Lowell leaders, residents field question: Is city on right track?

October 23, 2005 - By MICHAEL LAFLEUR, Lowell Sun Staff

LOWELL -- Lowell High School Headmaster William Samaras recalls that when he would introduce himself to strangers 20 years ago, he was often greeted with a surprised, “ ‘You're from Lowell?' You're still there?' "

When he goes out with friends now, Samaras said he meets suburbanites who proudly tell him they are dues-paying supporters of the Merrimack Repertory Theatre.

“I've had people offer me their Red Sox tickets for Spinners tickets because they wanted to take in what's going on,” he said. “These were builders, entrepreneurs.

“My point is the glass is more than half full,” he said. Indeed, that was the point made by most community leaders who were asked whether Lowell's renaissance is heading in the right direction.

They all said the city has undergone remarkable, exciting changes during the last five to 10 years. Most said Lowell is on the brink of something special.

But there also were concerns.

“The infrastructure of this city is terribly important,” said Nancy Donahue, a community activist and philanthropist. “It's just like your own home. If you keep it up and make it attractive, it's a lovely place. But if it's falling apart, nobody wants to go there. Why do people want to go to Newburyport? It's a lovely city.”

Over the past week, The Sun interviewed 17 civic, community and business leaders about Lowell's progress. Here are their responses, broken down by category.

Social Services

Respondents: Laura Buxbaum, executive director of the Coalition for a Better Acre; Deb Chausse, executive director of House of Hope family homeless shelter; Victoria Fahlberg, director of ONE Lowell, an immigrant-advocacy agency.

Buxbaum: “Lowell clearly has come a long way, and it is for many people who live and work here a much nicer place than it used to be, say 20, even 10 years ago. But I am very concerned about the direction that Lowell is continuing to head in. The focus of the revitalization is much too heavily on people of means, bringing people of means into the city both to live and as visitors.”

She called that emphasis “short-sighted.” According to Buxbaum, the city should require larger-scale private developers to either set aside some of their units as affordable housing or contribute to a fund dedicated to that cause.

“They're in grave danger of ignoring the people who are here who are homeless, or who are struggling residents and who need to be invested in to make this a healthy, mixed city,” she said.

Chausse: “The city is headed in the right direction. The growth in residential, particularly the condo market, is a good thing, although Lowell like every other major urban city in Massachusetts needs to continue to keep an eye on the housing needs of very low-income people, like the families House of Hope serves.”

She said rents in the city are growing increasingly expensive at the same time cuts in the federal rental-voucher program have left many poor families without housing subsidies.

Chausse said the city cannot be entirely blamed for that gap. “It's up to the larger government structures to sort of set the tone and lead the way,” she said.

Fahlberg: “It's no and yes. It's a great thing to attract more people. It's a great thing to clean up the city. It's a great thing to have the city become a safer place, but I don't think it's a great thing to displace our low-income residents.

“We need to care about all the residents who live here and give more attention to that,” she said.

Fahlberg said many of Lowell's poorest residents are being priced out of the city as rents are driven up by the market-rate developments. She said city officials do not look at that as a problem, as they should.

Developers

Respondents: John DeAngelis, owner, Earth Realty Co., a developer of high-end condos in the downtown; Brian Bush, owner, Heritage Properties, which owns more than 950 apartments in Lowell and Portland, Maine; Ed Barry, managing partner in Boott Cotton Mills LLC, which controls one of the city's largest mill complexes.

DeAngelis: ”There's too much affordable housing downtown already.” He said half the downtown's existing housing stock is state or federally subsidized, low-income apartments.

“We don't have enough high-end housing. If Lowell is going to become the queen to Boston that I feel it's going to be, we need at least another 100 or 200 quality units (downtown).”

He said the city's next focus should be on providing more downtown parking and attracting a neighborhood supermarket located within walking distance of the new condominiums.

“We need a small community built here, and I truly feel we're three years ahead of the other cities (outside Boston) right now. They're trying to catch up to us, but their planning isn't as organized as our planning.”

