When it came to commuting, living in Cleveland Circle just wasn’t working out for Chris Beland and his husband, Clifton Leigh. The MBTA’s Green Line was too crowded for Beland, 40, and finding a spot to park on the street after 5 p.m. was mission impossible for Leigh, 42, who worked in the suburbs.
Weary of the bars and rowdy late-night partiers, the couple decided in 2008 to look for an apartment in a quieter city neighborhood that fit their commuting preferences — near the Red Line for Beland and with parking options for Leigh.
A search on Craigslist brought them to Davis Square in West Somerville and to a three-decker on Jay Street that, as Beland tells it, “hadn’t been touched since the ’70s.’’
“It had shag carpet, orange counters, a mirror wall, [and] it smelled terrible, like old cigarette smoke,’’ Beland recalled. “I said: ‘I cannot live here. This is not fit for human habitation.’ ’’
But Leigh saw the potential — it had a side yard, was steps from the T, and offered the rarest of amenities — a garage. And at $1,300 a month, it was also under market for the neighborhood at the time.
Beland agreed to rent it, but only after the landlord gave the couple the go-ahead to upgrade a few things. They rented there for several years, then began looking for a fixer-upper in Davis Square they could buy. “I fell in love with the neighborhood,’’ Beland said.
As luck would have it, the family that owned their building was selling it.
In December 2016, the couple bought the three-decker for $1.4 million. After the second-floor tenants married and moved out, Beland and Leigh fully renovated the unit and listed it for $2,300 last September. Beland worried the rent was a little high, but in red-hot Davis Square it was a bargain — within an hour of listing it, they got a dozen requests from interested parties.
Beland, who has lived in the neighborhood now for more than a decade, said he appreciates the mix of old-timers and newcomers that embody Davis Square’s blue-collar working class past and evolution to “painfully hip’’ hangout for young professionals and students. The neighborhood has a mix of coffee spots, restaurants, and shops.
“I like a neighborhood with a diversity of age ranges. I like the Somerville old guard,’’ Beland said.
“We still have weird, independent things. We have an oatmeal restaurant — who has that? A bfresh went in the old Social Security office, a total hipster grocery store where you can find some guy in a moustache getting his organic groceries. They have a kombucha machine. Who has a kombucha machine?’’
Katheleen Conti can be reached at kconti@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeKConti.
