Streets of Hope tells the unique story of the revitalization of a Boston neighborhood—from the grassroots and without gentrification.

In the early 1980s Dudley Square was under attack. Redlining and redevelopment made arson common and hardly a night passed when a house was not on fire. It was here that residents and their allies formed the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DNSI), one of the most successful community development projects in the nation. Becoming the only nongovernmental agency in the United States authorized to claim eminent domain, DNSI wielded this and a range of other tools to create affordable, livable housing by and for the community.

As the mortgage crisis worsens and banks continue to tighten their lending guidelines, neighborhoods across the United States face a return to those fiery days. But not Dudley Street. DNSI’s land trust, a limited equity model—one hailed by Fannie Mae—is not at risk. Now, twenty-five years after DNSI’s founding and fifteen years after Streets of Hope appeared, South End Press is proud to release this updated anniversary edition.

With “personalities, poetic utterings and stories a novelist would enjoy” (The Boston Globe), Streets of Hope offers one community’s hard-won lessons to us all.

Peter Medoff, a leading consultant on community development, died in 1994, shortly after Streets of Hope was published. Media expert Holly Sklar is a nationally syndicated columnist, author, and policy analyst. Her op-eds have appeared in hundreds of newspapers and online outlets.