A series of events over the last week illustrates just how difficult it can be to build more student housing in any city as part of a larger solution to our housing problems. But that can’t be an excuse for moving slowly.
After leasing a significant portion of the Sheraton Boston Hotel in the Prudential Center to house students over the last few years, Northeastern University and the hotel’s owners have decided to formalize the relationship and permanently convert one of the hotel’s two towers into a dormitory.
The project’s application is currently before the Boston Planning & Development Agency and while the Back Bay Association business group did not return a phone call requesting comment, a spokesperson for the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay residents group confirmed to Banker & Tradesman that entity will not be opposing the conversion.
But in the same week, the Sheraton project was formally proposed, Northeastern officials discovered that a 1909-vintage dorm on Huntington Avenue had “significant internal and external damage” sending the school scurrying to find housing for 400 incoming first-year students.
Combined with the pandemic-era apartment rentals the school was planning to give up as of the city of Boston’s June “Student Housing Trends” report, it could be that Northeastern will start the school year with fewer school-owned or leased student beds than it had in the spring. If this indeed comes to pass, it will put that much more pressure on the overheated and undersupplied local rental market.
Meanwhile, Northeastern’s proposal for another 800-student dorm on one of its parking lots on the edge of Roxbury hasn’t advanced since the days of the Walsh administration. Community pushback – despite the fact the building would actually help relieve pressure on Roxbury renters – and what seems to be the school’s own limited staff capacity appear to have left it stalled, at least for now.
The degree to which this one step forward, one step backward pattern has eroded progress that Northeastern has made despite its clear institutional commitment to reducing the burden it puts on the city by pulling more students out of the neighborhoods is a signal. It suggests city planners in Boston, Cambridge, Brookline and elsewhere may not be able to rely on the state’s universities to fix this problem by themselves, especially given the scale of the problem.
That city of Boston June report showed 30,031 students – almost 42 percent of the Greater Boston undergraduate student population – lives off-campus because their schools never bothered to provide enough student housing in the first place, or housing that was rentable at reasonable rates.
As Massachusetts municipalities plot out future zoning updates, we urge local leaders like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu to include areas zoned to entice private student housing developers to build, as Greystar managing director Gary Kerr recently argued in these pages. They can act as reinforcements for schools trying to undo the damage of past years – and mitigate the actions of schools unwilling to do their share of the work.
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