A proposal to encourage construction of multifamily housing across Cambridge is only at the start of its process, city councillors assured alarmed commenters at their Monday meeting.
Residents could expect a full two hours of time for public comment at a May 22 committee meeting, then another Housing Committee meeting after that for developers of housing – affordable and otherwise – to weigh in to “see if the numbers work,” order author Burhan Azeem said. “We can figure out from there how we get to … zoning language or something more tangible to look at.”
“This is the very, very beginning of the process,” Azeem said, reminding residents of the long road ahead even after the idea gets turned into written zoning with specifics to debate.
The ideas behind the push also aren’t new, Azeem said. A motion to start the conversation was heard in March and led to a Housing Committee hearing Wednesday.
Still, the order that emerged from that hearing was a simple two sentences noting the discussion had been held and asking for staff to help “turn their vision into zoning language.”
[documentcloud url=”https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24661882-051324-multifamily-housing-orders?responsive=1&title=1″]
The goals of the order are to encourage more housing construction while ending the “exclusionary zoning” that keep multifamily buildings out of certain neighborhoods. Some ways to do that, according to a presentation in the committee hearing, are to simplify dimensional requirements and the design review process while allowing back into the mix of construction duplexes, triple-deckers and larger apartment buildings of up to six stories citywide. Recently passed Affordable Housing Overlay zoning meant to encourage the building of homes for lower- and middle-income people won similar breaks on design and review, but allows for up to four-story developments in the same neighborhoods where the new proposal would allow six, noted Jeff Roberts, the city’s director of zoning and development.
Based on what little they knew of that vision, speakers lined up to express their concern that the result would be “McMansions” and the undermining of the Affordable Housing Overlay zoning with no benefit for lower-income residents, with the risk of making things worse by opening up more possible construction sites that raises property values and encourages sales to developers and speculators. “I would like to commend the Housing Committee for the speed in which in two days they went from multifamily zoning discussion to tasking” staff to create language “without public engagement,” speaker Marilee Meyer said sardonically. “We are losing transparency in government.”
Another group of commenters said they were eager to see the proposal become law, creating more housing that would help keep prices from rising faster while undoing decades of racist redlining practices.
Councillor Paul Toner understood the problem: Residents saw a discussion of “ideas and concepts that people have been discussing, but they saw a presentation and then within five days there was a policy order,” Toner said. “Just looking at social media already, there’s hundreds of people on social media fighting back and forth on this issue. We need to have a clear process.”
One answer came in the form of an amendment proposed by councillor Patty Nolan spelling out that staff needed to talk not just with the co-chairs of the Housing Committee – Azeem and Sumbul Siddiqui – but with “a group of stakeholders including affordable-housing experts, developers and residents to develop a cohesive vision and draft to turn their vision into zoning language.”
The amendment passed easily, with councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler making a mild objection that it “was sort of implicit that we’re going to talk to affordable-housing experts and residents and the folks making housing,” but that he was “happy to make it explicit.”
The model councillors wanted to follow was that of an Alewife Zoning Working Group, which began work in June 2022 after the City Council ordered a freeze on development of offices and labs there a month earlier. It met nine times and wrapped up its work in less than a year.
“It went a lot faster than I thought it was going to go, and I was happy to be wrong about that,” said councillor Marc McGovern of the Alewife process. But he didn’t want the conversations about the multifamily housing and end to exclusionary zoning taking even that long.
With Alewife zoning in place, developers maxing out residential construction there would produce 3,000 units of housing, which “seems like a lot for the last big piece of land in our city that’s still to be developed,” McGovern said. Before the Covid pandemic, though, the number of new homes called for by the Envision planning process was 13,000 by the year 2030.
“That’s not going to happen,” McGovern said.
A stronger
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This is the Cambridge City Council at its worse. There has been NO notice and NO discussion with the residents city-wide who will be most affected. The Cambridge form of voting makes this radical, socialist -oriented action possible because there is no accountability. Hard to vote out practically the entire council.
