An article about Harvard's plans for its newer Allston properties

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From: Anthony D'Isidoro <anthony...@msn.com>
Date: Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 11:41 AM

Harvard’s Decades-Long Expansion Dream Meets Harsh Real Estate Reality (Greg Ryan and Janet Lorin, Bloomberg: February 24, 2026)

A biotech downturn and pulled federal funds have stymied the university’s property bet in Boston’s Allston neighborhood — while nearby MIT has thrived.

During his time as Harvard University’s president, Larry Summers outlined a bold plan to create an epicenter for scientific research befitting of the school’s prestigious stature.

Harvard had little room for growth in Cambridge, its home since the 1600s. But just across the Charles River sat Allston, a working-class Boston neighborhood where the university had assembled hundreds of acres of land. There, Summers envisioned developing a sort of Silicon Valley of the East — a worthy competitor to California’s Stanford University and the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology for high-tech innovation.

More than two decades later, that vision is unrealized. Harvard is opening a major complex in Allston at a difficult moment: The Boston biotech market is in retreat, and the project’s 510,000-square-foot laboratory building is only 20% leased. The Trump administration has also yanked hundreds of millions of dollars in support for a transportation overhaul important to the university’s larger ambitions for the neighborhood.

A new hotel, apartments and conference center have recently opened on the school’s Allston land. Yet beyond those buildings, plans to connect its myriad real estate holdings have stalled. Roughly 90 acres of land sit barren, rendered unusable by a tangle of highway exits that need government dollars for a revamp. Sprawled among the area are dozens of Harvard-owned properties, from bakeries to an auto-repair shop, that seemingly have few ties to an Ivy League institution.

Harvard’s Allston troubles can’t be pinned on any single moment or decision. The 2008 financial crisis, leadership changes, strategic missteps and simple bad luck all played roles. But taken together, they show how even a patient institution can misjudge timing and execution in the real estate market. More broadly, Allston’s long gestation has become a disappointment for Boston itself, which stood to reap the rewards of new tax dollars and a thriving innovation district.

“They operate sometimes in a time scale that spans generations, when we also need to make sure that we are delivering immediately, right here and right now,” said Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.

Harvard isn’t on the hook financially for the underleased lab building, which was developed by real estate company Tishman Speyer and its Breakthrough Properties joint venture. And the oldest and richest US university is accustomed to investing in timelines measured in decades. Still, the Allston project marks a very public wager that has fallen short of the real estate successes that have enriched other elite schools.

Notably, Harvard’s efforts stand in stark contrast to those of MIT and its role developing Cambridge’s Kendall Square, known as the most innovative square mile on the planet. MIT began commercially developing derelict land next to its campus in the 1960s, and it was well-positioned to accommodate demand for lab space decades later when money poured into biotech from the federal government and investors.

“Timing is everything,” said Jim Vrabel, a Boston historian who worked in the Boston mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services. “A lot of mistakes were made and a lot of investment was made in other places that kept Allston from happening.”

The tepid real estate market has collided with mounting financial pressure on the university itself.

Harvard disclosed a $113 million budget deficit in October, and is bracing for as much as $300 million a year in new endowment taxes. Last summer, the university warned that the combined impact of federal actions under the Trump administration — including tax increases and funding cuts — could approach $1 billion annually.

Harvard prevailed in an initial court battle over a research funding freeze, though the administration last May threatened new grants. This month, the Department of Defense said it will discontinue some educational programs at the university.

Harvard recently sold a strip mall near its Allston campus for $39 million in cash — its most significant sale in the neighborhood in years. The buyer, the real estate investment trust Urban Edge Properties, boasted in an earnings call that at about $5 million per acre, Harvard accepted a price that was roughly half nearby land values. In a statement, the school said it regularly evaluates its real estate portfolio to address market conditions and its property needs.

Meredith Weenick, Harvard’s chief administrative, business and operating officer, said the university considers itself in the early stages of development in Allston.

“Despite the real estate moment that we are in, we remain really optimistic about our plans,” she said.

Allston is about half a mile from Harvard Square, but the Charles River has long loomed as both a physical and psychological boundary. In 2001, the architect Rem Koolhaas, asked to devise a master plan for the area, even suggested rerouting the river so the university’s Allston land would effectively sit in Cambridge. Harvard demurred.

The school first started building across the Charles in the early 1900s with its football stadium and athletic facilities, followed by Harvard Business School, with its own thriving 40-acre campus. By the 1980s, Harvard began quietly amassing land for even broader ambitions to expand beyond Cambridge — fueling local ire because of its clandestine approach.

Harvard opened an engineering building in 2021 named for hedge fund manager John Paulson, an alumnus who donated $400 million. Around that time, the area seemed ready to thrive as a science hub. Almost every square foot of the Boston area’s existing labs was occupied. The world was emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic with pioneering vaccines, including one made by Cambridge-based Moderna Inc.

