Pomp and Whine

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Winter 2005 by Born, Kathleen Leahy

Can College Towns Keep the Sims Happy?

In Sim City 2000, the popular computer simulation game that debuted in 1993, a player designs an ideal city, arranging key elements in various sizes and proximities. These include not only natural resources like mountains and lakes, but man-made institutions as well, the most desirable being airports, sports stadiums, landmarks and, in particular, universities. After the initial design, the city takes on a not entirely predictable life of its own, which the player can tweak by raising or lowering taxes, building more housing, offices, stores, schools, roads or other civic amenities. Interestingly, in the earliest version of the game, the primary measures by which the success of a player's Sim City is gauged are its rate of growth, its rate of increase in property values, the rising educational level of its residents and the continual creation of jobs to ensure consistent employment.

When my husband and I chose Cambridge, Mass., in 1971 as a place to settle with our growing family, we had no ties as alumni or employees of the city's universities or colleges. Instead, we relied on a few unsatisfying tours of homes on suburban cul de sacs miles from the nearest coffee shop and our brief residence in several other university cities to tell us what the creators of Sim City postulated in 1993 and countless urban theorists have since confirmed: that cities with universities have a distinct leg up. They have a leg up microeconomically in the volume of pad thai a restaurateur can sell on any night of the week. And they have a leg up macroeconomically in the mindset of the CEO of an international company seeking to site a new research facility near an educated workforce that includes graduates or affiliates of top universities, and a vibrant cultural scene that will attract the most talented pool of employees from all over the world. Finally university cities tend to have steadier than average real estate values, and that ensures a stable tax base for providing a full array of municipal services.

Although other New England cities such as Burlington Vt., Hanover N.H., Providence R.I., Northampton Mass., and Worcester, Mass., reap the benefits of college and university presences, Cambridge is the quintessential "college town."

So, with an appreciation for this extraordinary value-added aspect of universities, why was I so uncomfortable in 1993 when, as a newly elected city councilor, I found myself sitting in the offices of an affable VP for government affairs at one of Cambridge's well-known universities? We were reviewing a glossy booklet that explained all the ways the university contributed to the economic and cultural health of the city, the number of hours university students spent volunteering in tutoring or other social service programs, the dollars spent by students and faculty and other employees in local businesses, the tourism dollars generated, some payments made to the city in lieu of taxes and all the new businesses magically spawned by university research.

Supposedly, the VP wanted my insight into growing local political unrest over the university's plans to build new classroom and laboratory buildings, residence halls, graduate student housing and parking facilities.

Perhaps the real reason I had been summoned was a comment I had recently made, as a novice politician, to the Boston Globe to the effect that when a particular university needed permits for a project, it should be prepared to offer something in return. I remember receiving a letter of stern rebuke from a Cambridge resident who identified himself as a member of that university's corporation. He advised me that what I suggested amounted to institutional blackmail, which in retrospect I guess it did.

Or the reason for my summons might have been my suggestion in a televised City Council meeting that some of the research conducted in campus buildings exempt from local property taxes on account of their educational nonprofit mission was actually being patented and licensed at a significant financial profit to, not only the universities, but individual professors. By 10 a.m. the next day, I had fielded calls from senior officials at both major universities in the city wanting to educate me about the benefits of this research to the city, such as new spinoff businesses and the global benefits of this research.

I continued to feel uncomfortable in similar discussions in the ensuing decade of my public service when I and my colleagues were regularly reminded that we owed much, if not all, of the city's prosperity to the universities because I knew that the universities were right ... but only up to a point.

Here's where they were right: while Sim City intuited general positive effects of universities on cities, Cambridge was witnessing nothing short of a new industrial revolution, completing its transformation from a soap, margarine, glass and wire manufacturing hub in the 20th century to an international center of biotech research in the 21st century. When other New England cities in the early 1990s were slashing budgets and services to reflect the fluctuating tax base of a volatile real estate market, Cambridge enjoyed atypical stability. This stability was grounded in part on steadily increasing residential real estate values driven by home-seekers who wanted latte, pad thai and live music within an easy walk of their homes and, in even greater part, by the more cyclical, but still remarkably robust, commercial development market fueled by scientific research and all the service businesses related to it.