The Battle of Mission Hill

Published June 9, 2010 at 9:31 p.m.
Town-versus-gown tempers are boiling over near the Northeastern campus, as residents charge the giant school with 'death by incrementalism'
Oftentimes, inner-city dwellers who have to routinely phone police about disorderly neighbors fear retribution from gangbangers or drug dealers.

NOT GOOD IN THIS HOOD Through the early ’80s, abominable Mission Hill tenements were sometimes deprived of heat, water, and even windows.

Oftentimes, inner-city dwellers who have to routinely phone police about disorderly neighbors fear retribution from gangbangers or drug dealers. That is not the case in Mission Hill, where folks who anonymously told the Phoenix about loud parties and constant intoxicated pandemonium there are instead scared that Northeastern students — whose keggers and illegal porch barbecues often rage until four in the morning — will smash bottles in their back yards and rearrange the side-view mirrors on their cars.

In fact, the incursion by Northeastern students into Mission Hill, the South End, and Roxbury is changing the face of those neighborhoods, and not just via the superficial evidence of broken glass, fire hazards, and mangled property that students leave in their wake. Multi-generational Bostonians are actually being displaced in alarming numbers, as their neighborhoods increasingly become extensions of the institutions that surround them, and as those colleges and universities continue to rapidly expand their campus footprints and inadvertently drive up real-estate prices.

Among the concrete harbingers of change that have particularly riled activists are: 52 existing affordable-housing units near the Mass Ave T station, which Northeastern now owns and can legally inhabit in 2023; that school's magnificent Fenway concert hall that is the former site of the dearly missed St. Ann's community church; and massive Northeastern facilities hovering above Columbus and Huntington avenues.

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