Oak   Terrace

 Boston's    Chinatown

In the Neighborhood

Jacquie Kay, a founder of the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC), talks about the impact that Oak Terrace and the planned Metropolitan — two housing complexes developed by ACDC — will have on Boston's Chinatown community.

Nineteenth-century buildings bordering Oak Terrace in Boston's Chinatown..

Oak Terrace blended so fast into the community. It was 100 percent rented, and the commercial space and community space were being used.

But it wasn't like, "Oh, here's a new housing project"; it was almost like, "Okay, you've built it, and they have come. Now let's move on. What's next?"

But I'm going, "No, no — no more. This one took eight years." I mean people had been waiting for it. It was so needed that once it was there, it immediately became a part of the community. I thought this was so exciting, but it was almost anti-climactic. You kind of felt like, "Hey you guys, this is historical, this is momentous." But people were going, "No, this is basic, this is real."

And that was great. It didn't create lots of awards and laudable things. It was just taking care of business. Oak Terrace is part of the fabric of the broader Chinatown community now. It's providing space for people who are in need. People here cross over ethnic barriers and economic levels. It's a mini image of the Chinatown community. It's like a plaid. You don't know which color stands out. You don't know which ethnic or economic or religious group people belong to.

The Next Step

Now the Metropolitan (a planned 251-unit mixed-income apartment complex adjacent to Oak Terrace) is going to happen. It has been as difficult a project as I have ever faced. I was too dumb to know what I was doing with Oak Terrace. In that project, we were supported so well by the Community Builders (the group's consultant) that I was able to just walk through the whole development process.

The Metropolitan has been a real battle, but we've done it. We got a real decent bit of ownership and return for the community. And we're going to own all of the apartments 20 years from now. So the community is going to do all right.

A Changing Community
All we did with Oak Terrace was create some spaces for people to be able to live there or continue to live there. The Metropolitan is different. It may change the traditional image of a Chinatown. It will bring in a modern sense of a Chinatown.

That modern sense is connected to the fact that the Asian-American population has grown up. We want to bring home a lot of the empty nesters who may want to return to live in the inner city or the urban areas again.

But they're professionals now — middle-aged, solid financially, and able to afford the market rates there. But we also don't want to lose that traditional image, so that's why we have the affordables. We're working really hard to market them to Asians.

As we all grow up and grow on, Chinatown has to change with the times. I think that is what's happening — it's changing with the times. But you still have the same population; you have that Asian-American concern. There's still that effort to keep it Asian, regardless of their income level.

You still have new immigrants coming in with different kinds of skills — if they have skills at all. We want to be able to provide a safe haven there. Chinatown changes because we all change and the world changes, but it hasn't changed because we wanted it to change, or because we wanted it to become something other than what it is.

Immigrants are still coming in, and that creates something of an issue, because they're not all Chinese. They could be Vietnamese Chinese, Cambodian Chinese. Now, you're getting a different country mix, so the issue is how does that work with traditional Chinatown?

All of the Chinatowns are going through this; it's the same in Seattle where I am from. In Seattle, we changed the name from Chinatown to the International District.

So we're providing modern buildings now to deal with the incoming people who can and can't afford them. I'm really proud of what these two buildings have represented. It's just too bad it was such a hassle to make it all happen.