Medford residents and city officials are raising concerns about the potential impact of the 401 Boston Ave. dorm on the community. The dorm, scheduled to open in 2027, is set to be a two-building complex with 300 apartments, housing nearly 700 upperclassmen.
Medford residents have teamed up to resist the project, saying it is out of step with the community’s environment and calling its effects life-altering to a generation of locals. A group of neighbors in the Hillside area north of Boston Avenue — Laura Jasinski, Laurie Krieger, Adrienne Rae Landau and Kelly R. — said they feel overlooked by the current proposal.
“The way that it’s designed and masked is really putting up a wall between Tufts and the neighborhood in a way that negatively impacts our neighborhood significantly for our lives and our generations,” Jasinski said.
Despite their concerns about the details of the plan, neighbors are enthusiastic about new housing for students on campus and are eager to partner with the university.
“Let’s be a model of town-gown relations,” Landau said. “We got all kinds of really brilliant people in this area who could advise us or help us to really have that kind of constructive dialog where the end product is something everyone will benefit from.”
Medford resident Ken Krause expressed his feelings of betrayal in a letter to University President Sunil Kumar.
“Literally and figuratively, Tufts has intentionally and emphatically turned its back on the adjacent Medford Hillside community and the city of Medford as a whole,” Krause wrote.
Local officials have also conveyed their opposition. State Sen. Patricia Jehlen and State Rep. Christine Barber co-authored a letter to the Medford Community Development Board urging them to “ensure that appropriate impact studies and disclosures are provided by the developer to clearly show impacts on the greater neighborhood.”
The Medford City Council passed a resolution in December calling on Tufts to use an alternative site plan.
Kit Collins, vice president of the Medford City Council and Tufts alumna, said the university’s necessary efforts to house more students are welcome but would benefit from more community engagement in the planning process.
“Tufts absolutely has the resources to do this in a way that is beneficial for Tufts, that is beneficial for students and that is best for the community,” Collins said.
The height and size of the 10-story project, coupled with its placement on a hill, are a major concern. Several houses are expected to be hit by shadows, especially in the winter.
Residents say that the shadow studies could have been conducted more scientifically and that the university’s environmentally conscious housing goal could be complicated by casting shadows on solar panels.
“[The building] is just massive. It’s so out of scale to anything here,” Krieger said. She argues that the perspective shown in design renderings makes the buildings appear farther from the residential streets than they actually would be.
Patrick Collins, Executive Director of Media Relations at Tufts, wrote in a statement to the Daily that the buildings are “well below” the 12-story maximum permitted in Medford and that a smaller project would reduce the number of students accommodated on campus.
“To build on a scale smaller than this would make each of the apartments too expensive for our students and fail to alleviate the housing shortage in Medford for working families,” he wrote.
He added that three public meetings were held in order to “listen to neighbors, address their concerns, and incorporate their feedback into the project.”
Residents argue a lack of transparency and dialogue has defined the planning process and contributed to a sense of exclusion.
“What they’re presenting hasn’t changed so they’ve clearly not heard us, and it would be great to have facilitated meetings wherein we are having a conversation and being heard. But it feels daunting that they just drop this on us,” Krieger said. “The meetings they’ve had — they don't feel inviting.”
Both residents and officials encouraged Tufts to connect the 401 Boston Ave. project to an institutional master plan, allowing Medford to better prepare for future Tufts developments.
Tufts representatives have made proposals to address public concerns throughout the process. Patrick Collins described a $500,000 neighborhood improvement fund, dedicated to public realm improvements such as a new Bluebikes station, new sidewalks and more trees.
“The primary goal of this project is to house 677 more students on campus and open up apartments off campus for working families in Medford,” Patrick Collins wrote. “This is a generational opportunity for Tufts University to add on-campus housing, revitalize Boston Avenue and improve the city’s infrastructure.”
