Lack of affordable housing gentrifying Chinatown, housing advocates fear

Housing advocates in Chinatown are voicing concerns about growing gentrification, as sleek skyscrapers take rise over the neighborhood and affordable housing for low-income Asian immigrants is being gobbled up by luxury developers.

A development proposal at 280 Tremont St. that would bring 168 affordable apartments and condos to Chinatown is one of several projects in the works that aim to stave off the surge of gentrification, but Angie Liou, executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation, said the neighborhood needs more projects like it to keep people in their homes. The wait for subsidized housing can reach 10 years and hundreds apply for the few income-restricted housing units available.

“This is very much needed in Chinatown,” Liou said at a community meeting Tuesday. “To bring this amount of affordable rentals and ownership opportunities to this part of Chinatown, on this site, is a rare opportunity.”

About 12,000 people live within the quarter-square-mile that comprises Chinatown, but its proximity to the city’s downtown have made it increasingly attractive to developers looking to profit.

The area is now home to some of the city’s highest rents, according to a 2015 BostInno report — a major disparity for a neighborhood where almost half of all households earn less than $25,000 a year, according to Census data.

Though the area is still 59% Asian, Asians have been leaving since the 1990s amid climbing housing prices as its white population has quadrupled, the most recent Census shows.

Siman Wang and her family are among those who left to find cheaper rent. Now in Medford, she spends four hours a day in her car driving her three children back and forth to school at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center so they can learn Chinese.

“There are a lot of older people in our family,” the Chinese immigrant said. “I really want them to be able to speak to them when I take them back to China.”

“We want to avoid it becoming a Chinatown in name only,” Paul Chan told the Herald recently. As president of the Chinese Benevolent Association of New England, he is helping to build another affordable project in Chinatown that plans to bring 85 more subsidized units to 288 Harrison Ave.

“The Walsh administration is very concerned about the Chinatown neighborhood and we are working really hard to keep Chinatown an affordable, vibrant neighborhood,” said Boston Housing Chief Sheila Dillon.

Since 2014, 70% of all new units built in Chinatown have been income-restricted. There are currently 750 units of affordable housing in the pipeline for future development.

Housing is only considered affordable when costs are at or below 30% of a household’s income, according to the federal definition.

Phillip Chong of Quincy Asian Resources Inc. said he has seen Asian populations grow in communities like Quincy, Malden and Newton as housing prices have continued to climb.

“Real estate prices in downtown Boston are getting higher and higher so the affordability is definitely a factor more and more as people move,” Chong said.

Quincy’s Asian population has gone from just 5,577 in 1990 to an estimated more than 27,000, according to Census data.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/36jhHSp