How Quincy got its groove back

LYNN – Not long ago Quincy looked a lot like Lynn but its downtown revitalization brought new life to the area and how it happened is garnering national attention.”I get calls from all over the country about this,” said Quincy’s Urban Renewal Planner Robert Stevens.Prior to 2003 Quincy’s downtown had a spike in homelessness and its largest employer, headquarters for Stop & Shop was threatening to pull out, Stevens said. It was the impetus the city needed to get moving toward revitalization.The process toward change is long and has included many steps from “a year long visioning process,” and adopting a plan, to rezoning the area and coming up with some creative financing and planning.Stevens said one of the bolder moves the city took was establishing a public/private partnership with one master developer, Beal/Street-Works, to tackle the entire revitalization project. City planners also armed themselves with some new tools to get the job done, namely by adopting the state’s District Improvement Financing (DIF) plan.Communities that qualify for DIF gain the ability to use various tools to implement their redevelopment under the program. Stevens said it includes the ability to acquire land, making improvements, such as building roads, schools or parks and pledging future taxes to repay debts. The DIF also allowed for the partnership with Beal/Street-Works.In many ways the community has been blazing its own trail with the revitalization plan the city put together, Stevens said.After nearly a decade of planning construction work has begun on what city officials callThe New Quincy Center. The design includes 3.5 million square feet of mixed use development to be completed by 2020. According to the plan, it will include retail, office space, 1,400 loft style apartments as well as health, wellness and education and parking. It will encompass about 11 city blocks, Stevens noted.”We’re sort of flipping urban renewal upside down,” he said. “The project is becoming national model.”Chris Stevens can be reached at [email protected].