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Letters
To The Faculty Newsletter:
As I sit here on the commuter rail on my morning commute (75 minutes door to door each way from Acton, MA!) I read in detail the current edition of the Faculty Newsletter (February/March 2003) and I just wanted to let you all know that I found the articles in it on subsidized housing interesting and thought-provoking.
I would strongly urge you to follow through with the suggestions being raised in the articles by Bob Brown and Bob Redwine (though given the historical context raised by Bob Simha I cannot help but feel a certain amount of deja vu...what a lot of missed opportunities!).
A few points I would like to add to the discussion:
As a former junior faculty member at Harvard I cannot help but reiterate the multiple levels of support offered to their junior faculty (including (a) rental subsidies on Harvard area apartments, (b) Harvard real-estate-owned condos/townhouses, (c) second mortgages). I made use of both (a) and (c) during my 6 years there, and as I look back and count, I realize that every junior faculty member I knew made use of one of these 3 options.
Everyone's circumstances are somewhat different: offering the breadth of choices above is key in accommodating as many people as possible. [There was even a fourth option – related to (a): we lived in an apartment in mixed-use housing. The first 4 floors were student accommodation and the top 2 were faculty only. How easy would this have been to realize in the Warehouse or the new Sidney-Pacific dorm? Even though there were no formal duties required, it was inevitable that you interacted with students who were neighbors and it certainly fostered a sense of community.]
The idea of immediately exploiting 100 Memorial Drive seems a "no-brainer." The location is ideal and the lease terms of "first refusal" for new rentals is perfect. The costs are relatively small and should indeed be considered part of the cost of competing/doing business (isn't it worth all the free press of that #1 U.S. News & World Report ranking?). As to the size of subsidies: Harvard used a sliding scale which worked well: with larger subsidies for more expensive/larger units (i.e., from 1 to 2 to 3 bedrooms as family size [and typically age, salary] grow).
As a corollary, let me suggest that empty nesters may also be tempted back to such a location (I personally am in the school-age years...which we wish to spend in suburbia) but my wife and I already are thinking about moving back to the city when we become empty-nesters...(as eloquently discussed in Steve and Lori Lerman's article in the same issue of the FNL). With my current commute, every offer of "finger food with the faculty" or dinner with students at a fraternity or chatting about graduate opportunities with the Society of Women Engineers/ASME chapter must be weighed against actually getting home to see my kids before they are in bed. These days will pass and it would be wonderful to live close to campus and in the metro area again. Senior faculty salaries are of course higher and so subsidies wouldn't be necessary (or perhaps there would be a prorated subsidy based on relative salary of junior/senior faculty). I am sure a number of senior faculty might be interested in such an option.
If one takes the long view (i.e., the 50-100 year view which Harvard typically does) then these programs don't even really have to be a loss-making proposition; just a different use of some of the endowment capital. Harvard Real Estate (HRE) is a stand-alone profit-making venture through which the townhomes/condos/apartment buildings for faculty/staff are rented/leased/bought. Harvard takes the view that any land it buys within 1 square mile of the Yard will be worth more in the future than it is now, whatever the price, and bids accordingly. I am sure the MIT Endowment already has substantial REIT or other real estate investments in the Boston/Cambridge area. The land continues to appreciate without any upper bound...why not encourage/force it to make new investments in developments that will be available to faculty/staff (either exclusively or preferentially). Even if the profits from lease income are lower than "market," this will not be a loss-making activity...they will inevitably appreciate over the years. This approach could be used to perhaps fund some new townhome/condo developments for purchase in the Cambridge area, rather than just the leasing option of 100 Memorial Drive.
I understand that a few years ago the option to purchase 100 Memorial Drive outright arose and we declined...let's not make similar short-term decisions in the future.
Although not directly related to housing of MIT faculty, if the institutional commitment is made to develop the modest infrastructure needed to administer such a program, then I would encourage us to leverage the effort to address another important concern: the possibility of providing visiting faculty short-term housing: I have a good colleague on sabbatical at Princeton this year living in a furnished apartment by a lake on campus in their faculty housing development. Many other universities offer similar programs...we don't!
The traditional MIT mindset of "we don't have to do that, people will come anyway" may have been good enough in the past, but we can do better, surely! Again this doesn't have to be a loss-making proposition – the costs can be recovered from the visiting faculty (or the hosting department). All it needs is for someone (the Provost's Office?) to assume a long-term lease on several of the 100 Memorial Drive units, furnish them (there are companies that can do this on purchase/rental/lease basis) and then rent them out to visiting faculty (at competitive rates...this may be the stumbling block I suppose – of course if we owned the building the rate would be decidedly lower!). Typical rental periods may be 1, 3, or 6 month increments. If this model is feasible, it can be scaled infinitely (depending on demand) from 1 to N units. This would allow us to attract many visiting faculty (some of whom we may even be trying to woo or recruit to MIT!). It would also serve needs associated with visiting faculty in programs such as CMI, SMA, etc.
To echo the concluding words of Bob Brown's article, I hope we get to hear more in the fall about new initiatives in the area.
Sorry for the length of this e-mail (if only the train ride were shorter!).
Best regards,
Gareth
McKinley
Professor of Mechanical Engineering
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