Three urban planners were invited to the Neighborhood and Long-Term Planning Committee last week to comment on and hopefully pick apart the Cambridge Up-Zoning proposal. All city councilors were in attendance, except for our mortal enemy Vice Mayor McGovern. He probably had a good reason for not being there, but we’re going to namecheck him anyway, so feel free to speculate.
This meeting really should’ve taken place last year as it could've derailed this petition before the ink on the draft even dried, but we didn’t move fast enough because we were busy torpedoing bike lanes.
As a quick reminder, the purpose of the proposal is to end “exclusionary zoning” by allowing the construction of multi-family housing city wide. We're baffled as to why anyone would want to do such a thing. Exclusive country clubs are the best, and our current zoning basically makes West Cambridge just that. It even comes with a golf course. If you lived here, you would understand.
The Meeting
The conclusion of "our" experts was that:
- That the Envision Cambridge plan was a good plan
- Cambridge should use form-based zoning
- Buy in from the community is important
We previously opposed Envision Cambridge as well as form-based zoning when the original Affordable Housing Overlay was proposed in 2019, just like the like minded organization the Cambridge Citizens Coalition. That's no longer a convenient position, so we're turning about face and hoping that no one notices. While we do believe that community buy in is important, we also want to underline that dirty transients like students and renters shouldn't count. They won't be here for much longer anyway if rent keeps going up, so their opinions should be discarded.
The Speakers
The first speaker, Professor Chris Zegras of MIT, kept to the script and asserted that the current plan would not meet the goals of Envision Cambridge. He helped bolster our position that we should move as slow as molasses when it comes to making changes to the city.
The next speaker, Professor Jeff Levine, mostly held the line but also said that the cost of building housing could go down by allowing more units on the same plot of land. He even suggested that the city subsidize and build more affordable units, which we have vehemently opposed. He also brought up Red Lining, the systematic denial of mortgages and business loans to African American communities. This doesn’t quite fit our narrative, so we're going to redefine it as the use of zoning to segregate the city, just as it is now, the same zoning that we’re currently fighting to keep.
The last speaker, Maurice Cox of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, spoke to a similar situation in Charlottesville, another college town that is current facing a housing crunch. He said that it was, “important to take a bold, decisive act,” which seemed to be in support of the current plan. He completely missed the point of the meeting. A real disappointment.
Conclusion
Overall, this meeting was probably a wash for us. We really wanted the experts to be on our side, but even ones hand picked for that purpose let us down. That being said, the Cambridge Citizens Coalition is better at spinning the truth than we are, so go take a look at their selective summary of the meeting.
Other Links
Read our previous post about the last time we opposed more housing: AHO 2.0 (Un)Likely Impacts
Cambridge Citizens Coalition posts opposing affordable housing: