Stop Simon Properties Group and Neiman Marcus' "Jim Crow" Skyscraper Reconstruction Project at Copley Place in Boston's Back Bay: Part 13

Only 13 percent of the 542 additional residential units that the Simon Properties Group is now proposing to construct (within a newly-built 52-story skyscraper) on the Copley Place land in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, that it leases from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, would be "affordable" rental units.

Yet--like the premises of the existing apartment building on Copley Place project land at 16 Harcourt Street--the premises of the Simon Properties Group's proposed additional residential units at the Copley Place project are subject to "the requirement that a minimum of 25 percent of the units must be available for rent at all times to persons and families of low income" pursuant to "Schedule C of the Master Lease;" and "the provisions of this paragraph may not be amended unless such provisions as amended are consistent with the requirements to provide housing set forth in Schedule C of the Master Lease..." (See Bk. 11488/074 to 095 in Suffolk County Registry of Deeds).

So unless 135 of the additional residential units that the Simon Properties Group is proposing to add in its reconstruction of the Copley Place project are to be "available for rent at all times to persons and families of low income" pursuant to "Schedule C of its Master Lease" with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the Simon Properties Group's Copley Place Reconstruction Project would still apparently be in legal violation of the terms and land use restrictions of its Master Lease, and should, thereforre, not be approved by the City of Boston.

As Andrew Warner--the then-director of sales of United Development Consulting Corporation, the former management agency for The Residences of Copley Place--indicated in a 1984 Christian Science Monitor article, the existing land use restrictions on Copley Place project land commits any real estate developer "to provide 25 percent of any housing built on Copley Place to low- and moderate-income senior citizens and families."