Kendall Square this is not.
But two Boston developers believe that Fields Corner in Dorchester could become an attractive location for entrepreneurs seeking low costs and the opportunity to launch a business — and help revitalize one of the city’s most economically depressed neighborhoods.
Travis Lee and his partner, John Mauldin, recently opened the Fields Corner Business Lab, a co-working space where a startup can rent a desk for a little as $100 a month, including Wi-Fi, cable, and the use of conference rooms. Already the lab, on the top floor of one of the most prominent buildings in Fields Corner, is home to nine very small businesses, ranging from real estate to law to health care.
“There’s nothing like this here,” said Lee, 33, who lives in Fields Corner with his wife and four children.
Such shared workspaces are common in well-known technology and commercial centers such as Kendall Square in Cambridge or Boston’s Innovation District. But as those places have evolved with the startups that grew up there, they have become high rent hubs, making them unaffordable to budding local entrepreneurs.
Gilad Rosenzweig, founder of the nonprofit Smarter in the City, which will open a high-tech accelerator in Dudley Square next month, said these efforts could succeed because office space in upscale neighborhoods is in increasingly short supply and many young people want to live and work in the city.
There’s “a lack of office space definitely in downtown and Kendall,” he said. “We’re at a point where we have to introduce people [entrepreneurs] in the city to other neighborhoods.”
Lee bought the four-story building that houses the business lab earlier this year for $1.6 million from Dorchester House, a health center. Built in 1915 and reminiscent of the distinctive Flatiron Building in New York, the property was called the Liggits Building before it was renamed the Lenane Building in honor of a wealthy benefactor to Dorchester House.
Lee said he was interested in the property as an investment and an experiment in community revitalization. Once a largely middle-class, largely Irish enclave, the area saw property values plummet when many families moved to the suburbs in the 1970s during the racial strife that resulted after court-ordered busing. Today, Fields Corner is home to the largest Vietnamese population in the city. Yet unemployment and crime remain problems.
The business lab sits above the fray on the fourth floor, with an exposed beam interior, stylish office chairs and couches, and penthouse views of Dorchester Bay in the distance. Lee said he hopes to open a cafe on the ground floor where entrepreneurs can meet, eat, and collaborate. He is looking for tenants for the second and third floors.
The business lab offers about 50 desks priced according to location in the renovated 4,500-square-foot space. A desk in the communal area rents for $100 a month; a private office rents for $450.
Dorchester resident Trisha O’Neil, an artist in her late 40s who runs a fledgling home care business there, said she will interview prospective employees in the business lab. She’s paying $100 a month for a desk, a chair, Wi-Fi, and other amenities like a communal coffee machine, which isn’t much more than she would pay for cable and Wi-Fi service alone if she leased an office elsewhere.
“I was looking at storefronts around Ashmont and they were all pretty expensive,” O’Neil said. “This is just perfect.”
Omar S. Gonzalez, a lawyer from Lynn, recently opened a satellite office in Fields Corner because he could meet with more prospective clients if he had a location in Boston.
The recent Boston College Law School graduate said the setting also allows him to work alongside other entrepreneurs and business owners, helping him understand what’s going on in the community and possibly even winning referrals.
“Other attorneys in high-crime areas, they just stay in their office and hope clients come in,” Gonzalez said. “The legal model I’m trying to use is community-based lawyering.”
Megan Woolhouse can be reached at megan.woolhouse@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @megwoolhouse.