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Development Issues | Tenant Organizing | City-wide Alliances
 Millennium Place is being built on Washington Street, on the edge of Chinatown. Photo: John Tlumacki, Boston Globe. |
Chinatown rooms without a view
Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff
Boston Globe, June 10, 2001
'If the residential district goes, you will have a a dead Chinatown. It will be a shell only for tourists.'ANDREW LEONG, Chairman of Campaign to Protect Chinatown |
 (Above) In the works: Four large projects that are in various stages of development in Chinatown |
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New developments, higher rents, and a community’s
erosion raise worries in Asian cultural stronghold
The new construction, Millennium Place, with 850 luxury condominiums and a Ritz-Carlton hotel, is one of five major developments planned for the area in and around Chinatown. The projects promise to bring bustle and glamour to a frayed corner of downtown long saddled with the blight of the Combat Zone.But to Lo and her family, they bring worrisome thoughts about the end of life within comfortable bounds. Last month, the family’s landlord gave notice that the rent might go up, perhaps tripling, within a year or two.Lo, a 22-year-old Hong Kong native, said her parents "don't speak a lot of English so life here is easy for them. We don't have any money saved up and I'm not sure what we’ll do.
"Today, Chinatown is still a place where residents gather to honor their ancestors in ritual ceremonies. Where the click of mah-jongg tiles filters from apartments to mingle with the buzz of Cantonese on the sidewalks, where live chickens are sold and English-as-a-second-language classes have robust enrollments.But as high-rise development muscles into Chinatown's low-lying streetscape, driving up property values, longtime residents worry about the potential departure of many families like the Los. Local activists say they fear that once all the hammering has stopped, Chinatown could be on its way to becoming a restaurant row - one where white residents outnumber Asians.
"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."To date, evictions are little more than whispered rumors. But with property values already lurching higher, the familiar tale of gentrification - of blue collar workers and old world ways booted by scrubbed facades and invading Starbucks - is being warned of at community meetings.Of the five projects underway, one of which has yet to be submitted to the Boston Redevelopment Authority for review, activists say the biggest threat is Liberty Place, a 650,000-square-foot apartment complex being negotiated for what is now a parking lot on Washington Street.
"This is the one the neighborhood is watching the most," said Martha Tai, the director of the Campaign to Protect Chinatown.Tai and others worry that developments like liberty Place Will clog traffic, create shadows and wind tunnels, and drive up rents at nearby buildings. But, more important, they say, is that the project will take up so much of the little developable land that remains in Chinatown - land needed for affordable housing.Without the construction of such housing, activists warn, Chinatown will lose its unique hold as the storied first stop for Asian newcomers to America."It is still a way station," said Beverly Wing, of the Chinatown Coalition, a consortium of community-based organizations that was formed in 1991.
"But it can no longer accommodate the number of immigrants it used to.”Economic springboards like Chinatown have long been vital engines for the growth of the city's Asian population, which grew to 7.5 percent of the city's total over the last decade, and is credited helping to drive Boston's population growth even as whites continued to leave for the suburbs.Census figures show that Chinatown's population has grown slightly in recent years, hovering around 4,000, despite expanding Asian enclaves in Quincy, Malden, and Brighton. Chinese still make up the bulk of Chinatown residents - more than 70 percent by some estimates - even as other Asian groups are increasingly calling it home.The population's constancy, specialists say, owes to the unabated influx of immigrants, drawn by low rents and a culture infused with familiar traditions.But replace herbalists with latte makers, activists say, and immigrants will no longer find succor in a city that has historically been one of the largest ports of entry for immigrants in the United States.
"This community is not antidevelopment," said Lydia Lowe, director of the Chinese Progressive Association. "But the answer is not to turn Washington Street into another Copley Place."Founded in 1870, Chinatown has long faced building pressures, a trend that accelerated with urban renewal. In the 1950S and '60s, highways such as the Central Artery and Massachusetts Turnpike ate up large chunks of the neighborhood, while hundreds of rowhouses were razed to make way for the New England Medical Center and the Tufts University medical school.The result was a Chinatown one third its original size. Today Chinatown comprises just 42 acres.For years, resistance to development was muted. Residents were transient, largely uneducated and unable to converse in English.
But the 1990s saw the creation of several well-organized preservation groups, which successfully blocked a proposed parking garage in the heart of the heavily residential swath of Chinatown south of Kneeland Street. In its place will go a 23-story building mixed with affordable and market-rate apartments. Yet in the last five years, activists lament, the number of battlefronts has multiplied. And hope is dwindling that Chinatown will one day shed its unhappy distinction as the most densely populated, most polluted neighborhood in the city with the least green space. "Chinatown is a survivor," Tai said. "But we are really feeling the pressure."
Mark Maloney, the director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which has already approved two major developments, said the projects like Millennium Place will provide economic sustenance to 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," Maloney said. "We are making it more desirable and when you do that prices go up."Quon Wong says he never wanted a desirable neighborhood. The 74-year-old Hong Kong emigre, who speaks little English, has lived in a historic Chinatown rowhouse since 1979. These days he wakes to the sound of drilling at the construction site of a Tufts University research center next door."I look out my window and it used to be airy, but now it's not a window. I see a building,” he said. "It feels dead."He says he has no plans to move, despite an escalating rent and noise that forces him to seek respite in coffee shops from morning to afternoon.
Melissa Lo and her family say they can't afford to stay. She said her parents already struggle to pay their government-subsidized rent, which is well below the market rate. Their landlord, David Wong said he has been losing money on a number of Chinatown properties in recent years as his costs have increased. As such, he said, he is not likely to renew the Sect ion 8 government contract on the Los' apartment building that keeps 15 of the 16 units subsidized.“There are so many regulations,” said Wong. "It's a lot of money for a small project.” For Melissa Lo's mother, who asked that her name not be used, news of a rent increase means a big question mark. The slight 43 year-old woman with gray hair knows little beyond Chinatown and there are few places to which she could afford to move her family on her hotel-maid's salary.
"What can we do?" she said, clearing platters of steamed fish and sauteed scallions and garlic from the dinner table. "We a are powerless. If you don't like the changes around you, you move.”