In 1946, a university found itself in the midst of a housing crisis. It had enrolled more students, particularly World War II veterans, than it or the surrounding community could house. Facing a serious housing shortage, this university took bold action by partnering with the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA) to build temporary apartment housing on its former polo field for 252 returning veterans and their families. That university was Princeton University, and that housing project was called the Butler Tract.

Finished in 1947, the Butler Tract — a 36 acre plot of land located on the east side of Harrison Street, in between Hartley Avenue and Sycamore Road — grew to contain 304 housing units before its demolition in 2015. The Butler Tract lasted 63 years longer than originally intended. Despite its fairly utilitarian construction, it came to be a beloved home for many University graduate students and their families.

The Butler Tract project occurred in an era when our most powerful institutions promoted housing with a sense of urgency. A decade after beginning to build public housing and subsidize homeownership in the 1930s, the federal government took unprecedented action by enacting rent freezes and mass producing housing for migrant workers and veterans.

Through the Butler Tract, the University took similar steps to relieve the housing burden among its student population, and, more generally, within the Township and Borough of Princeton.

Unfortunately, the policies of this era generated massive racial inequities. A plethora of research has detailed how the federal government instituted blatantly racist policies within New Deal programs, how the financial and real estate industries perpetuated these policies, and how their effects reverberate throughout society to this day.

As important as the Butler Tract was to relieving Princeton’s housing shortage, it was not immune from institutional trends promoting racial housing disparities. University records suggest that when the FPHA turned the property over to the University in 1948, all Butler Tract residents were white University-affiliated veterans and their family members.1Quarterly Report on Occupancy in Veterans Housing, September 30, 1948, Box 2, Folder 1, Butler Tract Housing, Department of Grounds and Buildings Technical Correspondence Records, ACO35, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Around the same time, Black veterans without the luxury of University affiliation experienced considerable housing instability in Princeton. Perhaps in anticipation of how scarce housing in Princeton would remain, one University official emphasized that “outsiders not connected with the University would have no right whatsoever to demand the use” of the Butler Tract. 2Letter from George A. Brakeley to Edward A. MacMillan, March 27, 1946, Box 1, Folder 4, Butler Tract Housing, Department of Grounds and Buildings Technical Correspondence Records, ACO35, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

This history of institutionalized racism and our insufficient responses to it points to a crucial observation about racial inequities: institutional policies created them and institutional policies must end them.

______
This history of institutionalized racism and our insufficient responses to it points to a crucial observation about racial inequities: institutional policies created them and institutional policies must end them.

Policy responses to COVID-19’s aggravation of our pre-existing housing crisis, such as eviction moratoria and emergency rental assistance (while far from perfect), represent arguably the most significant housing interventions since the 1940s. They demonstrate that our governments can still meaningfully respond to housing problems and perhaps have given us a renewed sense of urgency about correcting the inequities caused by our governments and financial institutions decades ago.

Nongovernmental institutions, particularly those like Princeton University that are anchored in areas of intense housing inequity, also need to recognize their unfulfilled roles. In past columns for The Daily Princetonian, I’ve documented housing inequities within Princeton and explained how many homeowners exacerbate them. This series is an attempt to show that Princeton University, one of the region’s largest landowners, can reduce these inequities and has an obligation to do so.

The University has a history of employment and housing discrimination. At the turn of the century, Princeton University made special efforts to help Italian laborers working at the University find affordable housing in and around the traditionally Black and under-resourced Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood.3Watterson, Kathryn. I Hear My People Singing: Voices of African American Princeton. Unabridged edition. Princeton University Press, 2017, 37. This housing, which was practically the only option available in Princeton to Black residents, was often of poor quality and hazardous to health. Instead of improving living conditions for its Black dining hall employees living in the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood, which several reports commissioned in the 1910s recommended doing, the University fired its Black dining hall employees, replaced them with white employees, and built a dormitory for these new white employees elsewhere in the Borough.4October 21, 1913, pg. 18; 1913 October 21-1915 January 14, Board of Trustees Records, AC120, Princeton University Archives, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library; October 26, 1916, pg. 54, 1916 October 26-1917 June 16, Board of Trustees Records, AC120, Princeton University Archives, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library The University did this despite previously acknowledging “the obligation of the University to improve the living conditions” of its Black employees.5 Report to Committee on Grounds and Buildings of the Trustees of Princeton University from University Financial Secretary Andrew Imbrie, March 13, 1912, Box 50, Committee on Grounds and Buildings Minutes, Reports, 1912, Minutes, Reports, Correspondence; Board of Trustees Records, AC120, Princeton University Archives, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library

