Tenant activist leaders at a meeting of City Life/Vida Urbana. (Photo courtesy of CLVU via Shelterforce)
This story was originally published by Shelterforce, an independent, non-academic publication covering affordable housing, community development and housing justice.
After a yearslong standoff with a large corporate landlord who had imposed sharp rent increases after purchasing their complex, a group of tenants in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood have scored an unusual victory: long-term affordable housing.
For six years, tenants who live at the Fairlawn Estates complex organized, sought to negotiate lower rent increases, and staged protests and rallies with strong support from City Life/Vida Urbana, a housing justice nonprofit that’s been organizing low-income tenants in the Boston area for more than 50 years. The situation took a turn in March 2025 when the building went up for sale again. That’s when the city of Boston stepped in to facilitate the purchase of the 347-unit complex by an affordable housing developer, who, aided by a $10 million grant and a $1 million low-interest loan from the city, has guaranteed permanent affordability.
Betty Lewis, 74, is a longtime resident of the complex who helped form a tenant association after being stunned by the rent hikes. “I was sweating tears, because I didn’t know what to do,” Lewis told Shelterforce. “I didn’t know where I was going to go. But when I went to City Life, they told me, ‘Stand strong. Don’t leave.’ So I grabbed that encouragement and I started to fight.”
Lewis had been renting at Fairlawn for nearly 40 years when the property was purchased by The DSF Group in late 2018. The market-rate complex, built in the 1960s, had remained relatively affordable over the years even as Boston rents soared overall. But a new commuter rail station was about to open nearby, and the buyer saw opportunity.
“This acquisition aligns perfectly with our strategy of purchasing underutilized properties at transit-oriented locations,” stated Josh Solomon, president of The DSF Group, at the time.
The new owner quickly rebranded the complex with a trendy name showcasing its transit proximity and announced rent hikes of hundreds of dollars for existing residents, many of whom, like Lewis, were older people of color living on fixed incomes.
“I was paying $1,800 per month. They asked for $2,100. I was very scared,” Lewis said during a rally for rent control in 2022.
Some of her neighbors, facing even higher increases up to $500, moved out. Lewis couldn’t afford the new rent but was desperate to stay where she had lived for so long, raising her daughter, working a long career at Polaroid, and entering retirement.
Forming a tenant association
City Life became aware of the situation shortly after the DSF purchase in 2018, says Gabrielle René, the nonprofit’s lead organizer for Mattapan.
“In DSF’s press releases, they had a lot of coded words, like referring to the community as ‘underutilized,’ and saying they needed to ‘maximize profit,’” René says. “We know that those coded words mean displacement and gentrification, big time.”
René began canvassing the Fairlawn complex to offer support, tenant rights information, and assistance in forming a tenant association. Lewis and other neighbors began attending City Life’s weekly meetings, where tenants tell their stories and organizers and peers pledge to support them.
With City Life’s advice and help, Lewis and her neighbors formed a tenant association, continued to pay their old rent, and stayed put. Over six years, they held vigils and rallies and tried to get the unresponsive landlord to negotiate, to no avail. Some tenants were threatened with eviction. One neighbor, 73-year-old Annie Gordon, was spared eviction in a jury trial just last year. Tenants and advocates suspect the eviction was pursued mainly in retaliation for her tenant association activities, though the jury did not uphold that charge.
City officials step in
Boston housing officials were also aware of the tenants’ plight, says Adam Goldstein, senior development officer in the Mayor’s Office of Housing, and had worked to assist some Fairlawn tenants who were worried about eviction. Last year, when officials learned that The DSF Group planned to sell the complex, the city stepped in and offered to facilitate and help fund its sale to a mission-driven developer who would convert the property from market-rate to income-restricted affordable housing.
This funding came from city’s Acquisition Opportunity Program (AOP), which launched in 2016 to blunt the effects of market forces on multi-family rental housing stock in Boston.
“The AOP is set up for just this purpose,” Goldstein says. “When there is naturally occurring affordable housing, from a two-family house to a 347-unit complex, then when these are sold, we want to know if we can help get a mission-driven owner to buy it and place permanent deed restrictions on the building and protections for tenants.”
The AOP has preserved affordability in more than 1,000 units so far, in some cases facilitating purchases by nonprofit community development corporations or land trusts. In the case of Fairlawn Estates, the fund had $10 million it received under the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) that had to be committed by the end of 2024, lending urgency to the process.
City officials let The DSF Group know that if it wanted to sell to a buyer aided by city backing, the sale had to happen quickly. “We had that conversation with DSF in September last year, and they were very open to getting going on it in fall and selling in early 2025,” Goldstein says.
