Emma Jacobs

he unveiling of Harvard’s expansion plan for North Allston is the latest signal of a nationwide campus building boom. Urban universities across the country have shown they are tuned in to the latest expectations for educational institutions. More students are pushing for more space, which means more faculty who need housing, and new laboratories help in the competition for research dollars. As well endowed, influential institutions, universities can implement major change. As developers, however, they do not adequately meet substantial, common problems when campus expansion comes up against surrounding communities. Universities anticipate their own needs better than their impacts.

The heart of the Harvard campus is in Cambridge, across the river from the beginnings of a sizable campus in North Allston. The university already owns over 4,900 acres (about six Central Parks), with influence extending well beyond the land they own. In January, Harvard announced plans to develop five million more square feet of building space on property in North Allston. Like Columbia, the new campus will involve major construction and redevelopment of an existing neighborhood.

GRAPHIC COURTESY OF ALLSTON DEVELOPMENT GROUP

The “800-pound gorilla” is a phrase people often use to describe Harvard’s ability to impact its community. Residents of Cambridge have watched the university come to dominate the area around Harvard Square, as lower-income residents and well loved, independent businesses have been forced out over the past several decades. The footprint of the Allston expansion contains little housing, but the surrounding area contains a considerable working-class population. Residents have expressed concern that their area will follow the model of Harvard Square-style gentrification. Their anxiety was not eased in 1997, when Harvard secretly acquired more than 50 acres in North Allston. Community members felt cheated of the ability to participate in the planning process, and they now feel they may lose control of their own properties.

Another major urban educational institution with plans to grow, the University of Chicago, has a fraught history with its community that contributes to tensions today. Located in the center of Chicago’s South Side, the university supported urban renewal efforts in Hyde Park in the ’50s and ’60s, not unlike Columbia’s moves in that era to change the area around its campus. “It was a big deal,” says Thomas Kelly-Kemple, of the student Southside Solidarity Network, referring to the Chicago redevelopment, but he says students today lack knowledge of what occurred. In Chicago, urban renewal displaced 2,500 families while leveling and redeveloping whole stretches of Hyde Park to slow twin trends of white flight and economic decline. Hank Webber, the current university vice president for Community and Government Affairs, wrote that UChicago had striven to “create a high-quality community” in Hyde Park in the ’50s and ’60s. The project, which pushed median neighborhood family income up 48 percent, was nicknamed “Negro removal” by residents, who eventually organized to fight the clearing of the Woodlawn neighborhood south of the campus.

In the ’70s, the University of Chicago finally “stepped back from its overriding concerns for community issues,” according to Webber, who also sits on the board of one major private investor in property in Woodlawn. Nonetheless, Kelly-Kemple said that urban renewal created community distrust of the university’s current plans to grow along the campus’ southern edge. Residents remember the destructive aspects of urban renewal, which produces skepticism towards the university’s latest plans and motives. Traditionally, “the university acts very much like a private developer,” Kelly-Kemple said. “I don’t think what they want is necessarily counter to community needs, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out for the community.”

Society is well aware of universities’ contributions to the public good. However, university development does not benefit everyone. Expanding universities extol the benefits their growth will bring to the surrounding community. Unfortunately, their own moves contribute to the departure of current residents, moved out by construction or priced out gradually, as infrastructural improvements attract new arrivals who can pay higher rents. When a university seeks more space, it generally moves into less affluent areas. The relatively small amount of political influence, combined with low real estate prices, make the choice to move into a poorer neighborhood attractive for a university. But it also creates a pattern of displacement that does not go unnoticed.

The University of Chicago and Harvard have begun to make efforts to substantiate their new-found commitment to their less affluent neighbors. “This is not just about bricks and mortar," according to Christopher Gordon, COO of the Harvard University Allston Development Group. "It is about… the creation of a new academic neighborhood in Allston and Boston that will create opportunities for Allston residents and the Harvard community to come together in ways that strengthen and enhance both.” Harvard is in negotiations to replace the housing in the expansion footprint, in addition to the limited amount they have already created in Cambridge. Both Harvard and Chicago have made substantial commitments to affordable housing funds in their respective areas, commitments in the tens of millions of dollars, and have made greater efforts to get community input during planning. These efforts can help rebuild a sense of common ground and demonstrate the universities’ newfound understanding of their pasts and their present potential to benefit communities.

As Kelly-Kemple explained, however,the language the university uses to win support for its development raises community expectations, but the university is “still not up to the level they claim to be.” These efforts are positive, but to be more than token contributions, they must be enlarged and sustained well beyond the years of the universities’ expansions. Communities expect these institutions to have a vested interest in transparent and cooperative engagement with their neighbors. A real commitment can prove universities’ full appreciation of their significance in the community, the positive as well as the negative.

University administrators are careful to distance their institutions from the demographic trends shaping the city these days, and they’re right that universities cannot stop the gentrification and affordable housing crises of the modern city alone. But for these institutions, it’s strange to see gaps in their awareness of their impact. Hank Webber’s descriptions of creating “quality neighborhoods” speak to a surprising ignorance of the effects of the University of Chicago’s history. As New York’s third-largest landholder (after the Catholic Church and the City itself), Columbia University’s failure to adequately support affordable housing demonstrates an inattentiveness to its impact on the neighborhood. Sometimes, the social awareness of these institutions does not hold up in the face of their own self-interest.