Workforce housing is critical for Cambridge keeping the essential, from doctors to police
Cambridge recently ranked first in “best cities” to live in America, according to review website Niche. “Living in Cambridge offers residents an urban feel and most residents rent their homes. In Cambridge there are a lot of bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and parks. Many young professionals live in Cambridge,” Niche wrote.
On the other hand, we needed to score higher in categories such as weather, cost of living and housing. According to Niche, our median home value is $888,000, compared with the national $244,900. Our median rent is $2,388, compared with the national average of $1,163.
Under the surface, though, there is an exodus of essential medical workers from the city. In the past three years, I noticed five medical doctors I know practicing at Mount Auburn Hospital deciding to move away or retire. Because I had to cope with the care gap it created, I could not help asking one of the doctors why. “Dr. F” told me it was an obvious decision for many doctors: On the one hand, medical doctors’ earnings in Massachusetts ranked 48 among all states; on the other, we live in one of the most expensive housing markets. If one doctor can earn double the money in New Jersey and pay less for housing, it is an easy decision for them to move.
In short, exorbitant housing and rental prices have driven away our doctors and possibly nurses, teachers and city workers. We could be left with many critical jobs vacant, and if there is one thing the Covid pandemic taught us it is that America’s best livable city cannot be without essential workers. We may have ignored that our essential workers are some of the most hurt by the affordable-housing shortage. As income stagnates, our essential workers are being priced out of our city, which needs their crucial services.
Therefore, I am calling for developing high-quality workforce housing in Cambridge to support everyday working individuals and families such as our firefighters, grocery store workers, teachers, police and medical staff. In the current affordable-housing paradigm, they earn too much to qualify for low-income housing but are severely cost burdened by market-rate rents.
Moreover, our City Council should commission a focused study and regular monitoring of housing affordability for essential occupations such as teachers, medical staff, firefighters, police and child care workers. In creating such a workforce housing program, we should uphold zoning requirements such as parking and setbacks, as these are necessary for our essential workforce’s high quality of living. The success of such a program can borrow from policymaking for inclusionary zoning.
Our workforce housing should ensure energy efficiency. We should promote our workforce homes with solar panels, Energy Star appliances and air-source heat pumps that can heat or cool the house. We should build fast electric-vehicle charging stations around our city. Our competent government should implement such a program with high priority and streamline the application process. We should identify critical occupations that need such supportive housing through careful study. We can retain the most livable city through the swift and decisive implementation of workforce housing.
To attract our essential workforce to stay, we should also maintain a solid community support infrastructure such as walkable bars, restaurants, coffee shops and parks. These are elements that made Cambridge a tremendous, livable city. Any city policies or initiatives that do away with these elements will hurt our chances of retaining our essential workforce to live and work here. Our preparedness for another pandemic or natural disaster depends on our resolve to support our workforce.
Nothing can substitute the togetherness resulting from the widespread embedding of our essential workforce in our communities.
Hao Wang, candidate for Cambridge City Council
One counter-argument is what we’ve seen with health insurance: having benefits tied to employment is bad on many dimensions. Imagine if deciding to switch careers, or just switch employers, means losing your housing.
(Also worth noting there is no longer any parking requirement in zoning.)
Data-driving city policy – what a (good) concept! Done well, this could help rebuild our increasingly diminished middle income housing base AND local neighborhood businesses across the city.
The is no parking requirement in Cambridge’s zoning ordinance. We seem to only want to build “affordable housing” and unless we pass one of the dozens of studies and accompanying zoning amendment to build market rate housing none of what you’re calling for is possible.
We absolutely need more housing that is affordable to middle-income workers, and I’m glad to see Dr. Wang highlighting this issue.
I am not sold on the idea that using the same system of public expenditure that we use for affordable housing is the right way to get it.
Our current affordable housing systems are a byzantine labyrinth of eligibility requirements and targeted programs. Every year we hear complaints from those who live in affordable housing about how they are worried about taking promotions, or having family members move in with them, because it might impact their eligibility to continue living in affordable housing. We need to expand this system, but we also need to make it a system for lifelong thriving by making it more generous and flexible for those who are lucky enough to enter it, rather than creating a new parallel system with the same problems.
Meanwhile, even in high-cost Cambridge, it is still true that a household of two middle-income earners CAN afford (i.e. spend less than 30% of their income on rent/mortgage payments) a two-bedroom condo or apartment on the market. That may not be true for long, but it is currently true.
So if our goal is to boost workforce housing, I think the best way to do it is by changing zoning rules to encourage the creation of more modestly-built condos and apartments. Our neighborhoods are full of recently renovated single-family homes going for $2M to $4M, which under a different zoning regime could have been many more much more inexpensive units. If Dr. Wang says we must preserve setback rules, that’s OK, that’s not necessarily at odds with producing higher-density housing (although I think the open space rules are more effective at improving quality of life than the setback rules), as long as we allow enough height and density on the useable land to make up for the unuseable land area.
I’m disappointed Dr. Wang didn’t fill out the ABC questionnaire (responses can be read here: https://www.abettercambridge.org/23quest). I would have really liked to know how he would have answered this one: “As Councillor, will you champion efforts to end exclusionary zoning in Cambridge by reforming the zoning code to allow, at minimum, four-story multi-family housing by right in all Cambridge neighborhoods?”
