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[Director of Planning, Emeritus Bob Simha offers a brief history of housing decisions at the Institute and suggests a potential future.]
In 1922, just a few years after MIT moved to its new home in Cambridge, a plaintive letter appeared in Technology Review. The letter, from a young instructor, urged that the Institute provide housing accommodations that would enable young members of the teaching staff to live near the new MIT in order to enjoy the benefits of social acquaintance as well as intellectual camaraderie.
When Karl Compton came to lead MIT in the 1930s, his experience at Princeton, where housing for faculty and graduate students played an important part in the life of that academic community, gave him a sense of the limitations faced by MIT's faculty and students at the Cambridge campus.
As he moved MIT toward a broader science- as well as engineering-based community, Compton recognized that by expanding the number of graduate students and faculty at MIT he would increase the need for housing. He urged the Corporation to purchase the River Bank Court Hotel in 1937 for a graduate residence and in 1939, Bexley Hall, a privately managed apartment house for faculty and staff.
As MIT's faculty ranks began to grow in the post war years of 1946 and 1947, housing for new faculty members became a matter of real concern. Compton, Vice President James R. Killian, and Treasurer Horace Ford, came up with a plan that was as audacious as it was respectful of the Institute's limited capital resources. MIT decided to lease the land it had acquired next to the MIT president's house to the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company for a housing development. The company designed and built 270 rental apartment units at 100 Memorial Drive. The agreement called for MIT to receive a modest rent for the land and to have first call on any vacant unit. The project was completed in 1948 and attracted both young and older faculty members as well as people from other walks of life. A penthouse apartment was reserved for the chairman of the MIT Corporation.
But the path to providing faculty housing was far from smooth. In some cases, MIT's changing priorities even moved the faculty housing agenda backwards. MIT's purchase, in 1948, of a private apartment house at 410 Memorial Drive that had housed faculty, staff, and graduate students was used to meet the expanding needs for undergraduate housing.
That year, 1948, also saw the presentation of the Report of the Committee on Educational Survey to the faculty. One of its conclusions was that major improvements to the physical environment were essential to the future good of the Institute. It recommended that over the ensuing 20 years MIT increase the opportunities for faculty families to live on or near the campus. The language of the report is startling in its contemporary relevance.
"We should like to see a nearby area developed which could be used for faculty homes. We believe that faculty residing near the campus can do a great deal to create a more attractive and civilized atmosphere. We believe such proximity would encourage the social gatherings, evening lectures, debates and other activities which bring faculty and students closer together."
During this time, some MIT faculty families did settle in Cambridge, primarily in the Harvard and West Cambridge areas. Others migrated to the suburbs. But as MIT prepared for the mid-century, the issues raised in the report regarding the environment were high on the list of things that MIT's leadership knew needed doing in order to build a healthy community at MIT. The Faculty Club, as a center for faculty social life on the campus, was established in the newly acquired Sloan Building. And in 1955 Killian, now president of the Institute, asked Corporation member Edwin Ryer to lead a committee that would review all of MIT's housing needs. The Ryer Committee Report reiterated the high value of creating more faculty housing opportunities close to the campus.
By 1960, Planning Office projections for student and faculty growth prepared for MIT's Long-Range Planning Committee noted that housing would be a critical feature of MIT's ability to recruit and compete successfully for both faculty and students.
Julius Stratton, who had become president of the Institute in 1959, moved the faculty housing agenda forward by appointing a Committee on Faculty Environment. In 1963, he asked Professor Ithiel De Sola Pool to work with the Planning Office in conducting a survey of faculty interest in Institute-sponsored housing. The results showed a strong interest, particularly from younger faculty members just starting their careers who had not yet made a permanent housing choice, as well as older faculty members with "empty nests" in the suburbs who wished to live closer to MIT and to the cultural and social resources of the city. In 1964, MIT established the Northgate Community Corporation to implement a program of providing housing for faculty, staff, and students in Cambridge.
Northgate went into action purchasing a variety of housing resources including existing single family homes and apartment houses. Homes were sold to faculty and staff with buy-back provisions and apartments were made available to faculty and staff, as they became vacant. Unfortunately, this was a period of escalating real estate costs. MIT was buying in a rising market. We had waited too long. To make matters worse, rapidly rising real estate values and the resulting higher rents led to the establishment of rent control which reduced Northgate's income and ultimately put it at risk.
In 1965, a Master Plan for the Sloan Campus was developed which envisioned both academic and residential buildings that would serve both married students and faculty. The first residence in this plan, Eastgate, was completed in 1968. Its 20 stories included two floors of apartments for resident and visiting faculty members. In addition, a child care facility was built on the ground floor of the building. One of the building's early tenants was Neils Bohr and his wife. But this step forward was to be short lived. As pressure built up for more graduate housing, the faculty apartment program was once again sacrificed in order to house more students.
