Like many in Massachusetts, I am reeling from Election Day. I don’t know what the next four years will hold. I do know that Massachusetts doesn’t, and has never, needed the president to tackle one of its biggest problems: the housing crisis. What we do need are local leaders courageous enough to take action and an electorate that demands it.
Last December, the Healey administration announced the emergency shelter system of a state of 7 million was “maxed out” at 7,500 families. This has been called a “migrant crisis” but it is really a housing crisis. Massachusetts’ housing shortage is measured in the hundreds of thousands. When residents are forced to compete for too few homes, prices soar. Half of Boston renters are cost-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent, and the rate is higher for renters of color. This shortage is why Boston has the second-highest rate of homelessness nationwide. How can we expect to be a haven for anyone else when we can’t house the families who are already here?
This housing shortage is humanmade. It was created by a system of rules, known as exclusionary zoning, that used housing policy to enforce segregation by race and class. After the Civil Rights Act banned explicit discrimination by race, towns shifted to banning the (cheaper) apartments “undesired” people lived in, achieving the same effect. Those rules stayed in place even as the Boston metro area kept adding jobs, driving prices up and people out. Exclusionary zoning is less flashy than a border wall, but probably more effective.
We can change this broken system. Cambridge is on the cusp of taking a step forward.
The Cambridge City Council is considering a proposal to allow up to six-story apartments in every neighborhood. Most projects would not require special permits, which have historically been weaponized to block apartments. Projects with 10 or more units would be required to set aside 20 percent as affordable for lower-income households. City staff estimate the proposal could add 4,880 homes by 2040, including 920 below market rate – at no cost to the city’s budget. This is a major improvement over the status quo, which would yield only 350 new homes and just 30 affordable units.
The stakes are high for everyone, and they’ve just become higher for me. My partner and I are expecting our first child this spring, but like the 1 in 4 young people thinking of leaving the Boston area, we have to weigh whether we can afford to stay, especially when day care is practically a second rent.
Against this backdrop, the dissonance between the yard signs and housing policies is jarring. Some homeowners with Harris-Walz signs object to building apartments on the grounds of “neighborhood character,” when that’s the kind of housing new families need. Some communities that believe “Black Lives Matter” and “Immigrants are Welcome” are upholding a status quo that was, quite literally, designed to keep those groups out. Some antiapartment zoning was even motivated by a desire to exclude families with school-age children because it was feared they would be a drain on local budgets. That idea probably isn’t true, but even if it were, do we want to be a community that bets against children?
We can be better. It starts by writing our local governments to demand action on housing. Imagine what’s possible if Cambridge starts building more apartments and other cities follow suit. Housing costs would finally moderate. Renters could breathe easier each Sept. 1. Homeownership would be in reach for more people. Young people could afford to live closer to home; seniors could afford to downsize. More kids could attend some of the nation’s best public schools. Low-income households on the long waitlist for subsidized housing could move into new affordable units. We could accept more refugees, domestic and international. We could lower our carbon dioxide emissions from transportation by locating people close to transit and jobs. Massachusetts could grow with fewer growing pains.
Perhaps, we could raise our child here.
Dan Phillips, Broadway, Cambridge
The author is a co-chair of A Better Cambridge, a group that advocates for housing.
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Cambridge’s housing crisis demands bold action, and zoning reform is the key.
Exclusionary zoning has perpetuated segregation and unaffordability for decades. It’s time for change.
The City Council’s proposal to legalize six-story multifamily housing citywide is a crucial step forward. This reform could create thousands of new homes, including hundreds of affordable units.
Housing is a fundamental human right, not a privilege reserved for the wealthy. Concerns about neighborhood “character” pale in comparison to the urgent need for housing.
Six-story buildings are perfectly compatible with vibrant, livable communities. In fact, they can foster more diverse, walkable neighborhoods.
By ending exclusionary zoning, Cambridge can become a leader in addressing the housing crisis. This reform will make our city more inclusive, sustainable, and affordable for all.
Let’s support the City Council in taking this bold and necessary action. Cambridge residents deserve nothing less than a city that welcomes everyone, regardless of income or background.