To be clear, what was proposed in the City’s presentation (and this was a presentation, not actual zoning language) was that market-rate, multi-family buildings could make use of the same dimensional changes currently allowed for the AHO. That is, if the AHO allows 6 stories (and it generally does), then private developers of market-rate housing could also build 6 stories, provided that they include 20% inclusionary units.
In my opinion, this appears misguided for several reasons, but the most obvious reason is that this eliminates any advantage that AHO projects currently have in comparison to market-rate projects. That said, the Council also hinted at the idea that to preserve an advantage for AHO projects, we will probably need to have an AHO 3.0 that permits even greater density for affordable projects.
Conversely, the Ronayne multi-family zoning petition that is currently before the Council includes actual zoning language that can be passed right now. It specifically addresses what CDD referred to in their prior presentation as “Part 1”: i.e. basic changes to legalize multi-family housing everywhere and to make adjustments to some dimensional requirements to make multi-family housing more likely in those areas (FAR, lot area, lot width, lot area per dwelling unit, etc.) In addition, it goes further, correcting several issues with the current zoning ordinance that limit ADU construction and force many property owners to seek variances for simple changes to their homes.
What the Ronayne petition does not do is address what CDD calls “Part 2”: i.e. major changes to heights and setbacks to allow for significantly larger market-rate projects across the city. As mentioned by some Councilors, this is a longer and more challenging discussion and will require more time to get it right, similar to the recently completed and much lauded Alewife Rezoning process.
Though similar in some regards, it’s important not to conflate the two efforts. I support the Ronayne petition as an important first step that can be passed today, while Part 2 of the conversation moves cautiously ahead over the next 12 months.
Upzoning to allow property owners more freedom to do what they want with their property is “socialist”? How?
Pretty obvious indication you are using reactionary buzzwords you don’t even understand, if responding to the city assuring you there will be even more process around this with “ There has been NO notice and NO discussion” didn’t make that obvious enough.
Lmao she works for pioneer institute, that neoliberal think tank that helped destroy the T and constantly advocates for cutting and privatizing public services.
Her work for them is related to healthcare: https://pioneerinstitute.org/barbara-anthony/ so we can probably thank her in part for the Stewart debacle, as they push for private equity to have a greater role in healthcare. These are not the people to listen to about anything.
If you think traffic is bad now give this 10 or 20yrs along with more road starvation diets. School over crowding, basic services already stretched.
Let’a make every lot a 4 story apartment building – communist built cities will be envious! Better yet let developers make them rentals so they collect 4x the rent and no one has the ability to climb out of poverty into home ownership.
About to go national news how ridiculous the “experts” are:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/cambridge-brattle-street-bike-lanes-safety/
Patty must feel like tossing her hands up and letting the experts destroy the city. Hang in there if you can!
Douglas Tiberious St. Jerome Brown,
Did you just say that the issue is that it competes with the AHO. You didn’t just say that right?
Lol…Barbara Anthony is really a special character. She thinks everything needs to be run by her personally or it’s “under the cover of darkness.” The point of a representative system is that you appoint people to make these decisions for you. You don’t get a say in everything.
Besides the general insanity of that kind of behavior, Cambridge and the GBA are woefully underdeveloped for the amount of business and education opportunities we have here. We need AGGRESSIVE zoning changes and developments to bring more dense housing to the area.
Stop thinking myopically and selfishly about car traffic. Focus on building a dense functioning city that has a majority of the population who rely on transit/bikes/alternative modes to get around.
It’s really not that difficult, when you remove the hyperbolic voices from the room.
Construction begins on what is set to become Cambridge’s tallest building
The residential building at 121 Broadway St. will consist of 439 rental units and 37 stories
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2024/05/07/construction-begins-on-what-is-set-to-become-cambridges-tallest-building/?amp=1
These constant lack of notice and process claims are frivolous and made in bad faith. They need to be reported by Cambridge Day as such.
These possible policy changes have already been covered numerous times this year—including in Cambridge Day as recently as last month!—and many, many times in the past.
