‘Better Future’ is one in which MIT renews grad-student housing policy, forum says
Preparing for Thursday’s “A Better Future for a Better Cambridge” forum are moderator Renee Loth, Fred Salvucci, Amy Cotter and Barry Bluestone. (Photo: Marc Levy)
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology took a relentless drubbing at a Thursday forum on “A Better Future for a Better Cambridge,” and the City Council didn’t get off much more lightly – save for councillor Minka vanBeuzekom, who voted earlier in the week against the institute’s request to rezone 26 acres in Kendall Square.
Fred Salvucci, a former state secretary of transportation and senior lecturer in civil engineering at the institute, returned time and again at the two-hour-plus forum to bashing his employer for its plan’s approach to sustainability and housing for graduate students, whom he called “shock troops” who will go on unintentionally displacing families and longtime residents.
“What they’re doing is reprehensible,” Salvucci said of MIT.
He made a direct appeal to the crowd of about 70 at the forum organized by the sustainable-development organization A Better Cambridge that, if they think the council voted right, “I urge you to reconsider” and to keep up pressure on the institute during its promise of “a process after the process … MIT is not invulnerable to public opinion.” He also drove home the theme that it is the T’s red line that makes Kendall Square thrive, but that the plan adds the pressure of hundreds of residents and 2,500 permanent jobs to a transit system that is already full. (A June study from the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University suggests the red line at Kendall Square is already over capacity and continues to be an area of concern for future congestion.)
Qualified, and clarified, praise
The rezoning, voted Monday after a two-year process, lets the institute build about 1 million square feet of commercial space, 800,000 square feet of academic space, 65,000 square feet of retail and more than 300 units of housing for a mix of wealthier, lower- and middle-income residents. Eighteen percent of the housing will be deemed affordable.
The plan drew praise from speaker Barry Bluestone, a Cambridge resident and founding director of the Dukakis Center. “I want to see us build more housing, not less, and I want to see it go higher where it’s appropriate, not lower, and I want to see some of those units be micro-units for young professionals – because not only do I want to keep them here, I want to get them out of my street. I want to get them out of older housing stock that is still affordable,” he said. “Trying to figure out a way to deal with housing prices is important, and that’s why I applaud our City Council for what they did [Monday] regarding Kendall Square.”
But after Salvucci’s withering screed against the school, which noted that the school didn’t propose net-zero energy use on its own or support vanBeuzekom’s net-zero amendment, and again after skeptical questioning from residents in a question-and-answer session, Bluestone clarified that his praise for the council was limited only to the fact it “put denser housing on less land, near transit.” He wasn’t happy the institute rejected net zero, he said, and credited MIT with housing as many grad students as it did – 39 percent of its 6,259 grad students last year, or more than 2,400 of them – only because his own employer houses only 78 out of more than 7,000.
In fact, only 8 percent of graduate students are housed by their schools across Greater Boston, Bluestone said, with Boston College, the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Northeastern combined housing fewer than 200.
Policy reversal
MIT’s shining example is deceptive, though, Salvucci said, because the institute is touting the lingering effects of a policy it has abandoned. During the presidency of Charles M. Vest, from 1990 through 2004, the school had a policy of housing 50 percent of its graduate students – a product of Cambridge resident Bob Simha, who served as director of planning for four decades ending in 2000. The policy was dropped by president Susan Hockfield after she took over nine years ago, and the school keeps adding grad students.
“They are drinking from wells they had nothing to do with digging,” Salvucci said.
Salvucci, Bluestone and final panelist Amy Cotter, director of regional plan implementation at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, were united on endorsing denser, city-focused development that offered options for getting from place to place – including walking – and as a result stayed diverse, helped small business, used fewer natural resources and polluted less. They inveighed against the city’s veering toward gentrification and agreed the “bump factor” touted by innovators to support density meant something only if there were different races, classes and kinds of people bumping into each other, not just scientists bumping into venture capitalists. (In talking about keeping families as part of that diversity, Salvucci blasted “this weird celebration of no-child households. A community without children, where the schools are hollowing out, loses its sense of community.”)
