Colleges as city builders

Third in a series

BOSTON'S COLLEGES and universities are no longer limited to shaping young minds. They are also molding their host city. The imperative to "grow or die" is strong on campus, stronger at times than both City Hall and Boston's muscular neighborhood groups.

The area's eight major research universities boast an annual economic impact of more than $7 billion. Universities and their affiliated hospitals include more than one third of the state's 25 largest employers. They compete fiercely for prestigious faculty members, research grants, and the most talented students from around the nation. They are, without a doubt, one of Boston's world-class assets, both economically and culturally. But how can the city accommodate 36 institutions of higher education and 140,000 students without affecting the character of its neighborhoods? And can the universities even be trusted to protect the character of their own campuses?

Maintaining the power balance between City Hall and the universities is a delicate dance. The Menino administration is pushing colleges to build more dorms on campus as a way to reduce the pressure on the rental housing market in nearby neighborhoods. Colleges have responded by adding 21 new dormitories since 2000. More than 2,000 beds are in the pipeline.

But pushed out of neighborhoods, architects have nowhere to build but up. Some of the dorms are architectural masterpieces, such as Northeastern's trim 16-story Building H. Others are misshapen, such as Harvard's 15-story graduate student housing complex on the Charles River in Allston. But the overarching point is that, with little public discussion, Boston is at risk of becoming a city of dormitory towers.

The tastes of college students should not be the primary factor in shaping the city. It's understandable that students prefer suites with kitchens and living rooms to the small, shared dorm rooms of old. Colleges that don't supply such amenities worry that they will be at a competitive disadvantage. But the arrangement of single occupancy rooms in such suites adds 25 percent to the overall square footage of the new dorms, according to architect William Rawn, who designed Northeastern's H building.

Boston needs to worry when 15-story buildings become the new baseline for college dorms. Efforts to build twice as high are bound to follow. That is what happened last year, when Suffolk University proposed a 31-story dormitory tower. The rush to grow threatens the livability of both the city and the campuses that attracted students in the first place.

Emerson College, which transformed downtown over the past decade by shifting its campus from the Back Bay to the formerly depressed Theater District, offers a solution that other colleges might consider. Designers of its recently constructed 14-story dorm and campus center at Piano Row also adopted the popular suite design. But students in the 560-bed dorm save space by doubling up in the bedrooms.

It's a clever compromise that respects both students' tastes and height limits.

Whether the subject is campus demographics or future building projects, Boston residents are often at a disadvantage when trying to figure out what university officials are up to. The first place to look is in the institutional master plans that colleges are required to file every five years with the Boston Redevelopment Authority. For some institutions, the document and its intermittent amendments suggest long-term goals. Others, however, see the plan merely as the obligatory price for building and occupancy permits. Regardless of motive, college planners have insisted on keeping their work under wraps until the finished product could be presented to City Hall. Only then would neighbors get a good glimpse of projects affecting their homes.

This murky model might have endured were it not for Harvard University's mid-1990s strategy to use secret proxies to buy 52 acres in Allston for campus expansion, hoping to keep its costs low. Instead of seeing Harvard as an engine of economic development, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino just saw red. He demanded that colleges conduct neighborhood meetings in the master planning process. Fearing the power of City Hall to withhold permits, the universities agreed. And while the change hasn't eliminated town-gown tensions, it has prevented full-blown confrontations like the one in West Harlem, where Columbia University is pushing into the New York neighborhood and residents are pushing back even harder.

A master plan update published last month by Northeastern University reflects a successful accord between the college and its neighbors on the siting of two future dormitories. But elsewhere, the bar is still too low. Harvard has retained renowned architect Stefan Behnisch, whose design for a science center includes a 125-foot building east of Barry's Corner in Allston. The early design serves the university's top scientists. But neighbors still don't know how it fits into the rest of Harvard's plans for Allston, because Harvard isn't scheduled to submit its master plan until January. This fact wasn't lost on scores of Allston residents at a community meeting Monday, who, by a show of hands, told Harvard officials that they wanted no part of a plan that arrives in pieces.

City officials promise they are watching Harvard's master plan carefully. "If they don't get it done and done right, they won't get this building," vows Linda Kowalcky, the mayor's liaison for higher education.

At times, master plans are simply inaccurate. A 2001 Suffolk University plan underestimated its student enrollment in 2006 by more than a 1,200 students. Now residents are resisting Suffolk's scaled-down proposal for a 22-story dormitory on Beacon Hill because they never saw the students coming.

Local universities are caught up in a desperate race to outflank, outfox, and outdo the competition. It's up to city officials to make sure residents don't get trampled in the rush.