The rental market in Cambridge is easing, but will it make a difference?

While the Cambridge rental market seemed to cool late last year, the city’s affordable housing advocates continue to say more needs to be done to make housing less expensive.

“Even if rents are flat, it doesn’t mean we’ve succeeded,” said Justin Saif, co-chair and board president of the housing development advocacy group A Better Cambridge.

A big reason for the market shift is the ongoing deficit in housing, and especially affordable housing. As part of the city’s 2018 Envision Cambridge plan, a comprehensive guide intended to boost the city’s “inclusive and sustainable growth” over time, the city set a goal to increase its housing supply by 12,500 units by 2030. But the city is well off that pace, having built only 3,112 new housing units, less than a quarter of the goal. And development of new affordable housing units also remains far from its 2030 goal of 3,175: as of 2024, only 814 have been built.

In the city’s 2025 citizen survey, 64 percent of respondents said it was “extremely important” the community focuses on “affordable market housing ” and “affordable housing (subsidized).” A majority of respondents said that the city addressed those same issues poorly, ranking them last and second-to-last, respectively, out of 13 issues.

Melissa Peters, assistant city manager for community development, said that there are many reasons for the housing shortfall.

“We’re in an economic downturn, high interest rates that people are expecting to go back down have not, labor costs are high, materials are high, and that’s exacerbated with the uncertainty around tariffs,” Peters said. “All of those have made it expensive to develop.”

Market softening – but only for some

Many current tenants are not seeing the benefits of a softened market.

Jiaheng Xie lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in a Central Square high-rise. His rent of $3,050 per month, which is negotiated by a third-party team, has increased by over $400 overall since he moved in as a student in 2021. He previously lived in Houston, where he and two roommates paid just $1,000 a month each and his lease wasn’t negotiated by a management team.

“Houston, they’re nice,” Xie said. “If you choose to sign a two-year lease or a three-year lease, they’re willing to do that, and they’ll give you a discount. I guess the intent is trying to lock in some revenue. But, here in Boston, they just don’t like to do it this way. They try to negotiate year by year and they have more power to handle their revenue.”

Now, two years out of school, Xie is still unsure if he’ll stay, in large part due to leasing and rent. “If I could sign a longer lease, I’m definitely willing [to stay],” he said. “If the raise of the rent is not crazy, I’m probably willing to stay in the same place.”

Even if the supply of housing in Cambridge had increased to meet the demand, it’s not clear that renters across the board would have benefited. Although there is no concrete data from real estate companies on rental trends by income bracket, anecdotally, the rents for low- to moderate-income tenants in Cambridge don’t tend to fluctuate, according to a representative of the Alliance of Cambridge Tenants, an all-volunteer organization that works to empower and support subsidized tenants in public housing. The organization has historically seen that rents for luxury and other higher end units, like the one Xie lives in, tend to go up.

What more can be done?

State and local government have taken steps to try to improve conditions for renters, City Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler said. Cambridge most notably passed the Affordable Housing Overlay (AHO) in 2020 and expanded it in 2023. The ordinance allows developers to create new, 100% affordable homes that are taller and denser than market housing. Sobrinho-Wheeler said the AHO led to the addition of hundreds of affordable homes in the city and forced landlords to lower their asking rents.

The city also reformed multifamily zoning in 2025, legalizing the construction of four-story buildings in all residential areas. “Up until last year, there were parts of the city where the only thing you could build was a detached single-family home on a large lot,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. “In a place like Cambridge, that’s one unit of housing.”

Separately, a 2025 statewide law that shifted broker’s fees from the renter to the person or entity that hires a broker or salesperson has effectively lowered the cost of rent.

Both open options for renters, Sobrinho-Wheeler said.

Another provision in the AHO allows new construction to be taller and denser in capacity. Parking requirements were also eliminated in 2022. Other levers the councilor said the city can pull to address housing costs are new zoning permissions such as the ones passed for Cambridge Street and Massachusetts Avenue, which also allowed for increases in height in some residential buildings, and increasing funding for the city’s affordable housing trust, which offers money to create new affordable housing and preserve existing affordable housing.

Saif said that while Cambridge has made some headway in zoning adoptions, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. “It’s simply a supply-and-demand issue,” he said. “We have a housing shortage and if we commit to addressing it, we will see rents go down,” Saif said.

Peters said she doesn’t think the city will meet its Envision Cambridge goals by 2030 but believes much progress will be made in getting back on track given the work the city is doing to develop more housing units and changing zoning policies. “We will make up lost ground and continue to reassess and set new goals and try to look at additional opportunities to help the market,” she said.

Another measure that may come into play is rent stabilization. Cambridge had rent controls between 1970 and 1994, when Massachusetts voters ended the practice statewide in a closely contested vote, but rent control appears likely to be on the ballot again this fall.

Sobrinho-Wheeler said he’s also working on rent stabilization as well as other tenant protections, such as just-cause evictions, which would forbid landlords from evicting tenants or not renewing their leases without specific conditions being met. Additionally, he wants the state to enact a real estate transfer fee to allow municipalities to charge property owners anytime they sell a multi-million dollar property – such a proposal gained Governor Maura Healey’s support last legislative session but the House and Senate did not include it in their final housing bond bill, Commonwealth Beacon previously reported.

“It would raise millions more dollars for affordable housing.” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. “I think we can pass a more thorough petition this term.”

This post was updated to clarify a reference to multifamily zoning, to correct the year the Affordable Housing Overlay was expanded and to more accurately outline its provisions.

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