Possible answers
A return to rent control was not the answer, the panelists said, as that was great for longtime residents and terrible for anyone trying to move into the few rentable places in town, where prices explode to make up for rates frozen everywhere else. Subsidies were a way to keep diversity where rents and homeownership were otherwise realistic only for the wealthy, Bluestone said, but in general there are subsidies only for low-income people, not middle-class families.
While Ellen Shachter, an attorney at Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services, used the term “tokenism” Thursday for MIT’s intentions to build 300 housing units, City Council candidate Tom Stohlman reminded the panelists that the zoning it won in Kendall allows for unlimited residential construction, meaning “MIT can still do the right thing.”
Also, in listing the failures of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority to build a blue line extension to Lynn by 1980; a blue line-red line connector by 2001; and a green line extension by 2011, Salvucci urged revival of an urban ring section of bus rapid transit through Kendall and for the Grand Junction rail plan, with a Kendall stop, last considered in December 2011. And a resident noted that a green line extension running within the next half-dozen years could take some pressure off the red line.
Focus on MIT, the council
But much of the focus and hope for a better Cambridge was put on taking grad students out of the private market and back into campus housing.
“If MIT were housing 100 percent of its postdocs and graduate students, which in this economy is the appropriate level, that’s 5,000 beds. With the lack of that housing, those students – I’m not blaming the students, they’re very nice people – are the blockbusters, they are the shock troops of gentrification. They will live [together] in density and pay rents no family can afford,” Salvucci said. “MIT has disgracefully failed to step up to the plate … if MIT wanted to walk the talk, the opportunity was Monday night.”
There was support in the audience for the notion that the council, in approving the zoning Monday, acted too quickly.
“I’m really happy we seem to have come to a conclusion that it’s not upzoning that is the issue, it’s MIT that’s the issue,” Cotter said to some chuckles.
I am curious about a couple of items here:
1) If MIT offers 50% of their grad students housing compared with 8% offer by competing universities across the river; how have we determined that MIT isn’t doing its part? Where is the “disgrace” and how are MIT’s actions in any way “deceptive”?
2) If we built “micro-units” what guarantee is there that the remaining 50% of grad students living in the city would move into them?
3) Further, if the “shock troops” gobbling up housing in the residential neighborhoods did all up and go, what evidence is offered that young professionals wouldn’t eat up the remaining stock? Or retired folk? Or the much loathed people who have money?
4) When did the order pass that we could force groups of people out of neighborhoods? Why are students some how fair game for policies of discrimination?
5) If MIT built micro-units, could they do it at less than $1000 per unit? If not where is the incentive for grad students to move out of “family housing”?
We have some real issues with regard to transportation that I do not see being remedied. However vilifying Cambridge’s greatest contributor is not an effective stratagem; in my opinion; especially when they are already doing a better job than any other institution to which they are compared.
On the face of it, to me, it looks like a grudge and the people leading the argument are either too idealist to be effective in argument or simply too out touch to make any sense.
I really need to see what these people are using for rental comps. Further, if you look at the market right now, there are a handful of multifamily properties on the market; all of which are selling at over $400/sqft.
At those prices you either have to condo, or you raise the rent to a point that will accommodate the 80/20 or 75/25 financing you had to secure through the bank. I see no “shock troops” in that equation; just a bustling real estate market fueled by high demand.
Patrick makes some excellent points.
That people believe that the entire housing “issue” is the result of MIT graduate students is either naive or disingenuous. Having attended a few of the meetings and talking with many current, recently graduated and soon to be MIT graduate students I came away with two poignant tidbits:
1) MIT houses more than 90% of the graduate students that request housing. Think about what this means. If MIT were to house 100% of the graduate students in campus housing they would be FORCING students to live there who wanted to live somewhere else.
2). This goes along with #1, a majority of MIT graduate students do NOT want to live on campus.
This seems to fly in the face of what certain activists are saying and contrary to their issue de jour.
Yes, housing is becoming ever more expensive in Cambridge, but is MIT the sole driving force – NO will housing 100% of MIT’s graduate students on campus solve the issue- NO.
Rents, as Patrick points out, are driven by the cost of housing. As housing prices go up and the cost to acquire rental properties goes up the rental prices go up with them. No amount of haranguing MIT will change that. Actually, the “public extortion” that some Councilors have pointed to in their reasons for voting for or against the petition drives the cost of market rate housing even higher, not lower. This drives those people with incomes to afford market rate housing from the newer developments into the neighborhoods which has the affect of driving more families, not fewer, from Cambridge. Think about that when you read the Councilors reasons for how they voted.
