by SAL GIARRATANI
SPECIAL TO EASTBOSTON.COM
I moved to the East Boston community back nearly 12 years ago. I first lived in the Eagle Hill neighborhood. I ended up moving during the pandemic to Jeffries Point after my residence was sold to developers for about $1.3 million.
Over my period of calling East Boston my home, I have come to call it my neighborhood. I have lived over the years in many different Boston neighborhoods and I have found East Boston ideal. Its people take pride in all that it offers. Folks seem to work together well. The phrase Eastie Pride rolls off the tongue easily. We have a diverse population and the mixture of cultures only makes us stronger together.
However, I do believe the over-development of this community is hampering our livability. So, working families will find it difficult to live here as developers keep building more and more high-end housing which has forced folks to move elsewhere. East Boston isn’t just a piece of valuable real estate ready to be exploited by builders looking to make quick bucks.
We cannot become a neighborhood of the very rich and very poor.
The richness of who we are together must not be trampled down into the ground. Lately, everywhere I turn I see more and more housing being built in all of Eastie’s neighborhoods. If you can find an empty parcel of land, it won’t be empty for long. I look all around me and I am not altogether loving what I can only call ongoing over-development. The more high end housing built, the higher and higher home prices rise and the higher and higher rents creep upwards.
I recently received a postcard in the mail from a real estate firm announcing a record price an East Boston residence went for. The sale price was $1,725,000. This bodes well for folks selling property here in East Boston but what about all of us who love this place and may soon be priced out by the higher and higher prices..
We need to work together as a community to ensure that we can remain here as a community. I love East Boston too much to be forced out searching elsewhere to live.
What better place to live than here?
A columnist for the Post-Gazette, Sal Giarratani is a frequent contributor to EastBoston.com.