This is a global problem, in large measure the result of housing investors seeking to profit off of housing need locally and globally. In Cambridge specifically, one example is notable in the recent Blackstone $325 million East Cambridge apartment complex. HERE
People might want to watch on this issue some of these:
Citizen Jane. The epic battle between Jane Jacobs versus Robert Moses. This 2016 Sundance competitor is titled: Citizen Jane: Battle for the City is available on Youtube: HERE
Real Estate Expert Answers US Housing Crisis Questions Wired (Kate Nelischer 2024)
How Britain (almost) Solved its Housing Crisis (Tom Nicholas 2024) HERE
Push: Documentary on Housing Crisis in Modern Cities (Fredrik Gertten 2019)
Official Trailer Review in The Guardian
Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality and Urban Crisis: a Conversation with Patrick Condon and Andrew Berman (Village Preservation July 2024).
The biggest barrier to getting Cambridge the housing it so badly needs is our own local zoning code. For at least a half-century, it has favored large, expensive single family homes and blocked or delayed less expensive, more sustainable multi-family buildings.
This year’s statistical poll of residents reports that the need for affordable housing (subsidized/income-restricted) is the second-most-important issue (61%) for the city to focus on in the next two years. Market rate housing (unsubsidized/unrestricted) was named (by 66%) as the most important issue.
Zoning reform is an essential step in reducing our housing shortage, no matter who builds the housing or how it’s financed.
Exclusionary zoning has fueled the current housing crisis by limiting supply and driving up prices. Allowing only expensive single-family homes exacerbates this issue.
It’s illogical to claim that upzoning will create problems already caused by exclusionary zoning. Common sense dictates that increasing supply through zoning reform is key to solving the housing crisis.
Ignore unfounded claims that zoning reform will be detrimental. The current situation is already problematic, and reform is essential for improvement.
Cambridge’s housing crisis stems from a fundamental imbalance between job creation and housing development. From 1980 to 2020, the city added approximately 45,000 net new jobs but built only around 12,600 homes.
This severe shortage is directly caused by exclusionary zoning policies that limit housing construction, particularly multi-family apartments.
We cannot solve the housing crisis without zoning reform.
The housing crisis stems from restrictive zoning laws that have limited new construction for decades, creating a significant supply-demand imbalance.
A key solution is increasing housing supply through zoning reform.
Opposition to these changes typically comes from homeowners who have benefited financially from the existing exclusionary policies and are now seeking to maintain their advantage. Don’t let them fool you into thinking otherwise.
Suzanne, if you’re trying to include links, nobody can see them. You need to include the actual URL
Thanks (CWEC) I had not realized the links did not show up. They are all in the blogpost I finished today on Urban History Matters: https://www.suzanneprestonblier.com/civic-blogs/urban-history-matters-here-there-in-film
Enjoy!
@Suzanne Preston Blier
Your blog oversimplifies arguments and contradicts established economic principles, empirical evidence, and ignores changes in Cambridge policies designed to foster affordable housing.
1. The claim that supply and demand theory doesn’t apply to high-demand cities like Cambridge is flawed. While demand is high, increasing supply can still affect prices. Studies show that increasing supply, even with luxury housing, can reduce nearby rents by reducing demand pressure.
2. New policies work with zoning reform to create affordable housing, a point that you have conveniently ignored.
Zoning changes have enabled the Cambridge Housing Authority to add affordable units to planned developments, showing that supply-side policies can deliver positive outcomes.
Cambridge’s Affordable Housing Overlay has also created certainty for developers, enabling increased density and streamlined approvals, which support affordability.
A balanced approach—combining increased housing production with targeted affordability measures—is more effective. Cambridge is already pursuing this with its Housing Capital Fund and policies designed to support both market-rate and affordable housing.
3. Similarly, criticisms of “trickle-down” housing theory oversimplify complex market dynamics and ignore evidence.
New housing, even luxury units, can absorb high-income demand, reducing competition for existing stock. Over time, as housing ages, it often becomes more affordable—a process known as filtering, which supports long-term affordability.
In short, a nuanced understanding of housing economics, paired with targeted interventions, is essential for addressing Cambridge’s housing challenges. It is misleading to oversimply complex dynamics and ignore policies and incentives that are in place to help create affordable housing.
