Live in Longwood
There are 218 condominiums inside the BPDA's Longwood polygon and not one single-family, two-family or three-family house, so this is a workplace that a few people live in rather than a residential neighborhood.
Longwood is 189 acres, or 0.29 of a square mile, and the 2020 census counted 4,096 residents in it. The Longwood Collective, the area's own planning body, says over 134,000 people are in the medical and academic area every day. The gap between those two numbers is the whole story. Intersecting the City's 2025 parcel layer with the BPDA polygon and reading the fiscal 2026 assessment roll gives 383 assessed parcels inside Longwood: 218 residential condominiums, 119 tax-exempt parcels carrying $10.9 billion of value between them, and no houses at all. The BPDA carries Longwood as one of its 23 neighborhoods and the City's own website has no neighborhood page for it, which is the most honest summary anyone has published.
A workplace of 134,000 that 4,096 people happen to live inside
A small rectangle south of the Fenway: Brookline Avenue and the Brookline town line to the north-west, the Riverway to the west, Huntington Avenue and Mission Hill to the south, and Avenue Louis Pasteur and the Fens to the east. The BPDA publishes the polygon this guide measures from and says plainly that its neighborhood boundaries are approximations rather than the City's official lines, and here that caveat bites hard: the boundary with Mission Hill runs through the middle of the Fenwood Road block, and the Green Line station called Longwood is not in Longwood at all but in Brookline. There is no postal city called Longwood, so no assessment median can be drawn by mail address.
Longwood is not really a residential neighborhood, and the numbers say so plainly. The BPDA carries it as one of Boston's 23, and it is 189 acres with 4,096 residents counted in 2020. The Longwood Collective, the district's own planning body, says over 134,000 people are in the medical and academic area every day. The City publishes a neighborhood page for almost every part of Boston and none for this one, which is a fair reflection of the ground. A buyer here is buying into a hospital and medical school district that has some housing in it, not a neighborhood that happens to contain hospitals.
The assessment roll settles the argument. The roll carries no neighborhood field, so this guide intersected the City's 2025 parcel layer with the BPDA polygon and read the fiscal 2026 values off the parcels inside. That gives 383 assessed parcels: 218 residential condominiums, 119 tax-exempt ones, and not a single one, two or three-family house. The exempt parcels carry $10.9 billion of assessed value against $1.6 billion on everything else, so 87% of the value inside Longwood pays no property tax at all. That is not a criticism of the hospitals. It is the reason there is no retail high street and no district elementary school.
The 218 condominiums are two buildings' worth, and knowing which one matters. 133 of them are at 100 to 122 Riverway, an apartment row the roll records as built between 1890 and 1915, facing Olmsted's parkway. The other 85 are at 80 Fenwood Road, opened in 2016 and developed by the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard with Brigham and Women's Hospital, and a large share of those units are deed-restricted rather than open-market. The median assessed value across all 218 is $436,750, which is low for this part of Boston and reflects the mix rather than the location. Only 90 of the 218 are flagged owner-occupied, which is 41%, eighth-lowest of the 23 Boston guides on this site and level with Beacon Hill.
The exemption still applies, and at this price it applies hard. Boston publishes one residential rate, $12.40 per $1,000 for fiscal 2026, then takes $351,108 of assessed value off any parcel the owner lives in, worth $4,353.74 a year. Against a $436,750 condominium that removes most of the bill, which is exactly why the 59% of these units that are not owner-occupied are paying so much more than their neighbors on identical floors. You must have owned and occupied on 1 January and filed by 1 April. The arithmetic is on the Boston hub.
The boundaries here are shakier than most. The BPDA says in its own dataset that its neighborhood lines are approximations rather than official City boundaries, and here that has teeth: the Mission Hill line runs through the Fenwood Road block, so the 2016 building sits on it, and the Green Line station named Longwood is on Chapel Street in Brookline, outside Boston. There is no postal city called Longwood either, so nothing here can be measured the way a Dorchester median is. The parcel figures above are what can be said with confidence.
- Establish first whether the unit is deed-restricted, because a large share of the 2016 building is
- Ask whether the seller took the residential exemption: 59% of these units are not owner-occupied
- Set the closing against the 1 January ownership test and the 1 April filing deadline
- In a pre-1915 building, ask for the reserve study and three years of minutes: Massachusetts has no reserve statute
- Do the groceries walk before you commit, because the nearest full high street is Coolidge Corner in Brookline
- Check the daytime traffic and parking rules at 8am on a weekday, not at a weekend viewing
How Longwood got here
- 1906Harvard Medical School moves to Longwood Avenue and opens the five marble-faced buildings of its quadrangle, which are still in use for teaching and research. The Fenway around it was open farm and marshland at the time.
