concur w/ @kiddie - gradschoolkid has to give notice March 1 if they aren’t renewing for August end of lease- and as soon as that notice is given the apt will be listed. Also hearing that prices are a bit softer and terms a bit gentler- a bit!
My nephew shared an apartment with his girl friend in the Inman Square area. Did not have a car and I don’t know what the rent was.
I just saw a studio in Inman for $1400, remarkable.
Thanks all. It’s looking like the most affordable option is on-campus housing with the car parked in Dad’s front yard. The Graduate School of Arts & Sciences has four residence halls for grad students which are just north of the Science Center, near the Law School.
Gadad,
I’m not surprised. My son and roommate stayed in grad dorm 2 years. After the first year, they did look for off campus housing. I’m not sure how he was able to keep his car there.
I looked at a studio in grad housing for the summer, and it was pricier than having roommates.
Wow - He’s just going to have to approach it from a variety of angles. It’s nice to be living in the age of Craigslist!
Perhaps a little off topic, but in the area of Harvard. Does anyone have any recommendations on buildings offering furnished studio or 1 bedroom student apartments WITH AC between MassArt and MIT? Even a single dorm style room would possibly be an option. $1250-$2100.
PM’ING youu
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BTW, my son has decided to live in GSAS Graduate Housing, in Perkins Hall. He’s also decided to buy a pass for on-street parking, knowing that it’s very limited and that he’ll have to move his car a couple times a week (he’s done this for the past couple years in D.C.). I think that on-campus housing is a wise decision; taking his car - not so much. But I’ve told him that a month or so in, he can call me if he wishes and I’ll take a one-way flight up there and drive his car back down to Georgia for him. In fact, I’ll be disappointed if that doesn’t happen. I love the Harvard area - his two older sisters did undergrad at Harvard and overlapped for two of their years, and I made 11 trips up there during their combined six years. I’ve missed having a reason to fly to Boston and visit Harvard Square. And I’m hoping that he tires of moving his car before the end of the baseball season so that I can try to get Fenway Park tickets before driving his car back. 
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I am living in Harvard Square myself right now. A parking permit requires that you change your registration and garaging with the state and insurance. I only have to move my car around now for street cleaning. A visitor’s permit is another story!
When I was a grad student, after one year in a grad dorm, I went in with three other grad students and we rented part of a run-down house. There was a kitchen and DR. The sitting room or whatever it might have been called was converted into a BR. There was another BR downstairs and two rooms on either side of the landing at the top of the stairs. One bathroom next to the kitchen. The house was of the era in which they used newspaper for insulation.
But, we he had a great time there. One of the roommates, who remains a very good friend, had been a chef in the Bay Area before entering a PhD program. His boxes arrived before he did. Twenty-four boxes of cooking equipment – I mean who can live without escargot trays or a poissoniere (neither of which I had heard of before we roomed together. One of the better wine stores in the area hired him to teach wine-tasting classes. He brought out his own cellar bit by bit from Berkeley and I learned a tremendous amount about wine. We each had a night to cook – I learned how to cook Chinese food so I didn’t have to compete. He had Saturday night and we could invite dates to our shabby DR with chairs and table picked up on the street. But the meals actually rivaled the best restaurants in Boston. It was not hard to find a date for that event. Great conversations with very smart interesting people. Great food and wine. Much broadening of horizons. I had one roommate from Texas – my whole life until that point had been Northeastern US – and one roommate was the first openly gay man I’d ever met. Despite the shabbiness of the housing stock, I remember those years fondly.
On parking, Cambridge parking is a PITA but it can be done. I don’t recall what I did with my car in the first year, but the shabby house had a few parking spaces and I would use it to do food shopping for the house, sometimes to go on dates, and sometimes to visit my parents.
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Nice 
Parking isn’t a problem really since the city of Cambridge instituted resident parking permit only parking. To get a permit you can show a utility bill or two piece of mail after changing registration to Cambridge on the DMV site ($30) and garaging with insurance. I only have to move my car before 7 am on street cleaning days, once a month, if I happened to park in a space that had cleaning that day.
I lived in Cambridge in the 1970’s and remember driving back in after visiting my mother, driving around looking for a spot and driving back to my mother’s after failing to find one! Very different now 