Zoning’s 100-year class war
Last May, The New York Times reported that the combined home equity of U.S. homeowners had increased by an unprecedented $6 trillion in just two years. “Most of this money,” the reporters wrote, “has been created by the simple fact that housing, in short supply and high demand across America, has appreciated at record pace during the pandemic.”
Economists predict that this huge gain will not diminish much over time, despite rising interest rates and the eventual end of the pandemic. Decades of inadequate housing construction rates have resulted in a major shortage of supply. In the face of strong unfulfilled demand, this has meant high (and rising) prices.
“High rents and sale prices in major cities are a policy choice, one that puts gates around many of our most wonderful places and taxes the folks lucky enough to live there. And it is unfair to all of us,” Annie Lowrey recently reported in The Atlantic. Our current system of regulating housing has troubling implications for people who rent their homes and for Cambridge’s goal of being a livable, diverse and equitable community.
The Census Bureau reports that the portion of homeowners who are white exceeds the portion who are Black by 30 percentage points. People born before or during the post-World War II baby boom are overrepresented significantly among homeowners.
This didn’t happen accidentally or naturally. It’s an outcome of a century of policies, at all levels, that have tilted the legal and economic playing field in favor of homeowners (disproportionately older, whiter and wealthier) and against renters (disproportionately nonwhite, immigrant and poorer).
The federal government played a role by making possible the long-term fixed-rate home mortgage back in the 1930s, excluding Black veterans from the benefits of the 1944 GI Bill of Rights and encouraging residential segregation across the country through discriminatory standards for financing home mortgages.
States yielded part of their authority to regulate land use to cities and towns, which have set highly restrictive zoning laws while delegating power and responsibility to unelected and unrepresentative boards of residents. Local zoning laws originally enacted to protect homeowners from intrusive physical conditions were adapted to “protect” homeowners from having “undesirable” neighbors, and even from having “too many” neighbors. Local zoning and planning boards have conferred extralegal influence and enormous benefits on homeowners at the expense of others.
The inequitable foundation of our zoning laws and procedures has compounded the damage from the housing shortage by distributing its consequences so unevenly. At a time of sharply rising housing costs, renters (a majority of Cambridge households) face steep annual increases in rent, costly and disruptive moves to less-expensive quarters and a shrinking chance of buying a home. Homeowners – about one-third of Cambridge households – enjoy stable housing, annual increases in wealth and one of the lowest property tax rates in the region.
This system has been in place for so long that some homeowners – unaware of its origins and consequences – seem to consider it part of their natural rights as property owners, an essential form of existential protection. Others defend the status quo, while some prefer slower, more incremental change, but the tide of rising housing costs is eroding that ground rapidly.
The results of our underproduction of housing, both short- and long-term, have become too harmful to put off until later. The housing shortage has been studied and analyzed extensively; policy experts know what needs to be done. Massachusetts, California and other states have begun to chip away at the fortress of zoning laws constructed by privileged suburbs, but denial and resistance indicate that progress may be slow on that front. Cambridge’s RISE pilot program, tenant protection activities and other measures provide more immediate relief from the crisis, but some are limited and temporary, leaving root causes untouched.
“The problem is largely, if not exclusively, the result of the country not permitting enough homes where people want them. Although some communities … have allowed housing construction to keep up with rapid population growth, the superstar metro areas of the Northeast and West Coast have not,” Lowrey reports. “Displacement happens only because building dense housing is illegal in many rich neighborhoods, and because cities build so little of it overall. If you want to build enough to really help low-income people, you’re talking about doing a lot of building.”
Fixing our long-term systemic housing problems doesn’t require abandoning all our zoning laws. We do need to correct their current slant and make our laws more consistent with our goals and our values. (We also need to keep in mind that the Cambridge housing shortage is a part of the regional and national housing shortage.)
Cambridge has begun to move in the right direction, with the 2020 Affordable Housing Overlay, last year’s prioritizing of people over cars and increased funding for affordable housing. Today’s housing crisis has been a long time in the making. It will be difficult to fix it as fast as we should, so Cambridge needs to expand and accelerate its efforts to wind down zoning’s 100-year class war.
James Zall, Pemberton Street
James Zall is a longtime resident and a homeowner.
