There is a housing disaster in Cambridge, with almost 50 percent of Cambridge renters struggling to pay their rent. No-income, low-income and moderate-income households face the greatest challenges. High costs have forced many, including many Black and brown residents, out of the city. Most of those who remain pay more than 30 percent of their income on housing and utilities. To meet the needs of these households and keep a vibrant Cambridge that is racially, socially and economically diverse, we need to provide decent, affordable and stable housing for these residents.
The Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition believes our city should prioritize meeting the housing needs of these no-income, low-income and moderate-income residents. We look for solutions that best provide affordable housing to these populations. This essay describes the solutions that we support. In a second essay, we will address the argument that it is possible to solve the housing crisis by ending restrictive and exclusionary zoning, thereby encouraging private market-rate construction.
What are these solutions?
We first support immediate actions to reduce the number of people displaced from Cambridge due to high housing costs. These include rent control, municipal housing vouchers and strong tenant protections: just cause eviction protections, a right to counsel, eviction sealing and condo conversion rules. In particular, the coalition recently filed a zoning petition that, among other changes, would enable the Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust to fund a city voucher program. We are clear-eyed, however, that though these would be life-saving policies for many families, they are not long-term solutions to the affordability crisis.
The affordability crisis is, instead, driven by a persistent lack of supply. This lack is mainly of housing that no-income, low-income and moderate-income households can afford. We can see this most directly in the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2021 Gap Report. It estimates that, in Massachusetts, per 100 renter families who make less than 30 percent of the Area Median Income, there are only 44 affordable and available homes to them. For 30 percent to 50 percent AMI, this number is 60. For 50 percent to 80 percent AMI, this number is 91. The question, then, is how to most effectively increase the supply of affordable housing to fill the shortage of housing for the low income groups.
We believe that the answer is to build it! This means using existing approaches, such as the Affordable Housing Overlay and its recently passed amendments. These policies allow for more, and larger, 100 percent affordable housing developments. These are largely financed through the Low Income Housing Tax Credit. This is not enough on its own, though. The tax credit is a limited funding source and is ill-suited to producing deeply affordable units; experts agree that though it has been successful in many ways, there is a desperate need for other financing mechanisms for affordable housing. The coalition, therefore, believes we also need to find and explore other approaches for the extensive development of non-market housing.
Two new non-market models
The coalition believes there are two models Cambridge should aim to replicate and innovate. The first is social housing. The intention of social housing is permanent affordability for households with a wide mix of incomes. The land is bought and construction is paid for largely with government money. The new housing is typically owned by the government, a nonprofit or by a public-private partnership. Typically tenants of the housing retain control of their homes through democratic governance of the buildings. Revenue from the rent is invested in rent-subsidies, maintenance and new social housing. This reinvestment strategy distinguishes this approach from the tax credit in that funds are recycled rather than spent once.
This model was pioneered in Vienna 100 years ago, and it is now common in Europe. Recently, it has been taken up by Montgomery County in Maryland, and Atlanta in Georgia. Other American cities are working on similar plans. Although details vary in significant ways, social housing often involves a publicly funded revolving fund that finances mixed-income developments with a controlling government interest, sometimes in collaboration with private developers, with at least 30 percent to 50 percent of the units set aside as permanently affordable. This approach can be financed because of the higher-rent units, and because the revolving loan fund has a lower required rate of return compared with typical private funding sources. Social housing can often leverage lower interest rates, lower property tax rates and other incentives that the government can help access. The combination of these features allows projects that can rapidly repay the revolving fund contribution, so more social housing projects can be built. Further, social housing projects, due to their unique financing, can create housing that is affordable to people with lower incomes than is possible in tax-credit-funded developments.
Social housing has gained traction at the State House. State Reps. Mike Connolly and Lindsey Sabadosa have introduced H.3873, an Act establishing the Massachusetts Social Housing Program, and Gov. Maura Healey has included funding for a social housing pilot in her recent bond bill proposal, financed initially by $50 million in state bonds. With this approach, the state government will provide funds and cities and towns can directly create mixed-income housing with a significant affordable component through a self-sustaining model. If funding is available from the state, we believe Cambridge should explore a pilot of social housing. Cambridge should also explore creating its own social housing revolving loan fund.
