From left: Houlihan, Nelson, Varano, and Gleason at their project site. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

On a drizzly Saturday morning in late April, four Boston College students are in Quincy, Massachusetts, taking stock of a two-acre parking lot. Immediately beside the lot, which is owned by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), is a homely six-level concrete garage. Beyond that is a Red Line “T” station. Surrounding much of the patched, oil-stained lot is a tangle of highway overpasses and parkways inhospitable to pedestrians. The students’ mission is to fashion a realistic and detailed development plan for the two-acre parcel, proposing apartments, green space, and retail shops. It’s an assignment, for a Carroll School of Management class called “Field Projects in Real Estate.” Their ultimate goal is to help the city of Quincy (population: more than 93,000) create a vibrant residential community for average-income renters, and their effort has the attention of the local Department of Planning and Community Development.

The three seniors and one junior (together with a fifth team member, a junior) have been out to Quincy nine or 10 times since late January. “You can never see the site enough,” explains New Jersey native Emma Gleason ’16, holding the lone umbrella in the group. Today they are talking about projected cost, which is running higher than expected. Standing in what has become a steady downpour, they discuss squeezing more rental units into the development when Nico Varano, a senior from a northern suburb of Boston, spreads his arms wide: “Guys, why aren’t we building a much bigger building!”

“Field Projects in Real Estate” is the brainchild of senior lecturer Edward Chazen (department of business law and society). A veteran real estate analyst and financing specialist, Chazen left the field for academe after the housing-market meltdown of the late 2000s. For four years he taught a similar class to graduate students at Brandeis University before coming to Boston College a year ago. He introduced the undergraduate course in spring 2016.

Students looking to take the course were first interviewed individually by Chazen. “The course gets them out of their comfort zones. They’re out there dealing with experts and stakeholders they typically don’t encounter on campus,” he explains, referring in part to meetings with state funders and with planners, developers, and realtors in Quincy and comparable communities. “They’re working with modest supervision, accountable to each other in the group.”

The 15 accepted students were divided into three groups. In addition to the Quincy team, there was a team assigned to plan a new public park and an office building for startup companies on sites known as “Lot 5” and “Lot 7,” respectively, in a rapidly changing part of Boston’s South End. Another team worked out of Saugus, Massachusetts, with an aim of converting three old iron-mill buildings into primarily senior housing and making improvements to the environs. All three projects grew out of Chazen’s ongoing conversations with urban planners, investors, and others he has known since his days in the business or has cultivated since becoming a professor.

The class is part of a five-course curriculum initiated by the Carroll School’s Joseph E. Corcoran Center for Real Estate and Urban Action, launched in early 2015.

The students working on the Quincy project latched onto an urban movement called “transit-oriented development,” which seeks to knit communities around mass transit portals and reduce reliance on cars, while promoting access to far-flung workplaces and cultural and commercial offerings. The Quincy team also put an emphasis on “workforce housing,” geared to household incomes between 80 and 120 percent of the local median income (about $63,500 in Quincy).

By early March, the undergraduates were preparing to share their concept and a preliminary schema with the city’s planners. On a Thursday morning, the students—Christian Nelson ’16, Shaun Houlihan ’17, and Wade O’Neil ’17, along with Gleason and Varano—sat with Chazen in a Fulton Hall seminar room, where, throughout the semester, each team met weekly with the professor for 90 minutes. Chazen outlined the components of an effective presentation. They would need to lay out some of the development challenges. “Every real estate project has them,” he said. Going to a whiteboard, he wrote out the words “Property Fact Sheet.” Theirs should address not only land area and zoning status (“light industrial” in this case, meaning a variance would be needed), but also current parking spaces. “How many square feet in an acre?” he asked the group. It took several seconds for them to cough up 43,560. Other components to be touched on: local demographic trends (including income and age); and methodology (for example, the students’ intention to interview area retailers, commuters, and other stakeholders).

Top: Drone’s-eye view of the two-acre MBTA lot in Quincy. Bottom: Artist’s rendering of the students’ development proposal. Photograph/artist rendering: Andrew Hartness

On March 18, halfway through the semester, the students and Chazen gathered in a meeting room at Quincy’s Department of Planning and Community Development, housed in a redbrick building a few blocks from City Hall. The undergraduates delivered an hour-long presentation before an audience of four planning officials, among them Robert Muollo Jr., manager of housing programs, who pressed them on the “design challenges,” including what Houlihan had described candidly as the “huge, ugly” garage facing the lot. (Muollo: “How do you compensate for that?” Chazen, from his high-back leather chair at the conference table: “Trees.”)

The students made clear their determination to bring to table a configuration of rental units exclusively for households hovering around the median income, citing the present trend in Quincy toward high-rent construction. Soon afterward, however, they hit a snag. The projected cost of their plan (including that of building an underground parking garage) was spiraling upward as quotes for materials came in unexpectedly high, or at least too high in relation to the income the students anticipated from strictly “workforce housing.” At an April 14 team meeting, Chazen began preparing a disappointed group of students for the possibility that they might have to include some high-rent units in their plan. They were headed back to the drawing board. “This is what developers do, by the way,” Chazen said. “You’re acting like developers.”

In the end, the Quincy team made the numbers work. They didn’t quite embrace the idea of building “a much bigger building” to increase revenue, as broached on the rainy Saturday morning (one factor being the prohibitive cost of excavating a second level of underground parking to accommodate more dwellers). But they did carve out some extra space for units and shops while adding more apartments for renters at the upper end of their targeted income range, among other adjustments. The property would remain “workforce housing.”

On May 10, the students traveled to Quincy for their final meeting with town planners (including economic development coordinator Maureen Geary), and they delivered their completed proposal. Dressed in black business suits, they unveiled a $54 million plan for the “Quincy Adams T-Station Development,” featuring a five-story building (22 studios, 75 one-bedrooms, 86 two-bedrooms, and 32 three-bedrooms), with small retailers on the lower level (a drycleaner, coffee shop, convenience store, workout club) and ample green space. Their 56-page presentation contained an artist’s rendering of the development, commissioned by the Corcoran Center. It elicited “oohs and ahs” from the half-dozen planning officials.

Other highlights included a 13-page financial analysis, which showed effective gross income for a private developer 10 years out as $7,662,347 and net operating income as $4,964,969 (subtract $547,258 for estimated “ground rent” to the MBTA). To encourage pedal and foot traffic, the students’ plan introduced traffic medians, bike lanes, landscaping, and new lighting.

Asked how often student field-project studies are implemented, Chazen said later in an interview, “Not too often, but that’s not what’s most important.” He underlines the experience gained by the students and what they do with it. One illustration is Gleason, now launching her career as an analyst with New York-based Emax. It is a women-owned real estate advisory firm that evaluates projects involving public-private partnerships like the one she helped propose to Quincy.

Read more by William Bole