In 1969, MIT announced the acquisition of the Simplex Wire and Cable property and President Howard Johnson declared that it would provide an opportunity for MIT to build housing for MIT faculty and staff on a portion of the site. A faculty and staff committee was appointed to help establish goals for the development. The Corporation Joint Advisory Committee, after reviewing the recommended goals and the results of the housing surveys and a prospectus for financing and building MIT housing in the Simplex area, recommended that MIT move forward to build 1,200 units of faculty and staff housing in the area now known as University Park and on other land MIT owned in Cambridge, as soon as possible. The average unit cost for three-bedroom apartments at that time would have been $31,000. Unfortunately, no progress was made on this recommendation. As before, MIT focused its housing activities in the 1970s on student housing on the campus. The Vietnam War, a desultory economic period, and the threat of highway construction nearby continued to defer consideration of faculty and staff housing by MIT in Cambridgeport.
In 1980, the Planning Office conducted a fresh housing survey which reasserted faculty and staff interest in a housing program. However, one thing was changing: the demography of the city. Homogeneity was now being replaced with diversity. A new generation of young homeowners – artists, musicians, young professionals, and faculty from a variety of institutions were moving into neighborhoods formerly the exclusive domain of blue-collar families. This variety helped to make the areas between Harvard and MIT a more congenial, interesting, and desirable place to settle.
By the mid-eighties, however, the pressures of rising housing costs and high mortgage interest rates resulted in demands by some young faculty members for greater financial assistance to help them obtain housing within their means. A second-mortgage program was quickly assembled to meet this concern and is now MIT's principal program of housing assistance available to all faculty. Sadly, for some, it has not always offered a satisfactory means of financing their housing. MIT also experimented with alternate ways of expanding its housing stock in Cambridge. Through agreements with small, private town house developers to purchase a portion of their development, MIT enabled these developers to secure favorable borrowing rates. In exchange, MIT was able to purchase its portion of the development at below-market rates. MIT occupants then enjoyed the rent advantage. Some of these units were subsequently sold to MIT faculty members. These techniques helped to expand the MIT housing inventory at a minimal cost to the Institute.
In June of 1990, a planning report to the MIT Corporation's Sub-committee on Real Estate outlined the trends the Institute would likely face in the 15 years ahead: a 50 percent turnover in the faculty; rising housing costs in Cambridge; greater demands for supporting services such as day care; and increasing competition from peer institutions with significant housing assistance programs designed to recruit and retain faculty. Several options for addressing these trends were once again presented. The land resources which we had carefully assembled within walking distance of the campus were identified. But no champion for faculty housing was at hand and no action was taken.
In the years that followed, the MIT community has done much soul searching about community, diversity, and opportunity for minorities and women. Whether stimulated by tragedy or by competition or the growing recognition that there is a relationship between the quality of life offered by MIT and its ability to recruit and retain the best faculty, MIT has been under increasing pressure to develop and implement a strategy that would provide access to convenient and affordable housing resources for its increasingly diverse community.
When compared to our competition, the Institute's housing efforts seem modest.
By comparison, our nearest neighbor, Harvard, has maintained an aggressive faculty housing program in Cambridge for years. It has included the purchase and resale of single family houses and the development of new rental and condominium apartment buildings. Within the last year, it has acquired 120 new condominium units for sale to its faculty and staff just a few blocks from the MIT campus. Harvard also intends to develop additional housing for its faculty and staff along Memorial Drive and in the university's new developments in Allston.
By comparison with MIT, Princeton provides approximately 600 apartments, single-family houses and town houses for its faculty and staff within walking distance of the campus. Yale University has, since 1994, instituted a plan to encourage university employees to live in New Haven. Over 230 members of the faculty and staff have taken advantage of this program and are making a significant contribution to the attractiveness of New Haven as a place to live. Stanford University has one of the oldest faculty housing programs, which continues to be a major anchor in its ability to recruit and retain faculty. In addition, the City of Palo Alto now makes it mandatory for Stanford to build additional housing for its faculty and staff before the city will issue the "general use" permit which controls all development on the Stanford campus. Columbia University has long depended on its stock of housing in the Morningside Heights neighborhood to recruit and retain faculty.
If we could glean from these experiences the common elements of a successful faculty and staff housing program they might include: (1) take the long view. Housing is a long-term investment whose purpose is to continue to support MIT faculty generation after generation. A good housing program is not simply another competitor for general funds; it is the price of doing business. (2) a focus on providing the young and most vulnerable teaching and research staff with quality housing. Good, convenient, and safe accommodations when you are starting out will provide not only shelter but also a network of faculty and family associations across disciplines from which MIT will profit in untold ways. As junior faculty members with a positive community experience become tenured, their willingness to contribute to the larger community can only be enhanced. (3) providing opportunities for the senior members of the faculty to transfer their housing equity to units near the campus. Several have already done so, drawn by a desire to remain part of the Institute community. If more could do the same they would be able to contribute to the critical mass of students and colleagues required to sustain a livelier environment. (4) recognition that the diversity of life styles now characteristic of the faculty and staff requires more imagination and risk-taking to meet their needs and to help them be fully productive citizens of the Institute. (5) realization that timely initiative and leadership in housing is always less expensive than crisis-oriented solutions.
But in the end it will require consistent and unselfish support from the faculty, administration, and the Corporation to make the plea of that young instructor writing back in 1922 come true.
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