Meanwhile, his office spelled out requirements for developers: The entire complex would become income restricted, with half of the units set aside for households earning up to 60% of area median income (AMI) and half for up to 80% of AMI. For existing tenants, annual rent increases would be capped at 2%.
The upshot: Permanent affordability
Fairlawn Estates, now owned by Related Affordable, the affordable arm of Related Beal, will be an income-restricted affordable complex, “forever, in perpetuity,” Goldstein says.
“This is a community victory, won by neighbors working together,” said Lewis, “and it’s not just for us—we hope it inspires organizing for housing stability all across Boston and across the state.”
Some details are still being worked out. Because of the new income restrictions, each tenant must go through a process of determining what level of affordability they qualify for. In some cases, household income may be too high to qualify, while in others, if income is far below 60% of AMI, the rent officially assigned would be unaffordable. It’s not yet clear where the current tenants will fall as the process will be completed upon each lease renewal, says Goldstein. The current AMI for the Boston area is $114,300 for an individual and $163,200 for a four-person household.
No matter a tenant’s status, city officials and City Life organizers say the agreement holds that no current tenant will be forced to leave. In cases of income mismatch, residents can stay at their current rent and see it increase by 2% when they re-up their lease. For the 130 households that have rental subsidy vouchers allowing them to pay no more than 30% of income for rent, nothing will change.
“This is an anti-displacement program, so we didn’t want someone making 83% of AMI to be evicted,” says Goldstein.
Broader affordability issues remain
René says she would have liked to see the Fairlawn deal assure rents more affordable to those with far lower incomes, but Goldstein says the city would have had to contribute much more money to force deeper affordability, and in this case, $10 million was all it could allot.
René and Lewis both express relief that the long struggle ended with a victory, and they are optimistic about working with the new owner. They also say they’ll continue to work for larger policy goals like bringing rent control back and adopting Tenant Opportunity to Purchase (TOPA) legislation, which would give tenants or their designated nonprofit buyer first purchase rights when an occupied rental property goes up for sale.
“If apartments in Boston were rent-stabilized, a national investment corporation would not have purchased Fairlawn Estates to drastically increase rents,” wrote Lewis and two other tenant association members in an op-ed in April. “And if we had TOPA, Fairlawn residents could have worked with a nonprofit to buy Fairlawn in 2018 and keep it affordable. Both tools would have prevented the displacement of our neighbors and years of physical and mental hardship for Fairlawn residents.”
Lessons and wisdom
Boston’s housing office fields about 600 calls a week from households struggling with housing instability, Goldstein says. While the city is also working to construct new affordable housing, preserving affordability on existing properties is also important, and gets better results for less money.
“For $28,000 per unit in city subsidy, we were able to add 347 units to our portfolio of affordable housing,” he says. Focusing on preserving existing affordability is crucial, he says, “to make sure we’re not unstitching the fabric of our communities while we’re working to build supply.”
For other cities trying to preserve affordability, Goldstein mentions the importance of investing money in a well-functioning program like AOP, making good use of federal dollars like ARPA funds, and creating programs like Boston’s Neighborhood Housing Trust, which collects fees on commercial construction projects and disburses affordable housing funds. That trust recently committed a new allotment of $10 million to the AOP.
Before completing the Fairlawn deal, the city conferred with the tenant association and City Life, Goldstein says, making sure they understood the deal’s components. He says it’s valuable for cities to forge close working relationships with tenant-serving organizations like City Life/Vida Urbana. “The amount of groundwork done by these groups is really important,” he says.
Lewis and René emphasize that for tenants challenging landlords, collective organizing is essential.
Lewis, who had not thought of herself as a leader before this struggle, ticks off hard-won nuggets of advice: “Form a tenant association. Know your rights… . Do marches, rallies, whatever you can to get them to notice you. Send a letter to let them know that you are not paying this rent, it’s too much—and then send the letter to the governor, the mayor, everybody that you can, so that they can know what’s going on in your community.”
Not least, she says, “You can’t be afraid to knock on a door and say, ‘Are you having the same issues that I’m having? If you are, would you like to join a tenant association with us?’”
Once a win comes, it’s wise to try to put bitterness aside, both Lewis and René say.
“We don’t want to bring the burdens of what we dealt with from DSF Group to Related Beal,” says René. “We’ve gotten promises, we’re waiting for them to deliver … and we’re going to be respectful and work with them as much as we can. Because at the end of the day, people want to stay here.”
This post was originally published on Next City.