The University also indirectly participated in a controversial urban renewal program in the 1930s. To make way for Palmer Square, Princeton Municipal Improvement, Inc., led by Edgar Palmer Class of 1903, a University Trustee,61935 October 24-1936 June 15, Board of Trustees Records, AC120, Princeton University Archives, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. displaced many Black households that once lived where a collection of mostly high-end, boutique shops now stand. After Palmer’s death, Princeton University came to own much of the Palmer Square property until 1981, when it sold the property for $17 million.

The University continues to aggravate housing inequities today. Most notably, it does little beyond the bare minimum to help supply housing for the people it draws into such an exorbitantly expensive, housing-starved area. By subsidizing mortgages for faculty and upper-level staff – members of the University community with likely the lowest need for housing assistance — Princeton University likely helps inflate local housing costs. In comparison, the University provides housing to only a subset of graduate students (roughly 70 percent) by lottery and limited financial assistance to low and moderate income employees, some of whom live paycheck to paycheck.

The University surely recognizes this decades-old problem. A 1970 Housing Market Study commissioned by the University highlighted the acute housing needs of low and moderate income households, including University staff, and recommended that the University should develop hundreds of affordable housing units. It also called for the University to consider opening up University housing to low and moderate income households in the community.7Housing Market Study from James D. Landauer Associates, Inc., August 26, 1970, Box 377, Folder 9, Princeton Community Housing–Low and Middle Income Housing, Office of the President Records: Robert F. Goheen Subgroup, AC193, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. As recently as 2005, internal surveys have suggested that many University employees spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing alone.

These actions (and inactions) have likely contributed to the displacement of Black households from Princeton over time. While the municipality has grown alongside the University over the past 100 years, the share of its Black population has declined considerably over the same period. According to Census Bureau records, at the turn of the twentieth century, Black residents made up nearly one in five residents. By 1980, that number fell to one in 13 and by 2020, one in 17. Decades of documented racial discrimination along with a chronic lack of affordable housing in the municipality likely explain much of the exodus of Black residents.

These patterns exist elsewhere, particularly in areas where massive, for-profit tech companies have been implicated for their role in the housing crisis. Like Princeton University, these companies aren’t singularly responsible for the crisis — after all, many local governments have failed to zone for sufficient amounts of multifamily housing — and these companies do provide economic benefits to the region. Yet, while companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to support affordable housing in their communities, these contributions represent tiny fractions of their overall wealth and are insufficient given the scale of the problem.

Similarly, Princeton University, one of the wealthiest and most well-renowned universities in the world, does little to address ongoing housing inequity in the area. It does support the municipality through voluntary contributions, both in the form of property taxes on the housing it owns and payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs), but not on the scale necessary to change the status quo. Even the recent $18.2 million settlement challenging the University’s non-profit status did not meaningfully address housing inequities in Princeton. Peer institutions like Harvard University, through its Local Housing Collaborative, have helped finance and preserve thousands of affordable housing units. Initiatives like this demonstrate that the University can do more.

Fortunately, the University has demonstrated its capacity to be a part of the solution in the past. In the late 1960s, it joined an emerging coalition of organizations in the area to promote housing affordability.8Princeton Community Housing–Low and Middle Income Housing, Office of the President Records: Robert F. Goheen Subgroup, AC193, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. In the 1970s, University administrators publicly supported and offered credit for the development that became Princeton Community Village. University President Robert Goheen’s administration pursued the construction of 1,500 low and moderate income housing units before President Nixon’s moratorium on federal housing subsidies undermined their plans.9Ibid.

More recently, the University has helped finance affordable home ownership and has sold and donated land to help the municipality reach its state-mandated affordable housing targets, leading to the development of affordable housing units both at the Butler Tract and the Merwick-Stanworth apartments. Its Lake Campus development will house many more graduate students, which will likely open up units elsewhere in the municipality for others. These are positive steps that we can and should build upon.

One obvious place for the University to strengthen its commitment to affordable housing is the Butler Tract, which has remained vacant since 2015. Currently, the University has no plans for the land, but has indicated that it could be used for University housing in the future. Yet, given the dire lack of affordable housing in Princeton and how ideal the Butler Tract is for development, the University clearly lacks a sense of urgency by leaving the land vacant in the near-term. The municipality of Princeton currently has one of its most pro-housing Councils in decades, if not ever. The time for Princeton University to act is now.

