Northeastern parcel plan raises Roxbury’s ire

Yawu Miller

Roxbury activists say they are ready to shut down construction work on Northeastern University’s 1,200-student dormitory at the corner of Ruggles Street and Columbus Avenue.

State Sen. Dianne Wilkerson held a meeting Monday evening at Roxbury Community College about Northeastern’s development plans, during which community members circulated a sign-up sheet soliciting volunteers to picket the construction site.

The meeting followed actions taken Monday morning by members of the Lower Roxbury Residents Leadership Group, who marched on Northeastern President Joseph Aoun’s Columbus Avenue office demanding a meeting and calling on the university to stop buying land on the Roxbury side of Tremont Street.

“We believe that the two towers on Parcel 18 West, with their 1,200 dormitory beds, are a Trojan horse designed to enable Northeastern to continue its plan to take over our community,” Roxbury resident Kerrick Johnson said before leading the march on Aoun’s office.

The planned dormitories, which will sit squarely across from the Whittier Street public housing development, represent the university’s deepest incursion yet into Roxbury. In the last 10 years, the university has acquired numerous properties on Tremont Street, Columbus Avenue and the streets in between.

Residents of that part of the neighborhood have been forced out as property owners, eager to rent two-bedroom apartments for as high as $3,700 a month, have signed leases with the university.

The 1,200-bed dormitory in question is largely the result of an agreement the university reached with representatives of abutting communities and elected officials aimed at removing students from private housing.

“The one provision we gave them was that they build on their own land,” said Wilkerson, who supported the university’s dormitory project at a Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) meeting earlier this year.

For Wilkerson, it was Northeastern’s plan to build a hotel at the same site that was the final straw.

“We’re here tonight because we do believe we are at a crossroads in the community we call Roxbury,” she said at the meeting, convened by the Parcel 18 Task Force. “We expect to be treated the same as any other community.”

Wilkerson circulated a list of demands nearly identical to the list Johnson presented to Aoun Monday morning.

That list, developed during a series of community meetings earlier this year, includes demands for 30 percent of construction jobs for local residents and payments into a community trust fund.

The schism between Wilkerson and the Lower Roxbury Residents Leadership Group, with which Johnson works, seems closely tied to Wilkerson’s initial support for the dormitory project.

The original meetings during which the demands were drafted were convened by Wilkerson and abutters to the construction site, many of whom supported the dormitory project.

Johnson and other activists pushed for broader community participation in negotiations. Although the meetings expanded to include representatives from other housing developments, the distrust for the negotiation process seems to remain an issue.

During Wilkerson’s Monday night meeting, activists questioned whether the senator and representatives of several public housing developments had cut deals with Northeastern and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

“There is no deal,” Wilkerson responded several times to persistent questions about previous negotiations with Northeastern University and the BRA, the city agency charged with hammering out community benefits agreements.

Some in the room remained unconvinced.

“We can all protest and go to jail, but who is going to be sitting in the room with Northeastern to negotiate?” asked Lorraine Fowlkes, an aide to City Councilor Chuck Turner.

Community organizer Klare Allen complained that Lower Roxbury activists she is working with did not know about the meetings Wilkerson’s office had arranged until the last three. She said the Lower Roxbury Leadership Group is already holding protests outside of Northeastern’s construction site.
“We’re letting them know that the community benefits package presented to us are not acceptable,” she said.

Wilkerson urged Allen to work together with the Parcel 18 Task Force.

“Our belief is that two heads are better than one,” Wilkerson said.

The land Northeastern is building on was originally cleared in the late 1960s and early ’70s for the planned extension of Interstate 95 through the center of Boston. After that project was derailed by widespread protests, much of the cleared land remained vacant.

Parcel 18 was developed by a minority-led team that constructed a new headquarters for the Registry of Motor Vehicles in 1995. The parcel was designated by the state Legislature as an economic development project for the Roxbury community.

But shortly after construction was completed, the registry was declared a “sick building,” the lease was broken and the property was foreclosed.

Northeastern then bought the building, using it for administrative offices and offering the Whittier Street Health Center space rent-free. Along with the building, Northeastern also acquired a multi-level parking garage and the vacant land on which it is now planning the dormitory and hotel.

In a move that apparently has done little to improve the university’s image in Roxbury, the hotel’s prospective developers are seeking $35 million in tax-exempt bonds from the local empowerment zone board, a federally chartered entity that helps finance development projects in Boston’s low-income census tracts.

“This is a little crazy,” Wilkerson said. “Here’s the thing about this hotel: It’s supposed to be the economic development plan for Parcel 18. But if it doesn’t have a benefit for us, how is it economic development?”

Wilkerson says the land on which Northeastern plans to build the hotel should belong to a community trust. Lease payments for a hotel or anything developed on the land should go into a community trust fund, she told the gathering Monday.

“This community has to have some ownership of that parcel,” she said.

In addition to questions about her initial support for Northeastern’s dormitory project, Wilkerson faced questions about the Columbus Center project, a $700 million South End apartment and hotel complex that is slated to receive $10 million in state economic development funds. Wilkerson, who sought Legislative approval for the funds for several years, refused to answer questions about the project.