BOSTON — The rats are out in spades this spring in North Allston, a gritty neighborhood wedged between the Charles River and the Massachusetts Turnpike, and residents blame Harvard.

Harvard had big plans to expand its campus into Allston with a science complex. But last winter, the university announced that the recession would force it to slow — perhaps even halt — the $1 billion project. So Allston residents are living with a gaping hole and a bunch of vacant buildings instead of the prospect of a revitalized neighborhood.

They are not alone in feeling burned by a university. As endowments everywhere sink, town-gown relationships, often carefully nurtured during the boom years as colleges and universities sought to expand, are fraying.

“We feel like we’ve been betrayed and taken advantage of,” said Harry Mattison, a resident who serves on the Harvard Allston Task Force, an advisory group. “Instead of Harvard bringing in jobs and excitement and vibrancy, we are sliding backwards.”

Some cities and towns — including Ann Arbor, Mich., Durham, N.C., and Princeton, N.J. — have renewed calls for the colleges and universities to make voluntary payments to the local communities because they have tax-exempt status.

Others have proposed levying taxes on dorm rooms or even on students, whom they say use municipal services at the expense of property taxpayers.

Response from the institutions has been frosty.

“The recession will certainly keep private colleges in the crosshairs of policymakers looking to expand the tax base,” said David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “However, it will be challenging to argue that an institution that has lost 20 to 30 percent of endowment value in the past six months, and is cutting millions from its budget, is overflowing with excess revenue.”

In Boston, which already gets about $9 million a year in voluntary payments from 13 colleges and universities, Mayor Thomas Menino has asked a task force to study how to wring more revenue out of the institutions.

Impact fees?

In Providence, R.I., Mayor David Cicilline has proposed charging students at the city’s four private colleges and universities, including Brown, a “municipal impact fee” of $150 per semester.

In Worcester, Mass., which has numerous institutions of higher learning, including the College of the Holy Cross and Clark University, one elected official has gone so far as to propose a tax on dorm rooms, an idea that is gathering support as layoffs take place.

“Police, fire, all the city services that colleges use are being cut,” said City Councilor Michael Germain, who proposed the dorm tax. “So now is the perfect time to go to the colleges and say, ‘Hey, we need a little bit more.’ This is a way to force their hand as far as I’m concerned.”

Resentment runs especially deep in Allston, which had finally been warming to Harvard’s expansion plan after years of opposition. In addition to the construction pit — a five-acre foundation for the complex — a string of vacant buildings that Harvard bought over the last 20 years but has failed to lease have also left residents fuming.

Harvard will finish building the foundation of the science complex in the coming months and then decide whether it can afford to continue, said Christine Heenan, the university’s vice president for government, community and public affairs.

A halt in construction would require covering the 40-foot-deep foundation and addressing any other “aesthetic or safety concerns.” As for the neighborhood’s rat problem, Heenan said the construction was not responsible.

Harvard’s expansion plan has been in the works for years, but the science complex construction, begun early last year, has been the most concrete step. The university has also bought a number of lots along Western Avenue, one of Allston’s main thoroughfares.

Harvard even forced some tenants, like a Volkswagen dealership, out of buildings for which plans are now unclear. The university has always described the expansion as a 50-year project, but residents want it to take more proactive, short-term steps.

“The fair and just thing would be to have a 50-year plan but also a five-year plan,” Mattison said. “Let us have a thriving neighborhood now.”

Harvard has continued smaller projects in Allston, like planting trees and starting a weekly farmer’s market. But the scientists who were supposed to move into the new complex in 2011 will work elsewhere indefinitely.

Meanwhile, finding the kind of tenants that residents want for the properties along Western Avenue — like shops and cafes — remains difficult, Heenan said.

In Providence, where city officials are predicting close to a $50 million budget deficit next year, Cicilline has been quietly meeting with local college and university students and presenting his proposal of charging them $150 per semester.

The city must close a $17 million deficit before the fiscal year ends in June.

“Look, this is a post-Obama generation,” Cicilline said. “At a time when our president is asking everyone to look in a collective way at our communities, there’s value in asking young people to make a contribution to the collective wellbeing of the city they are a part of.”

Extra costs

The private institutions already agreed in 2003 to pay a total $48 million to the city over 20 years. And students say they cannot afford the extra expense.

“We find it regressive and unfair and a little bit shortsighted,” said Heather Lee, president of the Graduate Student Council at Brown. “We provide a huge amount to the local economy throughout the year and to neglect that is not right.”

Judith Rodin, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania who led an ambitious effort to remake the troubled neighborhood of West Philadelphia in the 1990s, said town-gown relationships should not have to slide backward now after all the recent investment.

“The obligation is never more important than in difficult times,” Rodin said. “But so much of it relies on frequent, continuous, difficult communication — the type that doesn’t often occur during even the best of times.”

“There are ways of developing meaningful partnerships,” she added, “without putting up a building.”