Contrarian Boston/02.07.2024

Keeping BPS honest | The case of the disappearing exit ramp | Forget Roxbury - try Newton for migrant shelter | Steward patients, staff, taken to the cleaners | Challenges ahead for construction industry | Quick hits |

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Why Roxbury? Healey administration’s search for emergency shelter sites rules out some seemingly promising alternatives in wealthier suburbs

The unwelcome transformation of the Melnea A. Cass Recreational Complex into a emergency migrant shelter drew a group of angry residents when it was announced last week.

“Why Roxbury? Try Wellesley!” read the sign of one protestor outside the press conference by Gov. Maura Healey and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu at the Roxbury rec center, now packed with cots, the Boston Herald reported.

The sign, though, might just as well have read “Try Newton!”

For in that other, equally wealthy suburb near Roxbury, UMass Amherst owns an entire, 74-acre campus, having forked over $75 million nearly five years ago to acquire Mount Ida College.

Back when Mount Ida was still an independent college, there were more than 1,500 students on campus.

Today it is home to a few hundred UMass Amherst students doing co-ops at Boston area companies, veterinary students, and a few dozen employees at an incubator for local startups, among other uses.

Oh yeah, and there are also four shuttered buildings, including two dorms.

We took a drive through campus on a recent weekday morning and spotted cars in front of a few buildings, but that was about it. There were no students, or anyone else, out and about on campus on a bright, albeit chilly, February morning.

To be fair, other than the four that have been “decommissioned,” the remaining 19 campus buildings are being used by either UMass Amherst or the companies in the business incubator.

There is some amount of deferred maintenance in the dorm buildings that would have to be tackled were they be reopened, though how much is not clear.

“Their facilities condition assessment did not support re-investment,” a spokesperson for the Mount Ida campus said.

That said, there are already plans underway by UMass Amherst to continue expanding academic and related programs at its Mount Ida/Newton campus, which will require taking back some of the incubator space as well, the spokesperson said.

For their part, state officials looked at Mount Ida’s campus - and the Hotel Indigo by the Newton’s Riverside T station - but decided both “were not viable” for emergency shelters, an administration official said.

The Mount Ida campus is clearly filling a need for UMass Amherst, providing a crucial home away from home for third and fourth year students pursuing co-ops and internships at Boston area companies.

And UMass Amherst got a great deal when it bought struggling Mount Ida and its sprawling campus in 2018.

Given sky-high Greater Boston real estate prices, it could have easily cost UMass Amherst twice as much as it paid, if not more, to go out and buy a site and build a campus from scratch.

So it is pretty clear that there is a lot of untapped potential on UMass Amherst’s sprawling Mount Ida campus, beyond space for an emergency shelter. Think affordable housing or classrooms for programs for UMass Boston, or, for that matter, UMass Lowell or Dartmouth.

In fact, there may be some unofficial planning already going on between faculty members at UMass Amherst and UMass Boston on that front.

The Mount Ida campus also now hosts Camp Shriver - a UMass Boston initiative - for children with and without disabilities, while also hosting courses since last spring for UMass Boston’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

All those initiatives are certainly nice, but they are also fairly small.

UMass Amherst is now the steward of a valuable public asset, an entire college campus in Newton.

And when it comes to sharing the wealth, UMass Amherst needs to step up its game.

Dude, where’s the exit ramp? Key piece of proposed South End biotech campus goes missing

The Abbey Group, the powerhouse Boston developer, has been pushing plans for a giant lab complex in the South End for eight years now.

And with the bottom having fallen out of the market for lab space, who knows when construction will start on the proposed 1.6 million square foot research complex, slated to take shape next to I-93 at the old Flower Exchange site.

But a key element of the mega project, which is still under review at City Hall, has vanished.

An onramp from the highway is still in the works, easing the morning commute for the thousands of life sciences workers at the companies the huge project, Exchange South End, is expected to attract.

(Rendering of Exchange South End in all of its future glory)

But a previously planned exit ramp has been pulled, so those same commuters will wind up on Albany Street and other local neighborhood thoroughfares when it’s time to go home each day.