Liberty Place and Gentrification Threat

Liberty Place is a proposed 26-story development of commercial space and market-rate housing slated for a large parcel of land bounded by Essex, Washington, and Beach Streets. The proposed height is nearly three times the 8-story zoning requirements. Parking and traffic are already at crisis proportions. And the 410 units of market-rate housing proposed, combined with two other current projects on the block, make for a total of over one thousand market-rate and luxury units on the west side of Chinatown! But to really understand the significance of this threat, we need to understand a little of Chinatown’s history.

When Chinese first settled Boston Chinatown in the late 1800s, it was little more than a backwater area where no one but new immigrants lived—the Irish, Syrians, Lebanese, Jews, and Chinese, but Chinese gradually became the dominant group. Following World War II, the big urban centers developed as downtown financial centers with a system of highways to connect and support them.

The growth of the downtown and the elimination of the former elevated subway made Chinatown land more attractive for various purposes. In the 1950s, the Central Artery was constructed, followed by the Massachusetts Turnpike in the early 1960s. Construction of these highways displaced some 1,200 people from their homes. This was part of a larger Urban Renewal program, in which city government forced homeowners to sell their property and razed homes for “public purposes.” Much of the land taken through Urban Renewal was used for highway construction and for construction of Tufts/New England Medical Center. In 1974, the City decided to move the Combat Zone from Scollay Square, and zoned lower Washington Street as the city’s adult entertainment district. By the 1980s, Chinatown had lost over half of its land to institutional development.

Chinatown Community Plan of 1990

Throughout this history, Chinatown was relatively powerless. But by the mid to late 1980s, Chinatown began to fight back, joining other neighborhoods like the South End and Roxbury to call for greater community control of development. It was this citywide movement that demanded the creation of the “linkage” policy, through which large commercial developers must contribute to job training and housing development for communities, through a formula calculated according to square footage.

During this time, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) encouraged the idea that city government and communities could work together on development issues. In Chinatown, the BRA worked with community leaders to publish the Chinatown Community Plan of 1990, a community “master plan” which for the first time recognized Chinatown as a residential neighborhood.

As part of the master plan process, city government adopted zoning guidelines for Chinatown of eight to ten stories, and similarly set guidelines for the allowable “mass” of new developments. For the first time, the BRA recognized affordable housing as the top priority for Chinatown’s development, and called for policies to “protect the working class family neighborhood.”

Today, Chinatown is faced with nearly 30 redevelopment projects. The wave of new hotels and luxury housing developments threatens to increase real estate prices and push current low-income immigrant residents out of the neighborhood. An early sign of gentrification, two years ago, was a one-bedroom condo above a restaurant on Hudson Street which advertised for $300,000.

Lower Washington Street is a particular hotspot of development. Between the Millennium Place condos, selling for $460,000 to $7 million, the Liberty Place apartments, and the Kensington Project which is next in the pipeline, more than one thousand units of market-rate and luxury housing are slated for a one-and-a-half block of Washington Street. Yet another parcel across the street from Millennium, called Hayward Place, is expected to be used for a hotel and commercial mega development. In compensation for these thousand-plus market-rate units, a total of 50 affordable units are proposed (or 5% of the total).

“The City says that it is helping Chinatown get rid of the Combat Zone,” said longtime resident and Chinatown Resident Association co-chair Marie Moy. “The problem is that this solution may also get rid of the community.”

Chinatown 2000

An update to the Chinatown Community Plan of 1990 will be released on June 26, at a community meeting of The Chinatown Initiative to be held at the Quincy School cafeteria at 6:15 in the evening. The timely release of the updated community plan begs the question of developers and the City: How do the currently proposed developments contribute to the community’s priorities? Will Liberty Place, a 26-story building with 410 market-rate units, strengthen the working class, family neighborhood?