Harvard and MIT: How Cambridge Became a Research Hub

Cambridge is a separate city from Boston, across the Charles River, and it contains two of the most consequential research universities in the world roughly a mile apart. What grew up around them is arguably more economically significant than either institution alone.

Two very different institutions

Harvard, founded in 1636, is the oldest institution of higher education in the country and organises itself around a broad set of schools: the college, plus law, business, medicine, public health, design, government and others. Its centre of gravity is Harvard Yard in the north of the city, though its medical and public health schools sit across the river in Boston and its business school sits in Allston.

MIT moved across the river to Cambridge in 1916 and occupies a long stretch along the Charles. Its culture is built around engineering and science and treats the boundary between research and application as porous by design. That orientation, more than any single discovery, is what made the surrounding district what it is.

The two are not interchangeable, and locals will tell you so quickly.

Kendall Square

The most visible economic consequence is Kendall Square, the district adjacent to MIT that became one of the densest biotechnology clusters anywhere in the world.

The mechanism is worth understanding, because cities everywhere have tried to copy it and mostly failed. It was not a plan. It was accumulation:

• A research university with unusually strong industry ties and permissive policies on faculty commercialisation.
• A supply of graduates who wanted to stay in the area rather than leave.
• Early biotechnology companies that located near the science because proximity to specific researchers mattered.
• Venture capital that followed the companies, then concentrated locally.
• Large pharmaceutical firms that opened research sites to be near all of it.
• Specialised suppliers, lawyers, recruiters and contract labs serving that concentration.

Each step made the next easier and made leaving harder. The result is a few square blocks where an unusual share of the world's drug development happens, and where an early-stage company can hire a specialist, find lab space and meet an investor without leaving the neighbourhood.

The Longwood counterweight

Across the river in Boston, the Longwood Medical Area concentrates teaching hospitals and Harvard Medical School in another dense cluster.

Between Kendall and Longwood, the region holds an extraordinary combination of basic research, clinical practice and commercial development within a few miles of each other. That proximity is the real competitive advantage: a researcher, a clinician and a company scientist can meet in person on the same afternoon, repeatedly, over years.

Innovation economics tends to reward exactly that kind of repeated informal contact, and it is the hardest thing for a rival region to replicate with money alone.

What it costs the city

The pressures are equally real.

Laboratory and office demand pushes commercial rents up, which pushes land values up, which pushes housing costs up in cities with constrained supply. Cambridge and Somerville have both spent years arguing over how much lab development to permit, where, and what it should contribute.

University and hospital land is also generally exempt from property tax, which means a city hosting an enormous institution collects less than the land would otherwise yield while still providing services to it. Payments in lieu of taxes are a long-running negotiation and a long-running source of friction, and the gap between what institutions are asked to contribute and what they do contribute is a recurring local story.

Cambridge and Somerville have also been among the more aggressive municipalities in the region on housing production and on taxing commercial development to fund it, which is a direct response to these pressures.

Visiting

Both campuses are largely walkable and partly open to the public, though individual buildings are restricted.

Harvard Yard, the MIT campus along Massachusetts Avenue, and the museums attached to both institutions are the usual points of entry. MIT's campus contains a substantial collection of notable modern architecture, some of it much argued about, and its long interior corridor is a genuine piece of local culture.

The Red Line connects Harvard, Central, Kendall and downtown Boston, making the whole corridor easy to see in an afternoon. Walking between Harvard and MIT along Massachusetts Avenue takes roughly half an hour and passes through Central Square, which is more representative of Cambridge as a place people actually live than either campus.

The thing to take away

The cluster is not the universities. The cluster is what happened around them over decades, and it depends on density, proximity and a large number of people choosing to stay.

That is why the housing question and the research question are the same question here, and why a debate about a zoning change in Cambridge is, in a real sense, a debate about whether the thing that makes this region distinctive continues.

Beyond the two

Framing the region around Harvard and MIT understates it. Boston University, Northeastern, Tufts, Boston College, Brandeis, UMass Boston, the art and music conservatories and dozens of smaller colleges sit within a short radius.

That density is the actual regional asset. It produces a continuous supply of graduates, a deep specialist labour market, and an unusual concentration of people whose work is thinking about difficult problems. Employers locate here for the hiring pool as much as for any single institution.

It also means the region's population turns over substantially every September, which shapes the rental market, the restaurant economy and the character of whole neighbourhoods.

The town-gown relationship

The relationship between institutions and the cities hosting them is not uniformly warm.

Universities expand, and expansion consumes land in cities that need housing. Student rentals compete with family housing and change the character of blocks. Tax exemption removes property from the rolls while services are still required. Large construction projects impose years of disruption on neighbours who receive none of the benefit.

Cambridge, Somerville, Boston and Medford have all negotiated with institutions over these questions, sometimes cooperatively and sometimes through zoning fights that run for years.

Working here

For anyone considering a research or biotech career, the concentration cuts both ways.

The opportunity density is genuinely exceptional: more relevant employers within a few miles than most countries contain. Changing jobs need not mean moving house, which is rare in specialised fields.

Against that, the cost of living is among the highest in the country, entry-level academic and postdoctoral salaries have not tracked it, and the competition is intense precisely because everyone else also wants to be here. Both things are true, and people weigh them differently.