FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
Mary Fuller, Director of Communications
Asian Community Development Corporation
617-482-2380 x 203
maryfuller@asiancdc.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BOSTON, MA APRIL 27, 2005-  The Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC) and a design team comprised of graduate students from MIT and Harvard proudly accepted first prize and an award of $10,000 from the 2005 Affordable Housing Development Competition on Friday, April 22.  The winning proposal outlined an ambitious $65.9 million mixed-use development for Parcel A in Chinatown.  The program skillfully integrated substantial community benefits with an attractive and environmentally-friendly design.  Of 200 proposed rental and for-sale housing units, over 50% would be affordable to medium or low income residents.  Also included in the design were 1,600 square feet of business incubator space; an extension for the Boston Chinese Evangelical Church, and 29,000 square feet of versatile community space suitable for use for teen programs, classrooms, offices, a library, and/or general meeting space.  

Chinatown offered the students a challenging backdrop against which to explore affordable housing design.  Institutional encroachment, skyrocketing rents, neighborhood-scaled real estate development, and physical proximity to other rapidly changing neighborhoods are placing enormous pressure on the area.  Chinatown residents, many of whom are low-income, elderly, and first-generation immigrants with limited English language skills, are hardest hit by these pressures.  Despite these obstacles, the design team found the residents they worked with to be enthusiastic participants in the process.

“I was very impressed with how engaged the community was in the development process, how much they knew about it, and how much they wanted to know” said Harvard student Hannah Fischer-Baum.  “The apex was when I was talking about the finances of the proposal with the ACDC youth group and they were actually interested. As a former high school teacher, I know that it’s not your average teenager that clamors for information about real estate finance.”

The graduate student team benefited from working closely with ACDC staff, which has long been an innovator of mixed-income, mixed-use developments in this neighborhood.  ACDC, in turn, benefited from the students’ fresh ideas and thorough research into the possibilities for the Parcel A site.  The Boston Redevelopment Authority will likely release this plot of land for redevelopment in near future, and the AHDC team’s preliminary design gives ACDC and the larger Chinatown community a head start towards exploring possible development solutions that will best serve the surrounding neighborhood.

“The Asian Community Development Corporation is committed to ensuring that Chinatown residents and community members have a voice in how Parcel A is redeveloped,” said Jeremy Liu, ACDC’s Interim Executive Director.  “This team’s work provides the Chinatown community with some solid ideas and resources with which to begin that process.”

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