After more than a year of planning and several months of protest by area community groups, the Harvard-Allston Task Force is focusing its efforts on making sure Harvard’s now-inevitable multi-billion dollar expansion into neighboring Allston is a smooth one.
“The goal is: Start becoming much more pro-active, start creating a neighborhood vision of how this development can happen, how everyone can win and then to put that on the table, so that we’re not just reacting to something that Harvard happens to propose to us,” said task force leader Harry Mattison.
Though the Boston Redevelopment Authority approved construction of the billion-dollar Harvard Stem Cell Institute in October, its ultimate plans for the neighborhood are still pending.
The science complex is the first step in Harvard’s 50-year master plan for expansion, which will create 4 to 5 million square feet of academic development, between 4,000 and 5,000 permanent jobs and up to 800 construction-related jobs during the first 20 of 50 years of development, said Harvard spokeswoman Lauren Marshall.
Long-range plans for the neighborhood include the construction of more academic buildings, campus housing, retail buildings and museums, Marshall said, adding the university has held 70 public meetings to date with the task force to discuss its master plan for the “shared environment.”
Still, Mattison said communication between residents and the university has been sparse in recent months, and residents often find out information about the expansion from newspapers first before they hear it from the university.
“It’s not a collaborative process,” he said. “It’s not bringing the community in. It’s not saying, ‘Hey, these are really important design decisions for the future of your neighborhood.’ That’s not a great way to work with your neighborhood.”
“We will continue to work with the city and community to make sure projects are carefully planned and that we respond to neighborhood concerns and explore the community’s ideas about our shared environment,” Marshall said.
Though Mattison said the BRA has effectively closed the door on any further opposition to the project, he said the task force plans to hold Harvard and the BRA accountable for the community benefits they promised, including a new elementary school and middle school, refurbished roads, improved utilities and a new park, some of which await approval.
Mattison said he saw progress two weeks ago at a task force meeting where some attendees said discussion of community benefits was too restricted by meeting chairman Ray Mellone, The Daily Free Press reported last month.
Mattison said the main fear among Allston residents is that Harvard will “create its own sort of private isolated island in the neighborhood,” citing the university’s business school, already located in the neighborhood, as an example.
“Our hope is that the buildings and the campus will integrate with the neighborhood,” he said. “Saying that six or seven kids from the neighborhood can go to a daycare with 60 or 70 kids associated with Harvard is also not real integration. It’s serving a few token poor kids from Allston.”
BRA spokeswoman Susan Ellsbree said the organization weighed all sides of the issue before approving the project’s first phase.
“It’s billion of dollars worth of development that’s going to be in our city, so we wanted to get that going,” Ellsbree said. “The project will be a huge asset to the community, to our economy overall, to the advancement of science.”
The BRA worked to ensure the campus does not become isolated from the rest of Allston, she said.
“We spent a long time ensuring that the buildings that are on the science complex are permeable to the public,” she said. “There are public ways. There’s a lot of green space in and through it — there will be no fences. I think a lot of people are afraid of something that is not true.”