Comparing these efforts to unrelated examples, like the Pruitt-Igoe housing project or the movie Metropolis (what?), is also misleading and distracts from substantive discussion.
Finally, your posts frequently critique Cambridge’s housing policies without offering alternatives. The status quo caused this crisis—what is your solution, if not action?
@Suzanne, you seem to contradict yourself on supply and demand. You say about the private equity purchase of $325MM in housing in East Cambridge, “In 2021 Blackstone purchased some $325 million in housing in East Cambridge apartment housing investments, seeking to profit from the growing biotech industries and amped up housing need, furthering the costs of housing in the city”, yet two paragraphs later you say “Each new and more expensive luxury housing property simply adds to the increased housing prices everyone must pay.”
That just does not logically follow. You acknowledge that increased demand (relative to supply) drives increased prices, but in order for that relationship to exist, the opposite must be true: increased supply (relative to demand) must lower prices. One cannot exist without the other.
Additionally, your entire argument for why increasing supply doesn’t work is labeling it “trickle down housing” and then misapplying that label to political cartoons about trickle down economic theory.
I noticed other contradictions in @Suzanne’s arguments about zoning reform:
A prior claim: Zoning reform leads to a rush of homeowners selling to developers.
Blog argument: People won’t leave their homes, supporting a trickle-down effect.
These conflicting statements raise questions about the consistency of the position.
The main issue with these arguments is their incompleteness.
Housing experts generally agree that effective upzoning requires complementary policies incentivizing affordable housing development.
Cambridge exemplifies this approach, successfully increasing affordable housing development.
@Suzanne’s criticism of upzoning overlooks the crucial policy measures encouraging affordable housing.
Highlighting potential problems while disregarding working solutions is misleading.
The Cambridge model demonstrates the effectiveness of a comprehensive approach to zoning reform and affordable housing development.
Someone on another thread summed it up perfectly.
In opposing zoning reform, @Suzanne, like other NIMBYs, appears to work backward from a conclusion.
They oppose zoning reform and rely on confirmation bias—seeking evidence that supports their preconceived views while ignoring anything that contradicts them.
Arguing that increasing housing supply will somehow reduce it is illogical.
Why such mental gymnastics? As homeowners benefiting from the status quo, their motives are clear.
Ending exclusionary zoning is necessary but insufficient to end the housing crisis. Single family only zoning and artificial barriers to housing production are a huge problem but we have dug ourselves such a deep hole that simply removing them is not enough.
Private developers have no incentive to produce enough housing to reduce its overall price, that would go against their own financial interests. The private market alone has never been able (or rather desired) to meet housing production goals because a restricted supply increases their profits.
The UK is an interesting case study. The only time they have ever met their housing production targets is when the government was building tons of public housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZpLiJdIGbs In order to actually end the housing crisis we need to embark on a new era of public and social housing production, however we cannot do that without repealing the faircloth amendment. We do in fact need federal power, or to simply ignore it and dare them to stop us, if we actually want to fix the housing crisis for those who need it most. Allowing the building of more luxury housing has never actually been the issue.
@slaw Yes, that is why Cambridge has incentives in place to steer development toward projects that include affordable housing.
It is working. There has been a sharp uptick in development of affordable housing in Cambridge.
It’s seems like the people who are against zoning reform conveniently forget this.
@slaw I do agree that more needs to be done. But there is what we can do in the short-term and what we can do in the long-term. A new era of public and social housing is a long haul.
In the meantime, we can address the problem with zoning reform and incentives to develop affordable housing, as Cambridge is doing with success.
Cambridge’s incentives are nowhere near enough to address the issue I’m talking about. Cambridge is for its part building more new housing public than just about anywhere else in the US with clever work arounds to get funding despite faircloth, but still it is nowhere near enough.
To be clear I am in favor of zoning reform AND a massive public housing building campaign. Cambridge should do everything it can do but until there is a new era of social and public housing construction we will remain in a housing crisis, at least for the people most vulnerable to the current one.
@Slaw. No argument here. Zoning reform is just a start.