Negligent Landlords Perpetuate Boston’s Housing Crisis

Housing crisis graphic.

From doors falling off the hinges to ceilings caving in, Boston’s top landlords are taking advantage of students one family home at a time.

Alpha Management has had its claws in the college students around the city for over three decades. The corporation preys on unsuspecting students looking to rent for the first time. With little to no knowledge about renting, these first-time renters are the perfect targets for landlords looking to make a buck. For the past 30 years, Alpha has been buying family homes and renting them out for anywhere from $1,000 to upwards of $6,000 for approximately 3-5 students.

Alpha Management has no shame about targeting college students seeking housing off campus. According to the company website, there are apartments “near Northeastern, BU, Boston College, Umass, and Harvard University [with] a wide selection of available listings.”

The property management company, owned by Anwar Faisal, has even breached Northeastern University’s on-campus housing. Alpha’s 140-plus residential properties include several apartment buildings on Saint Stephens Street, which are leased to students through the university. Although landlords are not in direct contact with students at leased properties near campus, the conditions are often still abysmal. For years, Northeastern students have alleged the leased property conditions are barely liveable, but the University has not given a response on the issue.

“I woke up and there was a cockroach on my face,” one student told Huntington News, Northeastern’s independent student publication, in 2016.

"The ceiling actually, it was pouring water out. The ceiling actually fell," another Northeastern student, Ava Moran, told WBZ-TV about her old apartment.

In 2018, another student tenant told WBZ-TV that her apartment had doors off hinges, wobbly railings, and tiles missing from the bathroom floor. And when she first moved in, glass was scattered across the entryway floor. With what seems like hundreds of complaints and court cases from tenants past and present, it seems like Faisal’s slumlord ways could continue.

Student tenants allow for landlords to charge more for an apartment that would typically be meant for a family. A five bedroom can be upwards of $5,500 because it is divided among college students rather than a working class family. This process continues to contribute to the current housing crisis in Boston. In 2019, the Massachusetts Housing Authority estimated that Boston was over 38,000 units short of the amount of housing needed that year, and this figure has only gotten worse. Simultaneously, half of the renters in the Boston area are financially unstable due to high housing costs.

Thankfully, with the city’s rich history of activism and the recent formation of the Greater Boston Tenants Union, the future does not look so grim. More than half a century ago, the Southwest Expressway threatened to rip through Fenway, Roxbury, Brookline, Cambridge and the South End. This would have displaced over 13,000 residents and split the city in two. Although 500 homes were destroyed because of the project, community activists stopped the catastrophe from tearing the Greater Boston area apart.

Over 50 years later, Boston residents may be able to give tenants more power and relieve the Boston housing crisis with a crucial new measure that has the potential to be on the ballot this November—rent control. A 1994 state law banned rent control in all municipalities, but State Representative Mike Connolly of Cambridge has pushed for the ban to be lifted. Massachusetts Attorney General, Andrea Campbell, recently approved Connolly’s ballot measure. Once Connolly gathers 90,000 signatures from residents across the state, the question will officially appear on the ballot.

“We all recognize that this ongoing housing emergency is worse than it’s ever been in history, and seems to only be getting worse,” Connolly told the Boston Globe. “The issue is so severe, and the need for action is so extraordinary that we can’t leave any stones unturned in terms of options.”