Where to live in Boston
Boston is 48 square miles and 675,647 people at the 2020 census, and almost none of what makes an address expensive or cheap here is citywide. A Back Bay bowfront, a Dorchester three-decker and a Seaport tower are three different markets that move independently of each other, and the citywide index that averages them describes none of them. What decides an address instead is the neighborhood: which line reaches it, whether a commission reviews the front of the building, whether the ground it stands on was land in 1630. These are 23 neighborhood guides, filterable by part of the city below.
Where to start looking in Boston
Most people arrive with one constraint rather than a map. Each line below names one, one place to begin, and the figure behind it, which comes from the guide the line points at.
- The lowest price of entry. Brighton, where the median condominium parcel was assessed at $421,700 for fiscal 2026. The same figure in the Seaport is $1,435,500. Whichever you buy, the residential exemption takes $351,108 off the assessed value if you live in it.
- To commute without a car. Jamaica Plain, on the Orange Line relocated into the Southwest Corridor in 1987. Hyde Park and West Roxbury have no rapid transit at all, and a one-way commuter rail fare to South Station runs $2.40 to $7.00 depending on which of the three Hyde Park stations you use.
- A single-family house and a yard. West Roxbury: 6,555 single-family parcels, 89% of them owner-occupied, at a median assessed value of $752,700. In Roslindale houses outnumber condominium parcels 2.4 to 1.
- To be on the water. The Seaport is 622 acres of filled harbor whose condominiums have a median build year of 2016. Across the water, East Boston is the shoreline the City designs to a 2070 sea level rise horizon.
- The oldest streets. The South End, begun on the filled Neck in January 1849 and a landmark district since 1983, where the front of the house is reviewed.
Browse dedicated guides for Downtown, Beacon Hill and the harbor, Back Bay, the South End and the Fenway, Charlestown and East Boston, across the water, Roxbury, Mission Hill and Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, Mattapan and the southwest, Allston, Brighton and the Charles.
23 communities across the city
A start on a city of 675,647 people at the 2020 census that its own planning agency divides into 23 neighborhoods. Filter by part of the city, then page through the rest.
Allston
A student quarter more than a neighborhood, where the lease year starts on 1 September and Harvard owns most of the land north of the Turnpike.
Back Bay
Filled tidal flats laid out to a French plan from 1857, the only grid in Boston whose cross streets run alphabetically, and the most expensive ground per square foot in the city.
Beacon Hill
Federal-era brick on the slope below the State House, governed since 1955 by the oldest architectural commission in Massachusetts, which reviews the paint.
Brighton
Part of Cambridge until 1807, its own town until Boston annexed it in 1874, separated from the rest of Boston by Brookline, and holding the city's largest supply of 1920s courtyard apartment blocks.
Charlestown
Older than Boston and annexed by it in 1874, on a peninsula reached by three bridges, holding the Navy Yard, the Bunker Hill Monument and a landmark district study area.
Chinatown
The only historic Chinatown left in New England, a dozen blocks wedged between the Financial District and the Turnpike, and among the densest residential ground in the city.
Dorchester
A former town of 122,191 people, larger than every Massachusetts city but Boston and Worcester, and too big to be one housing market.
Downtown Boston
The colonial street plan nobody ever straightened, now an office district converting to housing under a city tax abatement, with the Freedom Trail running through the middle of it.
East Boston
Five islands joined by fill, reached by two tunnels and the Blue Line, sharing its ground with Logan and holding the city's largest Latin American population.
Fenway-Kenmore
Filled marsh around Olmsted's Back Bay Fens, where a ballpark, four universities and the hospitals next door set the calendar and the rent.
Hyde Park
The last town Boston annexed, in 1912, and the only neighborhood whose main link to the center is commuter rail rather than rapid transit.
Jamaica Plain
A streetcar suburb wrapped around a kettle pond and the Arnold Arboretum, on some of the highest ground in the city, and where Boston's rent argument has run longest.
