Scott Van Voorhis
Bashing our local colleges and universities is the other favorite blood sport in Boston.
But with the economy looking scarier by the day, it’s time to shelve the all-too predictable and tired laments about university expansion.
Amid the carping about rowdy students, other cities getting hammered hard by the downturn are looking enviously at Boston. When your downtown is a ghost town of empty condo high-rises as in Miami, putting up with a few inebriated undergrads might seem a small price to pay for hundreds of millions in economic activity.
That’s what Larry DiCara, the former Boston city councilor and now a high-powered downtown lawyer, found recently at a conference in Miami, ground zero of the this real estate driven recession. A former newspaper publisher pointed to Boston’s thriving institutional sector as one reason our city just may escape the worst of the coming downturn, he noted.
Institutional Investors
“Boston will come out of the recession far earlier than many other cities,” DiCara said of the view of Boston down in Miami.
If so, it’s looking increasingly like it will be the colleges and universities, not to mention the hospitals, who keep the lights on in Boston as times get tough over the next year or two.
Harvard is pushing ahead with plans to pump hundreds of millions into its new Allston campus, while Boston College has launched a $1.5 billion capital campaign to pay for its own ambitious campus revamp and expansion.
Nor is it just the big players that are barreling ahead, with the city’s many mid-sized colleges and universities also pushing forward with their own ambitious plans.
Berklee College of Music is preparing to file plans with City Hall for a major expansion, while Suffolk University is spending more than $100 million on a pair of projects that includes a restoration of the historic Modern Theater. Wheelock College just won City Hall approval for a $16 million project to add 39 dorm beds.
Suffolk’s projects alone will create 270 new construction jobs. The university will replace the empty and decrepit former Metropolitan District Commission headquarters on Somerset Street at the base of Beacon Hill with a new modern academic building.
“We have every reason to believe there will be no delay in this project and that at the appropriate time we will be able to obtain financing,” said John Nucci, vice president of external affairs at Suffolk. “It’s all systems go for both projects.”
Development Deadlock
Still, it’s not fair to say that the local higher ed sector is not at all feeling the chill from the current economy, with Boston University recently announcing it was putting a freeze on new construction. But so far BU is proving to the exception to the rule.
By contrast, both new commercial and residential development around town is grinding to a standstill. Of the bevy of grand new projects that were on the drawing boards just three months ago, it’s anyone’s guess which, if any, will get built.
Still, don’t look for gratitude among the city’s self-appointed neighborhood activists. The readiness of local higher educational institution players like Harvard and Suffolk to ante up literally billions of dollars on major job-producing expansions is too often seen not as a source of strength, but as a threat to the city’s quality of life.
Yet you can’t have one without the other. A vibrant higher ed sector has played a key role in making Boston the livable city that it is today. Just think what Kenmore Square would be now without Boston University or midtown without Emerson College’s new downtown campus.
It’s a view endorsed by one of downtown Boston’s top tower developers, Dean Stratouly.
“If it weren’t for the universities and health care institutions, the last person alive, please turn out the lights,” Stratouly quipped.