Harvard selected Tishman Speyer to spearhead what’s known as the Enterprise Research Campus, with the developer paying an upfront fee for the ground lease. Tishman Speyer filed plans with the city in 2021 for more than 300 apartments, the hotel, conference center and commercial lab building.

But as the project wound its way through city approvals and financing, the cycle turned. Rising interest rates beginning in 2022 cooled investment. Meanwhile, Harvard and Tishman Speyer were stuck in lengthy negotiations with the city of Boston about how much affordable housing they’d provide, a point of contention among Allston residents worried about displacement.

In July 2022, they reached a deal to offer subsidized rents on a quarter of the project’s apartments, nearly double the requirement in Boston at the time. It would be almost another year before Tishman Speyer landed a $750 million loan. Wu and Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay celebrated the start of construction at a ceremony in November 2023, with the mayor calling the project “a major step forward for the city.”

But by that time, lab vacancies were on the rise and poised to increase significantly. Many biotech buildings, started when demand was soaring, were wrapping up construction with few tenants looking for space.

Today, about 70% of the completed laboratory space in Allston and neighboring Brighton is available for rent, according to real estate brokerage Colliers. Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG will be the first tenant at the Enterprise Research Campus, taking up about 20% of the lab space.

The location will house Roche’s cardiovascular and metabolic research center, which includes its obesity drug development. The company considered Kendall Square but decided the Allston location is a “perfect spot” for collaboration given the company’s research partnerships with Harvard, said Manu Chakravarthy, global head of cardiovascular, renal and metabolism product development.

“You might look at this and say, well, at this point in time there’s not much happening there,” Chakravarthy said. “We’re not anticipating all this will suddenly happen in one fell swoop, but we fully anticipate this will be a vibrant ecosystem.”

Roche is now in talks with the school about constructing a large lab building of its own on Harvard’s Allston land, according to Chakravarthy and others involved in the discussions. While that would serve as a boon to the university’s biotech ambitions, it’s unclear what that would mean for Roche's space in the existing lab building.

“Demand is weak,” said Jeff Myers, research director for Colliers. “There isn’t a lot of opportunity to get new tenants in the door, especially big ones.”

Tishman Speyer is confident the lab building will ultimately be filled, Chief Executive Officer Rob Speyer said.

“We are sitting across the street from Harvard Business School. We are sitting across the street from the science and engineering school,” Speyer said. For companies in the innovation business, “can you imagine a better piece of real estate?”

Speyer said Harvard has been unusually engaged in the project, to a degree he rarely sees from a landowner. University administrators and professors have been involved in conversations with prospective tenants about the space, particularly companies it has worked with or may partner with on research, said John Shaw, Harvard’s senior vice provost for research.

Summers unveiled Harvard’s public plans for Allston in 2003, sharing visions of a “robust critical mass of scientific activity” alongside graduate-student housing, undergrad dormitories, museums and possibly Harvard’s schools of education and public health. Summers, who recently stepped back from public roles following additional revelations of his ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, declined to comment on the Allston project through a spokesman.

Summers resigned as Harvard’s president in 2006. His successor, Drew Gilpin Faust, committed to “moving aggressively and ambitiously forward” in Allston.

That ambition was upended by the global financial crisis. After its endowment lost about 30% of its value, Harvard halted construction on a planned science complex in 2009, leaving a foundation — and the broader vision for Allston — on ice for years. Faust ultimately scaled back the plans for museums and housing in favor of the Enterprise Research Campus.

All the while, MIT was helping build up Kendall Square. Located immediately adjacent to MIT, the area is more conducive to commercial development from a zoning and neighborhood perspective than Harvard’s part of Cambridge. Today, Kendall Square is home to offices for top drug companies and tech giants, including Google. Some are in buildings that MIT developed itself as part of its endowment.

Harvard’s Weenick said she doesn’t consider MIT a real estate rival.

“We do not see this as a competition. This is, more is more,” she said. “We have felt that way about our relationship with MIT, I feel confident I can say, since MIT was founded.”

Still, Kendall Square has prevailed over Allston in high-profile tenant decisions. “It’s eating our lunch,” said Alex Krieger, a Harvard urban design professor emeritus who was involved with the university’s Allston planning.

Around the time of its founding in 2004, the Broad Institute — a joint Harvard-MIT venture that’s now one of the world’s leading genomics research centers — considered establishing its headquarters on Harvard’s Allston land, according to its founding director, Eric Lander. But Kendall Square’s density and proximity to MIT’s biology department proved decisive.

Nearly two decades later, the pattern repeated. As Biogen Inc., currently based in Kendall Square, searched for a new global headquarters, the Enterprise Research Campus emerged as a finalist, according to people familiar with the search.

But employee surveys showed overwhelming support for staying in Kendall Square, and Biogen chose to remain in the neighborhood with a 580,000-square-foot tower that's being developed by MIT's real estate arm. In a statement, Biogen said it explored a number of options before deciding to stay in Kendall Square, noting its ties to the neighborhood and presence “alongside key academic institutions and industry collaborators and partners.”