A second non-market approach is a community land trust. Community land trusts are nonprofit organizations that own and manage land on behalf of local communities and have a governance structure accountable to their leaseholders, nearby residents and other local stakeholders. In a typical CLT focused on homeownership, leaseholders own their building but not the land on which they live. The building has a restricted resale value, allowing the trust to preserve affordability forever. This model has been employed effectively in many communities and neighborhoods, most famously by Dudley Neighbors Inc. in Roxbury and North Dorchester. The trusts can also develop rental housing, limited equity cooperatives and other housing ownership models. The trusts are especially suitable for smaller or scattered-site projects and are an effective complement to social housing, which focuses on larger projects. The coalition is working with others to develop a Cambridge Community Land Trust under the fiscal sponsorship of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative.
Investing substantially in social housing and CLTs while continuing to support 100 percent affordable projects financed through the tax credit is a multifaceted approach that the coalition believes will help Cambridge begin to solve the housing disaster we are confronting.
If you would like to work with Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition on housing policies and programs that meet the needs of no-income, low-income and moderate-income people in Cambridge, you can contact us at chjc@cambridgehousingjustice.com.
Kavish Gandhi, Stephanie Guirand, Carolyn Magid, Henry Wortis, Lee Farris, Cathy Hoffman and Puja Kranz-Howe, for the Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.
These are fine ideas but because you feel compelled to ensure no market rate fixes means you’ve lost half of the pro-housing people in this city. You’d get more accomplished if you aligned yourselves with people who share your goals rather than antagonizing them.
Thanks for the response, cambridgeresident. I’m writing here in my personal capacity, not speaking for the group. I encourage you to read our upcoming op-ed, which should be published soon. This present op-ed actually doesn’t address our opinion on your point, rather simply says “we will address the argument that it is possible to solve the housing crisis by ending restrictive and exclusionary zoning, thereby encouraging private market-rate construction.” That op-ed will be our longer-form discussion of market-rate – specifically whether prioritizing new market-rate construction is an effective way to increase our affordable housing stock in the way we desperately need. One key point I want to emphasize is that the amount of need is disproportionately on the low-end of the spectrum, between 0 and 50% AMI (and also 50-80% AMI), so it is important to assess solutions by how effectively they address that need
More to say in that op-ed, and likely also in the comment section!
(to be clear, “affordable housing stock” above could include the low-end of the market-rate distribution, provided that it is affordable given the standard definition to those income levels)
Here’s what Charles Barkley says, ”Poor people have been voting for big government liberalism for 50 years and they are still poor”!
These are pie-in-the-sky positions.
It’s not a solution to propose a bunch of things that state law currently prevents Cambridge from doing.
If you have reason to believe you have some reasonable chance of passing any of these reforms that require a home rule petition and approval by the state legislature, let’s hear the evidence, because it really looks like you just want to kill zoning reform and have zero real solutions that Cambridge has any chance of implementing.
$50M in social housing is barely enough for renovating a single public housing site. Bunker Hill in Boston is on the order of $2B. And the CLT has zero funding. Where’s the money coming from? The AHT and City Manager have already said they oppose your petition, and the Solicitor said it’s illegal.
I think public housing along the lines of what they do in Montgomery County Maryland is worth pursuing, and I hope Mike Conolly is successful in making that happen in Massachusetts. Ending exclusionary zoning is complementary to expanding public housing. If a public housing bill ever is passed, it is going to be more successful if more density is allowed in places like Cambridge. The same zoning restrictions that apply to market rate housing also would apply to public housing (in Cambridge we do have the AHO, but I don’t think it would apply to Montgomery County style public housing since I believe those developments are not 100% income restricted affordable housing).
Paul Williams, a socialist who is a big proponent of expanding public housing in the United States, was recently asked on a podcast about the idea (paraphrasing the question here) that instead of doing market rate housing we should do social housing. I’m not sure whether the authors of this editorial endorse that view, but I transcribed his answer below because I think he makes some relevant points:
“..as a person who essentially spends my days trying, working with public housing authorities, legislators and organizations who are trying to put forward these models and get programs like this stood up across the country, that dynamic bothers me too, because it’s like yes, we should have public housing and social housing. We literally don’t have programs to do it almost anywhere in the country right now. You know, like it’s going to take us some time to get those programs up and running and to get any of them to any reasonable scale that they’ll be able to address the problem and the idea that no housing should be built in the meantime is obviously you know not just I mean it’s bananas.”
