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Spire Graphics new facility , Boston, MA

BOSTON

65 Bay Street, Once a Brownfield, Now Houses a Thriving Business

Attracting businesses to distressed urban neighborhoods remains a challenge in Boston as elsewhere. But the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation (EDC), founded by residents and civic groups 25 years ago, has successfully tackled the problem—in addition to building and rehabilitating hundreds of lower-income homes—in the largely minority communities of Dorchester and Roxbury.

These communities historically included manufacturing districts, but they lost most of their employers over the years. Through its commercial development arm, Dorchester Bay EDC began to acquire and develop underutilized and vacant commercial properties for retail, industrial, office, and nonprofit tenants.

In 1992, it gained control of a large, long-abandoned brownfield site of a former insulated wire factory. After an extensive environmental cleanup, the EDC began the arduous journey of finding the right tenant for 65 Bay Street, with the prospect of bringing blue-collar jobs back to Dorchester. For the next seven years, the Dorchester Bay EDC pursued numerous potential industrial tenants, often spending months in negotiations only to have prospects opt for suburban locations at rents with which no urban site could compete.

Just as the EDC was about to abandon its dream, it met Spire Graphics, a state-of-the-art marketing, graphic design, and printing company that had outgrown its space. Together, the EDC and Spire designed and built a $13.4 million, 80,000-square-foot, high-tech manufacturing and office facility, one block from a public transit stop. In June 2002, Spire and more than one hundred employees moved into new headquarters.

With support from Living Cities, the Boston Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) was able to provide the 65 Bay Street project with more than $1.6 million in loans and grants, including an early $20,000 grant for legal research on liability for site clean-up. The liability report helped the project recover over $200,000 in costs from the former owners.