New real estate development could squeeze them out
By Associated Press
Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood has survived highway builders, hospital construction and the Combat Zone.
But residents are concerned that five major large real estate developments proposed or under construction in the neighborhood could force up rents and cost Chinatown its distinctive character.
Residents such as Melissa Lo are worried they can’t afford to stay in the neighborhood, which has served as a first home and springboard for Asian immigrants since 1870. Lo, 22, a Hong Kong native, has heard from her landlord that their rent may double or triple in the next few years.
She told The Boston Globe her parents “don’t speak a lot of English so life here is [not] easy for them. We don’t have any money saved up and I’m not sure what we’ll do.”
Two of the development projects are underway. Millennium Place, a 1.35 million square-foot development, which features 850 luxury condominium units, a Ritz-Carlton hotel and 1,400 parking spaces, is being built on the edge of the neighborhood and is scheduled to open in July.
One Lincoln Street, a 952,000 square-foot development with 900 parking spaces is scheduled for completion in 2003.
The Loews Boston Hotel, a 391-room hotel, is scheduled to be reviewed by the Boston Redevelopment Authority this month.
A fourth project, Liberty Place, could include 430 rental apartments. It is still being studied and a construction timeline has not been set.
“This community is not anti-development,” said Linda Lowe, director of the Chinese Progressive Association. “But the answer is not to turn Washington Street into another Copley Place.”
An official from the city’s redevelopment authority said the projects will benefit Chinatown businesses while counteracting the effects of the nearby Combat Zone.
“There is no doubt we are making a better Boston and making it more stable,” said BRA director Mark Maloney. “We are making it more desirable, and when you do that, prices go up.”
But Tai and other neighborhood activists are concerned projects such as Liberty Place will snarl traffic, create shadows and wind tunnels, drive up nearby rents and remove one of the few parcels of developable space left in the area.
That space is needed for affordable housing that will serve the new immigrants who have come to the neighborhood since it was established, advocates said.
“If the residential district goes, you will have a dead Chinatown,” said Andrew Leong, a University of Massachusetts law professor and chairman of the Campaign to Protect Chinatown. “It will be a shell only for tourists.”
Census figures show Chinatown’s population of about 4,000 has grown slightly in recent years, despite growing Asian neighborhoods in Quincy, Malden and Brighton. Chinese make up about 70 percent of Chinatown’s population, even as other Asian groups move in. |
