In Boston, as in other cities, change has its costs.

For working class residents in Allston/ Brighton and the owner of a Back Bay bookstore, those costs can mean being priced out of the neighborhood. For residents of Boston’s old West End and South End jazz lovers, the old neighborhood no longer exist. And for senior citizens in West Roxbury homes, change means higher taxes and home repair costs, even as they struggle on a fixed income.

But change can bring progress and, with it, hope. For residents and businesses in Jamaica Plain, progress can be measured in the colorful murals that have helped fight off the graffiti artists and drug dealers. For Hispanic immigrants in East Boston it comes with the halting words of a new language: English. For those in the North End, who’ve endured a decade of hammering, it soon will be seen in blooming flowers where trucks once rattled.
The reporters for this project set out to measure change in Boston's neighborhoods. This is their story of a City in Transition.

Allston / Brighton

As rents keep rising, lifelong Allston-Brighton residents are competing with area college students to find affordable housing. Rising rents have forced some to leave and others into sub-par units. Meanwhile, the Allston Brighton Community Development Corp. is working to support more subsidized units to rent and purchase.

Jamaica Plain

To a passerby, the murals in Jamaica Plain are a colorful sight. But to residents of the community, the murals are more than just public works of art: They tell stories of a neighborhood working to reclaim its streets from the crime and violence of a decade ago.

West End

This carefully planned community of high-rises and open space is a modern contrast to the historic North End and Beacon Hill nearby. Here, nearly 50 years after the original was razed by urban renewal, a West End neighborhood is rising again on the banks of the Charles River. The area is entering a new era of revitalization and growth, and the community wants the city to take notice.

West Roxbury

Home to the city’s highest percentage of senior citizens, West Roxbury offers a glimpse into the changing lives of elders nationwide. As a reflection of the enduring health and longevity of this exploding segment of the population, seniors are experiencing more independent and active later years than previous generations.

South End

The South End, once the center of Boston’s jazz scene, is quiet now except for the traffic – and the notes from Wally’s Café, the single club remaining from an era gone by. The neat rows of brownstones along Massachusetts Avenue give no other hint that clubs used to line the street and play host to jazz legends who passed through town from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Chinatown

With new buildings under construction and a park being planned, Chinatown has had its share of controversy. As some fight against luxury high-rise buildings they fear will drive up rents and drive out poorer residents, others are growing concerned that the drugs and crime that plagued the community during the seamier decades when Chinatown was the center of Boston’s sex-for-sale Combat Zone are seeping back.

North End

After years of being masked by the Central Artery and then the dusty, heavy-duty equipment and boarded up facades of construction, the North End will unveil itself anew in 2006 behind a ribbon of parkland. After nearly three decades of planning, the blueprint of an $8 million, two-acre park that will serve as a tranquil buffer between Boston’s bustling downtown and one of the city’s last ethnic enclaves, is in its final stages.

East Boston

With its rapidly growing Hispanic community, East Boston is becoming a place where the Spanish language unites and English keeps new residents apart from the mainstream. Their common tongue, Spanish, helps give them a sense of security but it is also what excludes them from better jobs. They know learning English is the key to break down these barriers. But learning it it’s not easy.

Charlestown

When the first Boys & Girls Club of Boston was founded in Charlestown in 1893, carpentry, printing and painting were the club’s core programs. Today, in a more technological world, computer skills are taught. Graphic design and digital photography workshops have replaced painting and printing classes. But classes aren’t all that’s changed. The demographic make up of the club has changed as well.

Back Bay

No neighborhood is above gentrification, and Back Bay, one of Boston’s most affluent, is no different. But not everybody gains from it. Recent rental trends on Newbury Street have seen some smaller stores close shop and corporate chain stores replace them. Stores like Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop will shut their doors while Diesel moves in down the block. Newbury Street is undergoing a face lift that some residents call “Mallification.”