@ Hao Wang
That all sounds very good.
However, when you say “developing high-quality workforce housing”, you leave out which entities are going to build the housing.
What are your thoughts?
@Angstrom thank you for your thoughtful response. Dial systems like those in Singapore or Tokyo, housing allowance such as that for expats when I worked for Accenture are all possible methods to implement it. It is not necessarily new builds that pressures the zoning, setbacks, or our land. I will write more on this topic and please keep enlightening me. BTW, ABC never send me a questionnaire like you just did. I am glad to share my view and hopefully you vote for me.
@concerned43. On this topic, I am still a business friendly guy. If for profit organizations do the job to build it efficiently why not let them. Of course we should encourage not for profit do it but new build is not the only solution here.
@Williard. Thank you. Once we have more access to Cambridge data, it will elucidate us with viable solutions. Local businesses should be a big part of an inclusive livable city.
@ Itamar Turner-Trauring. After working in healthcare for decades, I understand what you mean. This is more like VA and military health specialized to support our troops or essential work force. They will fight in the fronts for us such as Pandemic or crime or fire.
@HaoWang Ah, I see what you’re saying. (That’s frustrating that you didn’t receive ABC’s questionnaire, I would definitely recommend getting in touch with them and checking out the housing resources on their website.)
If you’re not considering new build to be a key part of this program, then I think this program would largely miss the point. It would be helpful on the margins – if it’s paid for by property taxes, it essentially is just a forced money transfer from property owners to middle-class workers, which I would support – but if you’re not creating new housing, then any new workforce housing you provide is housing you’re taking away from somebody else.
We have a huge shortage of all kinds of housing, and reallocating the housing we have without figuring out how to get a lot more new build reminds me of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
@Hao Wang, what do you mean by “new build is not the only solution here?”
Do you mean the city should purchase existing apartment buildings from private owners to turn them into affordable housing for certain types of workers? That would be extraordinarily expensive if it means purchasing newer buildings. If you mean buying older apartment buildings, it would require displacing hundreds or thousands of current middle-class residents employed in other fields.
Do you mean buying office buildings and converting them to housing? That’s often more expensive than tearing down an office and building housing on the newly-vacant lot, and with worse results, because most office layouts aren’t anything like decent apartment layouts.
I also share Itamar Turner-Trauring’s concern about marrying housing with employment. People should be able to change careers or employers without losing their housing. And people should be able to trust that reporting discrimination or other ill treatment with their housing won’t affect their employment status, and vice versa. When an entity controls both your income and your home, that’s a lot of power over your life. When that entity is the government? Way, way too much power.
The military works that way out of necessity, but it’s understood that a military career requires giving up many freedoms to which civilians are entitled. I don’t see how we can reasonably ask that of nurses, firefighters, teachers, or eldercare workers.
@Angstrom @Jess Thank you for your continued discussion. As someone who does not know it all, your comments showed me blind spots of mine and perspectives that I have not realized. Affordable housing initiatives cannot be accomplished in one particular way or a few years. It takes a long-term strategy and a combination of methods. I am calling for building more apartments on City-owned land, with clean energy elements and without breaches of city ordinances. I may recommend other methods, such as dual-pricing in Singapore, where I had visited and paid attention to their housing strategy. I may also recommend offering essential city workers an allowance to partially offset the housing expenses should they rent in the City. An inventory of workforce housing takes years to form. I need more data to study and form my recommendations. As a city councilor, I will advocate transparency and scientific reporting. If buying and converting existing private houses is more expensive than building new ones, we should build new ones within the proper parameters supported by the City residents and ordinances. I hear you; we should avoid tying home and income to one entity. I am unfamiliar with ABC, but I encourage you to vote for me because I will have listening ears and non-assuming approaches working with you.
@Hao Wang, I appreciate the open mind and will absolutely consider voting for you. No one can be expert in everything, and Cambridge needs different councillors with different policy strengths.
That said, when we call it a housing crisis, that’s not hyperbole. This is a genuine crisis, and I don’t believe we can justify waiting years studying when there are solutions available now that we know slow the rise in housing costs, like undoing exclusionary zoning restrictions to allow for more housing supply. Even with all unnecessary barriers removed, just physically building housing takes time, so my position is that we really can’t waste any time re-discovering the thing that mountains of evidence already support: building more housing.
Just like climate change, this work needed to have begun a few decades ago to avert the crisis, but the political will wasn’t there. Now the crisis is here, the political will is here, and we need to act.
There’s time before election day for candidates to learn more about housing policy and what’s been shown to work to slow or even reverse housing cost increases. As a voter with housing as my number one issue, I’m not making any voting decisions now. When I do vote though, I have to vote for candidates I’m confident will act to implement solutions without delay. I hope you’re one of them!
If you’re looking for recommendations, one book I’d suggest is Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern. It’s both accessible to a lay reader and backed by solid evidence. Or for a much shorter read, check out Darrell Owens’ writeup here on how rents in Berkeley, CA are finally falling after a construction boom: https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/berkeley-rents-fall-amid-construction?r=2fu6&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Thanks for the engagement, and good luck!
@Angstrom thank you for your link in your earlier comments. Following the link, I spent my morning to have completed ABC’s questionnaire. In my response, there was a type, by ‘dial” I meant ‘dual”. best, Hao