Good neighbors?

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Winter 2001 by Bowditch, N Sean

From Soaring Rents to Sour Relations, Housing Dilemmas Confound New England College Towns

Dozens of Free Pizza Delivery! fliers and copies of Just Rentals swirl like tumbleweeds outside the entrance to the Asian Sunrise Market in Boston's AllstonBrighton section. Around the corner on Linden Street, the guitar strains of REM blare from an open window; Budweiser cans litter a grassless lawn. College students lounge in groups on front stoops.

ON SATURDAY NIGHT, they will pack Harpers Ferry to hear live blues. After 2 a.m., when the bars close, the walls of Allston-Brighton's neat, single-family homes and triple-deckers will vibrate to the bassline of all-night keg parties. By morning, longtime neighborhood residents and new immigrants from Southeast Asia and Russia will curse their common threat: the annual onslaught of house-partying, non-voting, rentswelling college students.

For years, civic leaders have talked up the overwhelmingly positive impact of New England's 280 colleges and universities and their 800,000 students. But across the region, the effects of colleges on housing are increasingly problematic, and keg parties are the least of the problem.

The issues are myriad. Despite evidence that living on campus provides more opportunities for students to interact with peers and faculty members and take part in extracurricular activities, large numbers of students-either by choice or due to lack of dorm space-seek out scarce housing in the community.

Of Boston's 135,000 undergraduate and graduate students, fewer than 29,000 live in campus housing according to the Boston Redevelopment Authority. The others, many bankrolled by their parents, are willing to pay more for relatively low-quality apartments, thus putting upward pressure on rents. The average monthly rent of a two-bedroom apartment in Boston rose by 7 percent from 1998 to 2000, to near $1,600, according to the city's Department of Neighborhood Development. That's about $450 per month higher than the maximum allowed under the federal Section 8 program for low-income renters.

With Boston's housing vacancy rate at a slender 3 percent, the flood of student renters leaves lowincome families with few places to live. And as more non-resident, and thus non-voting students move into an area, neighborhoods lose political leverage. (Ever hear of college students pressuring a city councilor to fill potholes?)

Ironically, recent college graduates hoping to work in Boston find they are unable to do so because of the lack of affordable housing. In fact, nearly eight in 10 New Englanders surveyed by the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston cited housing costs as a major obstacle to regional economic growth.

Coming Back

In New Haven, Conn., Yale University officials remind visiting luminaries to stay with university-provided escorts as they walk from business meeting to evening cocktail reception. The same urban problems-namely, crime and drugs-that make Yale so security-conscious, have pushed many families out of New Haven. Nearly 8,000 residents, representing 6 percent of the population, have left in the past decade, leaving behind bankrupt businesses and shuttered brownstones. The city's chief housing problem is characterized oxymoronically as "undercrowding."

Similar problems have plagued Hartford, where Trinity College has captured national attention with its $175 million revitalization of the once-decaying neighborhood adjacent to its campus. Working with area banks and state and city agencies, Trinity has provided low-interest mortgages to encourage home ownership, developed housing rehabilitation projects and supported new housing construction. "We recognize that Trinity is an institution in a living community," Trinity President Evan Dobelle recently told a Hartford conference on university/community relations. "As such, we have a duty and a responsibility as well as the moral authority to make a difference in the health of that community."

In Worcester, Mass., the neighborhood around Clark University was losing population so fast that the local Catholic church reportedly experienced a 50 percent drop in collections. Clark forged a partnership with the community to form the Main South Community Development Corp.-another national model. The collaborative has spearheaded several housing projects including the renovation of 170 affordable housing units and 14 triple-decker residences in the Main South neighborhood. A Clark homebuyer incentive program provides housing grants to staff members who buy in the neighborhood. And in a striking show of good faith, Clark converted one of the neighborhood's rescued Victorian homes into its president's residence.

Even in less-populated sections of New England, housing issues are a point of contention between universities and communities. Explosive enrollment growth at the University of Vermont during the 1970s and '80s created enormous pressure on the city of Burlington's infrastructure and services, and relations with the city became, in the words of Mayor Peter Clavelle, "tense and acrimonious." Similar frustrations exist in Amherst, Mass., where town officials say the University of Massachusetts enjoys a sort of "academic privilege." Because UMass is a state-run entity, it is exempt from local zoning controls.