Lastly, think about the impact of the negative rhetoric has on owners and developers who wish to be longer term investors in Cambridge, people like Patrick and many others, who see the vitriol put forward by those who oppose any development anywhere in the City. This drives people who would develop and own for the longer term out only to be replaced with people whose only view is to short term profits and gains. Your actions produce the very results against which you so fervently rail.
I hope everyone takes a deep breath and looks at the impacts of certain actions on the market, not the words that are spoken, but the actions and results thereof, maybe then we can actually have a fruitful debate.
No one has ever said “that the entire housing ‘issue’ is the result of MIT graduate students.” Nor has anyone said MIT building lots of housing is the cure for Cambridge’s high cost of housing. What Salvucci and Bluestone said at the forum is that it reduces a factor that sends housing costs upward.
MIT officials have testified that they offer rates below market — and then Cambridge officials (councillor David Maher and Christopher Cotter, housing director of the city’s Community Development Department) wound up admitting directly afterward that it wasn’t clear that MIT was, since the rates MIT were using as comparison points were asking rents, and higher than actual rents.
See https://www.cambridgeday.com/2013/03/22/roundtable-raises-doubts-are-citys-official-rent-figures-to-be-taken-seriously/.
MIT is trying to offer below-market rates on its campus housing. If they build more of it and actually do offer competitive or below-market rates, those that can get housing for less money might actually take it. I think we tend to see that that when most people are offered good value and convenience for less money, they take it.
At the very least, the percentage of people who reject good value and convenience for less money is probably less than those who accept it, and that’s what Salvucci and Bluestone seem to be rooting for.
Finally, and I was hoping this was clear enough in the article above: MIT’s virtues in housing its grad students are due to a policy it no longer follows. So as the grad student population grows, as it has been, less of the total grad student population will be housed on campus.
And being better at something than people who are bad at it isn’t always such a compliment. (Saying that “Full House” was better than “Alf,” or vice-versa, isn’t saying much, for instance.)
Mr. Admin,
Your response here is a bit snarky and something more apropos of a “fair and balanced” newsie. However,
MIT DOES offer lower rates than market. I can confirm this directly. How much lower is certainly up for debate and property dependent. How much lower should it be? Can it be?
If MIT does build housing and offers it at less than $800/br I suppose they might be able to attract some students; its certainly possible. However what you’re assuming is a “good value” which I don’t see in the hail mary pass that is the “micro unit.”
You fail to define “good value” and thus add nothing with the angsty commentary. I’m merely suggesting that I see no reason for students to migrate to Kendall to live in $1500/mo micro units or equally institutional flats when they have much cheaper alternative with better amenities through out the city. There is your “good value.” A four bedroom apartment in Inman with a backyard, two full bathrooms, a couple of parking spots, and a bidet, for less than 650/br. Thats what I’m charging Mr. Other apartments come more expensive of course, but my prices are very indicative of what other landlords charge, in some cases I’m a lot higher. So again, I ask, with your rental housing expertise; What is a good value?
The only thing that is clear to me is your disdain for MIT. Is this a news blog or simply a place for you, Mark Levy, to slant the facts and distort truth to you and your contributors liking?
I fully understood what Mr. Salvucci, and thus you, are trying to say when you illustrate the changing policy at MIT. That you fail to recognize any accomplishment at all highlights how bias and slanted you both actually are and without the study in hand its even more difficult to assess what the current impact of that policy shift has been.
However failing to recognize that they do far more than any other institution compared makes you seem a little over zealous in your crucifixion of that policy shift. There is nothing complicated in your argument, just your inexplicable inability to be reasonable in your argument.
You also fail to recognize other factors in the housing market that greatly contribute to the costs associated with it.
Finally, your analogy just sucks. By your own article MIT is providing more than five times the amount of housing other institutions provide. Further, they house roughly 50% of their grad students, and possibly more. I guess you never played baseball, because by my count MIT is batting 500 where other institutions seem to be rarely connecting.
(For the record; You owe Bob Saget an apology)