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Image courtesy of Google Maps.
With the construction of a newly-announced dorm, MIT says it will complete a two-year-old pledge to reduce pressure on the Cambridge, Somerville and Boston housing markets by boosting its graduate student housing by 50 percent.
The dorm will be build on a school-owned parking lot on Vassar Street next to a 340-bed undergraduate dorm designed by Steven Holl Architects and built in 2002. The new building will house 550 beds for graduate students and their families. Neither the architect, development team nor general contractor were named in the university’s announcement and a university spokesperson did not immediately return an email seeking further information. MIT hopes to begin permitting for this project by the end of December 2020, and construction is expected to begin in 2021 or 2022.
The school had 6,990 graduate students enrolled as of fall 2019 but currently operates only 2,500 beds in its graduate student housing system. In 2017, the school promised to add 950 beds to the system to help ease pressure on the local housing market.
“[G]raduate students and graduate student families will now have access to the convenience and independence of apartment-style living in a residence hall minutes away from the heart of campus. We are pleased to be diversifying our housing portfolio to include an option that promises to be an exciting alternative to living off-campus for many students,” Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart, Provost Martin Schmidt, and Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz wrote in a letter to students announcing the building.
The school is in the process of adding 250 new beds in a new, 450-bed dorm under construction on the site of a former 250-bed facility in Kendall Square. The school also plans to add 150 beds through renovations to existing graduate housing.
