Every spring, Harvard’s freshmen are sorted across 12 residential houses. But the children of the 0.1 percent have a 13th option: 1075 Massachusetts Avenue. With a tenant directory resembling the Forbes Four Hundred, the 20-unit building is the go-to off-campus option for nepo babies at the Ivy League college.
“It has been extremely popular, and the clientele we have is obviously a very upper-end clientele,” says developer Raj Dhanda, who bought the Harvard Square property in 2009.
For real-estate investors, luxe housing on elite college campuses is increasingly attractive. These buildings’ owners point to benefits such as the constant churn of well-to-do students (who recommend the housing to incoming ones) and complicated zoning laws that scare away rival developers. “Student housing has been the darling of the real-estate-investment community for several years now,” says Daniel Bernstein, the president and chief investment officer of the Philadelphia-based, multi-billion-dollar real-estate firm Campus Apartments.
Dhanda says his Boston building—where two-bedroom units rent for $6,500 a month—has welcomed “the children of some of the wealthiest families in America.” Although Harvard has the world’s largest university endowment, many of its dorms remain decidedly no-frills. By contrast, the units at 1075 Massachusetts Avenue feel modern, with big windows and large kitchens, according to Harvard senior Brooke Sanford, who has visited the building. “When I would walk in, I was like, ‘Wow, you are living large,’” she says.
While the vast majority of students at Harvard live on campus, the sparse luxury offerings have meant that 1075 Massachusetts Avenue has been at near-full occupancy for the past 12 years, according to Dhanda. Indeed, it’s become so competitive to score an apartment there that some students take units without actually living in them. Dhanda recalled one Harvard undergrad who continued her lease for two years after graduation, in anticipation of attending law school there. “Nobody lived there, and of course she paid full rent,” Dhanda says.
These luxury alternatives to shabbier on- and off-campus housing extend across the Ivy League. Although most students at the University of Pennsylvania either live in dorms or in old, run-down town houses, the school’s wealthier students tend to live in the West Philly version of 1075 Massachusetts Avenue: AKA University City. The white-glove, high-rise building on 30th and Walnut Streets features an indoor golf simulator, a fitness center, and a private dining room. One-bedroom apartments rent for around $3,500 a month.
Other Penn students allergic to shared bathrooms live in Domus, another luxury offering near the campus. The building, on 34th and Chestnut Streets, is owned by U.D.R., a Colorado-based, $13 billion real-estate-investment trust. With monthly rents starting at nearly $3,000, the eight-story building offers amenities like a 24-hour concierge, an outdoor pool, and a private screening room. Plus, residents don’t need to pick up their Amazon packages at Penn’s mail center—Domus’s doormen handle that for them.
While there are only 290 units in the building, Domus is well known among Penn’s 10,000-strong student body. “It did have some of that ‘Oh, it’s an expensive building’ type of reputation,” says one member of the University of Pennsylvania class of 2019, who lived there for three years. It’s irked some Penn students—in 2017, Roshan Benefo, then a sophomore at the Wharton business school, told the student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian that Domus exacerbated socio-economic divisions within the class. “This works against the idea of community that I was really going for,” he said.
Penn is one of the few Ivy League campuses with an abundant supply of tony pads. One Brown University alum told me that some students’ parents, unhappy with the rental options available to their kids, bought them houses in Providence.
At Yale, the options are limited as well. The Fifth Avenue–to–New Haven pipeline often results in students living in the Cambridge Oxford apartments on High Street, where one-bedrooms—nicer, perhaps, than the standard student living, but by no means luxury—rent for $2,500 a month. (In 2019, the three “Ox-Cam” buildings, as they are known to students, and an adjacent two-family house sold to a Connecticut developer for $25.15 million.) After leases expire, students often pass the apartments off to friends in their social clubs, whether sororities or secret societies. Another luxury option is 18 High, which opened right across the street from the Cambridge Oxford apartments in 2021 and features a fitness center, yoga studio, courtyard garden, movie theater, and “rooftop BBQ terrace.”
Dhanda is planning more units in Harvard Square, near a Shake Shack, hoping to lure even more donor offspring away from Harvard’s own housing. His newest building, set to open on JFK Street, hopes to have almost double the number of units as 1075 Massachusetts Avenue.
“I’ve always believed that I want to have top-of-the-line places,” he says. “They will be smaller, but they will be state-of-the-art.”
Andrew Zucker works at a television-production company in New York City