Editor’s note: the article originally stated that the demolition of the Butler Tract occurred 2014; it did not. It was demolished in 2015.

Matt Mleczko is a member of the Princeton Affordable Housing Board and a researcher with Princeton University's Eviction Lab.

This is the second column in an opinion series by Graduate Student Columnist Matt Mleczko about how Princeton University can promote affordable housing in a reparative framework and provide a model for other similar institutions to follow.

Princeton University has a chance to meaningfully reduce housing inequity in the area, but it needs to aim higher than its original 1946 Butler Tract plan: it should donate the Butler Tract for affordable housing construction.

Since land constitutes a significant portion of the costs of developing affordable housing, particularly in a place like Princeton, donating the Butler Tract would be a major contribution to making Princeton a more affordable place to live. There’s recent precedent for this: in 2014, Princeton University donated land for a pending mixed income development just a half-mile north of campus. If 36 acres seems like a lot of land to donate, consider the fact that the University previously donated 127 acres of land for open space preservation.

Moreover, given the scale of housing unaffordability in the area and the largely temporary methods of financing affordable housing in this country, Princeton University should donate this land to be held by the community off the private market. The best way to do this would be through a community land trust (CLT), in which the community — rather than landlords, homeowners, corporations, or investors — owns the land that the housing sits on. This means that eligible households, typically those that would qualify for affordable housing, purchase or rent a unit at a discounted price and lease the land underneath it. Should a land trust homeowner decide to sell their home, they would do so at a pre-arranged, discounted price while sharing in some of the equity. This pay-it-forward arrangement keeps housing below-market rate and affordable in the long-run.

Despite success stories nationwide, CLTs are still a fairly uncommon form of housing. CLTs require both funding and technical assistance, which are often lacking. Fortunately, the Princeton community has a considerable amount of expertise that could be brought together to help. For instance, University researchers, students, architects, and real estate professionals would likely have much to contribute to this effort. Moreover, the municipality of Princeton hosts an affordable homeownership program that operates similarly to a CLT, which could be another valuable source of expertise regarding shared-equity housing.

This presents Princeton University with an opportunity. The University could help establish a CLT on the Butler Tract, which could host a significant amount of below-market rate housing. Communities disadvantaged by the University’s previous and ongoing policies should receive priority for this housing. The historical evidence indicates that this would include Black households along with staff or retirees who do not qualify for generous University housing assistance. Publicly available data on University employment groups by race and ethnicity suggest that there is overlap between these two groups. As of 2020, Black employees constitute about nine percent of the University workforce, but about three percent of all Dean of Faculty and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory employees — two employee groups whose higher ranks account for a large portion of employees who would qualify for significant mortgage assistance.1Authors calculations exclude Human Resources appointments, which do not include information on employee position or rank. In 2020, Black employees constituted 14% of Human Resources appointments.

The Butler Tract has surfaced several times in the University’s efforts to promote housing affordability. It was formerly supposed to be the site of a new 220 unit development and was last proposed as a development site in Princeton’s Third Round Fair Share Plan, before the University objected to the development timeline. Before this, in the 1980s, a small portion of the Butler Tract was selected as a site for affordable housing construction as part of Princeton Township’s affordable housing obligation. Yet, several homeowners, including Princeton University faculty, living in the neighborhood surrounding the Butler Tract protested this development in letters to University officials, with one accusing the University of “institutionalizing a slum” and threatening their property values, only to benefit a developer in the process.2Letter from resident to William Bowen, November 14, 1984, Box 113, Folder 10, Butler Tract, Office of the President Records: William G. Bowen Subgroup, AC187, Princeton University Archives, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library

The striking parallels between these letters from the ’80s and the acrimonious debates about housing development in the municipality today demonstrate just how little the discourse has changed over the past four decades. Residents of the neighborhoods of proposed multifamily housing developments, despite most likely having positive intentions, routinely criticize things like building heights and increases in density, implicitly weighting these concerns above giving people a place to live. Given its size and influence, the University has become an easy target for criticism and suspicion when it undertakes construction and expansion on or around campus. But these criticisms are not always fair, particularly when they are made from those who, as the previous paragraph demonstrates, scapegoat the University only to turn around and undermine housing affordability and integration.

