Chinatown Community
Land Trust: Community Control of Land
The street was rich with
chanting games and laughter of children and the activity of families.
Shared streets and shared
toys were our life. A volleyball net strung across the street; one pair
of bicycles belonging to a
brother and sister shared by all; games of stickball in the Quincy
schoolyard; hopscotch;
kick-the-can in the middle of the street. At dinner time, mothers hung
out windows to call children
home to meals.
Cynthia Yee remembers the Chinatown of
her childhood as a place where neighbors came together and watched out for each
other. How many of us can say that Chinatown brings us the same feeling today?
Chinatown has undergone sweeping change, particularly in the last twenty years,
and residents have often felt powerless to stop or even to shape the outlines
of that change.
The Chinatown Community Land Trust is a
new organization established to work for community control of land in order to
increase community control of development and permanently preserve affordable
housing. It will hold its first community meeting on Wednesday, January 14th,
6:30 pm at the Quincy School Cafeteria.
Preserving Chinatown’s Row Houses
With more than 3,000 units of high end
and luxury housing built or in the pipeline, both rents and real estate values
are on the rise. This has triggered increased turnover of the three and
four-decker row houses that once characterized the neighborhood, as well as an
increase in tenant overcrowding and displacement.
The uncertain future of Chinatown’s row
houses is one of the reasons why a group of residents, former residents, and
community activists have formed the Chinatown Community Land Trust.
Architect and longtime community
activist Lawrence Cheng worked on the Chinatown Community Plan of 1990 and
every master plan since then. According to Cheng, now one of the founding board
members of the Chinatown Community Land Trust, the master plans have focused
primarily on maximizing development of new affordable housing, most recently
setting a goal of creating or newly preserving 1,000 more units of affordable
housing over the next decade.
“We definitely must build new
affordable housing,” said Cheng. “But up until now, we haven’t paid much
attention to what is happening with the row houses, and that is a missing piece
of the plan.”
The Chinatown Community Land Trust
seeks to acquire and preserve some of Chinatown’s historic row houses as
permanently affordable housing.
Community Ownership of Land
A
Community Land Trust is a non-profit, membership-based organization that
acquires and keeps land for the community and never sells it. The Community
Land Trust provides a way for the community to control and administer land for
the common good, making decisions about use of the land for important needs
like permanently affordable housing, community gardens, open space, or small
commercial space. When the Community Land Trust is the permanent owner of land,
it can designate housing that sits on the land trust as permanently affordable
through land lease agreements, regardless of the ups and downs of the real
estate market.
Founders
of the Chinatown Community Land Trust began meeting more than a year ago,
learning from the model of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury. A land trust there helped the community
reclaim and develop vacant lots and abandoned commercial sites; today, the
Dudley Neighbors land holds 95 units of permanently affordable ownership
housing, 77 units of cooperative housing, 53 affordable rental units, a
playground, a community garden and mini-orchard, a community farm, a
greenhouse, commercial and non-profit office space.
The
mission of the Chinatown Community Land Trust is to stabilize the future of
Chinatown as a neighborhood for working class families and the elderly, as well
as a regional hub for the Greater Boston Chinese community. Oak Street
homeowner and founding board member Jeff Hovis says that Chinatown faces a very
different situation from the Dudley neighborhood, being at the center of a hot
real estate market, yet the overall goals are the same.
“We will work
for community control of the land, development without displacement,
permanently affordable housing, and shared neighborhood spaces, consistent with
the vision of the Chinatown Master Plan,” says Hovis, who also serves on the
Chinatown Master Plan Committee.
A Mechanism for Community Control
The Chinatown Community
Land Trust will also serve as a mechanism for community control. Any Chinatown
resident who supports the goals can become a voting member of the group, which
will hold periodic community meetings to gather ideas about how community land
should be used. Former residents and supportive stakeholders can serve as
participating members.
The Chinatown Community
Land Trust will seek opportunities to purchase and preserve Chinatown row
houses as permanently affordable housing, working with the City of Boston’s new
Housing Acquisition/Conversion Program and interested developers. Preservation
options could range from moderate-income home ownership opportunities to small
rental apartments for the very low-income households that make up most of
Chinatown’s traditional population. While some form of government or charitable
subsidy would be needed to create and maintain affordable rental housing for
the very low-income, moderate-income home ownership could be achieved without
ongoing subsidies, since a formula for moderate pricing would be written into
the deed.
The land trust could also
help to ensure that publicly owned land is developed with a focus on community
needs and priorities. With only a
handful of public parcels remaining, it is important that the community use
these to create as much affordable housing as possible. If public parcels were owned by the land
trust, this would give the community an enforceable mechanism to ensure that
its vision for the land is carried out by the developer.
The Chinatown Community
Land Trust plans to engage residents in discussing community goals for publicly
owned sites such as Parcel 12 behind the Double Tree Hotel, the old YMCA site
on Tyler Street, or the China Trade Center on Boylston Street, which is owned
and leased out by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Even tiny parcels such as
Parcel 7a across from the W Hotel or the empty lot next to the Holy Trinity
Church on Shawmut Avenue are important for the community to discuss. While these sites may not be envisioned for
community development, the public has the right to learn about them and to have
a voice in determining that their use will ultimately benefit the community.
Stabilizing
Chinatown’s Future
Marie Moy, an Oak Street homeowner
and founding board member of the land trust, has watched the community change
over the decades. As co-chair of the
Chinatown Resident Association along with Tai Tung resident Henry Yee, she has
spoken out about the impact of massive luxury development on the neighborhood.
“We just want to stabilize our
community,” explained Moy. “Not only for us but for future generations. We want Chinatown to be here for our children
and their children’s children.”
中華耆英會白禮頓樓九日舉辦慶生會，近七十人參加，祝八名壽星生日快樂，會場一片歡欣氣氛。
