Just days before the official ribbon-cutting on June 28 for the 100 percent affordable Cote Village apartment community in Mattapan, residents, developers, and community leaders discovered graffiti on the side of a street-level balcony on Cummins Highway that read: “Nu-style apartments, gentrification to follow, Issa (It’s a) playbook move.”
To those involved in the development of the Village, the graffiti’s message was the opposite of what elected officials and community leaders have tried to build there for more than a decade.
Additional graffiti with a similar message – making references to landlords as slave masters – was found on the wall of the Dunkin’ shop in Mattapan Square as well. It read: “We work + pay the landlord’s mortgage. They use our cash + buy more land. Then they price us from our homes. Masta’ has a brand, new form. Only together we can win. Together we are strong.”
On finding the graffiti, state Rep. Russell Holmes said, “It can only be the activists because if you are a community person, you would never go and do something that puts the community down like that. To have that much disrespect for the work that has happened is horrible. I think it is disrespectful for all the effort and all of the time that we have spent working on this for so long.”
After years of meetings and discussions within the community about the property, some Mattapan residents have moved into the building, so the graffiti felt disrespectful to some who have been involved in the project. But others thought it might spark a conversation about what gentrification is and is not.
CIDC Director Donald Alexis said the purpose of the development was to prevent people from being displaced, so he was surprised someone picked Cote.
“It was shocking to me when I saw it,” Alexis said. “My only conclusion is someone was just coming through and did it. Cummins Highway is a place a lot of people cut through to go to I-93, Lower Mills or Roslindale…It could be someone that wasn’t part of the process and wasn’t plugged into what happened there.
“If someone did it out of a lack of information, we’ll do better communication next time. If people were trying to make a point, then that’s a larger discussion we need to have with our leaders like the city, state Rep. Russell Holmes, and state Rep. Brandy Fluker-Oakley.”
Said Holmes: “I met a young lady who moved in February and welcomed her to the community. She said it was already her community. She had moved from her family’s home just down the street, and her son even had the same school bus stop. That’s the complete opposite of what was written on this building.”
Alexis said the graffiti on the Cote building and at Dunkin’ may indicate there needs to be a bigger conversation coming out of Covid-19 about what is happening in Mattapan – and what is being done.
“People are entitled to be concerned about what it means for Mattapan and what it means for them staying here and their kids staying here,” he said. “This could be a catalyst to sit down and find out what people are concerned about…It is unfortunate this happened, but I think if this is what was needed to have a community conversation, we should be up to the task of bringing the community together.”
Holmes agreed, saying, “Our community needs to have conversations about what is gentrification. We have invested millions and millions of dollars in this area with the community at Cote Village and at the new train station, and we need to be clear that not every new thing you see is gentrification.”