Photographs: Packard's Corner, Boston, MA, USA by bynyalcin, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Back Bay East, Boston, MA, USA by bynyalcin, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Morning Light, Beacon Hill, Boston by R Boed, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons · Brighton from the hill by 4300streetcar, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Bunker Hill by InSapphoWeTrust from Los Angeles, California, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons · South end of the southbound platform at Chinatown station, July 2019 by Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Thane Street Historic District, Dorchester, Boston by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · The Samuel Appleton Building by Epicgenius, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Central Assembly of God by Dominic, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Fenway-Kenmore, Boston, MA, USA by Arnab Majumdar, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Hyde Park from inbound footbridge by Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center in Boston, west and south sides by Emw, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
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Showing 1–12 of 23 communities
The six parts at a glance
Water and annexation cut this city into pieces that do not reduce further without saying something untrue. Charlestown and East Boston cannot be folded in with downtown without denying the tunnel; Allston and Brighton cannot be folded into anything, because the town of Brookline physically separates them from the rest of Boston. So there are six parts here rather than four, and two of them hold two neighborhoods each.
| Part | Neighborhoods | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown, Beacon Hill and the harbor | Beacon Hill, Chinatown, Downtown Boston, South Boston, The North End, The Seaport, The West End | The original Shawmut peninsula and the filled land that grew off it, where almost nothing is a house and everything is a walk from everything else. |
| Back Bay, the South End and the Fenway | Back Bay, Fenway-Kenmore, Longwood, The South End | Tidal flats filled from 1857 onward and laid out to a plan, which makes this the one part of Boston with a straight grid and its cross streets in alphabetical order. |
| Charlestown and East Boston, across the water | Charlestown, East Boston | The two neighborhoods reached only by bridge, tunnel or boat, which is the first thing a buyer weighs about either of them. |
| Roxbury, Mission Hill and Jamaica Plain | Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill, Roxbury | The high ground of the old town of Roxbury, annexed in 1868 and still one continuous fabric of hills, three-deckers and Olmsted parkland. |
| Dorchester, Mattapan and the southwest | Dorchester, Hyde Park, Mattapan, Roslindale, West Roxbury | The annexed towns beyond Franklin Park, where most of Boston's one and two-family housing is and where the commute runs longest. |
| Allston, Brighton and the Charles | Allston, Brighton | Annexed from Newton in 1874, cut off from the rest of Boston by Brookline, and priced as a market of its own. |
Where the list of 23 comes from, and what is wrong with it. The subjects on this page are the 23 neighborhoods the Boston Planning and Development Agency approximates to 2020 census block groups. That list is used here for one reason: it is the only Boston neighborhood list with a population attached to every row, and its 23 rows sum to 675,647, which is the city's 2020 decennial count exactly. The BPDA says plainly that its boundaries are not official neighborhood boundaries for the City of Boston, and the City's own list, published by the Office of Neighborhood Services, is a different one: it combines Chinatown with the Leather District, adds Bay Village, Mid-Dorchester and the Wharf District, and has no entry at all for Longwood or for the Seaport. Two subjects here therefore have no page on boston.gov. Harbor Islands is excluded from this site because its 2020 population is zero.
The six parts above are ours. Boston publishes no tier between the city and its neighborhoods: the City Council's nine districts are electoral and cut across neighborhood lines, the zoning code's neighborhood districts follow the same names rather than sitting over them, and the MBTA divides nothing. So the grouping is editorial, built from the water and the annexation history because those are the only lines the city actually offers, and which neighborhood lands in which part is our judgment rather than anyone's published map.
What is not here, and where it is instead. Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Newton, Quincy and nineteen more are separate municipalities with their own councils, their own tax rates and their own residential exemptions, and they are on the Greater Boston comparison rather than in this index. That distinction costs real money here: Massachusetts towns vote their own rate and their own exemption every autumn, so the same house pays differently on either side of a line that is invisible on the ground. Inside the city limits this selection still leaves real places out, and they come as the guides do.