There was a Policy Order in City Council a month ago to send ending exclusionary zoning to the Housing Committee. It was covered locally, including here.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/19/multifamily-zoning-cambridge-city-council/
https://www.cambridgeday.com/2024/03/26/all-neighborhoods-could-get-multifamily-homes-and-see-down-conversions-discouraged-in-laws/
The Housing Committee scheduled a public hearing, with public comment, which was held last week. The committee presentation and the CDD presentation were both posted. That was also covered locally by many different news outlets.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/housing/2024-05-09/cambridge-moves-toward-elimination-of-single-family-only-zoning
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/cambridge-considers-plan-to-abolish-single-family-only-zoning/3364609/
Those complaining are doing so in bad faith because they know the real issue they have, wanting to maintain exclusionary zoning, would make them look bad, like the resource-hoarding reactionaries they truly are.
1. We shouldn’t take Doug Brown’s advice on the AHO, which he and his fellow CCC members vehemently opposed.
The “Ronayne petition” is really a petition Doug himself appears to have worked up with Patty Nolan, as it is largely similar to a past CCC zoning petition. These petitions do somewhat increase density, which without more is what will encourage “McMansions,” if by that you mean very large, multimillion dollar homes like we already see under C-1 zoning.
Because developers can take advantage of increased square footage without incurring the additional costs to build multifamily, those very large, very expensive homes are what we will get, and that is all that we will get. That zoning will not produce multifamily homes in practice, which defeats the purpose of this entire undertaking.
For that reason, we should skip this part 1 of using development economics as a new form of redlining and only do part 2 where we require multifamily homes to take advantage of additional height and density.
2. The Affordable Housing non-profits like Just-A-Start and HRI have not been able to successfully buy properties in these neighborhoods and build six stories on them, and based on the annual AHT reports they have had very few if any prospects in those areas either.
We shouldn’t block viable multifamily housing to preserve a claimed AHO advantage that has not and will not result in any housing actually being built. That, again, defeats the purpose of encouraging multifamily housing citywide.
PRC,
Our public schools are far from overcrowded. Like most school districts in expensive urban areas with overly restrictive zoning, our birth rate is falling off a cliff, down approx. 25% over the past decade, and CPSD enrollment and future enrollment projections reflect that.
See page 216 of the budget showing births dropping precipitously from 1,265 in the 2014-15 school year (five years prior to 2019-20) to only 953 in 2023-24 (five years prior to 2028-29).
https://cdnsm5-ss5.sharpschool.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_3042785/File/departments/administration/financial/budget/fy2025/CPS_Adopted_Budget_FY25_WEB.pdf
To be clear, how many times do we need to be hit over the head wth a baseball bat by the far left progressives on CC and others who are intimidated by the prospect of adverse labeling before we realize that “floater” language talking about stakeholder input (wink wink) before a POR is drafted means the deal is done. Excuse the poor grammatical construct . Personally I have had it with this city. time for alternative housing ! I’ll just join the loads of absentee landlords in Cambridge in Cambridge, charge high rent and go else where to enjoy some
modicum of open space, less congestion and parking!
If the council were actually far left it would be talking about expropriating people like you and building massive amounts of public housing instead of a market based upzoning to allow property owners and developers to increase their profits and maybe build some housing.
Yes Barbara they the far left have taken over. A few are trying to hold the dam from bursting.
You can see for yourself, go onto mass Ave at rush hour and it’s now a parking lot from H sq to Arlington with empty bus only lanes, pavement peeled up with red war paint turn left to turn right signs.
You can see for yourself the tallest building in Cambridge going up is an apartment building in central sq. Rent to own nope – rent to make a developer richer model. Same as all the towers built in Alewife at the old bowling alley.
But don’t believe your own eyes this is progress.
“Rent to own nope – rent to make a developer richer model.”
Ahh yes exploitative rent seeking and traffic jams, the defining features of the far left…
You lot are profoundly unserious and ridiculous frankly. You know you’ve lost the argument so you resort to red scare fear mongering about free market capitalism. It is genuinely absurd.
