Town & Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

F-Line to Dudley said:
Wayne State? They have more undergrads than BU, you know.:rolleyes:
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And more than Harvard and MIT combined probably. Apples and Oranges?

The point isn't about undergrads... The undergrads are just an important pillar of the Universities. Without the undergrads you don't have the Universities, without the Universities you don't have half the Boston area economy.
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

tangent said:
The city has been telling Universities for 40 years to go build self contained campuses and eliminate off campus housing. Now that many Universities are nearing the ability to house their students on campus the problem is that they are walling themselves off from the city? Sounds like poor public policy and buyers remorse.
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This is a good point. The schools may, in fact, be doing exactly what the city and residents want them to do and it's merely just a handful of us screaming into the void.
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

I wouldn't say housing more students on campus is the problem- what I seem to be getting from this thread (and my personal experience at Northeastern) is that there is a lack of engagement, often willingly, between higher education and the city on a physical level. Consider BU's treatment of Comm Ave or Northeastern's treatment of Huntington Ave (which, to be honest, I don't think is that bad, but I just finished living there for 4 years and I'm biased.)

For what it's worth, this treatment goes back a lot farther than a decade or two. Some of Northeastern's oldest buildings create the most desolate stretches on Huntington.

Fixing this is certainly doable. I'm going to turn to Northeastern again for a minute, because improvements are and will be happening there: the last year has seen the takedown of the majority of the fences on campus, and the recent IMP makes a point of correcting some of the more egregious errors on Huntington's streetscape (Cabot Center, Cargill Hall).

Perhaps the city should leverage streetscape improvements or active ground levels while approving future IMPs. At the very least, if the city can push schools to house more students on campus, then they might be able to push schools to bring more of the city on campus as well.

Naive? Perhaps, but NEU has always held our "open urban campus" as a point of pride, especially on campus tours and orientation. It can be a selling point, and was one of the things that attracted me and many of my friends to the school.
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

statler said:
Ok, we already pretty much agree that in term of urbanity, most, if not all of our local colleges and universities are turning their back on the city.
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I would submit that without the local colleges and universities, there would much, much less urbanity in the city for them to turn their backs on! Having said that, the schools, when they locate buildings on heavily traveled streets in the city, should think about allowing retail/cafe's located on the ground floors where anyone walking by might enter. Isn't MIT doing much of this in their new buildings. Many commercial/residential buildings are now doing this, why not more on urban campuses?
 
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Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

I might agree that the stretch of Comm. Ave and probably Huntington could use a few more stretches of good mixed use. Otherwise it is a very nice walkable stretch with great streetscape. Kenmore has become a bit too sterile, but that is mostly because of the hotel.

BU could help Kenmore with some ground level retail/restaurant/pub at the corner of Comm Ave and Deerfield where they have a parking lot now. That corner really kills the square when it really should be a focus of activity.

Across the river MIT has a real opportunity to interface with Kendall square in a more meaningful way and have the initiative to do so. Harvard is doing stuff in Alston to try and make that a new urban area for the city where none existed before.

I am not as familiar with NEU's recent work as I haven't been over there for about five years, but before that they had some mixed results.

I don't think the situation is nearly as negative as some of you, in fact it is quite positive.


Boston needs to be the common campus for all the Universities. Boston needs to step up its game to keep our Universities the attractive places to get degrees, to start careers, to spend a weekend or to spend a lifetime.

Ask not what your Universities can do for you, ask what they already are doing for you and don't eff it up by trying to shake them down for more money or whatever. Plenty of opportunities, but leave the negativity at the door.
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

atlantaden said:
I would submit that without the local colleges and universities, there would much, much less urbanity in the city for them to turn their backs on! Having said that, the schools, when they locate buildings on heavily traveled streets in the city, should think about allowing retain/cafe's located on the ground floors where anyone walking by might enter. Isn't MIT doing much of this in their new buildings. Many commercial/residential buildings are now doing this, why not more on urban campuses?
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MIT = Cambridge = no BRA

