They're Baaaaaack!

Heightening the age-old tensions is the astonishing pace at which our local colleges are expanding (or metastasizing, depending on your view). Boston University is planning a huge development on Comm. Ave. by the BU Bridge, a project likely to include cafés, stores, dorms, and a transit hub for the Green Line, commuter rail, and the fabled Urban Ring, that Godot of local mass-transit projects. Harvard, after using proxies to secretly buy up 52 acres in lower Allston, is intent on building a whole new neighborhood on the land, with stores, dorms, transit, and a stem cell research facility. MIT is spending three-quarters of a billion dollars on three new academic buildings and a grad student apartment building. Northeastern, Suffolk, BC, and Berklee have all embarked on large-scale dorm projects. And a Texas-based development team is looking to erect a massive for-profit dorm off Huntington Avenue, an idea that had the neighborhood’s already beleaguered residents rending their garments.

There’s a whiff of manifest destiny to the colleges’ building binge, matched by a sense among city leaders that as long as it’s going to happen, we may as well get as many shiny beads as possible in the bargain. Linda Kowalcky, Mayor Menino’s liaison to higher ed, sums up City Hall’s position when she says it doesn’t see the growth as a problem, but as “something that needs to be done very carefully and thoughtfully.” Certainly, the situation doesn’t leave the mayor many options. On one hand, he runs a city that has a symbiotic relationship with the colleges (even if it is unclear at times who’s the host); on the other, his core constituents in the neighborhoods despise the students, and, given the chance, would just as soon float them out into the Mystic River on a trash scow loaded with C4 and Jägermeister.

Stuck between competing agendas, Menino has pursued the targeted goal of making sure the universities’ growth includes putting up more on-campus housing (particularly after Northeastern students famously turned a 2004 Patriots victory celebration into something approximating a Hamas rally), the thinking being that getting students out of the neighborhoods will at least help universities better control them, and at the same time alleviate high rents. This approach, though, has proven only somewhat effective in improving relations—if no one wants to live between two houses inhabited by students, no one wants to live within bottle-throwing distance of a 30-story dorm, either.

So the city’s been revising its tactics lately. Kowalcky points to efforts to get the schools and the neighborhoods to end their decades of steamrolling over and ululating at each other, respectively, and get together on a strategy to build out in a way that not only doesn’t involve the residents’ getting buggered half to death, but may actually enrich their quality of life. Key to this initiative is a push by the city to get colleges to tap local businesses to fill the retail portions of their developments, instead of doing what Northeastern did with its Marino Center on Huntington and BU did with the Warren Towers, which is lard their retail space with banks and crappy chain stores. You might think this step wouldn’t be necessary, that urban schools would see the wisdom of providing a diverse array of retail and culinary options, but you’d be wrong. “I don’t think they would have thought about it on their own, frankly,” says Kowalcky. “I don’t think that’s what they do.”