Talk of the Gown

BUILDING A COMMUNITY

By Bill Kirtz

Replacing parking lots with residence halls. Transforming a "sick building" into a commercial center. Turning desolate Roxbury streets into a bustling business zone. Northeastern is betting that revitalizing our neighborhood will buff our gritty image, meet our growing housing needs, and spark community renewal.

N.U. officials aren't the only ones talking happy talk about urban rebirth. Independent experts' advice and other city colleges' success suggest we can do well by doing good. Creating jobs, affordable housing, and a sense of community can further our own goal-a safe, attractive environment for learning and living.

Walk now down these mean streets of Columbus and Tremont. On the corner of Melnea Cass Boulevard, by the empty Registry of Motor Vehicles building, a five-year-old sign is the only evidence of a planned office, hotel, and retail center. On Ruggles Street, the gleaming new police headquarters is mocked by the adjacent shell of Connolly's Liquor and Cocktails, which long ago stopped offering the jazz and blues it still advertises. Head south and you'll find padlocked liquor stores, shuttered hair salons, decrepit pizza parlors. A check-cashing operation seems to be the most thriving enterprise.

It's hard to see the future from here. But things can change. Less than three years ago, many university departments were unhappy with the prospect of moving from dingy, frenetic, but relatively safe upper Huntington Avenue to Columbus Place-the only N.U. building south of the Orange Line. Now, with a parking garage across the street, a designer coffee outpost in the lobby, and an affable but strict security presence, Columbus Place is one of the most desirable spots on campus.

Next door to Columbus Place, if N.U. plans don't go astray, will be Davenport Commons. This combination of dorms and affordable community housing, tentatively slated to go up in September 1999, will include 185 units for upperclassmen and graduate students and forty-six for working families. Students will pay an estimated $750 a month to subsidize community families' $500- to $750-a-month rent for two- to four-bedroom, mostly duplex, housing.

Some in the neighborhood complain that the $47 million development would give N.U.-but not Roxbury-what it needs. They deem it a token smidgen of affordable community housing-a fig leaf covering the intrusion of hundreds of transient students. They say the plan would drain scarce federal low-income housing tax credits from home ownership and job creation resources.

Independent observers see things differently. Noting the Tremont-Columbus area's shabby lots, architectural author and critic Jane Holtz Kay sees "a lot of frayed land near Northeastern. I really believe in filling in gaps in open space. This is a walkable area, with good public transportation-a compact urban environment good for both students and the community."

A national authority on urban space, Kay says Northeastern's location and history of community involvement contrast favorably with the perceived arrogance of some universities-such as Harvard's widely condemned secret purchases of Allston property for future development.

Walter Little agrees that Northeastern is no rich interloper. The Mattapan real estate broker has worked with the nonprofit Community Development Group and is a member of the Grove Hall Board of Trade. He calls Northeastern the "ideal partner" to spearhead neighborhood improvement because of its cooperative education tradition. For business development, he says, "You need small, family-owned businesses and an educational institution to train them. Co-op fits into that. It can contribute by reaching out to the community."

Like N.U. planners, Little sees students bringing cash flow to support new and existing area businesses. "They're noisy, but they can stabilize the neighborhood by raising demographics and increasing public safety," he says.

N.U. architecture professor George Thrush holds similar views. A practicing architect, he is fashioning retail development guidelines with the Boston Redevelopment Authority and is working with political science professor Michael Dukakis and African American studies professor Joseph Warren on planning around Dudley Square and Melnea Cass Boulevard. He sees Davenport Commons as a win-win proposition.

"Like all universities, we have tremendous space needs," Thrush says. "A cynic could call [Davenport] a potential for exploitation. An optimist, like myself, calls it the best the neighborhood could get. Our heart seems to be in the right place." Thrush calls it ironic that poor areas faced with development "have so little power other than to oppose. The hope is that our long-term effort overcomes the inherent defensiveness of a powerless neighborhood."

Whatever the hope, Northeastern's director of government relations and community affairs, Thomas Keady, observes that Davenport Commons's financial risk is ours. Looking down from his third-floor corner office on Columbus Place at the pockmarked asphalt lot adjacent, he says affordable housing projects aren't being built because federal subsidies are gone, and that the university will issue bonds to finance the bulk of the costs.

But Keady is already looking beyond Davenport. He's excited about the possibility of transforming nearby parcels into a 200-room hotel, a conference center, and another office building to complement the former Registry building-that nine-story, $32 million environmental trouble spot N.U. recently bought for $17 million, after making sure its well-publicized air-quality problems were solved. Tellingly, the university renamed the building Renaissance Park.

"We're enhancing Lower Roxbury to be part of our community and vice versa," Keady says. "It's a community we're building, not just walls."

Northeastern is not alone in its community-building plans. "Many universities in fading cities become very active in finding means to revive their neighborhood," says Jane Holtz Kay. "It's in Northeastern's interest to have an attractive campus and in the neighborhood's interest to have amenities."

Trinity College knows what it means to hide behind walls-in its case, iron gates separating the high-priced liberal arts college from a steadily deteriorating neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut. After increasing concerns about student safety and failed attempts to subsidize faculty housing, Trinity decided to embrace, not ignore, its city setting. It's received national attention for a $175 million project to transform fifteen crumbling city blocks.

Trinity's vice president for development, Linda Campanella, waxes eloquent about the college's "moral obligation to be a good citizen" and "giving something back" to the community. Still, she acknowledges that the housing, education, and employment initiatives are self-interested. "Our front door is ugly and has turned people away. You can't be a first-class institution in a bad neighborhood."

Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York, agrees. With its rundown downtown location driving away students and faculty, the once-elite institution initiated a huge project, Metrotech, to build and renovate buildings around a four-acre, car-free, landscaped common. A thirty-two-story office tower and a hotel will replace parking lots and vacant buildings. Polytechnic, now running a $150 million fund-raising campaign to complete its campus, has invested $40 million while the private sector and the city of New York have invested more than $1 billion.

Warning: not everything works according to plan. In Milwaukee, Marquette University's Campus Circle project has been a community success but a financial headache. Marquette faced declining enrollments in an area where an astonishing one-quarter of residents surveyed said they'd been the victim of a serious crime in the previous year. So it drew $9 million from reserves, raised another $9 million, and guaranteed $30 million in bonds to create safe and affordable housing. The crime rate has since dropped significantly, but enrollment hasn't risen. The university is losing $2 million a year on bond interest and is selling off much of its rehabbed property.

Marquette's problems illustrate the danger of doing something to, not with, the neighborhood. To Joseph Warren, any long-term answer to neighborhood problems lies in partnership, not paternalism. As director of Northeastern's Community Opportunity Partnership Center, he foresees our business professors helping train Roxbury entrepreneurs to build manufacturing enterprises. Next month, Warren, management lecturer Samuel Pierce, associate dean of business administration James Molloy, and other Northeastern experts will present the Roxbury community with a variety of proposals designed to bring economic vitality to the area. If things go according to plan, the university will set up ten entrepreneurs, who will set up ten more, and on and on. Warren sees huge obstacles in building an "economic ladder of opportunity" in Roxbury, but also huge potential.

One traditional obstacle to development has been local opposition. To counter this, Warren has formed an advisory committee of forty local leaders. With them, the veteran development expert is as candid as he is with N.U. colleagues. His dreams for the Northeastern area are "mutual use-ery. They don't make demands; we don't dictate. The better the community looks, the richer it is-the better and richer we are."

Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the Gown."