The battle of the bulge is on in Allston-Brighton.
Just like the the German push against Allied forces in World War II, university students are infiltrating the Allston-Brighton community and occupying much of the housing.
The Alston-Brighton Community Development Corporation is fighting back though.
In recent years, Harvard University, Boston College and Boston University have looked to Allston-Brighton as a place to house and educate their growing student populations.
In fact, Paul Creighton, executive director of the Allston-Brighton Area Planning Action Committee, projected that the three schools will eventually meet in the middle of Allston-Brighton.
The ABCDC has been working to provide its residents with affordable housing despite competition from university students. This is a wise choice, considering the median household annual income for Allston-Brighton families is slightly above $38,000, less than the cost of one year of tuition at each of these schools.
Some of the ABCDC projects include single-room-occupancy houses for residents with disabilities, multi-family apartment buildings on Commonwealth Avenue and mixed income co-ops on Carol Avenue.
Now, the ABCDC is announcing plans to convert an apartment complex on Glenville Avenue into low-income housing.
Since Boston is already one of the most expensive places to live in the country, attempts by low-income residents to find affordable housing will undoubtedly become an even graver nightmare.
The ABCDC should continue to expand its affordable public housing projects, enabling more residents to remain in an area where housing prices have skyrocketed and colleges vie for the little space that is left.
The Allston-Brighton community’s perception that universities are destroying their neighborhood needs to come to an end, but this can only happen when Allston-Brighton developers and university administration work together to solve the daunting housing squeeze.
Universities must try to discard their image as property-gobbling monsters-and particularly, BU needs to find ways to cut costs and make on-campus living more alluring to students beyond its four-year guaranteed plan.
The university can also follow Harvard’s example by finding ways to give housing back to residents in the community who desperately need it. Harvard has taken the initiative to ease the lack of housing by reclaiming land once occupied by Legal Seafood’s fish processing plant and turning it into 50 affordable housing units on Everett Street.
Local universities must strive to develop a social conscience, one that not only takes into account the needs of their students, but also the needs of the entire Allston-Brighton community.
