Anti-institutional expansion group seeks more say
By Julie Masis/Correspondent
Thursday, February 15, 2007 - Updated: 04:35 PM EST

Sixteen people attended a three-hour Allston-Brighton Community Planning Initiative meeting at the Allston-Brighton Community Development Corporation office Tuesday night. The group has formed because these residents hope to have more control over St. Elizabeth’s Hospital’s, Harvard’s and Boston College’s expansion plans into their neighborhood.
The main goal of the meeting was to brainstorm ideas on how to best strengthen residents’ voices to keep these proposed developments out of the neighborhood.

Many residents reiterated concerns about the effect the projects, including Harvard University’s plan to construct a new 4 million-square-foot Allston campus in the next 20 years, would have on the price of homes in the neighborhood, and the quality of life for families.

“They’re buying up residential property as we speak,” said resident Shirley Kressel, who attends Boston Redevelopment Authority meetings regularly. “Harvard now is the only market; nobody else is going to buy housing in this neighborhood, no one else will buy because everyone knows this is the end of the neighborhood.”

Kressel said that although Harvard is paying top dollar for the houses it’s purchasing now, in the future it will pay “almost nothing” because no one else will want to buy houses in the neighborhood.

An Allston-Brighton resident who did not want his name used was also concerned about how university campus expansions affect single-family homeowners:

“Families are always moving out. Who is moving in — renters,” he said. “You need families here, and families don’t want to stay where the students are all living, because of noise, because of parking.”

Other residents had similar concerns about Boston College’s expansion plan, which includes a new student center, relocating baseball and softball fields, and using the property along Commonwealth Avenue and Lake Street that the college purchased from the archdiocese.

“If Boston College continues to buy up houses, you could be living on campus,” warned committee co-chairman Theresa Hynes, addressing committee member Diane Kline.

Residents also worry that the emergency room that St. Elizabeth Hospital plans to build will take away green space from the neighborhood, and that in the end city taxpayers will end up picking up some of the costs for the universities’ and the hospital’s expansions.

Ideas for strengthening residents’ voices as these projects proceeds included circulating BRA meeting agendas by e-mail; recruiting large numbers of concerned and informed residents to attend the city meetings where decisions are made; staying in contact with city politicians and the press; and working together with groups in other neighborhoods.

“Remember, the city can stop any of these institutions in its tracks. [But] the only way the city will do that is if the people scream,” said Charlie Vasiliades, the vice president of the Brighton-Allston Historical Society.

Eugene Benson, a member of a Roxbury-based organization called Alternatives for Community and the Environment, urged Allston-Brighton residents to join forces with other Boston neighborhood groups to support a City Council petition to create a separate planning department that would give people who live in the neighborhoods more say, while taking the planning function out of the BRA.

“We just think there has to be a citywide solution, because what’s happening in your neighborhood is actually happening in a lot of neighborhoods around the city,” Benson said, inviting people to attend the next meeting of a group called “Whose Boston Is it?”, scheduled to take place on March 1 at 5:30 p.m. in a to-be-determined location in Chinatown.

“It’s going to take a lot of support from the entire city to make this happen because there’ll be a lot of powerful forces against it [the proposal to take the planning function out of the BRA], including the mayor,” he said.