Word: allston
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...Although Harvard has decided to slow down its plans for Allston, the university continues to buy property there, even when Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences reports that it must cut jobs and reshape programs in order to compensate for endowment losses. While Harvard demarcates a certain amount of money to go to the FAS budget and an entirely different sum of capital for real estate and property development, essentially all of the capital comes from the same pool: the endowment. Harvard should not continue to buy million-dollar properties that will stay empty in Allston...
...example, Harvard has allowed a new Finale—an expensive dessert shop with branches throughout metropolitan Boston—to open on its Allston properties. The irony could not be richer: The world’s wealthiest university is saying “let them eat cake” to a working-class neighborhood recently deprived of a grocery store in the name of progress and science...
...cost of construction is a part of the FAS budget, and thus the four omnipresent cranes that tower over the new Allston science complex will remain idle for the indefinite future. They are behemoths hanging over residents and a constant reminder of the project there, which, for residents like Jake, has recently taken a particularly insulting turn. Not only did Harvard rush through the approval process to build the center, but the university also blasted a huge hole into the ground, displacing the rat population of the entire area...
...Jake has too much on his plate to spend a lot of time worrying about insults. Instead, he passes me a flier that offers information to residents of Allston-Brighton on dealing with the escalating rat population. “There used to be bunny rabbits in our neighborhood,” Jake remembered wistfully. Now there are rats that rummage through the trash and spread disease...
...Just next door live residents whose voices, unlike Jake’s, do not get heard. They are the massive immigrant, non-English speaking population who have been left out of this process. Harvard did appoint an Allston-Brighton “task force,” but it filled it with better-off homeowners. Moreover, because meetings are almost exclusively in English, Allston’s poorest residents are left literally voiceless...