HUNG UP ON HOUSING

By Emara Saez with reporting conributions by Liani Astacio

Since the completion of Sophia Gordon Hall in 2006, Tufts University has not expanded its on-campus residence hall options, instead focusing on maximizing current residential spaces. However, with an ever-increasing student population, the failure of the Tufts administration to create new housing space has contributed to a worsening housing crisis that has had detrimental impacts on not only the student body, but also the surrounding Medford and Somerville communities.

The Class of 2025, the largest group of students ever to enroll at Tufts University, arrived on campus this Fall to face a slew of issues associated with housing. As incoming first-years were preparing to arrive on campus, the Office of Residential Life and Learning notified 100 students that they would be living at the Hyatt Place hotel in Medford Square, a 30 minute walk from campus. This type of crisis is not a new phenomenon.

In 2007, the ORLL turned to a similar solution due to a larger-than-expected incoming class. However, that year, the Hyatt was offered as an option to rising sophomores rather than an obligation for randomly selected incoming first-years. The program failed to launch in 2007 because of a lack of interest amongst students who wanted to remain connected to campus. 14 years later, these concerns have reappeared. Although first-year students currently living at the Hyatt have access to hotel accommodations and amenities, many feel that not enough is being done to facilitate interaction between them and the Medford campus.

In a written statement, Lizzie Strehle, a first-year living at the Hyatt, noted that her first few weeks as a Tufts student were especially challenging. “I had no close friends on campus, I never had an insight as to what was happening on the weekends,” she said, adding that it made her feel like she was “missing out at times.” Furthermore, according to Strehle, the housing situation for first-years at Hyatt “has stunted their social growth at Tufts.” Aside from assigning students to nearby hotels, Tufts has sought out alternate solutions to address the lack of housing, two of which are on campus. The first was their decision to purchase and convert some of Medford’s wood-frame houses to create Community Housing (CoHo) in 2018 and 2019. To address lack of housing for first-years specifically, they decided to convert West Hall into first-year housing for the 2021-2022 school year. However, this decision was announced in April 2021, hours before sophomores were supposed to submit their housing preferences for the upcoming school year and it left many of them scrambling to adjust their plans.

Throughout the implementation of these changes, Tufts has practiced “bed optimization,” the process of forcing two students into a single and forcing three students into a double, in an effort to fit as many students as possible into existing dorms. With this practice, Tufts maximizes current housing resources rather than constructing new residential spaces. In 2021, the ORLL’s ongoing project of bed optimization led to many first-years living in forced triples in rooms originally intended to be doubles, creating challenges that on-campus students feel are just as prevalent as difficulties for students placed in the Hyatt.

According to a first-year student living in a forced triple in Hodgdon, they were shocked after receiving their housing assignment. “I thought that [forced triples] were really rare at Tufts… I was utterly panicking about it a few days before movein, like maybe it will ruin my whole college experience,” they said.

Due to these types of housing assignments on campus, some students at the Hyatt prefer their living arrangement to forced triples. “Personally, I would rather be in the Hyatt than in a cramped dorm

that’s only used in cases of over-enrollment and has less than ideal conditions,” said Strehle.

Furthermore, because Tufts only guarantees housing for first- and second-years, many students have to rely on finding offcampus housing for their last two years. Though juniors and seniors are eligible to live in various on-campus buildings, many upperclassmen are pushed off-campus due to the lack of beds and the difficulty of acquiring a lottery number. As a result, students are forced to navigate the unpredictable housing market in the surrounding Medford and Somerville communities. This comes with a plethora of issues, such as dealing with landlords who often take advantage of students, lack of resources to help navigate the housing market, and uncomfortable living conditions.

For residents of Medford and Somerville, the on-campus housing scarcity contributes to gentrification that makes living in their own neighborhoods unaffordable. Dylan Oesch-Emmel, a senior living off-campus, is concerned with how Tufts students are encroaching on the neighborhoods of Medford. “We aren’t building relationships with our neighbors, and we’ve really seen the sprawl of students out into the community,” said Oesch-Emmel.

According to Medford City Councilor Zac Bears, Tufts’ failure to provide sufficient housing for students on campus “displace[s] residents who are currently living in an apartment if rents go up, and a landlord wants to bring in Tufts students.”