BU/BC/NEU/Harvard-Allston = Boston = you better believe it's the BRA



That's a somewhat flip over-simplification, to be sure. But "BRA" can serve as a catchment for all the planning institutions on the city's side that are letting this bunker-in mentality take root here where it's not happening across the river (including with one of the very same U's pushing encroaching insularity on the city side of its campus), not happening in Somerville with Tufts or Lesley, etc. Some of that may indeed be things like misreading the dorm-building vs. student rentals issue with the public and pushing a mandate they haven't thought through the long-term implications of. Some of it is the city institutions' own insularity leaving them full of blind spots about what's happening at ground level (see here), and taking the word of fellow insular travelers at the Universities in too much a vacuum. But there seems to be a consistent theme of institutions that used to be able to get smart planning done...not getting it done nearly as well as they used to, and showing advanced signs of being well past their nineties/aughts prime and well into an extended stagnation phase.

When the whole issue came up beginning of the year about whether to renew the BRA's powers or end them, I was sort of fence-sitting with a lean towards "reform it, don't junk it". Then B24 laid bare for the world to see just how much these civic institutions couldn't stay out of their own lumbering way, were completely unable to forge new relationships outside of well-trodden circles, and have just lost too much off the fastball. The way that coalition fatally overestimated their strength of support amongst the Universities was a big, big mis-read. Now...just nuke 'em already. Things changed with the relationship. The U's are a lot more insular, wield more power, impose more will over larger contiguous tracts of city, and need to curry less favor from the city than they did a decade-plus ago when the partnership was equal-footing or critically dependent on working through the city to open up paths to growth. The last people who seemed to realize that there was a shift in balance of power in that relationship appeared to be City Hall, the BRA, and B24...basically, the city themselves.

There is a problem here with institutions that are not as responsive to their environment as they should be, as they need to be to keep these major tracts of the city open and livable for the whole city. Creeping across-the-board insularity is a symptom of dulled responsiveness to the urban environment. A leading indicator. Clean out the brainrot and work in new people, new relationships who have a well-balanced feel for the city at ground level...like we're seeing in Cambridge, like we saw for a 20-year span until institutional leaders got old and turned out. Better to do it sooner than before every last block of storefronts out to Packards Corner becomes a flat-facing student lobby and Comm Ave. a full mile-plus of purely single-use flyover country.
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

To add a bit to this, an egregious example is how BU is helping to fund the Allston commuter rail station: on the condition none of the streets are extended across the Pike into Lower Allston. This would help immensely with multi-modal connections, and even more by providing route permibility for all the traffic currently overloading Harvard Ave and Linden St. But BU doesn't care, because they want to keep the area behind the Shaws a perpetual institutional wasteland, so that on graduation day their precious flower's parents can drive in from CT, park, and walk blindly into the street.
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

The whole premise of this thread is adversarial and off putting... "Town Vs Gown". And you expect the physical manifestation as it plays out on the ground to be harmonious and seemless?

And what about this slamming of BU's campus along Comm Ave. If I recall the discussion about the history of this area it was basically a bunch of car dealerships at one point.. BU has done quite a bit to add to the Urban fabric there. Not everything has to be ground level Dunk and Starbucks with condos and rentals up top... That's a caricature of a city, not a city.

Although there is some retail and mixed use in this stretch also. Just look up and down past BU and you see similarly long stretches of lack of ground level retail beyond BUs campus, there is simply only so much demand for ground level retail and restaurants. And again, the stupid city government has been pushing the Universities to keep students in dorms for decades. Which means a smaller tax base and more insular campuses...
 
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Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

F-Line to Dudley said:
I don't think it has to do with the undergrads themselves. It's more the institutions adopting a cattle-herder's mentality about packing them into huge blocs of the city that are increasingly being stripped of their mixed-use properties for totally inward-facing redevelopment...
I am one of those undergrads who stayed...for 20 years come Aug. 2016.

I wanted to be FORCED to embrace the city in all its diversity, quirks, and life lessons.....

I don't see as authentic an experience for the freshmen coming in now....

It's all inward-looking. Designed to insulate students from the city, not force them out of their shells into the heart of it. Harvard's done it too, though not nearly as thoroughly as BU and more with the modern Allston construction than Cambridge. And NU is starting to close the gap a bit at bleaching the Huntington corridor.