Bush: The city “made a great move” by encouraging the creation of a downtown artist district and the building of loft-style condominiums and apartments within it, he said. He called the city a “great place to work.”

Bush said demand for housing is pushing the conversion of space formerly designated for retail and office use into condos and apartments in Lowell.

“The bottom line is 20 or 30 years from now, it'll be converted back to office if that's what the (market) demand is,” he said.

In anticipation of a future need for downtown office space, Bush's firm recently purchased 100 Merrimack St. and 45 Middle St., which consist of about 32,000 square feet of mostly vacant office and retail space.

Barry: ”People are coming to live in Lowell and they are buying units. They're buying their houses or loft condominiums and also renting, but it's the people who are buying that really have a stake in the community and they are interested in the community. All these mill buildings get put to good use, and you've got a clientele that will help bolster the economy to downtown retail and restaurants and everything else.”

He said he sees no problems on the horizon.

Education

Respondents: William Samaras, headmaster, Lowell High School, which houses nearly 4,000 students in a downtown facility.

Samaras: “A lot of my students do talk about coming back to the city (after college), where at one time they didn't. When I first became headmaster, that was not the talk. The city was in the process of pulling itself together, but it hadn't reached down to the students.”

From his perspective as a resident and headmaster, Samaras said the city is “going in the right direction.”

“The pitfall is we can't afford to make mistakes. We're held to a higher level of expectation because when it's all said and done, we're an urban center and if something happens at Lowell High School, it's ‘oh that's probably what goes on there' whereas if something happens at Newton, ‘that's an anomaly.' We've emerged but we have to be very cautious about how the communities beyond the city of Lowell perceive us.”

Cultural/Arts

Respondents: Nancy Donahue, an arts community activist and a founder of the acclaimed Merrimack Repertory Theatre; Charles Towers, MRT artistic director; and LZ Nunn, director of the Cultural Organization of Lowell (COOL), the city's arts-promotion arm.

Donahue: “It's going in the right direction. But it's crucial that we don't over-condominiumize and forget that we need businesses where people can work.”

Donahue said the city must address areas such as the east end of Merrimack street near the MRT -- which she called “unattractive” with poor lighting and no public street cleaning -- and stay on top of things like the strings of lights hanging in downtown trees. “Now, half of them are out,” she said. “It looks rundown.”

Nunn: “What's exciting about Lowell now is there is a concerted effort from a lot of different players and organizations in the city to build momentum behind cultural programming. Lowell has the opportunity to be more on the forefront of an artistic scene in the state.”

She said the city should find a way to make more housing or affordable condos available to artists.

Nunn also said Lowell needs more artist work space and art galleries, as well as a downtown art-house movie theater. Overall, she is bullish on the city.

Nunn moved here from Seattle with her boyfriend last year. The couple share a home in what she proudly describes as the “New Acre.”

Towers: “From where MRT sits, we're really looking at concepts of neighborhood improvements and what it feels like to walk from the Lower Locks parking garage to the (Lowell Memorial Auditorium) and MRT,” he said. “That walk in particular could use improvement, as well as others.

“The real challenge is making it into a pedestrian downtown,” Towers said. “That's about getting people to park their cars and then move about the city on foot ... You're participating in a city's life, you're not just going to one event. That's in Lowell's future but infrastructure and decisions need to be put in place to make that happen.”

Towers, who lives downtown, said the neighborhood is going in the right direction but needs improvements such as the quality of street signs, traffic flow and traffic enforcement, and the cleanliness of its sculptures, fountains and canals.

Sports/Recreation

Respondents: Kevin Cummings, president of the Lowell Lock Monsters minor league hockey franchise; Drew Weber, owner of the Lowell Spinners minor league baseball team.

Weber: “I love what the (city) administration is doing as far as really going out to attract development. I've seen the other side. They're running it like a business.”

He said the lack of parking near LeLacheur Park is a problem, but is confident the city will find a way to address it.

“Nobody in the city looks and says, ‘well it's a problem but there's nothing we can do about it,' “ he said.

