Harvard University contracting its empire in Cambridge, MA, USA, selling elderly housing

1. Harvard Selling Elderly Housing built by variance way above zoning allowances.
2. Reality at 2 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA, USA.
3. To be continued.


1. Harvard Selling Elderly Housing built by variance way above zoning allowances.

Thursday afternoon, February 28, 2013, I was in a large meeting room high above East Harvard Square.

The meeting was called for public discussion of Harvard’s intent to sell this monstrous building at the extreme eastern edge of Harvard Square.

It was built as part of a con that has been popular for the last 40 or 50 years. Under the Con, developers get massive zoning relief in exchange for temporarily allowing the needy to live in the resulting building for a limited period. The needy go very far toward paying for the cost of the building. At the end of the period, the needy are thrown out into the street or into the next con game project and the developer has an excessively large building which has been paid for.

This property saw zoning changes in Cambridge Machine activities over the last ten or twenty years. The zoning changes, without explaining why, gave Harvard relief in parking requirements for Harvard affiliate housing.

One of the variances for the property, because it was an elderly project, allowed severely little parking to be built, under the argument that the elderly frequently do not have cars.

You convert to Harvard affiliate housing, and suddenly you have people with cars in the building. So without explaining the reason Harvard was allowed to provide parking at a further distance from all its affiliate housing. By “coincidence”, the zoning change suddenly allowed parking for that building to be provided in a massive parking garage recently built on Cowperthwaite Street, a few blocks from the building.

But things have changed in the meantime.

The regional transportation people did a study which showed that the Cambridge / Brighton exit from I90 (Mass. Pike) could be moved to the Grand Junction Railroad Bridge under the BU Bridge. A few months later, Harvard bought the current I90 exit, ramps, highway, and adjacent railroad yards, an area bigger than Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.

So Harvard has a monster purchase and a whole bunch of places to put in buildings. Then environmental outrages started on the Charles River. Now Harvard is selling this massive building that it was set up to convert to affiliate housing. Lovely words. The reality is almost certainly that the empire building has changed the direction of Harvard’s campus expansion. Harvard no longer needs the building for affiliate housing, so it is selling it, but, of course, never explaining the reason.

2. Reality at 2 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Thursday afternoon, February 28, 2013, I was in a large meeting room high above East Harvard Square.

I do not know if I have ever been in that room before but I know the area well. I have had major positive impact on the area, and, pretty much always, The Cambridge Machine has been on the other side.

A few years after the building was constructed, I was in a meeting which included a heated discussion of the zoning relief. I remember the loud objections from members of the audience that this project was just another con for Harvard expansion.

I remember the developer piously proclaiming that the developer was independent of Harvard.

Thursday afternoon, there was no mention of those pious words. A few years after those pious words, Harvard unequivocally took control of the property. Thursday afternoon, nobody who claimed to know anything said anything other than that Harvard had owned the property from the beginning and that Harvard had made a bunch of deals.

3. To be continued.

I have deferred this report this long. I will talk more on this issue and the con games associated with that meeting in the future.