A New Neighborhood

Lydia Hill, the oldest child in the Hill family, is now 16 and a sophomore at South Boston High School.

An honor student, her parents are hoping that she can win a college scholarship but are worried that her new school may not be providing adequate preparation for the next level.

"It's too easy for her over here," Rick Hill says.

"With the Cambridge schooling she could really educate her mind, really move her mind the way it's supposed to move. Here she comes home from school and finishes her homework in 45 minutes."

His Kids' experiences in Jamaica Plain stand in marked contrast to his own childhood in Cambridge. Hill became known around the city in the early 1970s as a gifted athlete.

In 1971 his football team at Cambridge Rindge Technical High School (Before it merged with Cambridge Latin to become Cambridge Rindge and Latin) went undefeated and unscored upon in all but one quarter.

Now, neighborly feelings and close family ties have been swept away by a tide of rising rent costs and escalating property values.

But even if Hill could have remained, he would have faced a glitizier, more rarefied neighborhood than the one he remembers.

Hill says that you can see it happening just by looking some of the city's new businesses.

"All the stores that you used to be able to afford like Zares, those stores are gone."

But while he may be outspoken about Cambridge's ongoing gentrification process, Hill understands many of the concerns that the Bolognas express about the former rent-control regime.

Hill feels that the City Council was a major source of problems, playing politics instead of tending to the legitimate concerns of both tenants and landlords.

Indeed, Cambridge's last mayor and a former rent-control tenant, Kenneth E. Reeves '72, became one of the most notorious symbols of well-to-do residents benefiting from poorly designed rent protections.

Hill believes the abuses, although they existed, did not define the system, He would have preferred a means-tested system an idea that was repeatedly proposed to the council by landlords, but never adopted.