquarters to manage their production. Essentially, the role of cities has now shifted from the center of manufacturing and production, to the center of corporate management and services.

The result of this shift is the emergence of an 'hourglass' economy, with large numbers of low-wage jobs at one end of the spectrum and high-wage jobs at the other, but few opportunities in the middle. The service industry is the major industry in most cities now.

The Blackstone Group is one of the largest and richest private equity firms in the world. Blackstone is primarily involved in leveraged buyouts where the firm buys up public companies and later sells them for profit. They became a key player in Boston when it purchased Equity Office Properties, which made them the single largest owner of commercial real estate in Boston, as well as the nation as a whole. Blackstone owns signature buildings in Boston such as South Station, Center Plaza and One Post Office Square.

Here are the facts:
• CEO Stephen Schwarzman owns 5 homes—including a $31 million apartment in New York City and a mansion in Palm Beach worth over $21 million
• Blackstone controls assets worth $100 billion—this is more than 40 times the size of the City of Boston’s budget
• Blackstone owns 11.7 million square feet of commercial property in greater Boston and with rents as high as $80 per square foot---that’s nearly $750 billion a year they make in downtown Boston on just rent
• Blackstone managers pay only a 15% tax on their buyouts, while individual income is taxed at rates up to 35%

Community Labor United is a coalition of community and labor groups who run joint campaigns to counteract the growing gap between rich and poor while highlighting the connections between community issues and jobs. Our Mission is to protect and promote the interests of working class people in the Greater Boston region by uniting our organizations around a common vision and plan of action. Last year, CLU organized to turn $2 million worth of contract work to repaint school buildings into union jobs and established a partnership program with the Painters and Allied Trades DC #35, YouthBuild Boston, Women in the Building Trades, Sociedad Latina and Project RIGHT to train and mentor Boston youth to repaint schools through the Our Schools, Our Futures Campaign.