Boston’s Tent City Apartments will not be sold, property manager says

Tent Metropolis Residences is not going to be bought, in line with its property administration firm and the mayor’s workplace — however residents say extra questions stay unanswered.

Peabody Properties, the Braintree-based administration firm that took over the Again Bay advanced in late 2020, wrote to the Herald that it’s working with the board of administrators to refinance the constructing.

“Not solely will this refinancing convey much-needed bodily enhancements and monetary sustainability to Tent Metropolis, however it should additionally protect the affordability for residents of the group,” a spokeswoman wrote.

The message was backed up by the mayor’s workplace, which added that the town’s housing director, Sheila Dillon, has been involved with the administration firm and the company’s board of administrators.

“There are not any plans for the property to be bought or lose its affordability restrictions,” Ricardo Patron, the mayor’s press secretary, wrote to the Herald. “They’re refinancing which can permit them to carry out essential services upgrades.”

The mixed-income group was the positioning of an illustration Wednesday night by residents fed up with what they are saying is an absence of transparency on the possession, administration and funds of the group — in addition to expressing concern the constructing can be bought and the residents displaced.

Thursday’s revelation that the constructing is not going to be bought is small comfort to not less than one resident, who nonetheless has many issues over the property.

“As a result of there isn’t any transparency, we don’t have any solutions,” Heather Prepare dinner, who shares a townhouse on the advanced at 130 Dartmouth St. together with her 97-year-old father, World Warfare II veteran Richard Prepare dinner.

“The notion has been that the (Tent Metropolis) company is sound however the actuality is that it’s not and we gained’t know with out a forensic audit,” she added later by textual content message. It’s a sentiment that echoes these expressed by different residents on the protest.

A spokeswoman for Peabody Properties informed the Herald that she is working to get solutions to the extra questions.

The identify Tent Metropolis was picked in honor of the tent metropolis that arose across the website the place Dartmouth Avenue meets Columbus Avenue in 1968 to protest metropolis housing insurance policies and first appeared within the Herald in a narrative known as “‘Tent-In’ Housing Protest Swings to Bongo Beat” on April 28, 1968.

“Boston’s ‘Tent Metropolis’ — an open air camp-in protesting metropolis housing insurance policies — developed into a contented, swinging jive-in city final evening,” the newspaper wrote. “Earlier yesterday, residents of the South Finish — each black and white — pitched tents and erected crude shacks on the lot as a spokesman introduced, ‘We’ll be right here indefinitely; till our calls for are met.’”