Chinatown - Progress or Gentrification?

These issues surrounding Tufts MC sound awfully similar to the ones surrounding Harvard, BU, NU, etc.

One of the major problems with Boston is that we allow institutions to take over large chunks of the city and basically mark it off as their fiefdom.

It's analogous to the Turf problem that Jacobs writes about.

Institutions tend to deaden the area around them, and destroy city diversity, because of internal politics and a general hankering towards monoculture. Hospitals are particularly bad about this, perhaps for some legitimate reasons: but even so, it's still not good for the city.
 
John McCourt Co. Can I assume thats the same McCourt from the Seaport Square Parcels? His father's (or grandfather's) company?
 
Hi All,

The picture that AmericanFolkLegend posted is indeed a wonderful streetscape, and it is in fact gone, but the picture doesn't show Washington Street in Boston, it shows Market Street in Lynn. The view looks up towards the old Lynn City Hall, which was torn down in the 1940s. Only two buildings in the picture still stand: the one in the middle of the block (shown in the Google street view link below), and the old telephone building, which shows up as a ghostly presence in the far left background of the old picture. Google's truck did not drive down the street itself, but seems to have gone through a parking lot, so I can't get the angle just right:

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.463...ata=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sbm4KPcCfTCINvoscWTYJ3w!2e0

Here's a postcard of the old city hall:

http://www.amazon.com/City-Hall-undivided-postcard-1900s/dp/B00EV7WEAC

So, not Washington Street, but a lost treasure anyway.
 
Thanks BWeiss. I had found an old address for Joyce Clothing (in the picture) on Washington St in Boston. So that's where I assumed it was.

John McCourt Co. Can I assume thats the same McCourt from the Seaport Square Parcels? His father's (or grandfather's) company?

Yes. Frank McCourt's great grandfather was John McCourt.
Frank never worked for the company except as a laborer.
The company didn't get big until the 1980's when it got very good at installing cable TV infrastructure (it did the installs in Boston, Brookline, Sacramento, Palo Alto, etc.).
 
Wasn't sure where to put this..

Old registry building in Chinatown will be Bank of America on the ground floor and residential on the upper levels. Apartments- yay! Bank- ugh...
 
What's happening to Chinatown?
By Kayla Canne, Universal Hub

It's been nearly a month since Maxim's Coffee House served its last drop of hot coffee, its famous bun pastries flying off the shelves before the local bakery lost its lease and was forced to close its doors after 33 years in Chinatown. Yet artist Lillian Chan still finds sadness as she walks past the shuttered windows of the "iconic landmark" on the corner of Beach Street and Harrison Avenue. And neither she, nor the bakery, are alone.

As Chinatown's development spikes with high-rise luxury apartments and new commercial chains surrounding the ethnic neighborhood, many residents, visitors and small business owners are wondering one thing: what's happening to Chinatown?

"Just visually it's kind of jarring to see all of these high-rise building structures popping up around Chinatown," said Chan, a Boston resident who visits the neighborhood weekly. "It feels like it's just closing in on it."

Maxim's isn't the first of its kind — earlier this year another restaurant just down the street, Xinh Xinh, closed its doors for the last time, and prior to that Chinatown lost locally-owned grocery store Chung Wah Hong, along with many more local shops.

"The landscape definitely has changed," Chan said. "One of the bakeries that was on one of the corners was kind of a landmark in a way, and so it was kind of shocking when I found out [Maxim’s] had closed. It's just always been there and so you feel like it's always going to be there. And I can only imagine that more of that is happening as more construction is being done."

Craig Caplan, a small business owner who has worked within Downtown Crossing and Chinatown over the past 25 years, said small, locally owned businesses are threatened by luxury development. As expensive buildings go up, owners of other buildings in the neighborhood begin to believe that their spaces are more valuable and start to ask for higher rent.

"There's sort of this delusion of grandeur going on, where somebody who has been getting $20 a square foot for the last 15 to 20 years now thinks the property is worth $150 a square foot merely because they're a few blocks away from a beautiful high-rise," Caplan said. "So what you are seeing happening is people's leases are coming up for these commercial properties and they're used to paying $4,000 a month for their store, and suddenly they're finding that their landlords are starting to charge them $20,000 for the same exact space."

As locally owned shops struggle to afford higher rents, larger chains move in — most notably franchise coffee shops and pharmacies — which Caplan said is detrimental to any neighborhood, but especially one as culturally rich as Chinatown. ...

Column continues ...
 
Whigh, when someone you love dies do you just shrug your shoulders and say, "Oh well, shit happens!"?

Do you honestly not understand why people might be upset about this?
 
"Stuff Happens" because we haven't spent enough effort building up criminally underutilized land and our half hearted transportation system. It's not just some inevitable process that happens in a vacuum. I mean, if London and San Francisco of all places can continue to have gigantic Chinatowns directly adjacent to their downtown neighborhoods, than I'm sure we can figure out a way to make it work as well in Boston.
 