Weber added: “Bringing people in to live is so much more secure than building office space because office space comes and goes with demand but somebody moves in and learns to appreciate Lowell. They're not moving out.”

Cummings: ”I sense a lot of positive feelings from the fans, the civic leaders that I've met, the business leaders ... I'm really glad I've come here. It's a great place. Hopefully, we play a role in people wanting to come here.”

Cummings commutes daily to Lowell from Rutland, a community near Worcester. He said starting with the SRO crowd the Lock Monsters had on opening night Oct. 14, he has been “very impressed with the community, the energy.”

Business Leaders

Respondents: Jim Cook, executive director, Lowell Development and Finance Corp., as well as the president and executive director of the Lowell Plan; George Duncan, founder, chairman and CEO, Enterprise Bank & Trust Co.

Cook: ”The downtown is making great strides. You've got a lot of housing coming in. That's exactly the right direction to go in. The retail base is changing. We're getting more upscale, more of a variety.”

Cook said several independent studies have validated the various development decisions Lowell officials and business leaders have taken for the downtown. The one caveat, he said, is that those studies did not look at conditions in the city's other neighborhoods.

“The concern others have expressed is ‘how far can you go with jobs,' “ he said. “We still want to be in a position where we're very attractive to companies looking to locate. I know there's always discussion about ‘is too much space being turned over to residential' and I know the economy right now doesn't really lend itself to the commercial market. But in the long-term it's got to be something we're thinking about.”

Duncan: ”The last four years or so have, in a sense, been the best years Lowell has ever had for economic growth, especially in the downtown residential condo market. The retail base is still weak. While it's noticeable that there've been some positive changes, it's also noticeable that there are a lot of weaknesses.”

Duncan would like to see a greater emphasis on the creation and preservation of “green space” downtown and in the rest of the city.

He said city residents “have to do everything to support and encourage the arts and museums in downtown Lowell and the nonprofits like the theatre (MRT). That, in my opinion, along with the baseball and hockey and so forth, are crucial to downtown life.”

Neighborhood Groups

Respondents: Jerry Frechette, president of the Pawtucketville Citizens Council; Ann Marie Page, acting president of the Centralville Neighborhood Action Group.

Frechette: “Lowell is heading in the right direction overall,” but Frechette worries about the loss of blue-collar and office jobs in the city.

“There's jobs in the construction business, but those are usually cyclical,” he said.

He said the most important change for the neighborhoods was the city's adoption last year of a comprehensive new zoning code.

“That was huge. We've realized that there are shortcomings, but a lot of work was done on it. As we look at the future and what's happening with the real-estate boom, we're going to see that coming to a slowdown anyway.”

Page: Although she said the city is headed in the right direction, she still has problems with developers building multiple homes in her neighborhood on lots she considers undersized.

“That's what it all comes down to: How much can we squeeze into this itty, bitty spot in Centralville. You've got to give (developers) credit. They know they can do it and they do it.

“If the neighborhood groups don't stay active and don't stay visible and they don't stay vocal and they don't pay attention, they can slip down,” she said. “Then things happen."

“You don't want to say you don't encourage development,” she said. “What you want to say is ‘if you're going to do something, let's be considerate where you're putting it.' “

Youth Groups

Respondent: Gregg Croteau, executive director, United Teen Equality Center, the city's largest anti-gang organization and youth center.

Croteau: “There are so many civic and community leaders working tons of hours every day to make Lowell a better place,” he said. “In terms of Lowell's direction with respect to young people, we have to continue to keep increasing the number of opportunities for young people to be involved in the development of downtown and other parts of the city.”

“Our ability to bring together various sectors of the community through events such as the city's recent summit on gang violence is a testament to our capacity to collaborate. However, we also need to make sure that we continue to search for ways to increase our investment in young people, creating specific ways for young people's voices to be best heard.

“As there are so many strong young leaders in our community, we need to ensure that they are at the ‘table' when decisions affecting their lives are being made.”