Last night's Harvard Allston Task Force meeting

The logistics of Harvard's construction and how that will impact the neighborhood was a main topic of last night's meeting. One sticking point is where parking for the construction workers should be located.

Harvard estimates that the maximum worker parking demand during the Science Complex construction will be for 750 parking spaces. Surface parking requires about 300 square feet of land per parking space or 124 parking spaces can be created on one acre. So 6 acres of land are needed to park 750 cars.

The site size of the Science Complex is 4.7 acres.

So parking and the construction site need 10.7 acres (6 + 4.7).

Luckily, Harvard owns 19 contigous acres of land around the project site. Plus another 3 acres on the north side of Western Ave (allowing for a setback from the Charlesview housing) and another 1/2 acre to the east of Rotterdam (allowing for a setback from the homes at the end of Hopedale).

Put this all together and there are 22.5 acres that seem to be avilable for the construction of this building, and 11.8 acres that can be used for things other than parking and the actual site of the buildings. I'm not an expert on this, but 11 acres is a lot of land. It would be great to understand what Harvard needs to do to support the construction that can't happen on 11 acres. This information would help explain why Harvard proposed using the Sears building site for the construction of the Science Complex and why the problems that would result for residents of Windom St would be justified.