"Stuff Happens" because we haven't spent enough effort building up criminally underutilized land and our half hearted transportation system. It's not just some inevitable process that happens in a vacuum. I mean, if London and San Francisco of all places can continue to have gigantic Chinatowns directly adjacent to their downtown neighborhoods, than I'm sure we can figure out a way to make it work as well in Boston.

London's Chinatown isnt that big... and I dont know, but I dont think that it's an area with cheap rents like Boston's. Which comes to the question of what a "Chinatown" is... basically a ghetto. I guess I support the preservation of our own Chinatown but only out of some bourgeois desire to maintain a so-called "authentic" neighborhood in the heart of the city - and once we start putting measures in place to "preserve" Chinatown it becomes just as much of a Disneyland - whether it appears to be or not - as all the phony-baloney new faux-historic buildings in Harvard Square that everyone gripes about, or even the development restrictions across the city that everybody lambasts because they strangle the creation of new, dense neighborhoods.

The only way around this is through transformation at a societal level, and the total relinquishment of top-down controls on development. We all hate the rich condo towers for what they represent (well, most of us do), but in the era of the streetcar suburb - the Gilded Age - the rich were just as bad as they are now, it was just that there was land to be developed everywhere and nobody from the historical commission squawked when Dorchester, for example, was changed in 30 years from farms to triple deckers. New neighborhoods went up and old neighbors got "pushed out" all the time - it's just that back then, there was always a new frontier (both locally ie the suburbs as well as nationally ie The West) that offered a new place of expansion for those who were displaced. Now, everything is set in stone - I suspect that most AB'ers on here wouldnt mind the conversion of Chinatown into a rich neighborhood if we knew that the other one in North Quincy could easily just convert to a dense, urban and "organic" neighborhood in ten years.

I suppose the socialist solution superficially seems like the answer, but most of those countries have their own problems and even though ostensibly the safety net is better in those nations, racism and xenophobia predominate in many of them, the poor immigrants live in horrendous ghettos outside the cities while the picturesque inner cities that the tourists see are really the areas that represent the urban planning principles that we like. Kind of like how here in Boston, we'll have cycle tracks all over the place before we ever get one Roxbury (except the bullshit pipsqueak thing theyre planning for Malcolm X). How to keep things equal, fair, and just without imposing top down order and strangling natural, organic development......?
 
Neighborhoods comes and go. Chinatown hasn't always been Chinatown.
 
Right. But again, people come and go as well. Don't mean we don't mourn them when they pass.

Losing Chinatown is actually a big deal for the city. I don't understand why some people can't see this.
 
Right. But again, people come and go as well. Don't mean we don't mourn them when they pass.

Losing Chinatown is actually a big deal for the city. I don't understand why some people can't see this.


Concentrated suffering, dispersed gain. The Chinese community is suffering the effects of this, a traditionally insular community without anywhere near the political clout of a place like Southie or JP, etc...the impact on the wider community in Greater Boston is limited both in a political sense and a cultural sense. If you're a member the long-standing Chinese community, yeah it's an issue - but let's just say the obvious, majority of people in Greater Boston's experience of Chinatown is a) Combat Zone if you're of the era or b) appendage to downtown with lots of Chinese people and businesses.

Losing Chinatown is a big-fucking-deal for that community, but for the City.....I honestly do not think people care that much, they see it as an improvement on the CZ or they fit into the "it's inevitable because it's so close to everything"-sentiment. Look, I feel you that it's an issue and I feel it's an issue that "meh, shit happens, we just have to accept it" sentiment takes agency away from very real power that groups in the city have to instigate positive change - but it isn't blindness to gentrification of Chinatown, it's just apathy from the majority of people. A Chinese Chinatown or a superluxury, fake-granite countertop Chinatown makes little meaningful difference in my life. When you flip through the obituary page of the Globe, do you mourn the people that you didn't know. Or do you just forget about as quickly as you read it?

Apathy is just the principle of our times man, we'll all come to regret it as some point, but we've gotten good at that.
 
A couple thoughts on Chinatowns:
-As many people have posted above, (ethnic) neighborhoods come and go.
-Chinatowns are somewhat different though:
-Historically, they're not as numerous (until recently, authentic Chinese food etc was only available in localized places, vs, say, Italian food)
-They're generally (on the east coast at least) downtown. I suspect this has something to do with large Chinese populations only arriving after the 1965 immigration reform act. This meant that there was cheap/empty land near downtown (in what had once been Chinese neighborhoods before the '20s in some cases).
-Chinatowns (on the east coast) thus sprung up in places with downtown zoning, but not downtown density. This is clearly the case in Boston, NYC, DC, and Philadelphia.
-The "foreignness" of Chinese immigrants deterred gentrification for a long time. Additionally, by the mid 1960s, slum clearance / removing nonwhite minorities was not longer acceptable government policy.

Thus, today, we end up with a peculiar situation of beloved ethnic neighborhoods in locations, where, in no functioning city, a low-mid rise residential neighborhood would be. This makes it much harder for them to hold on. Chinatown Boston is much more "downtown" than even the North End. Once Chinatown became something non-Chinese people enjoyed visiting, the gentrification and building up became sadly inevitable, it seems to me.

