On Campus Housing vs. Off Campus Housing

Academic sprawl
Boston Globe
January 7, 2008
LIKE OLD dance partners, Boston planners and university officials pride themselves on anticipating each other's next move. And right now the city's higher-education scene is whirling with 2,901 dormitory beds under construction and roughly 2,000 more under review or proposed. Residents of neighborhoods where colleges are expanding are understandably dizzy from all of the activity.

An influx of institutional master plans will soon land on the desks of city planners at the Boston Redevelopment Authority. The documents, which colleges are required to file, project development goals from five to 20 years into the future. With city approval for a new science complex in hand, Harvard University is expected to file its long-range plan in the fall for a campus expansion in Allston that could exceed 5 million square feet. Suffolk University, which hungers for dorm space, is expected to deliver its plan this month. BRA officials, who are examining the latest Boston College master plan, are also anticipating an offering from Berklee College of Music.

It's unlikely that these and other colleges will reach deep consensus with neighbors who are wary of disruption from construction, traffic, and student behavior. But at the least, colleges will need to reach a state of detente with neighbors if they hope to see building and occupancy permits from the city.

The city's 36 institutions of higher education are indisputable leaders of the local economy. In 2004, Boston's colleges added $5.4 billion to the state's economy, according to the BRA. Higher ed in Boston directly employs 44,000 people. But that kind of clout can also breed a sense of entitlement.

Whether they mean to be or not, colleges are the most powerful development force in Boston. As Harvard, for instance, pushes forward with its science center in Allston, neighbors worry about Barry's Corner, an area whose fate is almost entirely in the university's hands. For city officials, the greatest challenge is to find the right balance when the needs of universities conflict with those of their neighbors.

Wrangling over dorms
Colleges could fill tomes with their volunteer and community service efforts. But the quality of town-gown relations usually depends upon student behavior.

Loud, late-night parties do not make for good student ambassadors. And families often resent even the best behaved students, because their presence often drives up housing costs, especially in modest neighborhoods such as Allston and Mission Hill. The Boston City Council recently passed a zoning change that would cap at four the number of students who could live in a single apartment.

The Menino administration has pushed consistently for colleges to house their students in residence halls on campus. The policy is succeeding. According to the BRA, about 46,000 undergraduates at private colleges live in Boston, of whom more than 70 percent call a dorm room home. (The agency does not compile data on public colleges, which do not fall under its planning authority.) But while the policy of getting students out of the neighborhoods is sound and clear, the implementation is inconsistent from college to college and neighborhood to neighborhood. "It's an art, not a science," says BRA planner Linda Kowalcky, who specializes in town-gown relations.

Boston College is a case in point. As part of an ambitious 10-year, $1.6 billion master plan, BC is proposing to house 500 students on land formerly owned by the Archdiocese of Boston north of Commonwealth Avenue.

But while BC leads the city in its success at housing undergraduates, its expansion plans are tricky in a way that 1,000 dorm beds proposed for the University of Massachusetts at Boston are not. Located on a peninsula, UMass-Boston is largely isolated from residential areas. But the proposed BC dorms are meeting with stiff resistance from neighbors in the Lake Street area, who want to see the student housing built on the main campus - further from their own homes.

Last week, opponents of the BC plan appeared to pick up an ally in Mayor Menino, who also said he wants to see the new dorms "all on one location" south of Commonwealth Avenue. BC is eager to build new academic centers, an arts district, recreation center, and other keys to a great future. But it must also build political support.

No rules apply
In general, more dorms are the right answer for Boston. College officials are skilled at using resident advisers, alcohol policies, and campus police to control student behavior. But no hard and fast rules for dorm construction apply. Neighbors of Berklee College of Music in the Back Bay, for example, recently resisted a high-rise dormitory proposal at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston Street. But they seem more open to a subsequent plan for two smaller Berklee buildings on a nearby parcel. At BC, however, neighbors would prefer taller dorms, provided they remain set back on the traditional campus. The path of least resistance would seem to be the one that houses students, whenever possible, on the existing campus.

But some universities, like Suffolk, don't have traditional campuses. In 2006, Suffolk officials found themselves at war with the neighborhood when they purchased a building on the edge of Beacon Hill to build a high-rise dorm. The Menino administration initially blessed the project. But it walked away as neighborhood opposition escalated. Happy endings, however, are still possible. Suffolk is now housing students in less thickly settled sections of Downtown Crossing, bringing new energy to the area.

Mayor Menino, meanwhile, is using the colleges' desire to expand as his leverage to increase their civic commitments. He wants colleges to create major initiatives in public education, sports, and job training - initiatives far broader than the limited community programs that universities now offer. "I'm out of the pilot program business," Menino says.

Since Boston has long been a center of higher education, neighborhood residents need to have realistic expectations. But universities in turn need to recognize that their planning decisions don't just affect their students - and that, to neighbors, accommodation means more than a comfortable dorm room.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.