Exchange starts around 58:30:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-new-liberal/should-we-build-more-public-Aw2QYTsXtGZ/
I also would note that in general I think market rate and social housing both have their place. In Vienna, plenty of market rate housing is built in addition to the social housing:
https://marketurbanism.com/2019/06/29/the-truth-about-red-vienna-its-a-yimby-paradise/
Again, writing in my personal capacity.
@Qwerty: we are not proposing renovating public housing, but rather new mixed-income social housing. I don’t want to again speak for the group, but I am not proposing getting rid of state or federal public housing, which is absolutely essential affordable housing stock.
Re cost: Depending on size, yes, necessary funding could be about $20-30 million. To be clear, the principle is that the money does cash flow back into the revolving loan fund, allowing for repeated investment. Yes, size may need to be bigger! However, I’d encourage you to read about Atlanta, Seattle, Montgomery County, and other American cities considering this, as well as the long history of European cities. This has worked extensively before, and is not “pie-in-the-sky.”
“you just want to kill zoning reform” I’d love to engage in a discussion on the merits of these proposals, rather than positions we didn’t take.
Re: CLT’s – yes, financing would be necessary. CLT’s might take advantage of small property acquisition funding, which already exist and have had talk around expansion, and often fit into a niche in affordable housing development/finance that others have receded from.
Re: “The AHT and City Manager have already said they oppose your petition, and the Solicitor said it’s illegal.” I encourage you to watch our planning board presentation tonight. While we certainly respect and recognize expressed opposition to certain *ways* of accomplishing goals (through zoning, in this case), we believe there is much wider agreement with many of the goals in the petition, including vouchers. We are not single-minded on a single way of achieving goals, and hope to be collaborative with the Trust, City, councilors in that process. As far as the petition being illegal; this is clearly not what was stated. The legal memo contends that certain aspects of the petition would require a home rule petition or other enabling steps; we will contest this view tonight, especially for project-based vouchers, which we see as equivalent to the creation of affordable units, but the legal memo is not equivalent to it being illegal.
@DWH333
“Ending exclusionary zoning is complementary to expanding public housing.”: yes, zoning changes would be needed for the projects we contemplate. Agreed re: AHO analysis.
Re: Paul Williams – again, speaking for myself, since this is a group that has differences of opinion . I would say two things. First, I personally do agree with most of what he said. Second, I want to clarify that I think our main contention is not necessarily that increased market-rate supply is “bad”, but that it is not a solution to our affordability crisis, and therefore should not be the primary focus. Those are distinct positions (that of course require justification!), and does generally allow for alignment with his statement.
In particular, I do firmly believe that without expansive versions of the types of approaches like those described in this op-ed – in short, more and different types of affordable housing finance through government funding, especially self-sustaining ones that produce mixed-income developments like social housing –, we will not solve our affordability crisis. I don’t believe an approach that focuses solely or principally on increasing private, market-rate supply will have a substantial effect on affordability, even as it will likely slow rent growth and/or lower median rents. We will have more details on why in the second op-ed. I also work in eviction prevention work daily, and have my concerns about corporate ownership of housing, both in terms of documented rent collusion vis-a-vis YieldStar (from ProPublica) and other mechanisms that distort the market, as well as the redevelopment-driven (and rent-increase driven) displacement that we may see and that I see on a daily basis. This is not to say that, for myself, I oppose new market-rate construction categorically or individually; in many cases, I would be marginally supportive or agnostic. I just simultaneously believe that we need much, much more to solve our affordability crisis, and that much, much more should center on non-market government interventions, like social housing, that have been proven long-term successes in many other countries.
Finally, vis-a-vis Vienna being a YIMBY paradise; I certainly agree completely that we need to increase supply! I’d want to check the source of those numbers, but broadly take your points; my specific reason for questioning is the breakdown I’ve seen in Vienna is much closer to 50% of units either directly or indirectly subsidized /controlled by government (both social housing under our definition); see https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_article_011314.html#:~:text=Rents%20are%20regulated%20by%20the,that%20the%20city's%20income%20restrictions. I do understand that new starts/new units in recent years might have a slightly different breakdown. Further, the *fact* that 50%, or 70%, of the market has been new market-rate construction does not answer the key question in my mind: what aspects of Vienna’s housing policy are most key to its success (even if not complete / perfect) in addressing affordability? However, I fundamentally agree that NIMBYism is indefensible, and on that we can be completely aligned
Who is solely arguing “that it is possible to solve the housing crisis by ending restrictive and exclusionary zoning, thereby encouraging private market-rate construction”?
