Eliza Datta
Title: Senior Project Manager, New Boston Fund
Age: 41
Experience: 15 years
Eliza Datta is the New Boston Fund’s senior project manager for the firm’s high-profile redevelopment of Parcel 24 in Boston’s Chinatown. The $140 million project will create 217 market-rate rental units, 95 affordable rental units and 50 affordable homeownership units for the residents of the state’s largest Asian community. The mixed-use, two-building development will include ground-floor retail space, approximately 13,600 square feet of open space to provide pedestrian access between Hudson and Albany streets and 135 underground parking spaces. A simplified description of her job? Get all the ducks in a row. And if you know commercial real estate development, you know there are a lot of ducks, and they don’t always get along.
Q: Can you describe what exactly your job is as the senior project manager of an urban project like Parcel 24?
A: As the project manager I bring together all the disciplines required to push a project forward. So I’m involved in the community process and permitting. I’m involved with the programming of the building and work with the design team to produce the drawings that will help get the building built. I work with the various agencies for approvals. It really encompasses the full spectrum of the disciplines that fall under the development umbrella. We’re leasing the ground from the [state] Department of Transportation (MassDOT). We have significant investment from the city and the state for the affordable housing units that we’re developing. And we’re bringing that all together with private investment from the USA Fund, which is one of the New Boston Fund funds … to create a very complicated capital stack for this project. We’re working toward a spring 2013 groundbreaking. We’re completing our designs and will be going out to bid for a general contractor early in the year. And we’re finalizing our reviews with various public agencies. This is the first of a series of development projects that MassDOT expects to see along the Big Dig. The idea is that we’ll be connecting this part of Chinatown to South Station, so we’re creating those connections through this project.
Q: What were some of the challenges involved with the Parcel 24 project?
A:The site itself is just an acre and a half. At the center of the project is this open space area, and that was an important community benefit that the neighbors were looking for that has been central to the design, and a design challenge because we have different elevations between the two streets. We have Hudson Street, which is about 20 feet lower than Albany Street, so to traverse that grade change we have a series of walkways to allow pedestrians to get back and forth from the Albany Street side of the site into Chinatown.
Q:Tell us about how you got started down the development path.
A:Well, I majored in architecture for my undergrad at Yale. My first job from college was with an architecture firm in Boston, and that just kind of clinched it for me that I should not be an architect. But I got very interested in development at that point since the firm I was working for was designing workforce housing in Boston at the time, and I thought that was pretty cool and wanted to learn more about it. So I went to work for a community development corporation (CDC) in Worcester and worked in every aspect of community development and housing development. Then I moved to Boston to work with a South Boston CDC. That was enough to give me the development bug. I went to grad school at MIT for urban planning and real estate development. Since then, I’ve worked for private developers and nonprofit development groups on affordable and mixed-income housing projects, which is what I’m doing now for New Boston Fund.
Q: How did all that translate into your dealings with the community on the Parcel 24 project?
A: The project is a large-scale urban redevelopment of an existing site and it’s transformative in nature. The training and schooling I’ve had helps me think about all the different perspectives involved in a project of this scale – from the community side to the public sector side and the private sector as well, and then balancing the interests to produce a project that works.
Five Favorite Boston Food Trucks
- The Taco Truck
- Roxy’s Grilled Cheese
- Clover Food Truck
- Bon Me Truck
- Go Fish
