In Boston, the start of the academic year is met with the rumble of moving trucks, as thousands of leases in apartments across the city turn over with new tenants scrambling to load and unload truckloads of furniture and other household goods. Much of this moving detritus ends up on sidewalks and street corners in neighborhoods heavily concentrated with students. The city of Boston has long struggled with how to remove and potentially reuse the mountains of discarded furniture that appear each year during what is affectionately—and infamously—known as “Allston Christmas,” in a nod to one of the most affected neighborhoods.
For Naomi Carolan MPP 2025 and Nora Cahill MPP 2025, Allston Christmas became the subject of their Policy Analysis Exercise (PAE), which Master in Public Policy students regard as the culmination of their experience at HKS. For their PAEs, students examine and develop solutions for a public or nonprofit sector policy or management issue presented by a client organization. We spoke with Carolan about the recommendations she and Cahill shared with the city of Boston to help reduce the landfill waste that Allston Christmas produces.
Q: Boston is very much a college town. How does the influx of students at the beginning of the academic year put a strain on the city’s ability to pick up furniture and other waste generated by turnovers in apartment rentals? Is this problem unique to Boston?
The pressures Boston faces during move-out is truly unlike any other city I’ve lived in. Because such a high proportion of the city comprises students, it makes sense for the rest of the city’s landlords to align their leases with the start of the school year. If I’m a landlord and want to maximize my selection of prospective tenants to choose from, I’ll want to set my lease for when all other leases are ending. With this unusual herding of lease start dates, the city has to stretch its resources profoundly over the course of just a few days to accommodate mass moving. We found in our research that trash pickups double, and universities and other community organizations fill in the gaps with their own trash pickup and recycling services. One university even hires their own truck to go around off-campus neighborhoods. If you walk around most streets in Boston, you’ll see dumpsters piled high with furniture and mattresses stacked on street corners.
Q: With so much furniture and other household items being left on the curb at the end of the summer by vacating tenants, wouldn’t there be an excellent opportunity to rehome much of it so that it doesn’t end up in the landfill? Why hadn’t that been happening? Wasn’t there a demand for what was essentially free furniture?
I had actually tried to talk with some nonprofits about this idea after I graduated form my undergraduate program at Boston University and would hear the same issues over and over again. Nonprofits had considered collecting furniture but were nervous about furniture cleanliness (from stains to bedbugs) and had no way to transport or store furniture. On the government side, everyone we spoke to had always felt bad about the amount of usable supplies going to waste, but developing an entirely new donation function hit on transportation, storage, and sanitation challenges, all while the city was already managing a resource-intensive few days. Moreover, the government’s zero-waste initiatives typically have such bulky items go through their own unique processes. Reusing or recycling furniture would be a whole other beast entirely for them.
As Nora and I dug into the issue further, we found that furniture banks checked off a lot of these considerations; they had a couple reserve trucks to pick up furniture, massive storage warehouses, and strict inspecting and cleaning protocols. Some of these furniture banks had actually tried to reach out to the city for possible coordination but operated mostly on volunteer support and were unaware of the best avenues to approach city officials. We realized a solution would require joining forces with all of these stakeholders to partner nonprofit capacity with the city’s reach.
“It’s been a privilege seeing how you can create innovative solutions to help people who don’t always have a seat at the table.”
Q: What were the recommendations you laid out to the City of Boston in your PAE last spring?
We had a few different possible courses of action that we recommended for a test pilot. The furniture banks we had talked to mentioned that they’d already considered a coordinated furniture pickup, but there were many logistical challenges in maximizing pickup routes, identifying furniture for donation, etc. Moreover, we’d heard from people during the move out days that a lot of their decisions to curb furniture were made last minute. They’d planned to sell it or give it to a friend or squeeze it into their truck and for one reason or another, those options fell through on the day they planned to move out. Coordinated pickups wouldn’t necessarily capture those people. We also recommended stationing trucks on streets where people were already frequently curbing furniture to be near people moving in. This would address some of the last-minute nature around curbing furniture, but if the city were trying to flatten the curve of moving pressures on the city, this option would not achieve that aim. The third idea was to host a yard sale at a central location—something the city of Cambridge did last spring. However, we found it would require a significant amount of resources and liability for the city to take on inspecting, sanitizing, and re-donating furniture all over the course of a couple days. Of course, in our recommendations we laid out possible ways to mitigate all of these challenges. All options felt possible but would require different resources, timing, etc.
Q: What did the city ultimately implement in advance of Boston’s peak move-out period earlier this month?
The city went with the first option, partnering with a furniture bank to execute a one-day coordinated pick up, and from their initial findings, they were successful at engaging households and picking up furniture! I’d assume given the traffic and trash pickup pressures the city faces, they wanted to have a pilot prior to the big move-out weekend to reduce the city’s stress on September 1. At least on a small scale, it sounds like they were able to work through some of the logistical challenges and that option paid off.
Q: Looking back, how do you think everything went?
There are always places where you can say to yourself, “Hmm, I wish we went about that a bit differently.” For example, Nora and I wanted to work more closely with the Supportive Housing Division to transport people who need furniture to furniture banks, which are often hard to access for people coming out of homelessness without a car or driver’s license.
But nitpicking aside, it’s been very rewarding to see the city take a sincere interest in the issue. There were a few times in the spring that Nora and I would be in conversation with someone at the city and they’d say, “oh, wait, you’re the Allston Christmas project! I heard about that at a meeting the other day!” I’ve found that convincing people that an issue deserves their scarce time and resources is half the battle. Once you get the buy-in you need, you can start tinkering around the margins to make the program bigger and better.
This whole journey made us both excited to work directly in government. It’s been a privilege seeing how you can create innovative solutions to help people who don’t always have a seat at the table.
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Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images