News

Students sleep-out to protest housing prices

Students, community activists and homeless people staged an all-night sleep-out at Harvard University yesterday as a show of solidarity with Cambridge residents, who protesters say are being forced out of their homes by the high price of housing.

“It’s a great thing they’re doing,” said Boston University Professor Emeritus Howard Zinn, who made a surprise appearance at the rally. “The more student-community cooperation there is around issues wages, food, housing, the essentials of life, the better. I think that’s where the future of our country is, in solidarity, people crossing all sorts of lines in order to get together against the forces trying to squeeze the life out of the American people.”

Approximately 50 protesters gathered on the lawn of the Harvard Science Center to listen to speeches and share in a dinner of lentils, rice and hot chocolate to fortify them against the cold. Approximately half of them spent the night in tents pitched on the grass.

The primary complaint of the protesters was the skyrocketing cost of housing in Cambridge and Boston, which protesters said Harvard has a duty to fight.

“The University presence raises rents, because they own a ton of land. Harvard is the largest landowner in Cambridge and BU is the largest in Boston, and they don’t pay taxes on any of their land, so they can do whatever they want with it,” said sleep-out organizer Carol Garvan, a Harvard junior.

Garvan said Harvard has attempted to relieve Boston’s housing crisis with such programs as the school’s “10 and 10” deal to loan the cities of Boston and Cambridge $10 million each for housing development. However, she said, there is room for improvement.

“We don’t want to belittle what they’ve done because they’re leading in a lot of ways. They house 99 percent of their undergrads … but at the same time, only 40 percent of graduate students are housed, so that’s a weak point,” Garvan said, stressing the “10 and 10” loan is not a gift.

Garvan also said Harvard does not pay property taxes, which would amount to about $32 million annually. Instead, the school makes a voluntary yearly payment of $1.6 million, or about 1/1000th of one per cent of the school’s $19.2 billion endowment.

“BU is one of the biggest landowners in Boston, and if nothing else we’ve really helped exacerbate the housing situation in Boston,” said BU College of Communication senior Jamie Weiss. Allston is all BU students. Workers down there can’t afford to live in many parts of Boston and [BU] doesn’t do anything. … BU has to take responsibility for its role in the Boston community.”

Protesters also took umbrage with what they saw as the low wages Harvard pays its employees.

“We see wages and housing as two parts of the same problem, which is basically poverty,” said Campaign for a Living Wage member Jane Martin. “If people aren’t paid enough, they can’t live in affordable places and, also, there are no affordable places to live.”

Members of Campaign for a Living Wage said Harvard employees like janitors and cafeteria workers are forced to work upwards of 80 hours a week to afford housing in the Boston area. Although Cambridge has recognized $10.25 an hour as the living wage for city employees, many Harvard workers continue to earn the minimum wage of $6.25, said Campaign for a Living Wage member Amy Offner.

“Harvard is the largest employer in [Cambridge] and they’re still paying people as little as $6.50 an hour. That’s enough to put a parent with one child under the federal poverty line. That people would be living under the federal poverty line here is abysmal. It’s ridiculous and it’s totally intolerable,” said Offner, who described Harvard’s response to the living wage campaign as “horrific.”

“This [sleep-out] is the first time ever at Harvard, and this is wonderful to see. I encourage this kind of thing — the next generation getting involved. At a place like Harvard, of all places, this is wonderful,” said a homeless protester who identified himself as Outrageous Ragin’ Love.

Love, who said he has attended numerous sleep-outs in New England, said he came to Harvard to raise awareness about the quality of life in Boston’s homeless shelters.

“There’s so much abuse in the shelters here in Boston. These shelters get millions of dollars to warehouse the homeless, and the people are lined up like cordwood, lying on the floor, with two-inch long cockroaches, 400 mice running around where people are trying to sleep. … It’s reached monumental proportions, this housing issue,” Love said. “We need 25,000 apartments right now — or build 25,000 more institutional beds.”

Protesters also criticized Harvard’s acquisition of land in Allston-Brighton. According to Garvan, Harvard owns over 90 acres of land in the area, about half of which she said was bought “under the table.”

“We’re not really launching specific demands on Allston-Brighton lands, just a general ‘live up to your ideals’” campaign, Garvan said.

Housing prices have increased 40 percent in the past year, according to a report issued by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s housing commission. According to that commission, nearly 10,000 housing units must be built to reverse this trend.

Harvard administrators did not reply to repeated requests for comment for this story.

Website | More Articles

This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.

Comments are closed.