Excellent. The turnpike should be covered as much as possible. No reason to have a pit through the city.

But they can't pay their grad students a living wage.

It’s such a mystery why BU tuition is 60k, we may never know why.

Union is 100% going to happen. Too much support and unity being shown for them to divide the grad workers in the long run.

MAKE THEM PAY THEIR PROPERTY TAXES !

I'm this person. I got offered a more attractive offer from BU than other schools that accepted me. But I have to say the rate is fairly standardized for research and TA work. It's not required to do, but most of us do it voluntarily.

You definitely need a "cost of living" scholarship or a loan to get by.

I grew up in Mass and remember when you could find a 2 bedroom near Davis Sq or Alston for $1200. You can live on campus and generally it's covered in the Fin Aid package. Or just have too many roommates off campus.

In the meantime the MED campus is in desperate need of renovation of the instructional buildings. Classrooms are so tight that department conference rooms are being used for classrooms. But BU keeps saying no to MED and puts all the emphasis on Comm Ave.

This exactly

The answer is obvious: international students that will gladly overpay to attend. Same goes for Northeastern.

Yeah the parcels they outline look like really good spots to cap. You could really expand the pedestrian/cycling/transit access with a few caps and new street connections.

Would be cool if the entire turnpike could be capped from BU to Mass Ave. I know there's already at least one project going on around Mass Ave, so who knows... we might someday have some improved pedestrian access throughout that corridor.

Thank God they get to not pay taxes or else they would be broke.

That’s been the plan for while. Glad to see it happening. http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/f7188bb6-c25e-4e8d-86b1-b3244fa49762

And Harvard, and Northeastern, and Suffolk, and MIT, and Berkley, and Emerson, etc etc

They've been doing test pits/probes on the turnpike from downtown through Newton all year, it's only a matter of time before they start building over the pike anyway.

That’s a sizable parking lot they’re going to be removing at 250 Bay State where most of the staff/faculty in the CAS building park.

It’s going to be pretty rough for some people to commute to BU when that’s gone.

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Law students don’t do research that furthers their university. Grad students participate in research that often is funded by outside sources. They bring the university profit so they themselves should get their wage like any employee for doing so.

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Because they teach full courses and work so much for BU. From research labor to TAing to their teaching commitments. LAW students don’t have those commitments.

I’m so fucking pissed about the CAS parking lot! That lot serves CAS, Admissions, LAW, and so many of the surrounding buildings. And what about IT support staff? Where should they park their department vehicles? You want them to be able to drive a TV down to your events don’t you BU? Well they need to be able to quickly roll that out of the office in CAS and into the van with minimal outside exposure! Because rain/snow + a/v = broken equipment.

11 story building? Cool! Make the first 2 floors parking!!!

The next closest parking lots are either 2 long blocks away or across Comm Ave. Screw anyone in need of accessible parking I guess! They might still have ADA spot at other lots but now they have to walk/roll across Comm Ave rather than a mere 5 ft from the CAS doors???

You can’t have faculty to teach or staff to support your operations if you don’t give them a place to park!! And before anyone says boohoo take the T, there are a number of employees who live outside the MBTA’s service area and the commuter rail is cost prohibitive. And we all complain about the T’s reliability anyway so we know it’s not reliable.

Right, but you can say the same thing for high level grad research. Plus grad research gets funding.

80*

Harvard and MIT do pay millions to the city of Cambridge already. It's why Harvard wants to move to Boston as they won't make it pay

Are you saying we have a BIG problem and we should DIG to fix it? There's no way this can go tits up.

So instead of asking why should grad student researchers get paid because law students done, you should ask why don’t law students get paid for their work that profits their school?

I’m sure paying for all faculty and staff to take commuter rail would cost way less than two stories of parking garage. The BPDA could leverage BU to contribute to improving public transit in their vicinity as part of the deal to allow this development to happen, as it will attract more people to the area.

BU wants all staff working on campus at least 3 days a week, but the campus sucks to commute to from pretty much all directions and they've made it impossible to get parking. Not sure about other areas of staffing, but I know one major administrative dept that is having serious trouble recruiting because no one wants the commute.

Really in this case it would be more like the Big Coverup, which is certainly a name that does not imply anything negative.

Such weird priorities. Knocking down the COM building (when BU has one of the top 3 COM schools in the country) and replacing with a research facility, with no mention of where COM classes will go.

Warren was in need of a major overhaul 16 years ago so I can only imagine how shitty it is at this point. And I'm all for them building additional dorms to bring more students on campus. But the proliferation of luxury dorms that essentially segregate students with and without money is really ugly. And BU would have an easier time housing all students on campus (and provide a better education overall) if they just reduced the undergrad student head count from the completely insane 18k. What a mess.

That would be nice. If BU covered more of the ridiculously high commuter cost and daily parking at commuter stations, I would consider it.

