As Boston’s Students Face Annual Housing Crunch, Universities Pursue New Solutions

As droves of students have struggled with high U-Haul prices and getting trucks stuck on Storrow Drive as they moved in for the fall semester over the last week, educational institutions are trying to solve the challenge of housing them. 

Every year, tens of thousands of students move to Boston to study at the 64 colleges and universities in the metro area. But many of these institutions don’t have nearly enough dorms for their students, leading them to move into off-campus apartments and add pressure to the city’s housing crunch.

Undergraduate enrollment in Boston increased 2.6% from 2022 to 2023, and 43% of students – totaling 70,000 people – lived in off-campus housing last year, according to Boston's Student Housing report. Meanwhile, Boston's apartment vacancy rate is less than 1%, with the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom unit costing $2,676, according to Boston Pads Real-Time Rental Data.

City and state leaders have called on universities to help alleviate the housing shortage. In the 12 months since last year’s move-in week, a series of new proposals have moved forward for universities looking to build more housing — and pursuing creative methods to do so.

Universities are increasingly partnering with private developers and looking to convert offices and hotels to student housing. Some real estate players say the city should look at helping multiple universities share buildings. 

"I think the city should encourage institutions to talk to each other," said Nixon Peabody partner Jennifer Schultz, who is working with Wentworth Institute of Technology on their 10-year institutional master plan. "You live in a very dense urban area that has one of the worst areas of housing crisis in the city."

Wentworth earlier this year unveiled plans to add roughly 1,400 beds across three residence halls as part of its 10-year plan. The plan would include a 111K SF, 217-bed residence hall, a 267K SF, 672-bed residence hall and a 13-story, 522-bed residence hall.

Laura Brink Pisinski, vice president of university real estate development and facilities management at Simmons University, said that of the school's 1,700 students, 1,000 of them live on campus with 700 commuting from nearby neighborhoods.

She said that bigger, neighboring universities like Boston University and Northeastern University, have requested housing help from them.

"We get requests almost every year," Pisinski said. "[They ask], 'Do you have any housing available?' Sometimes we're able to accommodate that in our dorms, and sometimes we're not."

In previous years, some universities have relied on putting students in local hotels and signing master leases with apartment buildings.

This year, institutions have moved forward with longer-term proposals to convert buildings from other uses into student dorms.

In June, Suffolk University acquired an 11-story, 79K SF office building on Tremont St. in Downtown Boston for $30M, The Boston Globe reported. The deal comes after the university received a record number of undergraduate applications this year and in the past three years.

The university's president, Marisa Kelly, said in a memo to staff that the building could be able to accommodate 260 to 290 student beds if approved to be converted to housing, according to the Globe. The university plans to begin construction early next year in time for the fall of 2026.

Kelly said the conversion would also help the city by bringing more students to on-campus rather than off-campus housing. The university won't be participating in the city's pilot program for office-to-residential conversions since university-owned student housing is property tax-exempt.

Suffolk has been slowly adding new housing to its campus for years, with the most recent project in 2019 when the institution bought the former Ames Hotel on Tremont Street.

In January, Northeastern University received approval to renovate the south tower of the Sheraton Boston Hotel in the Back Bay to bring on 856 student housing beds, Boston.com reported. The project would also include 18K SF of student amenity space.

Schultz said these types of partnerships have attracted new developers to work with universities.

"What does seem to be a frothy market right now with real opportunity is the [public-private] market," Schultz said. "An institution has the need on its campus but doesn't want to float the bond to pay for it, so they find a private developer, funder, [general contractor], or joint venture to come forward and do it." 

These P3 partnerships, in which universities team up with private developers to bring forth new projects, have become more common. Prominent universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Northeastern have taken this path to make the development process easier for them.

Northeastern has also partnered with private developer American Campus Communities to bring on a 23-story student housing tower at 840 Columbus Ave. near its main campus. The project received approval in March. 

ACC has worked with Northeastern in the past on the LightView Apartments, an 825-bed dorm building that opened in the fall of 2019. The student housing developer has also worked with MIT to bring on a 950-bed graduate student housing building with the project scheduled to deliver this fall.

Simmons has also launched a partnership with Skanska to build a 1.7M SF mixed-use project on the institution's campus.

Skanska was selected to be a partner on the project in November 2021 and would take over the university's ground lease for its campus in the Longwood Medical Area, creating additional housing between 50 to 80 beds on campus. The project also includes over 380 market-rate and affordable housing units across five buildings that will be delivered in phases over the next 10 years.

"We knew that we needed to have slightly more housing," Pisinski said. "We knew that we wanted to consolidate our two campuses."

Another creative solution Schultz highlighted is the concept of private dormitory development, which would consist of students from different universities and colleges sharing space under a privately managed building. But she said this isn’t something that city officials have wanted and therefore have mostly prevented.

"There have been attempts made in Boston for private dormitories," Schultz said. "It's a head-scratcher to me and to many others as to why the city is so dead set against this concept of private dorms. I think it's something that really needs to be advised."

In 2016, Cabot Cabot & Forbes and Atlanta-based Peak Campus proposed a 680-unit privately owned and operated graduate student housing project at St. Gabriel's Monastery in Brighton, the Boston Herald reported. The project fell through and the developer pivoted to market-rate multifamily development.

Two years later, London-based Scape announced its $1B launch into the U.S. with its headquarters in Boston. The developer, which specializes in student housing, proposed several projects that fell through, including a 533-bed dorm building on Boylston Street in the Fenway.

Pisinski said the future will come with a lot of collaboration from nearby colleges to help house students. She said this is already being seen with the Colleges of the Fenway, a group of five neighboring colleges in the area.

"I think what colleges are really going to need to do is think about getting creative," she said. "There's plenty of other colleges that could be thinking about doing something together as it relates to student housing because I don't think that it's necessarily going to be the future that each college has its own housing."