This doesn't bother me quite so much from a nostalgia standpoint; I know why Dirty Old Kenmore™ had to be rationalized, and I'm not much for nostalgia. It bothers me for the reasons I stated in my B24 post-mortem post that Busses quoted up the page: that the U's now view their relationship with the city as a one-way street. They expect to be accommodated at every turn, they expect to have the streets turned over to them for keeps. OK...but what is the city getting in return?.....

The scales have tipped too far, the relationship has gone too unbalanced. Too often they don't join the city, they bunker in from it.

People notice the cattle-herding of undergrads now because there's de facto fences going up around the herds. It was not as noticeable before because even at ground-zero BU Central there was enough intermixing of other walks of life and people being there to do things totally not-BU related that the campus still felt borderless. Does anyone feel like that campus is borderless anymore?
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F-Line -- as usual the answer is "Its Complicated"

Why -- well to some extent the city [Boston and Cambridge] decided that students took up housing space that could have been rented to "residents" -- and so the city told the U's to house all or most of the students on campus -- and the U's have responded by building lots of dorm rooms on or near to the Campus Core

To some extent its the desire of large bureaucracies to expand in every way shape or form and the U's are some of the very largest and richest bureaucracies around and some of the most aggressive in property aggrandizement-- although BU and Emerson seem somewhat ambivalent about theatres these days

To some extent its the U's desire to control their future destiny when a future local government might try to impose development on their immediate surroundings -- so why not bank some land for the future

To some extent its the nature of the times when U's start to seek to return to the "Medieval Walled Fortress model for protection from ?

That's part of it -- but conversely some of the U's are seeking to increase and soften their interactions with their surroundings such as MIT's Kendall Sq. initiative and of course all the U's who aspire to greatness are trying to emulate Kendall [e.g Harvard in Alston]

So its complicated -- and since the U's are one of the largest export industries in the Hub -- i.e. they import students and their money from around the world and export graduates with their diplomas -- there will always remain a tension between the Town and the Gown

PS: the students can of course take the initiative of taking a walk or a T ride to someplace within the Hub to see what they don't find on the campus

PPS: As an undergrad at MIT in the 70's I used to walk around quite a bit as a stress reliever -- one of my favorite walks was to what is today's Seaport / Innovation District -- back when the most exciting things to see were a few old freighters tied-up where the Cruise Terminal is now, and an occasional Navy ship in drydock -- But you could see that in the acres of mostly derelict-looking the Papas Brothers warehouses, and empty lots that were just a stones throw from the Financial District that there was a whole lot of potential

Same was mostly true about the mostly empty lots where Booming Kendall is not located -- the old 19th C and early 20th C industrial land was resting waiting for its next incarnation as today's Hub of Innovation
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

davem said:
To add a bit to this, an egregious example is how BU is helping to fund the Allston commuter rail station: on the condition none of the streets are extended across the Pike into Lower Allston. This would help immensely with multi-modal connections, and even more by providing route permibility for all the traffic currently overloading Harvard Ave and Linden St. But BU doesn't care, because they want to keep the area behind the Shaws a perpetual institutional wasteland, so that on graduation day their precious flower's parents can drive in from CT, park, and walk blindly into the street.
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This story should be more widely told. Is there any recourse at this point?
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

tangent said:
The whole premise of this thread is adversarial and off putting... "Town Vs Gown". And you expect the physical manifestation as it plays out on the ground to be harmonious and seemless?

And what about this slamming of BU's campus along Comm Ave. If I recall the discussion about the history of this area it was basically a bunch of car dealerships at one point.. BU has done quite a bit to add to the Urban fabric there. Not everything has to be ground level Dunk and Starbucks with condos and rentals up top... That's a caricature of a city, not a city.