A couple thoughts
1. Does anyone on the city council or otherwise honestly believe that the numerous drafters of our city’s zoning laws just *accidentally* constructed it such that virtually all extant multi-family housing stock in this city, including our vaunted triple-deckers, violates at least one and usually several dimensional constraints? No. They knew exactly what they were doing. Our zoning code was explicitly and purposefully constructed to functionally and practically make virtually all multi-family housing either illegal or impractical build.
2. The gall of some on the city council to “question” whether our zoning code — THE legal mechanism that purely functions to restrict what can be built — is behind high housing prices and lack of development in Cambridge is appalling.
It is clear some on the council are planning on making a play to “upzone” the city without relaxing dimensional constraints, a situation that will result in almost all buildings having to go in front of the BZA.
I don’t want or need a setback and I don’t give a passing thought to whether my neighbors have one or not. Thanks and have a nice day.
Thanks to my North Cambridge neighbor for this excellent and necessary historical perspective. Let’s keep moving in the direction he suggests — see action plans at abettercambridge.org and abundanthousingma.org
Yup…..building skyscrapers in super high-density TOTALLY fixed the problem in Manhattan. It will work here too!
@Sam Noubert: Good thing you can put that strawman you are arguing with on your city mandated setback. Good for you!
Interesting cherry picked facts on this agenda, but Mr Zall, as a leader of A Better Cambridge, uses too broad a brush comparing Cambridges zoning and housing policies against the entire country’s, with some erroneous accusations and connections.
The reality is that years ago Cambridge relaxed its zoning to allow multi family housing, it hasn’t blocked development but built thousands of new units, one of the densest cities with one of the highest rates of subsidized housing in the state. The number of these units recently surpassed the number of rent controlled units that once existed.
There certainly are minor tweaks to the AHO that should be considered, but they will do nothing for our high housing costs, rent increases, housing segregation or home ownership.
The notion that high rents and sale prices are simply a policy choice that our city council can control with zoning alone is completely misleading.
As Housing Expert Jenny Schuetz says in the Atlantic article Mr Zall quotes above,
“As a general point, “it’s really hard to imagine the most expensive cities becoming significantly cheaper”.
They won’t be significantly cheaper, but allowing the construction of houses has been proven to slow or stop the increase in costs.
And you claim that zoning was changed so that multi families were “allowed”.
Very interesting statement given that virtually all the city’s multifamily housing stock violates other aspects of the zoning code, and virtually all multi family projects must go before the unelected BZA. A conveniently ignored point from anti housing folks.
It’s true that the expanded AHO isn’t enough to make housing affordable for everyone, because it focuses on subsidized affordable housing. So it’s a good start, but not enough.
The _other_ thing we need to do is legalize taller and denser buildings. Every time a building in my neighborhood (Baldwin) is renovated, it basically keeps the same dimensions, so no new units are added. And the reason is that it’s “single and two-family detached dwellings” zoning, with e.g. max height of 35 feet.
So each of those rehabs that resulted in a massively expensive single family home, or maybe two very expensive condos. They could’ve been 4-6 story apartment buildings like other existing buildings that predate the zoning, with many more (and much more affordable) units… but that’s not legal at the moment.
This is a fun conversation. It is possible both camps are a little bit right here. On one hand if you read the preamble to the North Cambridge Design Guidelines it say very explicitly they were created to keep folks out. On the other it is true that if we build a ton of housing the prices will not go back to 1975. At this point I have to say, “So what?” At least the homes will exist right? I’m not a yuuuuge fan of the AHO but I see it in part as a “necessary reaction” to forty plus years of neighborhood group activism, exclusivism, and down right nasty fighting among some local groups who felt they owned whole areas of the city (spoiler: some still do). Zoning is a set of rules we self impose for almost arbitrary reason at this point. There was a time when keeping rendering plants away from orphanages was clearly a well stated and intended goal of zoning but now it has been weaponized. Despite the fact our original code was 16 pages and the regulations much looser 60 years ago every time a change is proposed it is called “Up zoning” forgetting that in most cases its a return to a previous condition or maybe addressing the fact that a lot of what is currently in our code is anachronistic. To my mind zoning is nonsense especially Euclidean zoning which is why I tend to push everything into “special permit” territory as an attempt to ameliorate nonsense judgements.
The role of zoning laws and NIMBY neighbor protests in driving up housing prices is well established.
We need smart growth like that planned with the AHO. The city needs workers of all incomes. The population is rising. Providing affordable housing near public transportation, as planned, is smart. It will provide homes for workers and take cars off the road.