In addition to concerns about Tufts students contributing to the gentrification of the Medford and Somerville communities, students are also displeased with the uncomfortable living conditions, hidden costs, and landlord difficulties that come with off-campus housing. Leila Skinner, a senior currently living off-campus, said, “I sought out off-campus housing mostly because it was the norm for what my friends and peers were doing. We’ve had some slight issues with some parts of the housing like our fire alarms going off—and our landlord won’t change them—and some issues with flies.” She also elaborated on the financial burden the housing market puts on college students. “For me, finding the money for the initial down payment and security deposit was a hefty cost,” she said.

For students dealing with off-campus housing issues, Josh Hartman, senior director of the ORLL, said they have a housing website that has support resources and listings in an email to the Tufts Observer. The website also has resources regarding tenant rights, but according to current upperclassmen, they are either unaware of these resources or feel that they are not helpful. “I would have appreciated it if Tufts had provided more resources or cohesive mechanisms for housing to be passed down and if Tufts didn’t have to push students off campus in the way that they do,” said Skinner.

Though Skinner has dealt with undesirable conditions at her off-campus house, she was still fortunate to know someone with connections to her landlord to obtain housing near campus. Because underclassmen rely on upperclassmen to pass on their lease once they have graduated, many students who entered Tufts after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic do not have the same good fortune. Given the remote nature of classes and student organizations, underclassmen have had less opportunities to interact with their upperclassmen peers, making the housing process especially hard for members of the classes of 2023 and 2024. According to Priscilla Mach, a sophomore,

the loss of connection is detrimental. “We haven’t had time to get close to the upperclassmen that could pass us their lease, and most of the people we know our age who have been successful either have a realtor or got lucky by passing a paper sign on a lamppost,” she said.

A significant reason for the housing crisis—including shortage of beds and offcampus housing itself—is that the size of incoming classes continues to increase. In fall 2018, James Glaser, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, announced that the university was planning to expand enrollment over the following years. Since Glaser’s announcement, the university has added 450 beds to campus, while the undergraduate population has swelled to 6,114 by the fall of 2020.

In an email to the Observer, Patrick Collins, executive director of media relations, explained that the university has added “[these 450] beds to campus over the last 5 years through bed optimization, major renovations, and CoHo,” adding that Tufts continues to “look for opportunities to add more beds through these types of projects, such as 114 Professors Row and 123 Packard Ave,” which will add another 50 beds when completed next summer.

However, despite the previous and planned bed increases, the ORLL has consistently heard complaints from students who are unable to obtain campus housing for their junior and senior years. According to Hartman, “The remaining bed spaces are often 300-400 less than our demand from juniors and seniors, and in that situation, those 300-400 folks are placed on a wait- list.” This year, those students did not receive housing. “Due to the larger than expected incoming class

and a lower than expected ‘melt’ among continuing students, we were not able to accommodate them,” Hartman said. “Melt” refers to the number of students accepted by the university that do not matriculate in the fall. Due to students’ decision to return from their gap years and Tufts’ decision to go test-optional for the fall 2020 college application cycle, the projected melt was much lower than the actual number, which contributed to the large size of the class of 2025.

Furthermore, with the expansion of the Green Line into Medford expected to be complete in 2022, the desirability of the area surrounding Tufts’ campus is likely to increase, prompting a further rise in rent for off-campus housing. Nyomi White, a Medford resident, sees the expansion as a possible “factor in raising [rent] prices because there’s going to be more access [to Boston].” The combination of the overflow of Tufts students into the surrounding housing market in conjunction with the expanding Green Line will likely exacerbate gentrification and rising rent costs in the greater Medford and Somerville area. According to Oesch-Emmel, “The inflation of rent is crazy and not sustainable for members of the community.” He added, “We are not really members of the [Medford] community, yet we are renting property.” White, who lives in an apartment advertised as student housing, has seen the price of their rent increase since moving to the area last year: “[My rent is] $2300 split between three people. That’s what we started on, and then they just added $150 to our rent for the next nine months. Having a nine month rent period and having it go up $150 every nine months is not going to be ideal.”

Furthermore, the changes brought by the expansion of the Green Line could complicate housing in the future for incoming students. Cheyanne Atole, a firstyear, expressed concern that the expansion of the Green Line and increasing competition in the surrounding market will affect the housing prospects of underclassmen in the future. “I’m really worried about my housing for the next few years,” said Atole. Students are not the only ones concerned with how the expansion will impact living options. “[The Green Line extension] really could be an issue for students, for Medford residents—really everyone who is looking for affordable housing in the neighborhood,” said Bears.

If Tufts finds a permanent solution to the housing crisis, it would alleviate the concerns of both parties. “Having the college experience be combined with the campus [by creating on-campus housing] is better for the future of Tufts, as that is going to ease relationships with Medford [and Somerville] residents,” said Oesch-Emmel.

