With only three City Council meetings before a Feb. 17 deadline to vote on a multifamily zoning ordinance, there’s a real possibility Cambridge will end single- and two-family “exclusionary” zoning this year. In a committee vote Thursday to advance a new version to the full council, only councillor Cathie Zusy voted against the motion and said she would vote no on the current proposal in the deciding vote.
A majority of the councillors stated that they were likely to vote yes, despite each having their own misgivings on the details of the ordinance, now with amendments proposed in December.
The “four-plus-two” proposal, a product of months of public hearings, allows for four-story buildings in all residential areas with an additional two-story bonus for 20 percent affordable buildings on lots of more than 5,000 square feet. The amended proposal stands in contrast to the original proposal introduced by councillors Burhan Azeem and Sumbul Siddiqui, which would have allowed for six-story buildings with no lot size minimum.
“I’m on Team ‘Pass Whatever We Can’ at this point,” Azeem said. “I still like the original petition better, but at the same time, I want to pass something and try to get broad support. So happy enough with these compromises, I guess.”
Mayor E. Denise Simmons and councillor Patty Nolan did not explicitly say how they would vote in the final decision, though Nolan expressed a desire for more time in the process.
“It would be better if we just took another month or two,” Nolan said. “However, the sense of this council is very clear that there’s not more than maybe two or three people who are interested in doing that.”
Lot size limit
One point of contention is the 5,000-square-foot lot size minimum for buildings over four stories. On Thursday, the Community Development Department presented housing production projections predicting that including such a lot size requirement would mean around 1,000 fewer units built by 2040.
The limitation, Nolan said, was included to appease concerned residents. The councillors thought it would not affect housing production meaningfully, and Nolan expressed surprise at the projected impact. Jeff Roberts, the director of zoning and development, pointed out that it is difficult to predict exactly how the rule would affect production.
“In some ways, we’re not really sure exactly what will happen, because it’s not currently allowed,” Roberts said of the current lack of taller buildings in smaller lots.
Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler advocated for “three-plus-three” zoning along with removing the lot size minimum, which would produce 550 more units than the current proposal by 2040. Three-plus-three zoning – which would allow for three-story buildings with three extra stories for buildings in which 20 percent of square footage is kept affordable – is most vocally supported by Sobrinho-Wheeler and councillor Ayesha Wilson, with the goal of protecting tenants from displacement and incentivizing affordable housing development.
Community Development estimates no difference in affordable housing production between three-plus-three and four-plus-two plans, and four-plus-two results in higher total housing production.
Sobrinho-Wheeler and Wilson expressed support for moving the current proposal forward.
“I think there are multiple versions here that would be an improvement over our current zoning,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said.
“I will move this forward, recognizing that there’s room for opportunity for more conversations,” Wilson said.
Community Development feedback
The Community Development Department also used Thursday to respond to questions from councillors around form-based coding, disincentivizing “McMansions,” and protecting solar panels from shadows of taller buildings.
Zusy inquired about the timeline to develop form-based coding – in other words, including design standards with the intention of having buildings reflect their urban context. She referred to a Jan. 8 meeting in which urban planning experts disagreed whether to pass the ordinance before further designing a vision for residential buildings.
What she was asking for “could take upward of five years to accomplish,” assistant city manager Iram Farooq said – Somerville took seven years to pass its form-based code in 2019. Farooq said that form-based design could instead be included in the council’s future priorities.
Roberts also noted that the proposed zoning “isn’t doing away with variation in heights,” referring to parts of the city where taller residential development is allowed.
“One of the key changes is to have more equitable zoning in the residentially zoned areas in East Cambridge and West Cambridge, where, right now there’s sort of a disparity between what’s allowed in terms of multifamily use,” Roberts said. “And, in fact, the height limit in those areas is currently the same.”
Zusy also repeated concerns that the zoning change would be hard to reverse if it, for example, led to “six-story buildings in dense neighborhoods that were shading people’s light and gardens and infuriating neighbors.”
In response, chief of planning strategy Melissa Peters told councillors: “If, after some time, the type of development that’s going up is not consistent with the objectives that the council decided, you could always change the zoning again. This is not a permanent change.”
“There’s going to be time to react,” Peters added, referring to a professor’s comments from an experts’ panel. “But there is a cost in inaction, given the housing crisis.”
Community Development also said it would be difficult to include an amendment to limit unit sizes to 2,000 square feet to disincentivize oversized and ostentatious homes known as McMansions – in this case, taller single-family homes that take advantage of the increased height limit. Such a change would require a new petition process due to being a change to the “fundamental character” of the original proposal.
Solar panel protections are similarly hard to include in a zoning ordinance, though city solicitor Megan Bayer said it’s possible to protect sun access through restricting the size of top stories on taller buildings.
Making compromise
In his closing words, vice mayor and Ordinance Committee co-chair Marc McGovern urged unhappy residents to recognize the compromises on details such as setbacks, lot size minimums and height restrictions that have resulted in the current proposal.
“If getting 80 percent or 75 percent of what you want isn’t enough to help you feel comfortable, I don’t know what to do now,” McGovern said. “I wish more people felt comfortable, and more people could realize that there have been a lot of compromises here.”
“Even though I also am not getting everything that I want, and the people who are advocating with me are not getting everything that they want, that’s okay. I’m proud of the work that we’ve done,” McGovern said.
The next council meeting is Jan. 27. Residents can submit written comments by Thursday to cityclerk@cambridgema.gov.
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Obviously this isn’t the point of the article… but I always thought the term “McMansion” referred to mass produced oversized houses built by tract developers (think model home in “Arrested Development”). Whatever you might think of this zoning reform, that doesn’t seem what it enables, no?
“McMansions” is a scare tactic. Re-zoning provides Cambridge with the flexibility to create affordable housing while maintaining a regulatory process to guide development. It’s not a blank check for developers but a necessary step to address the exclusionary zoning that inflated housing prices, enriched a few, and fueled a housing crisis for many.
The city already accommodates most of the demands of status quo defenders, yet it’s never enough.
People need homes and shouldn’t have to spend a significant portion of their income on rent. That takes priority over preserving a homeowner’s kitchen window view.
There is an abundance of misinformation of there regarding this proposal and those pushing the nonsense on either side of this issue aren’t helping their cause. The McMansion thing is an example of this. Cambridge added (see also: issued a certificate of occupancy) about 48 novel units last year. Zoning reform is long overdue. However if this were to pass there remains many real obstacles to developing housing in Cambridge specifically and notably absent from this conversation are (in no particular order) the building code, sanitation code, inclusionary, and the practical elements of development that CDD doesn’t soil their hands with like financing, construction costs, permit costs, article 22 costs, article 19 sloth and cost, and specialized stretch code implications for all new development. That being said the new zoning as proposed is a much better condition than the obtuse clunking garbage pile we are currently working with.
I don’t understand the McMansion concerns at a logical level. Current zoning does not prohibit the construction of large, ugly single family homes whatsoever. There’s a few recent examples in the East Cambridge neighborhood alone, namely the new one on Third Street and another diagonal from the O’Connell library branch. Each of those have characteristics that lean towards the restrictions some of the critics of the rezoning proposal want, like setbacks, and all it does is highlight how un-integrated into the neighborhood it is. East Cambridge is full of old and historic homes, and they all have much smaller front and side setbacks or none at all, the inclusion of setbacks makes it fall further from the local character that many people say they want to preserve.
Rezoning those lots to allow for denser multi-family construction as of right won’t make McMansions any more possible than they are now. If anything, I would imagine they would be discouraged since the value of the land will increase when the potential construction value from increased number of units goes up.