Harvard Measures Its Housing Impact

The Harvard Planning Office has completed a new survey of the University's direct impact on Cambridge housing. The survey's conclusion: the impact is somewhat less than critics have charged.

The principal new finding the survey makes is that Harvard students, faculty, and employees living off-campus last year occupied 3504 units of Cambridge housing, some-ten-per cent of the City's total of approximately 35,000 residential units. Cambridge has been suffering an acute housing shortage in recent years.

Last spring, the Design School's Expansion Committee-one of the chief critics of Harvard housing policies-had estimated that about 4600 Cambridge housing units were taken up by Harvard personnel. This estimate prompted the Planning Office survey.

The 1100-unit difference between the two figures is mostly due to different calculations of the amount of "doubling-up" (several students living in the same unit). The Design School group used a formula to estimate this, while the Planning Office mapped addresses of off-campus Harvard personnel.

If the office found, for example, more Harvard students living at an address than the known number of housing units there, it did not count the excess students.

Other findings of the Planning Office survey are:

The number of Harvard personnel living off-campus in Cambridge rose from 5120 in 1958 to 6858 last year, with most of the increase at the graduate student level.

The University demolished 185 units of residential housing in Cambridge during the last decade, and built 1059 dormitory units during the same period.

Harvard now owns 451 apartment units in Cambridge, as compared to 64 in 1958. Harvard personnel occupy 164 of these units, and non-Harvard tenants take up 287.

Both University Planning Officer Harold L. Goyette and a spokesman for the Design School group said the new survey does not change their respective views of how much Harvard should do to ease local housing shortages. "I have never accepted the premise that one should accept as valid these overall targets of 4000 or 5000 units. One should only acknowledge the housing problem and continue to work on it," Goyette said.

Design School student Nancy Slavin said, "It is less but it's still quite a hunk. We're glad he did this work. There's very little concrete data on housing-that's one of the big problems."

During last April's crisis, the Design School group called upon the University to build 3000 new housing units in Cambridge. Two weeks ago, Harvard announced plans to construct 389 housing units exclusively for the use of non-Harvard residents of Cambridge. Plans for another 600 to 700 units-most of which will probably be for Harvard personnel-are currently being developed.