After all, the University has previously acted to promote housing affordability and integration on the Butler Tract. It originally prioritized housing for a specific group of people — returning, married veterans with families — who it knew to be the most housing burdened subgroup among its campus community. Moreover, in 1963, it prioritized two Black, married undergraduates for the scarce Butler Tract housing due to their inability to find any other local accommodations. In defending the decision, former President Robert F. Goheen ’40 acknowledged local conditions — housing shortages and racial discrimination — that made securing housing particularly difficult for Black students and invoked a “decade-old” policy of providing housing to faculty and students of color when necessary. If Princeton University was once able to recognize its role in a racially unjust housing process and intervene, it can certainly do so today.

This matters because in their ongoing reckoning with systemic racism, institutions within the municipality of Princeton have begun considering reparative policies that similar places, like Evanston, Ill., have undertaken. The Princeton Theological Seminary has pledged close to $28 million in the name of reparations to fund initiatives such as scholarships for descendants of enslaved persons or members of underrepresented groups. The Princeton Civil Rights Commission has been holding community discussions and dialogues on reparations. Princeton University itself has launched a campus-wide initiative to combat systemic racism.

Addressing housing inequity in our own community is a crucial way in which Princeton University can promote racial justice — as the Butler Tract’s trajectory has shown. Importantly, this proposal aligns with and amplifies other University priorities. For instance, if the University takes seriously its effort to reduce carbon emissions, one of the single most effective things it could do would be to provide workforce housing for those employees who currently have no choice but to live miles away and commute, most likely by car, due to unreasonably high housing costs.

Moreover, by acting decisively, Princeton University would be creating a model that other universities could follow. Many of the nation’s most endowed universities and colleges are located in urban areas with acute housing needs. If the University established this model and these universities followed suit, we wouldn’t just be talking about housing for a few hundred households or so — we’d be talking about tens of thousands of housing units nationwide.

Universities should take the lead. Local and state governments, despite in many cases having the desire to increase access to housing, rarely have the funds to do so. Despite having the financial means to guarantee housing for all, the federal government budgets far less than it used to for housing assistance and Congressional gridlock continues to delay or thwart necessary interventions. Yet, many universities, particularly over the past few decades, have seen their operating budgets and endowments rise rapidly.

This wealth accumulation certainly applies to Princeton University, an institution whose fortune includes a wealth of donated land — including the Butler Tract3Breese, Gerald William., and Earle E Coleman. Princeton University Land, 1752-1984. Princeton: Princeton University, 1986. — that it has received over the years, in some cases from wealthy individuals engaged in the trading of enslaved people. These colleges and universities are institutions with the stated mission of making a difference and the budgets to do so. We desperately need these functioning and less-encumbered institutions to step in and deliver solutions to social problems that our governments have let fester.

Make no mistake, this is a bold proposal, but one that has been made before, in one form or another. In addition to internal studies recommending more affordable housing construction, previous University administrators and faculty, such as Robert Geddes, have called upon University leadership to do more to provide affordable housing to the Princeton community.4Letter from Robert Geddes to Robert Goheen, Ricardo Mestres, and Henry Bessire, March 12, 1970, Box 377, Folder 9, Princeton Community Housing–Low and Middle Income Housing, Office of the President Records: Robert F. Goheen Subgroup, AC193, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. The Princeton Housing Group, the Princeton Association for Human Rights, and the YWCA all previously petitioned the University to do the same.5Princeton Community Housing–Low and Middle Income Housing, Office of the President Records: Robert F. Goheen Subgroup, AC193, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. I join them in asking this University to reclaim its past affordable housing ambitions and to lead by example.

Princeton University prides itself on being a world-class institution that produces research and equips students with an education that makes the world a better place. Yet, we must include our commitment to the surrounding community when we consider the good that this University can accomplish. We live up to our University’s informal motto — “in the service of humanity” — by building trust in the community and applying our work to solve problems and achieve social justice. We should realize that this work and our research and educational pursuits are not mutually exclusive, but mutually reinforcing.

Ultimately, this is an invitation for Princeton University to build upon its world-class reputation by pioneering a potentially path-breaking model for housing justice. I urge the Princeton community to explore the resources shared throughout this column and to join in petitioning the University to act on this once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Matt Mleczko is a member of the Princeton Affordable Housing Board and a researcher with Princeton University's Eviction Lab.