Harvard has pursued profit at any cost - including relentless appropriation of land.
Read our full reinvestment report for more information on Harvard's land practices and the need for reinvestment.
As a university and a non-profit, Harvard's primary mission should be education and taking care of its community. But we've seen that Harvard prioritizes its bottom line over everything else. Take a look at how Harvard's land practices perpetuate injustice in Cambridge, greater Boston, and around the world.
Harvard as a Bad Neighbor
As the wealthiest university in the world, Harvard's presence has a massive inflationary effect on Cambridge and greater Boston, which isn't helped by its continual land expansion into surrounding areas like Allston. However, most community organizers interviewed by FFDH agreed that Harvard's engagement with and support of its greater Boston home is minimal at best. Some facts about Harvard's presence as a neighbor and landowner:
- From 2011 to 2019, as Harvard rapidly expanded its presence in Allston, median rents in the area increased 36%, and the median cost of a home jumped by 43%.
- Harvard affiliates are likely to have lower-than-average incomes, putting them in competition with other working-class Cambridge residents for reasonably priced housing.
- Over the past 40 years, Cambridge has added 45,000 jobs — largely driven by Harvard — but only 13,000 housing units.
- Harvard made the jobs of Harvard Square Homeless Shelter and the Y2Y shelter far more difficult during the early stages of the pandemic by barring student groups from organizing and participating in shelter management.
- Harvard has made high-profile donations to aid those struggling with housing in greater Boston, such as a $250,000 donation in April 2020 to help create the War Memorial emergency shelter; however, it hasn't been enough to offset the problems created by Harvard's presence, and organizers interviewed by FFDH agreed that a university with $53 billion could be doing far more.
Harvard and PILOTs
As a non-profit, Harvard does not pay property taxes on most of its holdings. Boston has instituted a system that asks Harvard to contribute 25% of their assessed property values in what are called “PILOTs,” or Payments In Lieu Of Taxes. This would mean Harvard was paying only a quarter of what it would be paying in taxes. One Cambridge city counselor estimated that this would amount to around $12 million paid to Cambridge.
But Harvard has consistently failed even to contribute this much. In fact, they’d been slowly increasing their PILOTs since 2006, and in 2020 they reached $4 million. All three Cambridge city counselors interviewed by FFDH for our reinvestment report called this contribution far too low, or even "ridiculously" low.
Harvard Land Grabs
Forested land in Northern Argentina prior to monocropping
The same land after clear-cutting and monocropping
After the 2008 financial crisis, Harvard spent over $1 billion buying up land to diversify its asset portfolio - making Harvard one of the world’s biggest global farmland investors. Much of that land was in South America, where Harvard's purchases perpetuated severe environmental damage and harms to the local communities.
During a public forum in spring 2021 organized by the Stop Harvard Land Grabs campaign, three South American defenders of their land and communities told stories of the damage Harvard has caused. Forests were cleared for monocropping, former public land and water was fenced off, local communities were displaced, and chemicals polluted the water and the air, causing cancer rates in the area to rise dramatically. Intermediaries for Harvard in the area also pushed people off of land they’d traditionally inhabited through a mixture of fraud and outright violence.
Much of this abuse was revealed in a 2018 exposé by the international nonprofit GRAIN. Since then, Harvard has been working to sell off most of its land investments, but there’s been no work to address the harms done.
Until Harvard justly reinvests its endowment in its community and the world - until it channels significant funds into affordable housing in greater Boston, reasonable PILOTs, and reparations to the people harmed by its land grabs - the work of divestment is not really finished.
Stop Harvard Land Grabs