What is wrong with a 25-story building? Someone probably complained when the first triple-decker was built.
Lack of support for restricting commercial development revealed all you need to know about ABC. They are pro-growth, not simply pro-housing.
Overall, since the 1961 zoning reform, Cambridge has focused development of dense new housing in specific places, typically places that are considered to be otherwise undesirable. In this way, Alewife — a former swamp turned light industrial region — has seen thousands of new units; as has North Point, a former industrial brownfield. At the same time, neighborhoods like Cambridgeport have seen very little in the way of new housing, and even less in the way of eliminating barriers to new housing that exist.
In practice, the number of properties in the city that would allow even a standard 4plex to be created — much less to allow the creation of the type of dense housing that Cambridge would benefit from having more of — is tiny. Prior to the AHO and elimination of parking minimums, I have not found a single citywide policy affecting residential zones — A-1, A-2, B, C, or C-1 — that reduces dimensional restrictions since the introduction of FAR as a guiding policy for our zoning code in 1961. (I won’t rule out that they may exist — it’s somewhat hard to research the zoning amendments before the 2000s — but it certainly doesn’t seem there are any big ones.)
I do think that Cambridge has done more than some to allow housing… but it’s done so by enforcing the same classist boundaries that our initial zoning rules enforced, literally maintaining the same lines on the map that were present in the racist, segregationist HOLC loan maps (commonly referred to as “redlining” maps) of the 1930s.
Drawing a line on a map to keep Black people (and other “undesirables”) out of a neighborhood was something I think most folks would agree is a mistake. I hope that we can all agree that maintaining those lines in 2023 is a similar mistake, and take action to remedy them.
Thank you to the careful and thoughtful readers who added information on a couple of points I may not have emphasized enough:
The housing crisis will not be fixed by zoning tweaks alone. The shortage of housing has pushed costs so high that substantial public funds will still be needed to make housing affordable to households whose income is much less than the regional median (about $140,000 for 4 people). The strawman goal of rolling today’s prices back to 1975 levels is clearly unrealistic…for anything, really, but especially for housing.
Although zoning changes are not sufficient to resolve the housing crisis, they are necessary. Cambridge land is expensive, so to lower prices lots must be allowed to contain more housing units than our zoning restrictions, like floor-area-ratio caps and minimum-lot-area-per-dwelling-unit rules, now permit. Cambridge cannot achieve its housing goals while leaving signs saying “no multi-family housing here” embedded in our zoning code.
The suggestion that we should subject even more housing proposals to the inequitable special-permit process is clearly not what the city needs. Most government-required permits or licenses have fair requirements, clearly stated and enforceable. They are not subject to a kangaroo court influenced by public clamor and private interests. The lack of housing is too consequential to be subject to an inequitable process.
The city currently has several housing-related initiatives underway. These include expanding and strengthening 2020’s 100% Affordable Housing Overlay (AHO), complying with the state’s MBTA Communities Act, and cleansing our zoning code of its out-of-date exclusionary provisions. People who want to repair the damage resulting from the housing shortage can sign this petition in support of more affordable housing: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf9zDU-qYFHvMoumIc_uWV8IUJu893WkRre_QINhB_HMGRETg/viewform .
@chrisschmidt-First, Alewife and Northpoint have added the largest amounts of housing and affordable units in the last 10 years. The developers were given significant additional density above the existing zoning to do so.
You and ABC are advocating for more housing in the entire city by reducing zoning which would effectively allow the same increased density, and then some. So its not clear why you are calling these areas “undesirable” when that seems to be what you are seeking to create in the rest of the city.
Secondly, most of Cambridge housing was already built before your erroneous claim of “1961 zoning reform”, even before the 1930’s HOLC maps. Thats why areas like Cambridgeport don’t need to build “new housing”, its already one of the densest areas, 15.7 dwelling units per acre, one of the highest in the state. The current real estate market here only sees one color, green. Big bucks green, and that won’t change unless our job market does.
It would be much more productive to agree upon an acceptable livable density index by neighborhood/building size and ensure zoning allows development to meet those goals than to tear down an existing system that has already built this city into one the most desirable communities in the country.
If ABC is successful in upzoning the entire city as it seeks to do with more high rise buildings it certainly won’t be Cambridge anymore.