Posted by Pam on February 18th, 2010 in Life in Boston
For years the city had been talking of transforming the moribund Seaport District in South Boston into a 24-hour neighborhood resplendent with shops, offices, entertainment, green space, and waterfront residences. And indeed, it was easy to imagine such a glam neighborhood during the go-go 90s, when every crappy little corner of Boston was getting fixed up and gentrified into something decent.
But then the recession hit. Just as developers were gearing up to build more luxury condos, expensive steakhouses and sleek office buildings, the economy tanked and a good bulk of the development plans were blown away, like so much trash in one of the Seaport District’s parking lots. The Seaport District was left with only half of the office space originally proposed and only one-eighth of the proposed residential units. The shops and restaurants that were supposed to be the crowning glory of this District never materialized. Only 231,000 square feet of shops has been built of the 2 million square feet originally proposed.
But now Mayor Menino has another plan: why not create a biotech district similar to that over in Kendall Square? His idea is to create an affordable new neighborhood that would attract web developers, manufacturers of green products, pharmaceutical researchers, bio-tech, and other start-up businesses. The city is talking about “co-housing” aimed at young, creative, highly-educated people with miniscule salaries. The new type of housing might offer internet access as part of the rent, but only a shared kitchen somewhere down the hall. The idea is to attrat and retain the 20-somethings and 30-somethings that might be tempted to pull up stakes for more affordable high-tech cities like Austin, Texas or Raleigh, North Carolina.
The model for the new district comes from Barcelona, Spain where an old industrial area was remade in the past decade into a lively hub, attracting thousands of new residents and hundreds of new companies. It’s called 22@Barcelona, a modern take on the city’s traditional 22a zoning designation for industrial areas. The district features technology centers, new apartments, parks, restaurants and bike paths. The workforce is organized into “innovation clusters,’’ including zones for medical devices, energy efficiency, and information technology. Pretty clever stuff.
Now can such a district work in Boston? Who knows? But it’s certainly worth a try. The mayor’s new plan is special, in that it is not dependent on building housing for the wealthy, and that it can potentially expand on the city’s current technology and academic base. Nurturing small start-ups can’t help but improve the city’s economy, and we would expect the area’s landscape to improve too, as trash-strewn parking lots get developed into parks, bike paths, bio-tech buildings and apartment buildings. So over here at MondoBoston, we say: go for it!
Read more at Seaport Alliance for Neighborhood Design.
Read the South Boston Waterfront Public Realm Plan.
Read about Seaport Square in South Boston.
