Tuesday’s Boston City Council hearings on affordable housing (“Local residents decry student off-campus housing in city council hearing,” Dec. 1) focused overwhelmingly on the problems of finding housing rather than on the possibilities of resolving the problem.
Local residents indicated that Boston needed to regulate universities’ purchases of buildings to stem the loss of available apartments in the city. But this would not actually solve the underlying issue. Rather than needing more regulation of housing by city authorities, we need to untangle the restrictions that result in a housing shortage.
Allston in particular has limits on buildings, such as limiting their size, that make it uneconomical for developers to build in the part of Boston directly surrounding Boston University. Anyone who strolls down an Allston residential street can notice the lack of high-rise apartment buildings. Allston residents may argue that larger apartment buildings would detract from the village’s culture, but in fact, this culture is already largely gone due to the high crime rate and poor building conditions. Landlords have found that it is more economical to sell to local universities than to suffer a loss by continuing to let apartments.
Removing the height limit on these buildings would allow developers to include more apartments in the same area. Letting more apartments in larger buildings would mean lower rents, better building conditions and no need to resort to smaller unit size in an already cramped city. All of this, in turn, could even lead to lower crime rates and more amicability between off-campus students and locals, who would no longer need to fight over affordable housing.
Megan E. Griffith
COM ’11, CAS ’11
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