“If the commitment to an Enterprise Research Campus was made earlier — let’s say by half a decade — it would be pretty successful, and at least for the first phase, the place would have been filled,” said Krieger. Harvard “missed that golden moment.”

MIT’s real estate endeavors are part of its now $27.4 billion endowment, which generated a 10.6% annualized return over the 20 years through June, according to data calculated by Bloomberg. The school bested the entire Ivy League and Harvard’s $56.9 billion endowment, which is tied for the worst performance among the eight schools for the 20-year return, Bloomberg data show. Harvard’s fund has moved away from real estate, reducing its exposure from 14.5% in fiscal 2016 to 5% in fiscal 2025. The Allston project isn’t part of the endowment.

“We tried to be prudent about how we deployed capital and how we created a place here,” said Steve Marsh, who ran MIT’s real estate portfolio for more than 20 years. “Innovation was a very important driver to what we were doing.”

Both Kendall Square and the Seaport District, a Boston neighborhood where commercial development exploded in the 2010s, had a huge advantage over Allston: robust transportation infrastructure. Kendall Square has long had its own stop on the MBTA’s Red Line. The Seaport has a subway-like underground bus line, and Boston’s infamous Big Dig project included tunnels carrying Interstate 90 underneath the neighborhood, linking it to Logan International Airport. By contrast, the closest train stop to Harvard's Enterprise Research Campus is almost a mile away.

A similarly transformative infrastructure project was set to open up a large chunk of Harvard’s Allston property to redevelopment, until the plans were torpedoed by a now-familiar foe: President Donald Trump.

For more than a decade, Massachusetts, Harvard and the city of Boston have tried to assemble funding for a $2 billion project to straighten a section of I-90 that cuts through some of Harvard’s Allston land. The project would free up dozens of acres for the university to develop along the Charles River and enable construction of a long-planned transit hub known as West Station, linking the area to the region’s commuter rail network.

The state committed to funding most of the work, with the city, Harvard and Boston University pledging a combined $300 million. Harvard's share included $90 million toward the construction of West Station. Federal support, however, has been considered essential.

That support appeared to arrive in March 2024, when the Biden administration awarded a $335 million grant through its Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods program. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat, called the funding a major win for the state.

But just over a year later, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill — the same legislation that increased the tax on Harvard’s endowment — spiked unspent funding for the Reconnecting Communities program. At that point, officials had allocated just $8 million of the money, and a key state environmental review of the project had yet to move forward.

Harvard’s Weenick said the university is “super optimistic” about the transportation project’s potential, though it hasn’t yet started detailed planning for the empty land.

Fully developing the land now occupied by I-90 and an adjacent rail yard would generate $6.4 billion in economic output and support more than 36,000 jobs annually, according to a report by A Better City, a business-backed group, and infrastructure firm AECOM. They found it would also raise about $238 million in state and city taxes every year.

Wu said in an interview that the rescission of federal funds is “very frustrating.” A 2007 Harvard College and 2012 Harvard Law School graduate, she was a student when the university’s early plans for Allston emerged. She said she’s happy the Enterprise Research Campus will house the sort of innovation and research under threat from Trump, as well as provide affordable housing, one of her top priorities as mayor.

But unlocking even more Harvard land through the I-90 project would accomplish “all of our big-picture goals,” she said, including improving public transit and stitching together parts of Boston split apart last century.

For now, the city is working with Harvard to plan what can go on the I-90 land and beyond, “as we try to figure out how to put together the financing and get all the pieces in place for the short run,” Wu said.

The stalled project carries fiscal consequences. Boston’s broader development pipeline is slowing and office values are under pressure. Property taxes account for roughly three-quarters of the city’s revenue, and Wu has ordered 2% budget cuts across city departments in the coming fiscal year.

With the I-90 project on hold indefinitely and the lab market in the doldrums, Harvard’s immediate future in Allston is unclear.

Outside its campus borders and the enterprise research project, the scant development activity on Harvard-owned land has largely been housing-related. A 325-unit apartment building, constructed by a Boston developer under a ground lease with the school, opened near Harvard Stadium a decade ago. Another developer won city approval last year to build a small residential complex behind the engineering school.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s Allston holdings make it landlord to one of Boston’s most popular gardening stores, a CrossFit location and a warehouse full of bounce houses that hosts children’s birthday parties. The strip mall that Harvard recently sold is home to a Star Market, McDonald’s, Petco and a shabu-shabu restaurant.

Ming Wong has run his Allston auto-repair shop out of a two-door garage since 1989. Harvard acquired the property in 2003 for an undisclosed sum. In 20-plus years, Harvard’s never increased his rent, Wong said. It’s also never given him a lease.

Wong said he “gave up asking” about Harvard’s designs for the property, which is next to a university recycling center.

“I don’t know what their plans are,” he said. “But it is what it is.”