After several years of housing students, Northeastern no longer uses the Midtown Hotel as a residence hall.
In 2018, Northeastern leased the Midtown Hotel, located 0.3 miles away from Krentzman Quad at 220 Huntington Ave., to house students while on-campus options were limited. The hotel was initially used as a temporary, semester-long residence hall for 60 incoming N.U.in students, but it continued to be used into the fall semester of 2018 to house 36 incoming first-years. Shortly after, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Northeastern expanded the lease to decrease campus housing density.
Although Northeastern’s lease was originally set to end spring of 2021, the university was granted authorization by the lessees of the property, National Development, to continue to use the hotel as housing for the 2021-22 academic year.
The university no longer offers the Midtown as a housing option, a Northeastern spokesperson confirmed in an email to The Huntington News. The university did not confirm when the hotel was discontinued as a student residence, but The News confirmed that several students lived there in the spring 2025 semester.
Although Northeastern is discontinuing its lease of the Midtown Hotel, the university is maintaining and constructing new housing options.
60 Belvidere St., a residence hall that was previously the south tower of the Sheraton Hotel, will remain in use. Longer term, Northeastern plans to expand housing capacity by adding new buildings such as the 23-story residence hall at 840 Columbus Ave. According to Northeastern’s 10-year institutional master plan, filed with the Boston Planning and Development Agency in 2024, the new residence hall will house an estimated 1,370 beds.
A redevelopment plan for the Midtown Hotel, proposed by hotel lessees National Development, was approved in 2021. Construction is slated to start soon, with plans to transform the Midtown Hotel and the adjacent building, 1 Cumberland Ave., into a 351,500-square-foot mixed-use building.
As a residence hall, the Midtown Hotel received mixed reviews from students, who cited a lack of amenities such as wifi, laundry services and campus security.
“I don’t love it. The one good thing was picking who we lived with,” Jordan Brofksy, a then-first-year health science major living in the hotel, told The News in 2018.
Other students, however, enjoyed living in a hotel as it offered more privacy and space than other residence halls such as International Village, or IV, and East Village.
“I’ve been to rooms in East Village and IV and they’re pretty small. I like all of the space we have here,” said Brandon Wang, a then first-year business administration and computer engineering combined major, in an interview with The News in 2018.
The university also plans to replace the recently-demolished White Hall with a new 230-foot tall residential building housing around 1,000 students.