I actually think people would prefer public housing vs apartment towers. Literally a tower the tallest building in Cambridge for rental apartments. There is no way out of poverty and the cycle continues.
Monthly lease car – monthly rent apt – monthly pay insurance – you will own nothing and be happy…at least with public housing the monthly cost subsidized so there is a chance to climb out of poverty.
Do people are people actually excited to add an apartment tower in central sq ? Really?
Its been a disaster for alewife brook parkway you pretty much can’t drive there anymore and there are limited / no bike lanes on it. Maybe that’s the plan force people like Barbara to rent or sell their home.
The city is certainly changing and not sure who it’s benefiting other than developers and the tax revenue. Guess that’s the sad reality.
See Barb sell and then become a renter for the remainder! Bloomberg and some troll on cam day told you to do so 🤣
Baby Boomers Are Loving the ‘Freedom’ of Renter Life
https://twitter.com/markets/status/1790739854722015616
I love that the person pitching dubious conspiracy theories about the origins of the Ronayne petition calls themselves “User” rather than an actual real name. Well done, Cambridge Day. Way to enforce real accountability.
The people pitching conspiracy theories are those claiming a free market approach to the housing crisis (up-zoning) is communism.
Doug,
If you haven’t noticed its not like the comment section of the day is a bastion of rational debate or dialogue of reasoned kind. Anonymous morons have been spouting off here more than usual, but the second Levy applies any standard the day itself might be taken seriously and not the “not necessarily the news for entertainment purposes only” kind of blog that it is. My best guess is that most of the anonymous people have multiple accounts and are just talking to each other in circles for sad laughs or equally sad endorphin rushes. Now … back to the housing experts … please anons … tell us more …
PRC- the n mass ave bus lanes are not empty at that hour, they are full of cars driving in them illegally with no enforcement or ticketing in sight, rendering them pointless as well as enraging those of us who are actually trying to follow the law.
Q99 i often often being every time i drive there see parked cars in the designated spots. I guess people running in to get food make a delivery etc rendering them pointless.
Either way it’s a complete joke. But let’s let the experts tell us it’s working great and not believe what we see with our own eyes. 😔
Slaw – if you are capable of research, google me and also research all my work since leaving the post of Deval Patrick’s head of consumer affairs. In addition to overseeing commercial implementation of the ACA, I oversaw the first time ever rejection of health insurance rates to make health insurance more affordable for small business and individuals throughout the period when Deval was governor. Unfortunately Gov Baker fired me and since then small business rates have only increased higher and higher. If you know how to research you will find all the studies and lords I have written about escalating health cost costs and the lack of transparency in our current system. So kindly do a little research before you attack someone who has had a long and disguised career in state and federal governments on behalf of consumers. Not that you could possibly be aware but Pioneer has zero to do with Steward. In fact I am in the process of crafting an open criticizing the lack of oversight by DPH and the lack of action by the legislature to impose greater oversight of for profit transactions. Now there is bill in the House which I support but which is entirely too late to do anything re Steward. The other thing you may or may not be aware of is that your major hospitals here dominate the market with high prices and high commercial revenue and despite the efforts of the HPC we have been unable to bring prices down. That reminds me when I was with Gov Patrick , my office was one of the key offices that worked to create implement Ch 224 – not that you have any idea what that is. I am really through with coming on this page but I wasn’t going to let your ad hominem attacks against me go unanswered.
The ACA was a neoliberal plan for healthcare that was modeled after Romneycare and which has very much effectively and intentionally blocked momentum for single payer.
Pioneer has its dirty hands in every effort to undermine and privatize public services in the commonwealth.
Ch 244 set up the regulatory captured environment we have today that has lead to those ballooning healthcare costs. Again it it’s an example of a neoliberal reform to stave off more the more meaningful and fundamental changes that are necessary in the healthcare sector.
I am very familiar with all of this. Clearly more than you want people to be.