Who’s Got the ’View?

A shining beacon of science. A world-class crossroads of commerce and academics. A spankin’ new hub for all things Harvard. All of it surrounding what is now no more than a barren intersection known as “Barry’s Corner,” where University planners hope to basically relocate Harvard Square someday. Such is the sweeping vision for the Allston campus unfolding before our eyes.

There’s just one problem: the hundreds of families already living there.

The Charlesview Apartments are a gritty cluster of concrete rising in the shadow of the brick walls of the Business School and the neighborhood’s long-time neglect. Charlesview is not exactly a pretty sight. But for many of its low-income tenants, it’s all that they’ve got.

Whether or not students care enough to pay attention to the machinations of our university in the communities of others, one day these tenants will either be our next-door neighbors—or faceless families we’ve just displaced from their homes. And many of them are saying they’re not willing to just pack up and go somewhere else at Harvard’s bidding.

Take Bill, who put down his groceries to speak to me on a snowy morning outside Charlesview this weekend. He chose to be identified only by his first name. Bill was born and bred in the apartments and has lived there his entire life. His mother was born on the site, too, long before the complex went up in its present form in the late 60s.

“I hope they don’t kick us out,” Bill told me. “They have more money than God, so they act like they can do whatever they want.” Yet Bill sees a different use for a fraction of that money when Harvard comes to Allston: “The place does need fixing, that’s for sure.”

In fact, Charlesview has needed fixing for decades, with mold and leaks abounding through the halls and walls and the building’s owners refusing to take action. Though the lowest-income tenants get federal housing subsidies, many have seen their rents driven up by even the smallest of renovations.

A little commitment from their new neighbors, with a tiny fraction of the billions we’ve already set aside for Allston development, could make all the difference.

But Harvard doesn’t seem to want to renovate Charlesview as it takes over the surrounding blocks. Instead, the University pushes to tear down the apartments and relocate their residents somewhere way out of sight of the future campus. One tenant informed me that she and her neighbors have received multiple phone calls in a single week pressuring them to sell.

For new homes, tenants have been offered only an old trucking depot and a dangerous intersection at Soldiers’ Field Road, neither of which provides easy access to public transportation so people can get to work. The University was expected to make a nicer offer this September, but our much-touted Allston Campus Task Force failed to do anything of the sort.

But for all the talk of money and location, lifetime tenants of Charlesview have two things that can’t be quantified in cost-benefit analysis: pride, and long memories.

Some first learned what it was like to be kicked out of their homes 40 years ago, when the Boston Redevelopment Authority seized dozens of Charlesview homes under eminent domain with the plan to replace them with luxury condos. After massive civil disobedience, the Authority was forced to go with the affordable housing complex instead.

As for affordable housing, Harvard has made a solid start of contributing to the larger community, investing millions in a housing project in south Allston and more in other area programs. But Harvard can’t have its way with the residents of Charlesview by throwing money at the neighborhood. It’s time to actually start respecting what these people want.

Tenants are demanding the right to negotiate directly with Harvard over the future of their homes. This comes from years of being kept in the backseat as the building’s owners schmoozed with Harvard planners and kept the residents in the dark.

In October, a tenants’ association even filed a suit with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development charging that they’d been “prevented from participating substantially and meaningfully” in the decision-making process.

The proposal to include all community members in the Charlesview decision deserves the unconditional support of the student body. Any expansion that fails to respect tenants’ rights, their voices, and their desires will not only demolish one of Allston’s last bastions of affordable housing, but will pit town against gown before the first brick of this campus-to-be is even laid.

If tenants want a new apartment complex, give them one that’s better built and just as well placed, such as on the land Harvard owns behind the Honan-Allston Library. If tenants want to stay, then let them stay—and, like self-respecting neighbors, help them renovate so that we all have something to be proud of together in Allston.

As you look up at the Charlesview Apartments on a snowy day, there’s a moment when the jagged concrete edges fade away, and all you can see are the windows of neighbors, bright with holiday green and season’s greetings and simple joys found amid adversity.

This is what home looks like to hundreds of lower-income families in Allston. And that home deserves pride of place as Harvard builds its own home next door.



Michael Gould-Wartofsky ’07 is a government concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.