[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
By: David A. Smith
Yesterday’s post confronted us with the centrality of Boston’s economy – that the city depends on the area’s universities, which among them have 250,000 students and out of which have spun aerospace, software, and genetic engineering inventions, innovations, and job a-plenty – and that the universities want to grow. So it makes sense for Boston, for the city to forge a pragmatic working relationship of the kind that served Yale and New Haven so well, and although the former mayor never thought so, the new mayor is making it a priority, as reported in The Boston Globe (October 9, 2014):
New mayor Walsh (BC graduate) being inaugurated at Boston College, January 6, 2014
Another reason more campus leaders seem to be on board with the city’s plan: a new mayoral administration.
The city should be investing in its universities’ expansion, and when you think about it, university expansion requires only that it align four things:
1. Applicants. Nearly all of Boston’s universities have more applicants than they can accept – a great position to be in, and one that not all American universities enjoy.
We came for the education
2. Faculty. The same power brands that attract students also attract faculty, and among graduate and doctoral students as leaders of seminars and pro-seminars, as well as adjunct faculty, there are (for better or worse) plenty of them.
More who want to teach than adjunct places available
3. Classrooms. These must be built, of course, but when business are high-occupancy and high-density usage.
High occupancy, low cost
4. Housing. And here we are: back to the problem of on-campus or off-campus.
If you want lots of students on-campus, build up
An urban university can expand without worrying about housing, because the students will find the lower-income convenient apartments, rent them, add roommates as necessary, and gradually overcrowd them (Boston Globe, April 28, 2013; blue font):
By the time Binland Lee and her friends moved into the house in the fall of 2012, landlord Anna Belokurova, who had just emerged from bankruptcy protection, was renting out nearly every space as a bedroom, including the family room with the sliding glass door. That left the building without a mandatory second exit for the upstairs unit.
It was nothing out of the ordinary for this student-packed neighborhood where homes with rafts of code violations persist despite crackdowns promised by the city. The house, which listed six bedrooms in building plans, was actually filled with 14 residents sharing 12 bedrooms, including three people who lived in basement spaces that city inspectors had cited as illegal in 2001.
(Clockwise from top left) Housemates Nick Moore, Thiérry Désiré, Alex Mark, Avaloi Atkinson, and Binland Lee, in the living room of their apartment at 87 Linden St. a week before the fire there in April 2013.
– meanwhile overrunning the neighborhood and tolerating code violations (Boston Globe, September 1, 2014):
Students Ankur Patel, Asees Binepal, and Gurvir Dhaliwal signed paperwork to allow housing inspectors to enter and inspect their new apartment at 24 Highgate St. in Allston.
Mouse droppings. Exposed wiring. External padlocks on bedroom doors. A second-floor porch tilting at a precarious angle.
These were just some of the violations city inspectors found over the weekend in apartments where college students rushed to organize clothes, books, and furniture for the fall semester.
Such enforcement activity is depressingly rare:
The city acknowledged it has yet to fulfill its promise to increase the number of inspectors. Some landlords and tenants have resisted efforts to follow city housing codes.
Nevertheless, every journey begins with an initial step, and Mayor Walsh deserves credit for taking one:
Walsh said 50 inspectors had prowled the neighborhood in the days leading up to move-in day, armed with housing lists provided by colleges and universities, to address concerns about student apartments.
In overcrowded markets (which Boston has), even with aggressive enforcement (which Boston doesn’t have), the economically rational result will usually be absentee-landlord neighborhoods and academically-enabled slums:
Students say they are forced to share crowded apartments simply to afford the rent.
That’s probably true, and it’s a consequence of the universities’ expanding their enrollment without correspondingly expanding their dormitories:
Creating more student housing would free up some of Boston’s existing housing stock for working adults and families, Walsh’s report said. The city estimates that 16,000 new dorm beds would open up about 5,000 units to nonstudent renters.
There is a mountain of evidence that some landlords are perfectly willing to be complete slumlords:
How they got out … but Binland Lee didn’t
A series of Globe reports last spring uncovered illegal and dangerous living conditions, widespread overcrowding, and sanitary problems in neighborhoods popular with students. The city vowed to step up code enforcement over such issues.
“My greatest concern is the health and safety of every young college student living off campus in overcrowded apartments” Walsh wrote.
…and the building code violations contributed directly to her death
For years, residents and families — fed up with both rising rents and quality-of-life issues associated with college students, including loud parties and drunken vandalism — have demanded that colleges house and police more of their own students, particularly undergraduates.
This the universities have been reluctant to do, because among other things it is a no-win cost center for them, and would put them into the position of having to police their students’ non-classroom activities, which really isn’t a university’s business.
After a fire at an off-campus apartment in Allston in April 2013 killed Binland Lee, a 22-year-old Boston University student, community activists called on colleges in Boston to release the addresses of their off-campus students to enable the city to detect overcrowded living conditions.
Dying from a shortage of dormitories: Binland Lee
Devin Quirk, director of operations at Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development, said he believes that having data to support the dorm-construction plan is a key driver for the enthusiasm of school leaders.
“It’s a very data-driven plan,” he said. “We now have data we didn’t have before.”
Though I can understand why the universities were initially reluctant – privacy concerns are a bugaboo – in this case, the public imperative is more powerful. And presumably the universities and the city agreed to scrub from the information anything too personal (such as people’s names) and instead provide simply a list of addresses, number of people at each one, which college or graduate school of the university, and so on – so that the city could in fact properly map where the students were living.
A key portion of that new information was provided recently by colleges.
Most universities, citing privacy concerns, resisted until June, when Walsh met with college leaders, who largely agreed to disclose the students’ addresses.
Good – without it, the city would be planning in the dark.
In August, the City Council formalized the rule, making it a legal requirement for schools to give the addresses and related data to city officials each semester.
Give the mayor credit for this; town-gown relations are often strained, and he seems to be opening a new page in the book.
“It’s refreshing that [Walsh] has brought universities into the conversation,” said Nucci. “He’s trying to establish a collaborative approach, and that’s a great idea.”
The cost to build 18,500 new dorm beds in Boston would exceed $2.6 billion, according to the report.
At $140,500 per dorm bed, a typical 3-BR dorm room must cost $420,000, which to the family a total cost of $420,000 apiece, a huge sum that probably reflects the university’s need to build high-density, high-amenity dormitories.
Gotta house those hockey players, remember?
While the colleges could finance that sum in the bond markets, capital isn’t their principal obstacle. Instead, the mayor’s desire brings us back to my question to my dining-hall-kitchen supervisor: Where do you want me to put them? And the new mayor has a different answer from his predecessor:
Yes, I know he won without any support from me, but I know how to smile in public, don’t I?
[Continued next week in Part 3.]