This is a loss - but in NYC, for instance, there are numerous peripheral Chinatowns. This seems to be our best bet, be it Malden or Quincy or Dorchester.
 
Thee housing stock in Chinatown is 36 percent affordable / subsidized, according to the UH column and will be 40 percent once Oxford Place is occupied.

No other neighborhood reaches that level - the South End is next, as far as I know; somewhere in the mid-20 percent.

Just like Southie, many long-term residents moved out of the city during the 20th-century. What's left in Chinatown is the lower-middle class in housing projects and the very poor living in five-story walk-ups. The new construction didn't cause any displacement directly since the buildings went up on what were empty lots, parking lots, abandoned theaters, etc.

What are we afraid is going away in Chinatown? The restaurants and coffee shops owned / run by Chinese people? The cheap housing that existed for so long, housing that was in poor shape but never renovated because no one wanted to live there (that may have last seen improvements ... never, since being built in the late-1800s, early 1900s?) The comfortableness of a homogeneous neighborhood, something we don't have any longer in the North End or South Boston? A fear if we don't "save" Chinatown then we'll be regretting it much like (some) regret losing the West End and parts of the South End due to urban renewal?

^^^ Person above mentions that the Chinese population in the US didn't take off until the mid-late 1960s due to immigration policy. Boston's Chinese population has always been "small" (comparatively, to the city's population as a whole and compared to other city's Chinese populations). How many Chinese people do you think live there now? How many do you think lived there 10, 20, 50 years ago? The numbers are in the low thousands.

Then, just as the Chinese population in Boston was rising, in a neighborhood that, at least part of was made up of people of other nationalities, was being torn apart by "progress" - the Central Artery / Southeast Expressway and the expansion of Tufts University.

Today, more Chinese, and more Asian people live in Boston's Chinatown than ever before, based on census data. The (big) difference of course being that the Lees and Changs who live at 660 Washington Street (nee Archstone Boston Common) are wealthy whereas those arriving in the 20th-century were immigrants with little in the way of marketable skills and a limited, if not non-existent ability to speak English.

Is it gentrification or regeneration? That might be too cute a phrase but I believe that much of the existing housing in the neighborhood is of low-quality (I haven't been inside so I can't say "substandard"). Landlords had no incentive to renovate because there was no money to be made. Or, they made enough money to pay their bills and were satisfied with that. (And, many of the owners, I assume, were Chinese / Asian, just like their tenants.)

Now, not only is there an incentive to invest in renovation, but many business people who own properties in the neighborhood who moved here in the 1960s and 1970s are reaching retirement age and want to sell out. The coffee shop at Beach and Harrison is apparently owned by Billy Chin, brother of "Uncle Frank" Chin. They moved to America in the late 1970s. They're 90 years old from the looks of it. No one knows why they didn't resign the lease with the coffee shop - everything is hearsay. I think he didn't sign a new lease b/c he wants the building empty so he can sell it and the new owner can put in a tenant. A coffee shop? Maybe. A Taco Bell? Possibly. A 200-foot luxury tower? Unlikely.

I think this is the sort of thing going on. People who can now make a return on the investment are doing so - and the ones doing the selling aren't "greedy" if you consider they've owned in the neighborhood for a generation. Did the (Asian) guy who owned the Sprout shop in the South End who just sold after owning it since 1979 get "greedy"? No, he's looking at his life and considering what he needs to live going forward. A win-win.

The resident middle class in Chinatown has been moving away for decades; isn't the same thing just continuing to happen now? And, isn't a lot of that middle class actually living in housing developments like Mass Pike Towers, Castle Square, and Tai Tung Village? They're not getting kicked out.

In the UH column, the author - who I think did a great job by not getting dragged down in pointing blame but just explained the situation as it currently exists - didn't actually interview anyone who actually lives in Chinatown - she interviewed some Asian lady walking down the street who lives in Quincy and a white guy who owns a pushcart in Downtown Crossing. So, basically, everyone is assuming he/she knows what people who live there think.

How / Why do you want to preserve Chinatown?
 
I think this is the sort of thing going on. People who can now make a return on the investment are doing so - and the ones doing the selling aren't "greedy" if you consider they've owned in the neighborhood for a generation. Did the (Asian) guy who owned the Sprout shop in the South End who just sold after owning it since 1979 get "greedy"? No, he's looking at his life and considering what he needs to live going forward. A win-win.

This is key. It's well documented that when racial turnover happens in neighborhoods due to gentrification, it's frequently owner-occupants or small time landlords, barely wealthier than their renters, cashing out now that their building is worth something. Activists wringing their hands over gentrification in Bed-Stuy in NYC, for instance, seem to forget that selling your brownstone for $1 million and moving to the suburbs is a much better deal for lower middle class and working class African Americans than staying put in a newly fancified neighborhood.
 

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