Although there is some retail and mixed use in this stretch also. Just look up and down past BU and you see similarly long stretches of lack of ground level retail beyond BUs campus, there is simply only so much demand for ground level retail and restaurants. And again, the stupid city government has been pushing the Universities to keep students in dorms for decades. Which means a smaller tax base and more insular campuses...
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Tangent some good points -- but there are a couple of observations

It's worth noting that All of the Major U's have begun or at least hyper-expanded [i.e. the U''s version of Inflationary Cosmology] into virgin or near virgin territory:
  • Harvard did much of growing when Harvard Sq. was essentially all there was to Cambridge except for farms and later when there were a couple of other squares with open land in between
  • BU's Comm Ave major expansion didn't displace residential or even "urban Commercialism" -- it mostly expanded along the new corridor of Comm Ave created by the filling of the Back Bay
  • Similarly, NU expanded into what was just developing along Huntington Ave. -- the MFA landed on newly filled land in the 19 teens
  • Even, MIT while it began in the Financial District
    it had its adolescence as "Boston Tech" in a mini campus built on land set aside for the purpose on the Newly-filled Back Bay

    and when it became a young adult 100 years ago it crossed the river and landed in Cambridge -- but not a then exiting Cambridge -- MIT's Campus was laid out on the new fill along the newly created Charles River Basin with the Industrial Kendall Square behind it
  • And of course the newest of the U's -- UMAss Boston is built upon a site that was a working landfill in the 1950's and its only neighbor was the Boston version of Pruitt Igoe -- the isolated Columbia Point Housing Project

So its a bit of a revisionist view to say that the U's have become more isolated from their immediate residential and local commercial city environs

The one development which has had a transformative impact on the Town-Gown situation is that transformation of all of the U's into residential campuses with mostly "foreign" students.

Remember that all of the U's were established to educate local or near local students and in their early days, many of their students were from the immediate or slightly wider area -- many commuted on a daily basis from home or lived with relatives

As each of the U's in turn [starting with Harvard -- by the time of the Civil War and MIT by WWII] has grown in reputation and stature an increasing fraction of the students are selected from areas far from the U's hometowns and increasingly now they are truly "foreign students"

So as I replied to F-line -- the Town/Gown relationship is and will remain Complicated
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

tangent said:
The whole premise of this thread is adversarial and off putting... "Town Vs Gown".
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Fair point. I'll change it.
 
Maybe dorms should be subject to property taxes. Housing generally isn't considered a non profit activity.
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

BussesAin'tTrains said:
Wait... Rifleman? Is that you?
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That cracked me up.

Tangent, I agree. I am all for non-profit status for universities but when I hear leadership say things like "we can't build until the dorm starts generating revenue" it makes me crazy. Tax them on the dorms.

Also this thread focused alot on the monster universities but I think Berklee is a good example of explosive growth while trying to respect the neighborhood.* They helped clean up Boylston at the Fenway and control a lot of productive ground level retail. The gaping black hole in their new building (which is mystifying) is an exception but I hope some day there will be something there.



* to a degree: the use of public sidewalks and other public space as their campus is an entirely different issue.
 
Re: Town Vs Gown: The role of schools and universities in Boston

bbfen said:
That cracked me up.

Tangent, I agree. I am all for non-profit status for universities but when I hear leadership say things like "we can't build until the dorm starts generating revenue" it makes me crazy. Tax them on the dorms.

Also this thread focused alot on the monster universities but I think Berklee is a good example of explosive growth while trying to respect the neighborhood.* They helped clean up Boylston at the Fenway and control a lot of productive ground level retail. The gaping black hole in their new building (which is mystifying) is an exception but I hope some day there will be something there.



* to a degree: the use of public sidewalks and other public space as their campus is an entirely different issue.
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On the tax issue, I think that is a pretty straightforward issue. Universities pay property taxes on their commercial holdings. Housing they are charging rent for is just like any other residential property and should be taxed just as off campus housing used by students is taxed. That would make a huge difference to the tax base and it is the right thing to do.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Potentially expansive discussion fodder o' the week:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2...al-services/GOqMY8ZyIcefIMcEnP6iuN/story.html


(Frankly, I'm gobsmacked BU willingly forked over 80% of what it was asked for. I was expecting Northeastern levels of D.G.A.F. from my alma mater.)
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And if they actually paid what their property was worth, the City of Boston would be getting ~$330 million from the top 12 institutions alone.

Not that I expect that to ever happen.
 
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