Tufts University’s slow pace in building student housing is a frustration for Somerville city councillors.
The undergraduate student population at the school, which crosses the Medford and Somerville city line, increased to 6,877 last fall from 5,196 in 2015, bringing to town more than 1,600 students. The university, meanwhile, has added housing for 207 undergrads, with another building under construction for 398 undergrads, in figures discussed by the CIty Council.
In a city suffering a real estate crisis, councilor Jake Wilson doesn’t think that’s enough.
“Somerville bears the burden of housing these Tufts students,” Wilson said at an Oct. 24 council meeting. “Over 1,600 Tufts students live off-campus in Somerville, and these students often live together in coalitions of roommates – and these coalitions typically live in three-plus-bedroom rental units, and we have a shortage of those units in our city. Families can’t compete with students because children don’t pay rent.”
Tufts has acknowledged that its students can hurt the local housing market, and the university wants to add more housing to reduce this impact. Executive vice president Michael Howard said in a Sept. 12 announcement of new housing that the university has a “the goal that we share with our host communities of Medford and Somerville of significantly reducing the population of our students residing in residential neighborhoods.” That will result in “freeing up housing for working families in those cities,” he said.
Recent housing creation has been primarily through the renovation of older buildings. The university announcement in September was for a completely new building at 401 Boston Ave., Medford, next to the school’s Dowling Hall. Tufts has not said how many students it will house, but did say it will be “the largest residence hall project in the university’s history.” Even if all goes according to schedule, it is three years off, expected to open in the fall of 2027.
The university said it is committed to ensuring the dorm is not more expensive than off-campus housing, to try to get as many students as possible living on campus.
Tufts has not announced plans to add large amounts of graduate student housing, despite having about as many graduate students as it does undergraduates. One of its “new” undergraduate dorms was formerly a graduate residence.
This contrasts with Cambridge’s MIT and especially Harvard, which have been adding graduate housing and plan to add more.
Harvard, MIT, Lesley University and the Hult International School of Business had a combined 13,711 undergraduate and 17,543 graduate students in 2023, according to the year’s town-gown reports to Cambridge’s Planning Board; of those, 10,921 undergraduates (80 percent) were in dorms but only 3,723 of grad students (21 percent).
While councilor Willie Burnley Jr. appreciated that Tufts is adding some housing, he thought it was bad that the university wasn’t paying construction workers fair wages. “I want to remind them that despite being on the Medford side, we do hold a vested interest in public institutions in our city taking the most ethical approach to construction.”
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