February 12 - 19, 1998
![[Housing Crunch]](/archive/features/98/02/12/image/Crunch_468x80.gif)
Bridget Sherry doesn't seem like the kind of person interested in causing trouble. The 20-year-old from Tulsa, Oklahoma, shares a three-bedroom apartment in Brookline with four friends who, like her, are juniors at Boston College. Their apartment is tucked within a residential neighborhood on a quiet, tree-lined street, and because of this location, the five young women try to keep a low profile: no keg parties, no loud music, no doors slamming in the middle of the night. Better not to disturb the neighbors, says Bridget. Housing 101
Boston is a mecca for college students. But when students move off campus, stereo volumes aren't the only things that rise. So do rents.
by Jason Gay
But intentionally or not, Bridget and her college friends are disturbing the neighborhood: specifically, the cost of surrounding rental housing. Students who live off campus in Greater Boston neighborhoods raise rents and drive out working-class and elderly residents, because -- despite their predilection for loud parties and music -- they are attractive tenants to many landlords. Students will cram into small apartments, often two people to a room, and pay the large rents and finder's fees that many families, single parents, and retirees cannot.
Losing control
Ethnic struggles
Of course, students have been a part of Boston's residential life for many decades. Nearly one-seventh of city residents are students, with 70,000 living in off-campus housing near colleges and universities. But in this post-rent control era, students have helped tighten the rental market and spike prices further skyward -- irritating long-time residents and aggravating town-gown tensions. Neighbors used to coexisting with students are feeling overwhelmed. "This has always been a student town" says Nancy Hall, a housing activist in Cambridge. "But a lot of people are leaving, and the people who are moving in are usually affluent, and many are students."
The problem shows few signs of abating. As local colleges grow, there's always going to be concern about more students spilling into city neighborhoods. Northeastern's expansion into Lower Roxbury has angered residents there. And Carlos Rosales, executive director of the Massachusetts Tenants Organization, says that students are popping up in areas where they haven't been seen in large numbers before. "It used to be that they [students] were just located around colleges," says Rosales. "But now we're seeing them in places like Dorchester, where the rents are cheaper."
Cambridge and Boston leaders believe that local universities and colleges must do a better job of providing on-campus housing, thereby minimizing student impact on residential neighborhoods. Gradually, schools have been moving in this direction. But new dormitories alone cannot solve the problem of rising rents in these areas. College students are always going to want to live off campus, and will pay a premium to do so -- whether city neighbors want them there or not.
Bridget didn't exactly have a choice. Because of its on-campus housing shortage, Boston College asks its junior class to live off school property. As a result, more than 1500 students tumble annually into surrounding neighborhoods in Brookline, Newton, and Allston-Brighton. Competition for off-campus units can be fierce: Bridget and her roommates signed a lease for the 1997-'98 school year before Thanksgiving of 1996. "My father couldn't believe he was putting down all this money for a place I wasn't going to be living in for another year and a half," she recalls.
Bridget's apartment is on the first floor of a three-story home. There are three actual bedrooms, but a sun porch out back has been converted into a fourth (two of Bridget's roommates share a room). Though it's not the most spacious of places, and is drafty on cold nights, it's cute and, as Bridget says, "a lot nicer than the dormitories at Boston College." The cost for this fine arrangement: $2400 per month, plus a finder's fee equal to one month's rent.
By splitting the expenses equally among five people, Bridget and her friends have had little trouble meeting the rent. But that's bad news for working-class residents and families with similar housing needs, who find themselves outbid by groups of college students. "When students go three or four to an apartment, sometimes with two students to a room, they can pay more, and it makes landlords raise rents to the point where working families cannot afford them," says the Massachusetts Tenants Organization's Rosales.
What's more, landlords typically can get students to pay more for less. Students are inexperienced in the housing market; compared to residential tenants, they tend to have lower standards for rental units, even expensive ones. (Bridget's apartment, for example, was a mess when she and her roommates moved in, she says.) And because students typically stay only one year in an off-campus location, student-occupied apartments turn over frequently, giving a landlord more opportunities to raise the unit's price. "We're easy targets for price-gouging," Bridget says.
To be sure, many of these issues have existed for as long as students have been living off campus. But since rent control was repealed, causing thousands of tenants in Boston and Cambridge to leave decontrolled units, the student invasion has widened. A recent study in Cambridge revealed that 30 percent of the new occupants in decontrolled housing stock are students. During rent control, students accounted for just 10 percent of the same stock. "That's a very sharp increase," says Roger Herzog, Cambridge's housing director.
The housing market, fueled by the economy, is tight throughout the Boston area. And this has meant a crunch of affordable housing, especially in the areas -- Allston-Brighton, Back Bay, Fenway, Cambridge -- where student populations are high. As people are forced to migrate away from the city, students become the target of resentment. "We have low- and moderate-income people with children competing against students and roommates," Herzog says.
Leaders like Herzog have been calling for universities to build more on-campus housing. Cambridge has also been successful in convincing Harvard to contribute to affordable housing; recently, the Ivy League university sold 100 apartment units to the city at below-market cost. In addition, Harvard has agreed to cap rent hikes in its remaining housing stock at 5 percent annually.
But Stuart Dash, Cambridge's director of community planning, says that whenever a university reaches out to its surrounding neighborhood, it must be careful. Even the best of intentions can backfire, he warns. This has certainly been the case in Boston, where Northeastern University has come under fire for its Davenport Commons proposal in Lower Roxbury. Though the project would accommodate 800 students and provide nearly 50 units of affordable housing for area residents, it has been harshly criticized by local activists, who have felt excluded from the planning process. "There has to be caution," Dash says. "Universities and neighborhoods have different agendas, needs, and priorities."
That's especially true with urban universities, where it's often hard to tell the difference between "on" and "off" campus. In the Audubon Circle neighborhood, near Boston's Kenmore Square, a vocal band of residents has warred with Boston University administrators for nearly 20 years over the issue of student housing. Here, the concern centers on formerly residential housing that BU purchased for student use; critics charge that the school's presence in the neighborhood is too great, and has driven out families and the elderly. Audubon Circle activists are petitioning the city to rewrite zoning laws in order to ban further expansion in their neighborhood. They also want BU to make good on its plans for an 750-student dormitory at the old Comm Ave armory site -- and once this facility is completed, to divest its residential holdings in the area.
These debates come at a time when more urban universities are seeking ways to improve strained town-gown relationships. And no issue is more pressing than housing. "What BU should be doing is working in partnership with the neighborhood," says Kathy Greenough, an Audubon Circle resident and activist.
Cambridge's Dash thinks schools are getting this message. "I think schools realize that they, as well as the neighborhood, will be better served if they can locate students nearer to the core centers of campus," he says.
Such an arrangement would be fine with Bridget. The five-and-a-half months she has spent off campus have been fun, she says, but she's looking forward to moving back onto Boston College's campus for her senior year. She says she and her roommates haven't felt entirely welcome in Brookline. Back on campus, there will be less tension to worry about -- not to mention lower bills. "My friends at home are shocked by what we pay," Bridget says.
Jason Gay can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com.
