Chinatown group jumps at chance to ‘Imagine Boston’

Baolian Kuang of the Chinese Progressive Association translates community demands for Corey Zehngebot of the Boston Redevelopment Authority at a public gathering in Chinatown.

Chinatown residents and activists responded last week to Mayor Walsh’s new citywide planning initiative, “Imagine Boston 2030,” with their own event dubbed “Imagine…Chinatown 2030?” — a question meant to highlight the precarious situation that many residents say the neighborhood currently faces.

“We’re asking will Chinatown still be here in 2030?” said Mark Liu, Director of Programs and Operations for the Chinese Progressive Association. “We need protective zoning for the neighborhood so it can maintain being the gateway for working-class immigrants.”

Local residents repeatedly cited affordable housing as one of their chief concerns. One resident who gave his name as Mr. Ma said he had been renting a three-bedroom apartment for $600 per month in a rent-subsidized building until the property’s subsidy expired without the landlord providing the required advanced notice to tenants. Suddenly, he said, his rent jumped to $1300 per month.

Residents also noted a range of ‘wish-list’ items related to housing such as the return of rent control (eliminated in Massachusetts in 1994 by state-wide referendum), the use of public land parcels for community benefits such as affordable housing or libraries, and more tenant protections such as better enforcement of sanitary codes.

Residents and the CPA both pointed to the boom of luxury developments in the area as the main source of the affordability problem. The CPA is pushing for the adoption of a Chinatown master plan developed in 2010 as a community-informed way to address issues of concern to its working-class residents.

BRA outreach

The CPA gathering was organized to coincide with the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s visit to the neighborhood at the same time. The BRA currently is engaged in a citywide effort to solicit public feedback and convince Bostonians to give their blessings to a ten-year extension of 14 of the city’s 16 expiring urban renewal districts.

The term ‘urban renewal’ strikes a nerve among many of those old enough to remember the razing of entire neighborhoods like the West End and large swaths of the South End, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain in decades past, to build what are now known,

respectively, as Government Center and the Southwest Corridor Park.

Now, however, the city is trying to convince residents that the urban renewal of 2015 will be a fundamentally different affair, characterized not by the top-down redesign of entire areas, but rather a more nuanced and community-informed city planning process.

Corey Zehngebot, a senior urban planner with the BRA, was at the Chinatown gate last week on behalf of the city.

“These are tools in our tool box,” she said of urban renewal powers. “We do use eminent domain, but we don’t take peoples’ properties against their will.”

She emphasized, as the BRA has repeatedly stressed during its public outreach process, that urban renewal was a technical term that included several different kinds of powers: not only the well-known eminent domain powers, but also things like title clearance, something the BRA says in important in an old city like Boston where some land records are not clearly delineated.

Zehngebot stressed that this time around, however, the emphasis would be on community process.

“We genuinely want to have that conversation,” she said of neighborhood feedback.

She noted the plethora of neighborhood plans that already exist – including specific mention of the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan – and said the city wanted to build on those previous efforts.

“Maybe this is a good time to look at those,” she said of the previous plans.

Lydia Lowe, co-director of the CPA, told the Banner on Friday that she appreciated the city’s “transparency” during its current public outreach process, but that she also thought there was a need for bigger reform.

“The question of renewal of urban renewal brings up the question of, ‘Is this the system we want?’” she said. “The BRA is a quasi-public agency that is not held accountable to the city. It raises its money through the sale and leasing of land.”

For that reason, Lowe said, she wanted the city to have its own, separate economic development and planning department that would be more directly accountable to voters.

Exchange of ideas

Lowe and Zehngebot had a conversation about the community’s future as the two organizations converged at the Chinatown gate.

Lowe said she was open-minded, but that for her, it was a matter of priorities.

“I’m not necessarily against the use of urban renewal,” she said. “The question is more — for what end? We’re trying to highlight that we want [Chinatown] for working class people.”

“We want to have neighborhoods stabilized,” Zehngebot replied.

She added, however, that it was a matter of balancing competing needs. “We’re thinking about stabilization and growth … [but] we’re trying to do things differently, as evidence by this [outreach process].”

What are the guarantees?

Zehngebot said that Bostonians who were wary of the BRA’s promises of a community-driven urban renewal process could take comfort in two factors that would serve as a check on any potential city government overreach: money and politics.

“When urban renewal began, there was an unlimited trove of money,” she said, referring to the post-World War II boom that precipitated a wave of federal spending. Today, she said, those kinds of funds simply don’t exist for the BRA. Even if the agency wanted to do what it did in the past – which, she stressed, it didn’t — she said it would simply not be able to afford it.

Secondly, she added, there was not the kind of political will to engage in the same kinds of urban planning of the past

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a politician who would go out and [support] the wholesale sale of neighborhoods,” she said.

In terms of legal checks on BRA authority, officials said there are not any written guarantees per se. In response to a Banner question about such checks on BRA discretionary power, spokesperson Nick Martin emphasized that the public would have to judge the agency by its current outreach efforts.

“I don’t know that there are ‘legal guarantees’ that we can offer about the responsible use of urban renewal tools,” he told the Banner in an email.

“Ultimately, engaged community members will be the judge of that, and I think we’ve been very open and honest about what we believe are the benefits to having urban renewal tools at our disposal. Unlike the approach to urban renewal decades ago, or even the last attempt to extend the powers in 2005, we, as an organization, have been extremely forthcoming in terms of sharing information and gathering feedback from residents about how we can use urban renewal more wisely. The current approach is much less top-down and much more informed by members of the general public.”

His comments echoed a sentiment expressed by Zehngebot at the Chinatown public meeting, where residents shared their list of hopes for the future through a translator. One of the community members read through the list, which included repeated calls for affordability to maintain the community they called home.

“I have to say, this is amazing,” Zehngebot replied. “This is the sort of information we are hoping to get, so in many ways, you’ve done a lot of the initial thinking … This is exactly the sort of response we want.”

While the extension of urban renewal powers is not directly related to housing affordability per se, the two issues do overlap. The BRA and the Department of Neighborhood Development currently are working together to update the city’s Inclusionary Development Policy, a policy first implemented under former Mayor Thomas Menino that mandates how many units of each new development should be officially designated as affordable.

Next steps

The next step in the public process on urban renewal will be a series of community workshops in June and July. The dates of those meetings have not yet been set. BRA officials have said that those conversations would continue to focus on urban renewal goals in an attempt to gain community feedback rather than any specific projects.