Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s alma mater Harvard University stands to reap major benefits from a Boston highway mega-project in a neighborhood where it owns about a third of the land and is paying less than 5% of the cost — despite its $53 billion endowment.
Back in March, the US Department of Transportation announced $335 million in federal funding for the I-90 Allston Multimodal Project, an estimated $1.9 billion endeavor to rebuild a worn down portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike and free up multiple acres of land for the Ivy League school.
The project was drawn up over a decade ago and a $1.2 billion funding application had been initially rejected last year before a Harvard administrator got Buttigieg’s approval on a nine-figure bid — all to be drawn from President Biden’s vaunted 2021 infrastructure law.
Harvard has agreed to pay just $90 million to help finance the project and nearby Boston University agreed to pony up $10 million.
The Boston County assessor estimates that Harvard’s land in Allston is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, though the value is expected to skyrocket once the university’s new campus is completed.
“[Harvard] stands to make a killing on real estate development when the project’s infrastructure is finally built,” one analysis of the project concluded.
“The Commonwealth’s taxpayers have already been generous to Harvard where this property is concerned,” the assessment added, in reference to its purchases in the early 2000s.
The project affects two major plots of land that Harvard owns — one 48-odd acre section where it is building its Enterprise Research Campus and the other, roughly 90 acres which is split up by turnpike and will be freed up after the project.
Harvard had acquired most of the two parcels of land in Allston — a roughly 12 minute drive southwest of Cambridge — two decades ago, when the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority was somewhat strapped for cash.
Specifically, it bought the 48-acre parcel of land adjacent to the project for its forthcoming Enterprise Research Campus, which broke ground last year, for about $152 million in 2000. Three years later, it purchased roughly 90-acre plot under I-90 for $75 million, which it reportedly plans to use for housing after the I-90 Allston Multimodal Project is finished.
In August of last year, months after the US DOT’s initial rejection of the funding request application, the Ivy League’s executive vice president Meredith Weenick penned a letter to Buttigieg, 42, backing a new application from the city.
“Harvard is pleased to have the opportunity to support MassDOT’s application by both memorializing future-looking commitments and outlining the foundational steps undertaken by the University to support this Project over the last two decades,” Weenick wrote in the letter.
She further claimed that the Cambridge, Mass. institution invested hundreds of millions of dollars worth of “enabling costs” for the project by relocating a former railyard, among other steps.
Buttigieg had graduated from Harvard in 2004 and previously said that he enjoyed the “the benefit of an elite education” from the school.
After city officials provided more details than in the initial ask, US DOT came around and offered $335 million for the project, tapping into the $1.2 trillion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“This project aims to modernize and improve the safety of Boston’s Allston neighborhood and is being led by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, which is in charge of putting together the project’s financing,” a US DOT spokesperson told The Post.
“This is just one of 66,000 locally-led infrastructure projects underway so far across every state and community in the country thanks to $568 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”
Massachusetts residents are expected to cough up another $920 million for the project. Boston will pay some $200 million and $200 million more will come from Turnpike tolls.
Some of the state-taxpayer funding will come from a millionaire’s tax that Massachusetts voters narrowly approved in 2022, bumping up the tax rate on annual income over $4 million by 4 percentage points, which had been projected to bring in some $1.3 billion statewide last year.
There are some indications that Massachusetts is suffering from out-migration of wealth. One study from the Pioneer Instutite found that adjusted gross income out-migration soared from $900 million in 2012 to $4.3 billion in 2021.
The state’s delegation to Congress had cheered the US DOT’s funding for the the I-90 Allston Multimodal Project.
Earlier this month, Buttigieg marked the third anniversary of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“We’re in the middle of an infrastructure decade unlike anything this country has seen since the time of Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System. The 2020s will be viewed as a turning point that ushered in the improvements that will sustain our 21st and even 22nd century economy,” he proclaimed in a video.
That same week, he also spoke with the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School.
The project is expected to take six to 10 years and would straighten out a section of the highway in Allston near the Charles River, streamline the tangle of ramps there and create a new MBTA station: West Station.
The Post contacted Harvard University for comment.