A booming city economy, a shortage of housing, traffic chaos, planning controversy and urban renewal. No, it's not Dublin, but Boston - and with Massachusetts' state-wide unemployment rate at 2.8 per cent, and the city expecting a growth in jobs of 8.6 per cent over the next decade, its crippling recession of the early 1990s is very much a thing of the past. The signs of success are there for all to see. Bigger cars, classy clothes and an air of confidence borne of old money and the new economy. The downside that success brings is also there of course. Cranes fill the sky, traffic is choked, house prices are rocketing and areas previously thought out-of-bounds because of crime or social status are being gentrified and made safer for suburbanites who want to move back to the city.
"The Big Dig" is the name given to the already nine-year-old project to improve traffic flow. When the Central Artery, the six-lane elevated highway that runs through the city's heart was built in 1959, it easily carried its load of around 75,000 vehicles a day. The almost 200,000 a day it slowly moves now has long been regarded as unsustainable and it is being replaced by an eight-to-10-lane underground expressway directly beneath the existing road. It is costing billions and is hundreds of millions over budget, leading to politically-expedient compromises such as higher taxes on hotel rooms. Nobody wants a return to the Dukakis era (the governor who lost to George Bush in the 1988 presidential election) when the state was often known as "Taxachusetts".
However, taking the problem underground isn't the only weapon in the "traffic-fix" armoury. Taking cars off the road is another part of the plan, and to do this people must be convinced that moving from the suburbs to the inner city is a good idea. This has led to huge amounts of money being poured into neighbourhoods such as Roxbury. I worked in this predominantly black area, while on a student visa, from June to November 1989. Finishing work at 3.30 p.m., I would rush for a bus that left only two minutes later. Sometimes I made it, sometimes not. One particular day I did and was shocked to discover when I turned on the TV at home that I'd missed being caught in a drug shooting by minutes. A man was killed in a hail of bullets at the very same bus-stop. It was numbing to think that while missing the 3.32 was a regular annoyance, I'd never considered it a danger, just a 10-minute wait.
Seeing Roxbury 11 years on is to see a place transformed. It is now closer to being the proud community where Malcolm X spent his teenage years and Martin Luther King preached while studying in Boston University in the 1950s, than the place I knew.
Crime figures have fallen dramatically - violent crime fell 39 per cent between 1994 and 1999 and the number of murders from 38 in 1995 to 10 last year.
At the same time, house prices are rising faster than the city average and commercial rents are up 30 to 40 per cent. And if traffic and housing problems are the flipside to boom times in other parts of the city, increased business rents are of no little concern to organisations such as Dudley Square Main Streets, a linchpin in the area's redevelopment. Some established businesses have lost their leases when chains offered higher rents. "Payless and Foot Locker, [two multiples which have moved in] they never come to a meeting in this neighbourhood," said Ms Joyce Stanley, director of the Main Streets project. "When you have local companies, or national chains run by local residents, they're concerned about the community."
According to Ms Stanley, the regeneration of Roxbury is different from that of projects in other parts of the city in that she is often dealing with abandoned buildings. "This effectively means that while other areas are improving or updating buildings, in Roxbury we are often starting with just a shell."
One local business that is thriving is the Dudley Soul Food Restaurant. "People thought we were crazy to set up a sit-down restaurant in Roxbury," said co-owner Ms Joanne Nelson. It has been a success since the day it opened 18 months ago. "With new offices, people coming back to the area and more, professional people locating here, we get a very diverse crowd," she said. One of her regulars is Mr Douglas Pendarvis, at whose Dorchester gym Irish boxer Steve Collins trained when he first went to live in Boston.
"The government feels this is an area that can be developed for convenience," said Mr Pendarvis. "You can go to work by bus if you live here rather than the suburbs. It takes cars off the streets and highways." He also sees increasing racial harmony. "Whites and blacks are starting to get along, maybe not by choice, but by living beside each other. They stick together for business reasons." Despite the vast improvement in the area's fortunes, there are still many signs of deprivation.
There are still the homeless on the streets and you are still asked for money every 100 yards and the biggest clue, perhaps, is the large number of phone boxes on the street. In a culture where, as in Ireland, the mobile phone is becoming ubiquitous, thus negating the need for coin boxes, in urban areas such as Roxbury as many as 25 per cent of people have no phone, mobile or otherwise.