- 1915The apartment row at 100 to 122 Riverway is finished. Those buildings, recorded on the assessment roll as built between 1890 and 1915, still hold 133 of the neighborhood's 218 condominium units.
- 1972Eleven institutions found MASCO, the Medical Academic and Scientific Community Organization, to run the shared transport, planning and infrastructure a district of this shape needs and no municipality provides.
- 2016The building at 80 Fenwood Road opens, developed by the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard with Brigham and Women's Hospital. Its 85 condominium units are the only for-sale housing built in Longwood this century, and a large share of them are deed-restricted.
- 2020The census counts 4,096 people inside the polygon, the smallest resident population of the 23 Boston neighborhoods this site covers, on ground that draws a daytime population thirty times that size.
- 2022MASCO renames itself the Longwood Collective on 21 July, fifty years after it was founded, and keeps running the shuttle fleet that moves staff in from off-site parking.
- 2026The City of Boston still publishes no neighborhood page for Longwood, though the BPDA carries it as one of the 23. A buyer looking for the usual municipal orientation material will not find it.
The Riverway, the Fens and the Muddy River
Longwood has no park inside it. What it has is an edge on two of Olmsted's: the Riverway, the strip along the Muddy River that forms the western boundary, and the Back Bay Fens a kilometer north, with the rose garden and the Victory Gardens on it. South along the water the chain continues through Olmsted Park to Jamaica Pond.
What the map does not show: the Riverway is a parkway with a path beside it rather than a park to sit in, and the traffic is constant. The Fens is the nearest space that works as one, and it is a fifteen-minute walk with two large road crossings on the way.
Elsewhere in Boston, not Longwood
21 places, with real drive times
Road-adjusted distance and drive time from the centre of the community to each destination, nearest first. Filter by category.
Showing 1–12 of 21 places, nearest first.
Method: distances and drive times are computed from one representative point near Brookline Avenue and Longwood Avenue, using straight-line distance multiplied by a road factor and a tiered speed model: honest ranges, not routed times. This neighborhood is 0.29 of a square mile, so almost everything on this list is a walk, and the drive column is close to meaningless inside it.
Every gym within reach
There is no municipal facility inside Longwood. The nearest are the City's BCYF Tobin on Tremont Street and BCYF Hennigan on Heath Street, both up the hill in Mission Hill, and the Huntington Avenue YMCA by Northeastern. Several of the institutions here run staff fitness centers, which are not open to residents who do not work for them.
- BCYF Tobin has the nearest municipal pool, about a fifteen-minute walk uphill
- If your employer is one of the member institutions, ask what its fitness benefit actually covers
- In a pre-1915 condominium there is no building gym and no association funding one
| Facility | What it is | Drive |
|---|---|---|
| BCYF Tobin Community Center open | The City's center on Tremont Street in Mission Hill, with a gymnasium and a pool at municipal prices, and the nearest public facility. | 4–6 min |
| BCYF Hennigan Community Center open | The City's center on Heath Street, up the hill, and the second municipal option within a reasonable walk. | 4–7 min |
| Huntington Avenue YMCA open | The nearest full YMCA branch, with a pool, on Huntington Avenue by Northeastern. | 5–8 min |
The free option is the Muddy River path: the Riverway to Olmsted Park and on to Jamaica Pond, continuous, flat and free the whole way.
The country's oldest school is here, and it admits nobody by address
Boston Latin School, founded in 1635, stands on Avenue Louis Pasteur inside this neighborhood, and living opposite it confers nothing: the three exam schools admit on grades and a test, with places allocated across tiers built from census tracts. There is no district elementary or middle school inside the polygon at all. Boston Public Schools assigns none anyway: it builds a list from your address, here drawn from the Fenway and Mission Hill, and runs an algorithm close to a lottery over the choices you rank.
