Dorm city

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Winter 2001 by Kressel, Shirley

College Students Put Pressure on Boston's Housing Market

oston's critical housing shortage and soaring rents are exacerbated by the housing policies of the city's renowned B higher education institutions. Thirty-five colleges and universities call Boston home; more than 90,500 of their 135,000 students live in the city, constituting about 15 percent of Boston's population. Though these institutions bring valuable intellectual and cultural vibrancy to the city, the impact of this added housing pressure on Boston's neighborhoods is a significant issue in town-gown relations.

In 1990, only 21 percent of college students residing in Boston were housed in dorms, leaving 67,000 students living in neighborhood housing stock. More than half of these students were concentrated in three neighborhoods: the working- and middle-class areas of Fenway/Kenmore and Allston-Brighton and the more upscale Back Bay/Beacon Hill. In those neighborhoods, students constituted large percentages of the total population (63 percent in Fenway/ Kenmore, 27 percent in Allston-Brighton, and 26 percent in Back Bay/Beacon Hill) and significant proportions of people living in neighborhood housing (29 percent in Fenway/Kenmore, 22 percent in Allston-Brighton, and 17 percent in Back Bay/Beacon Hill). Students also accounted for about 12 percent of the population in central Boston, Jamaica Plain and the South End.

By January 2000, with rents rising and community pressure building, Boston colleges accelerated their construction of dormitory beds; the total number rose by 10,500 or 59 percent to 28,500, while enrollment grew by 4,480 or 3.4 percent.

Unfortunately, some of these beds were built on land that could have been used for neighborhood housing. For example, Northeastern University's Davenport Commons project was built on urban renewal parcels on which residents who had been displaced decades earlier hoped to rebuild. The university obtained the land from the Boston Redevelopment Authority after much community protest, and built units for 625 students, along with 60 units for neighborhood residents. Despite the small victory for community housing, this dorm-tohousing ratio will never rebuild the neighborhood. Colleges have also annexed many neighborhood buildings for dormitory use, or, like Harvard University, have been acquiring large tracts of private and public land for academic expansion, reducing land available for the community. The very concept of a "core campus" is now ambiguous, and campus boundaries can scarcely be drawn when city-required Institutional Master Plans are prepared.

At last count, nearly 107,000 students in Boston's colleges still live in off-campus housing, 62,000 in Boston, and 45,000 in nearby suburbs. Even assuming that three students lived in each unit, college students would occupy more than 20,000 of Boston's 250,000 housing units. Meanwhile, overall housing in the city has increased by fewer than 5,000 units in the past decade.

In the areas of highest student concentration, the imbalance damages the neighborhood fabric. The issue here is not students behaving badly, but the actual occupancy of scarce neighborhood housing stock. Thousands of students take up apartments and houses in a city with an estimated shortfall of 40,000 housing units. Landlords buy spacious houses suitable for families, then chop them up, sometimes irreversibly, into student cubbies. Students group up and, wielding their parents' money, bid rents beyond the reach of workingclass (and even middle-class) families. In a gradual process of displacement without gentrification, prices and quality of life progress inversely as the nature of neighborhood life changes. A once-diverse commercial spectrum narrows to a pizza-beer-futon mix; in summer, it's a ghost town that threatens small businesses.

The exodus of neighborhood residents, meanwhile, breaks up stable communities where families had lived together for generations. The infrastructure of community withers as churches, schools and civic associations lose membership. Ultimately, the neighborhood loses political power as active voters leave, and local officials figure they can neglect residents' needs with impunity. his situation is an enormous problem from the neighborhood perspective, but city governments and colleges share an interest in continuing the current pattern.

For colleges, student housing is an economic burden; schools prefer to use precious campus land for development that more directly promotes their core mission. They bank land in surface parking lots and inexpensive, often "temporary" buildings. As they expand, they use it for building academic facilities and prestigious cultural and athletic venues, which are more likely than dorms to attract large donors and research money. Moreover, student beds can be located anywhere, with the burdens of providing mundane services and policing and dealing with occupancy fluctuations, which may lead to underutilization or shortages, all shifted to municipal government. (It's an analogue of cities and suburbs. Cities want to have gleaming office towers and cultural centers and entertainment zones and commercial emporia, which generate money and prestige, but they are happy to let the suburbs carry the housing, with all its concomitant demand for schools and trash pick-up. In fact, they effectively force housing out by creating far more favorable regulatory and financial incentives in town for "economic development" and "world-class" icons.)