On My Block: What It’s Like Living in Harvard’s Backyard

Long before Allston-Brighton became nice, my best friends and I would take long walks around the neighborhood for fun. There was nowhere to go and not much to see except for the Tedeschi’s on the corner of Market and Faneuil and McKinney Field just a block and a half down the street. It became something of a tradition for us: Every day after school, we’d play two-hand-touch in our khaki pants and dress shoes, buy Little Debbie Honey Buns in obscene quantities, and roam around our simple, unpretentious neighborhood. Then came New Balance. And then the Lantera. The Aberdeen. The Saybrook. Harvard.

It’s no secret that Harvard’s property development is contributing to the rapid gentrification of Allston-Brighton. The University owns about one-third of Allston, which houses Harvard Business School, Harvard’s athletic facilities, and the new Science and Engineering Complex. Still pending state approval are the Enterprise Research Campus on Western Avenue and the development of the old Beacon Park Rail Yard by the Massachusetts Turnpike. Private developers, in anticipation of Harvard’s expansion into Allston-Brighton, have been eager to capitalize on what Boston officials say is the biggest building boom in the city’s history.

But what about the people who actually live here? While Boston officials and real estate developers are busy putting Allston-Brighton on the map, we have been struggling to pay rent in a time of pandemic and racial reckoning. Our diverse community, faced with mounting housing insecurity and social tension, has become a breeding ground for hate.

With land values increasing and new luxury apartment buildings popping up every few months, the average rent in Allston-Brighton for a non-luxury two-bedroom apartment has increased by more than 38 percent over the last five years, from $1,807 in 2016 to $2,500 in 2021. And as rent goes up, people get pushed out. It is no coincidence that Boston is ranked the third-most “intensely gentrified” city in the United States and that Massachusetts ranks first in the growth of family homelessness.

Consider, too, that Allston-Brighton’s population is made up of 30 percent people of color, with immigrants from every corner of the globe. These factors — combined with increased media coverage of anti-black police brutality in other major American cities and President Trump’s insinuations about China’s role in the Covid-19 pandemic — coincide with the City of Boston recording an all-time high of 355 hate incidents in 2020.

During the pandemic, my two best friends and I settled back into our old tradition of walking around the neighborhood after nearly five years of being too busy to hang out regularly. Only this time, there were a lot of places to go and a lot of things to see. At the top of our list were the new restaurants in Allston-Brighton, where everybody knows you can find the best Korean food in all of Boston. I remember waiting with my friends to pick up our takeout dinner from Coreanos, when a middle-aged white man, sitting on a nearby bench with tattered clothes and a knapsack, interrupted our conversation and asked, “Are you guys from China?” The only thing I could bring myself to say was no. It wasn’t a lie either — two of us were Filipino and the other was Chinese American, born right here in Allston-Brighton. “Oh, you guys are from here?” We nodded. He left us alone after that. I couldn’t help but think that we had just barely escaped something more serious.

On another night, my two friends and I were coming back from dinner on Harvard Avenue when an elderly white man, sitting on a bench with a flushed face and bottles at his feet, asked for the time before narrowing his eyes and pointing at us, demanding to know if we were Chinese. My friend and I both responded that we were Filipino. I closed my eyes in anticipation of my other friend’s response: “I’m Vietnamese, man,” he said, his voice breaking at the lie. There was a lump in the back of my throat. We walked in silence for several blocks afterwards. I still wonder what would have happened if he had told the truth.

The crux of the matter is this: If you take an ethnically diverse neighborhood whose residents are being forced out of their homes and onto the streets and you infuse it with hateful sentiment, you get a community fractured along race and class lines.

The totality of our experience tends to get overlooked when it comes to discussions about gentrification in Allston-Brighton. There is far more at stake here than winning state approval for development projects and rising property values — we’re hurting, and we need to find a way to heal. It’s time for Harvard to start paying attention to what its expansion is doing to the Allston-Brighton community.

Francis Immanuel N. Puente ‘24, a Crimson Editorial editor, is an English concentrator in Adams House.