| School | Board | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Boston Latin School | Boston Public Schools | Founded in 1635 and the oldest school in the country, and it stands on Avenue Louis Pasteur inside this neighborhood. It admits nobody by address: entry to the three exam schools is by grades and a test, with places allocated across tiers built from census tracts. |
| Elementary and middle school, from a Longwood address | Boston Public Schools | There is no district elementary or middle school inside the polygon. Boston assigns no neighborhood school anyway: it builds a list from your address, starting with the schools within a mile, which here means the Fenway and Mission Hill, and an algorithm close to a lottery makes the assignment. |
| High school, from a Longwood address | Boston Public Schools | Every Boston high school is a citywide option rather than an address assignment. Living opposite Boston Latin School confers nothing at all. |
| The Winsor School | Independent school | An independent girls' school on Pilgrim Road inside the polygon, admitting by its own application rather than by residence, at independent school fees. |
| Harvard Medical School and the graduate schools | Harvard University | The school buildings a Longwood household actually lives among are graduate ones: medicine, dental medicine and public health on the 1906 quadrangle. This is worth stating plainly, because a family reading a neighborhood's school list expects something else. |
The school buildings a Longwood household lives among are graduate ones. Harvard's medical, dental and public health schools occupy the 1906 quadrangle, and the Winsor School on Pilgrim Road is independent and admits by its own application. A family reading a neighborhood school list expects something else, so run your exact address through the district's own tool before assuming anything.
Month by month, what living here looks like
Not a highlights reel: the actual annual rhythm, including the dates residents have to remember.
- Highs near 3 °C and lows around -5 °C at Logan, with 36 cm of snow in an average January
- The hospitals do not close, so the streets here are plowed early and the sidewalks are cleared by institutions rather than by householders
- A declared snow emergency clears one side of most streets, and a resident permit does not exempt you
- Marginally the snowiest month, at 37 cm on the 1991 to 2020 normal
- The E branch runs in the street on Huntington Avenue and is the first Green Line service to slow in snow
- The quietest month for viewings, and there are rarely many to see in a stock of 218 units
- Highs near 8 °C, with 23 cm of snow still normal for the month
- The medical school calendar sets the rental year here, and residency Match Day in mid-March starts it
- A closing after 1 January means the residential exemption waits a full year
- Highs near 14 °C and only trace snow
- 1 April is the filing deadline for the residential exemption, and missing it costs the whole year
- Only 41% of the condominiums here are owner-occupied, so a seller's tax figure is more likely than usual to be a landlord's
- Highs near 19 °C, and the Riverway and the Fens are at their best
- Graduations across the medical and academic area fill the hotels and the streets for two weeks
- The busiest listing month everywhere in the city, including a market this small
- Highs near 25 °C, and the Emerald Necklace is a continuous walk from the Riverway to Jamaica Pond
- New residents and fellows arrive from now, and the short-term rental demand is unlike anywhere else in Boston
- Longer evenings make the daytime crowding obvious by contrast: this neighborhood empties after six
- Highs near 28 °C and lows near 19 °C, the warmest normals of the year
- The fiscal year turns on 1 July, and the first bill of the new assessment cycle follows
- The academic and hospital year turns on 1 July too, which is the single busiest arrival date in the district
- Leases turn over on 1 September and the last week of August is the worst traffic of the year
- Tropical systems reach New England in August and September, usually as heavy rain rather than wind
- Test a pre-1915 apartment for heat and for window noise on Brookline Avenue before you commit
- Highs near 23 °C, low humidity, and the clearest stretch of the year
- Term restarts and the shuttle fleet and the E branch both run full
- Baseball into October keeps Brookline Avenue unpredictable in the evenings
- Highs near 17 °C, and the wettest month on the normals at 102 mm
- Heating gets its first real test, and most of the housing here is a pre-1915 apartment building on steam
- In a condominium of this age, ask for the reserve study and three years of minutes: Massachusetts has no reserve statute
- Highs near 11 °C, with the first snow normal of the season at under 2 cm
- The Muddy River behind the Riverway is a managed flood channel, and the work on it is public record worth reading
- The market goes quiet, which in a stock of 218 units means it goes very quiet
- Highs near 6 °C and 23 cm of snow on the normal
- You must own and occupy on 1 January to qualify for the next year's residential exemption, so a December closing beats a February one by a full year
- Short days, and the district is lit and staffed at every hour, which is not true of most Boston neighborhoods
4 more photographs of the community and its surroundings
All freely licensed, via Wikimedia Commons. Filter by category.
Showing 1–4 of 4 photographs.
About these photographs. Openly licensed images geotagged in or near Longwood, found on Wikimedia Commons and served from there with full attribution. Inline photos elsewhere on the page may still come from the site's shared Boston library.