The other kicker is there’s a limit on pretax deductions for transit. So no limit on how much BU pays but for the employee there’s a limit on how much your deduction for the pass and MBTA parking can be pretax.

I still think BU needs some sort of parking in this area. This parking lot is right next to Admissions. I know from back when I had my first campus tour and even during orientation I was so lost and didn’t know the lay of the land. If prospective families had to park several blocks from Admissions, I can see that being a hassle and putting a stain on their first impression.

They literally already are lol

Same for tufts. It was 70k when I started in 2018. I just graduated paying 84k and it’s only up from here lol

I guess all those COVID layoffs were really necessary…

TIL Boston colleges don’t have to pay taxes and that Harvard wants to break up with Cambridge.

Yeah they got billions for upgrades but not enough to stop gouging their students with debt.

Harvard wants to move to Boston? How’d they do that? Opening up a separate campus and “domiciling” there?

Harvard owns more real estate in Allston than in Cambridge.

Take a look at Harvard’s plan for developing that land.

They’re already doing it.

They’ll never give up the Cambridge campuses for undergraduates but the majority of future expansion will take place on the other side of the river.

Brought to you by predatory student loans and grossly overinflated tuition!

Law students write journal articles that become “decisive” for future SCOTUS cases?

Would love to see three of those if you can provide any.

Law students do edit a lot of shit that professors write for journals…but the student written notes aren’t really changing the world or advancing the profession in any meaningful way.

You know the MED school just got a $100 million dollar donation right?

It’s fine to say this, but YSK that BU and most other area institutions participate in the Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT) program, which sees them contributing directly to the community rather than pay certain taxes.

Boston 2022 PILOT Summary

A link to the numbers at the bottom of the page— BU contributes 80% of the city’s ask, which is above the average. And it’s worth noting that under certain criteria some institutional property IS taxable, and schools pay out for that.

https://i.imgur.com/fJxO9gW.jpg

Yeah I took my daughter on a tour of BU. This photo shows one of many smoke detectors in the dorms. They were all like this.

That’s not true as far as new building space. There’s ongoing design conversations centered on a new building specifically for instruction where a parking lot currently sits.

The issue as some might be able to imagine is that it’s very costly to acquire buildings in the south end. And even more expensive to renovate spaces with labs.

I believe the IMP that the article refers to references a potential new COM building next to the gas station at armory.

There’s also a renovation listed for Warren.

What are we looking at here?

In terms of IMPs, if only a potential new building is laid out in this plan it's unlikely to happen in the next 10 years. There will almost certainly be a long period of displacement for the school.

The Warren renovation is really the only sensible thing.

Smoke detector in the BU dorms that has its protective cover still on it. The cover protects the device from harm during installation but must be removed to detect smoke. The two floors we toured were all like this.

It doesn't mean that the institution gets access to 100 million right away - generally, they get access to whatever the interest is on that money yearly which is then divided up across the spending priorities that the donor specified (endowing professors, scholarship aid, research, etc) so that the money is sustainable and keeps giving over time.

Got that right.

Because they work. In many instances grad students are considered employees of their university.

Isn’t MED school separate endowment and separate administrative setup?

But why?

They pay good jobs. Also universities pay for their own services including police. They aren’t removing taxable property at the moment.

$50 million of that goes to scholarships for students and $25 million for endowed professorships. The remaining $25 million will “support research and teaching.”

I doubt that would cover a single new building with the current cost of construction. Even if it did, there is a backlog of existing spaces that need technology, HVAC, and furnishing upgrades.

Make sure to keep charging student more and more money and have less and less professors teaching!

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Brutalist architecture and yes it sticks like a sore thumb

And why isn’t there a T stop near there…

>You could really expand the pedestrian/cycling/transit access with a few caps and new street connections.

Sorry, best I can do is 3 banks and a Tatte.

That Chinese foreign student money be rolling in...

I wish I wish I wish

COM doesn’t bring in DOD money.

Except most of that isn't cash. And they get to value their contributions to the community.

Cold hard cash is better.

Lower Allston would like a word. And Longwood. And like thirty percent of cambridge.

Drop a line to the FD?

Well you might be right about that. Though this is the government where, as folks here will readily point out, funding allocation doesn't always seem to get fed back in to supporting that which generated the revenue. (The MBTA being saddled with Big Dig debt isn't a direct example, but it sure rhymes.)

Sure the institutions will tend to focus their community benefit on things that benefit them as well, but it seems to me that the city is incentivized to have the universities succeed (and to self-determine the best ways to do so).

Fair, I wish that Universities would contribute more cash, though in Boston the Pilot amounts aren't enormous and I know they'd be a burden for smaller schools. I lived in Lower Allston near all the Harvard stuff and even though Harvard claims to have things for Allston and Boston residents, it was never clear or communicated how I could access the classes, or other community benefits they claimed.