That seems like a straw argument. The councillors who support ending exclusionary zoning are the same councillors, with the same supporters, who have spent most of the past decade working hard to pass the 100% Affordable Housing Overlay.
These are the same councillors who have successfully pushed the City to greatly increase its spending on affordable housing (and continue to push the City to do more) and who support tenant protections.
No one claims ending exclusionary zoning is some magic solution—as opposed to a necessary piece of the puzzle. More market-rate housing means less competition for existing housing, with those least able to afford it ending up as the ones who lose out.
Re: User – I respect your position, and if your vision for solving our housing crisis is ending exclusionary zoning and then focusing our energy on social housing, then we’re in alignment! Your point is well taken re: the 100% AHO, and larger amount of $ on affordable housing. I however strongly disagree that people don’t represent this position. I hear it constantly, specifically in the form that constraints on market-rate supply are the *main* barrier to solving our affordability crisis. I think this is naive, and if we don’t shift major focus *now* to developing infrastructure that will allow us to rapidly expand our affordable housing finance, we will not be able to address our housing crisis. Yes, new market-rate housing may loosen the market somewhat, but the size of the effect on prices is not clear, especially on the low-end, as we argue. Our housing policy needs to focus, as we argue, on significantly expanding our affordable housing finance, which is most easily scalable under a social housing approach
The state social housing pilot is explicitly aimed at offsetting the cost to renovate existing public housing. ($100M, not $50M, but either way still $0 coming to Cambridge for new housing).
“ A $100M line item for Public Housing Demonstration Projects is intended to subsidize the redevelopment of existing public housing developments and the creation of denser mixed income developments that replace all affordable units on site while also adding a substantial number of market rate units. Based on the limited amount of available information about projects underway (such as the redevelopment of Innes Apartments in Chelsea and Bunker Hill Housing in Charlestown), EOHLC assumes a $250,000 subsidy per public housing unit replaced, and a 2:1 ratio of new market rate units to public housing units redeveloped. As a result, a $100M investment could enable the full redevelopment of 400 public housing units and the creation of 800 market rate units.”
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/the-affordable-homes-act-research-and-analysis
@Qwerty: thanks for commenting, and for correcting me; I thought you were referring to what we advocated here, rather than the governor’s proposed pilot. Our op-ed is not limited to the specific pilot in the bond bill, but we could have been clearer in the paragraphs above. Here we have described a social housing model much broader than that, a la what exists elsewhere. Connolly’s social housing bill similarly calls for this, and we call for Cambridge to allocate funds directly for this purpose in this op-ed. At least some of us have also provided comment on the Affordable Homes Act that would allow for more funding (which yes, clearly, is greater than when we first referenced the link!), and social housing models beyond this within the context of the pilot (which would yes provide proof of concept, which we support, but wouldn’t lower or add any affordable units in total, as you reference). Have more thoughts and comments on the bond bill as well but I think perhaps not relevant to the broader discussion
“Poor people have been voting for big government liberalism for 50 years and they are still poor”
This is deeply stupid we have had 50 years of neoliberalism and market fetishism regardless of what poor people voted for. That’s the actual reason that class mobility has reduced.
“These are pie-in-the-sky positions.”
These are real policies enacted in real places with real results. The pie in the sky position is thinking that the market will address the needs of those without adequate funds to afford it. It has clearly and demonstrably failed at that and the level of gentrification and displacement we see is testament to that.
I think it’s short sighted to dismiss market-rate housing as a tool here. Over the last several decades, new job creation has far outpaced new home creation in the Boston region and especially in Cambridge. This is still the case today, and until we turn that ratio around, things are simply going to get more expensive.
Limiting the number of jobs created is a hard sell, and probably not the right approach, but we can greatly increase the amount of homes that are built, at least as a bulwark to prevent higher income people coming for the new jobs from grabbing up all the existing affordable housing.