Monday night, the City Council passed zoning changes for the Cambridge Street Corridor that had been developed over four years of public meetings, surveys, Planning board meetings, and Council hearings. It was time for the council to act based on this public process and furtherance of the city goal of updating zoning to incentivize adding the thousands of housing units we need. But what measures were put into place to evaluate if these changes build housing meeting the needs of lower and middle income residents, elderly, families? Cambridge has not performed a comprehensive housing needs study, so policy makers are simply assuming that increasing housing development will meet our needs.
The council is convinced that allowing taller, denser development through Multifamily Housing Zoning, and now the Mass. Ave and Cambridge Street zoning changes will create the thousands of housing units to stabilize housing for residents displaced by burgeoning rental and sales prices. Passing these ambitious policies without setting specific targets for numbers of housing units, affordable, market rate, rental vs, ownership will make it impossible to measure if these changes work. Will most of the new housing be high end rentals and condos? Will affordable housing developers be outbid for sites by market rate developers? Did the council require that the CDD track residential building permit applications by size of project, affordable, mixed income, AHO or IZ and pro forma rental rates and sales prices?
Building community trust will require proving the effectiveness of these policies by establishing goals based on a Housing Needs Study, then measuring results, amending policies and providing additional resources to achieve them.
Louise Venden, Rogers Street, Cambridge
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.
The claim that Cambridge should have delayed zoning reform until a new housing needs study ignores a basic reality: The housing shortage is already well documented.
Every serious analysis, from MAPC to the city’s own inclusionary housing reports, shows a severe lack of homes affordable to low- and middle-income residents. The main barrier has been restrictive zoning, not missing data!
The Cambridge Street changes do not block future analysis. They make it possible. Only by allowing projects to move forward can we see what actually gets built and adjust policy accordingly.
Demanding perfect foresight before reform guarantees inaction. It is the standard tactic of development opponents: delay, delay, delay.
The outcome is predictable: higher rents, just as exclusionary zoning has produced for decades. How does that help lower- and middle-income residents, seniors, or families?
I don’t think this is what you were going for, but requiring studies as a prerequisite for making any changes is a common tactic for NIMBY-style delay and defund tactics.
While I agree that having more information is good to help have a better understanding of how changes affect our community, I think this is “both and” situation where we can’t stop and wait for a full assessment before making any changes as there are active needs that are under- or un-addressed.
Delay for more studies is classic NIMBY.
In fact, the housing market has been studied extensively. The answer is clear: More hosuing is needed because we don’t enough. It is the only way to bring housing costs down.
The new zoning along Cambridge St. does not require the building of any 100% affordable housing. What it allows is the construction of buildings by for profit developers. The only units available to households making less than 80% of median annual income (AMI) will be in 20% of buildings with 10 or more units or with very large square footage. No units will be available to households making less than 50% of AMI because these require rent vouchers and there is no money available for new vouchers.
Because many new buildings will replace old buildings, many low income tenants will be displaced. This means there will be a population shift to higher income households. This is not what the advocates of the new zoning promised. It does fit with the results of similar new building in six other cities, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., as just published in a report by the Georgetown Center on Poverty and inequality.