The battle to be Boston’s ‘gayborhood’ star
Dorchester now wears crown for real estate appeal, some say
There’s always infighting among LGBTQ+ friend groups as to what was the key moment when the South End lost its crown as Boston’s leading “gayborhood.”
Was it when the Eagle — a longtime gay bar known for generous pours and salacious stories from the gravelly voiced late owner, Jack Repetti — shuttered its doors? Others say the “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” moment was when Stella, a restaurant that was the closest the South End had to Cheers, turned into an elementary school. Some even say the neighborhood lost its edge years ago when people started to feel safe walking south of Tremont Street.
Now the community appears to have gone well past Tremont and into a new neighborhood entirely: Dorchester.
“It used to be, when everyone lived in the South End, you’d meet the occasional person who lived in Dorchester, and it was met with embarrassment,” said Bobby Ortega, a former South Ender who now calls Dorchester home. “But I remember after a night at [Dorchester LGBTQ+ bar] Blend one night, we went to a party, and everyone’s saying where they lived. And someone said, ‘Oh, I’m in the South End,’ and everyone goes, ‘Why?’ There’s definitely been a 180-degree turn.”
There’s been chatter for years in gay circles around when Dorchester’s star would finally shimmer in terms of queer real estate appeal. Sure, there was always a defector here or there from the South End, but it always seemed out of the realm of possibility that the hub of Victorian brownstones and brunch spots would lose its grip as the hub of gay real estate.
But just as every pop diva knows, loyalty can be a fickle thing in this community — at least in terms of home purchases and song of the summer contenders. Soaring home prices during the pandemic may have finally tipped the scales in Dorchester’s favor — as well as other parts of the region — as part of a broader rearranging of the deck chairs across the country as to where the queer community concentrates.
Plus, Dorchester also has an established stretch of LGBTQ+ bars and restaurants like dbar and Blend.
“We decided to buy something, and we went to every open house in the South End for two years,” said Martha Tierney, who lived in the South End for eight years before moving with her partner to Dorchester. “I think we saw everything there was to see. In the end, the cost per square foot was just not competitive to what we could get for our money in Dorchester.”
As of March 29, the average home value in the South End’s 02118 ZIP code was $958,536, according to Zillow. In Dorchester’s 02125, which includes portions of Savin Hill, it was $611,496.
“We have clients that were looking for a specific unit where, in Dorchester, they end up finding it for a million dollars. That same thing in the South End would have been $1.8 million,” said Ricardo Rodriguez, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Realty. “There is a real difference in affordability.”
Rodriguez also noted Dorchester’s appeal to younger renters; the South End was once a place where you could find a single-family homeowner willing to rent individual bedrooms out for a couple hundred dollars a month. Affordable rent is more a possibility farther south.
Alex Bitterman, who coauthored “The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods” with Daniel Baldwin Hess, has studied gay neighborhoods for more than two decades. He points to what’s going on in Boston as part of a broader regionalization spurred partially by the pandemic.
Members of the LGBTQ+ community moved from onetime gay bastions such as the South End in Boston or Chelsea in New York City to places such as the Hudson River Valley or the Berkshires and Cape Cod.
“For the first time in American history, we’re starting to see the nascent or the beginning formations of an LGBTQ region or an LGBTQ-friendly region, which is something that is very exciting,” Bitterman said.
Historically gay-friendly neighborhoods such as the
South End often took off because members of the community were able to find more for their money. What’s happening in Boston is a similar “hypergentrification” that took place in New York City and San Francisco: Someone may have bought a fixer-upper unit for $500,000 only to see its value soar by hundreds of thousands of dollars — if not more than a million dollars — in a relatively short period of time, Bitterman said.
“Of course, there’s a ton of sweat equity and things that go into places like that, but any reasonable person is going to say, ‘Yeah, let me realize my profit, and I’m going to get out of here,” he added.
But there’s also another factor: the double-edge sword of increasing acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. Homophobia is obviously still rampant, but there has been a monumental shift in acceptance toward samesex couples over the past three decades. Seventy-one percent of respondents in a May 2023 Gallup poll said same-sex marriages should be recognized by law, compared with only 27 percent in 1996.
The rise of acceptance means less of a need for some of those longtime safe spaces.
“All this stuff that was LGBTdriven was also based on selfpreservation,” Rodriquez said. “For a lot of people, it was not safe to go to a regular gym or coffee shop, so they had to go to the gay gym or gay-owned coffee spot. But because all that shifted, which is the good news, we lost that core and we lost those places of congregation, and so we lost neighborhoods.”