Though students are quick to point out the tense relationship that off-campus housing creates for Medford and Somerville with Tufts as an institution, the administration believes Tufts has a close-knit relationship with its host communities. Rocco DiRico, executive director of government and community relations, said in an email that “Tufts works very closely with our host communities on a variety of issues, including housing, and we support our communities in many ways. Tufts University pays more than a million dollars a year in property taxes and more than 1.4 million dollars in PILOT payments each year,” referring to the “payment in lieu of taxation,” or tax-exemption program, between Tufts and the cities of Medford and Somerville. “Tufts also provides more than 12 million dollars in community benefits to our host communities each year,” DiRico stated.

However, the PILOT program does not directly address the immediate concerns of some Medford and Somerville residents. Edward Beuchert, a West Somerville Neighborhood Association member, drew attention to how Tufts students who are forced to find housing—and accept local landlord’s costly demands—in residential neighborhoods cause the price of rent and property taxes to increase. As Beuchert stated, the high profitability of renting housing to students causes the value of properties to rise, which benefits landlords but harms local community residents. “One reasonable, easy number to use for the annual rent around here for students is $10,000. And [landlords are] able to look at that and say, ‘Well, I can get $120,000 a year in revenue from that.’ And that ends up bidding up the prices of the houses near Tufts to what’s a very bad level,” said Beuchert.

All of these compounding elements of the housing crisis beg the question: If the situation is so dire, what can be done to improve the housing situation on campus? Oesch-Emmel feels that the way to fix the solution, “is [by simply] having more oncampus housing.”

Student advocacy for more on-campus housing was previously led by Tufts Housing League, a student organization specifically created for this purpose. However, since the dissolution of THL in 2019 due to issues of sexual assault and bystander violence, an organized group dedicated to addressing housing issues on campus has not existed.

One of THL’s main demands when they existed was for Tufts to build a new dorm. In late April of 2021, Tufts secured $250 million in bonds which, among a slew of other projects, is intended to be used for the construction of a high density, on-campus residence hall for students on the Medford and Somerville campus. According to Collins, the construction of the residence hall is “part of the university’s efforts to increase the percentage of students living on campus, which is currently in the high 60 percent range.”

In regards to the timeline, Collins explained that “[the] work is ongoing.” Specifically, he noted that the university is “looking at potential locations, the ideal number of residents, the style of units, amenities, and other requirements, all of which will drive the project’s projected cost and dictate potential timelines.”

In an effort to better understand Tufts future expansions, the cities of Medford and Somerville requested that Tufts give them an institutional master plan for future building endeavors. However, this request has been stalled at the State House for a few years. According to Bears, Tufts “students and the community have a lot of shared interests and can work together to hold Tufts accountable to being a responsible partner and responsible institution in our community,” especially when it comes to transparency regarding Tufts’ institutional master plan of future building endeavors. “This is not about Medford versus the students…it would be great if Tufts would actually advocate for institutional master plan legislation and [make] it clear that they want Medford to know what they’re doing,” he added.

In response to sharing future plans with the Medford and Somerville communities, Collins said, “Any new project that the University proposes must go through a rigorous review by the appropriate building department, elected officials and our neighbors. For these reasons, Tufts University opposes any proposal that would weaken our ability to make sound campus planning decisions to carry out our mission,” he said. Still, he mentioned the importance of the community, saying, “Soliciting feedback from our neighbors is an important part of any project that we develop at Tufts.”

As concerns surrounding transparency rise, Tufts continues to work on plans for the new residence hall. Although building one dorm will address student concerns and alleviate some of the housing insecurity created by the ever-increasing size of incoming classes, its construction could also take several years. For current students, there is no time to wait.

“No student can function without a room—Tufts will not educate a single addition to the student body if it is not also willing to house them. Housing students on campus should be the priority, not just accepting them,” said first-year Edward Hans.

For years, Tufts has failed to provide large-scale housing solutions, which has led to the current crisis. Shane Woolley (A‘19), a former member of THL, expressed his frustration with this ongoing disregard. “The administration still needs to be pushed to prioritize a sustainable plan for student housing. In a decadeslong quest for elite university status, Tufts has been putting off needed investments in student quality-of-life infrastructure for a long time,” he said in a written statement. His concerns and desires to see improvement are echoed by current students. “Housing should be more of an [active] priority for Tufts. The university cannot afford to run the risk of having a single houseless student so long as they claim to operate in the interest of anything worthwhile,” said Hans.