00:02This is a story about Harvard, real estate, Boston, and timing.
00:07A few decades ago, Harvard started secretly buying up all this land in the Boston neighborhood of Alston.
00:13People were wondering, what are they going to do with this land? They've come up with different plans.
00:18Celebrating Alston as a place for all, the workforce opportunities will lay the foundation for a thriving future.
00:26It was a tough year for Harvard.
00:28They're going to be opening what's called the Enterprise Research Campus.
00:31But that lab building is going to be opening mostly empty.
00:41What's behind me is the first step in what Harvard envisions as an entire new neighborhood in Boston,
00:47filled with lab buildings, offices, apartment buildings.
00:50Harvard is envisioning its land in Alston becoming this scientific mecca.
00:54It is thrilling to be able to be at one more moment of history between the city of Boston and
01:00Harvard.
01:01MIT has had a lot of success with the land they own. Kendall Square has been called the most innovative
01:07square mile on the planet.
01:09Harvard is in Cambridge, but there's really not any room for them to grow.
01:13Alston seems like a natural place, but a lot of it's been sitting empty or underused for the past 25
01:19years.
01:20Real estate investments have been very lucrative for MIT, just as they have for Stanford out in Silicon Valley, and
01:25that's something Harvard's looking at.
01:26But there is prestige that comes with this. There are relationships.
01:30It could bring in billions of dollars in economic activity when it's fully built out, and it could generate close
01:35to a quarter billion dollars in state and local taxes.
01:37When the Trump administration took over, there was an immense amount of scrutiny on Harvard. Federal funding taken away, lawsuits.
01:47One of the things that's unique about what the Trump administration has done with Harvard is that they have pulled
01:51so many different levers.
01:53They have 52 billion dollars. They get huge tax incentives and tax breaks on that 52 billion.
01:59A big chunk of Harvard's land in Alston is this beacon rail yard. Harvard's owned it for decades, but it's
02:05been unable to do anything with it because I-90, the highway, runs through it.
02:09And there's this tangle of highway exits and you can't develop anything on it.
02:13Under the Biden administration, the state landed a large $335 million federal grant.
02:18But then in 2025, the Trump administration took back that grant, and so that's left state officials scrambling.
02:26A state official said that they may have to wait until a new presidential administration to try to get that
02:31money back.
02:32Right now, the land is fairly empty.
02:34The market's not doing great right now when they're trying to fill this building.
02:38It could be quite a while before we see more meaningful development activity in that neighborhood.
02:43People argue that if Harvard had moved more quickly, this lab building might be full.
02:49The city of Boston is counting on Harvard's development in Alston as well.
02:54Boston relies on property taxes more than just about any other major city in the U.S. for its revenue.
03:00New development is a huge part of that.
03:01The completion of the enterprise research campus is a big milestone for Harvard.
03:05And even though the lab building is opening mostly empty, it looks like,
03:09I think there's a lot of pride about the Conference Center, about the entire project that Harvard takes out of
03:14this.
03:15Harvard's not in financial trouble.
03:17They've been around for a few hundred years.
03:19They can certainly be patient investors, but the state and the city, the Department of Transportation,
03:24they're all invested in this land because they see it as a new frontier, a new type of development.
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