It took five months, but the biggest issue of last year’s city council race landed on the council’s agenda for the first time this term, as councillors defended or decried proposed changes to last year’s residential upzoning measures.
The most immediate impact will come from a resident petition by West Cambridge denizen Doug Brown, who filed proposed changes to the zoning code with the city clerk’s office on June 3. Brown’s petition will temporarily become de facto municipal law until council can vote on it, creating a potential roadblock for affordable housing developers in the meantime. By law, Brown’s petition must be forwarded to the Ordinance Committee for a public hearing, which has not yet been scheduled.
Any changes that arise from Councillor Timothy Flaherty’s policy order will take longer, since his proposed changes can’t be decided by council until city agencies write new language that would set new design requirements for developers.
The council voted to review Flaherty’s policy order in a joint meeting of the Housing and Neighborhood and Long-Term Planning committees, scheduled for June 25.
Petition aims at developer incentives
The petition submitted by Brown will affect zoning policy as soon as a public hearing on it is scheduled. At that point, any buildings seeking permits will have to be in compliance with the petition’s rules to be approved.
Brown’s filing aims to make direct changes to the Affordable Housing Overlay (AHO), a set of zoning rules passed in 2020 and updated last year, which allow for 100 percent affordable housing projects to build up to nine stories high. Brown’s changes cut allowed AHO building heights to six stories. They also block projects that meet inclusionary requirements from building up to six stories high unless all adjacent properties are three or more stories, and they include setback and parking requirements.
Higher building heights are an essential component of the AHO. Prior to its passage, affordable housing developers were often out-bid by market-rate developers. Tying building size to affordability made these projects much more economically feasible.
“We are concerned about potential impacts to the pipeline of new AHO developments, which could delay or prevent the completion of new affordable units,” Jeremy Warnick, a city of Cambridge spokesperson, said in an email. He noted that several developments will probably be unable to move forward as planned.
Once scheduled, a hearing cannot be held until two weeks later. In this case that could put a chill on new projects that lasts through much of the summer, because city council will be on its summer break. The ordinance committee cannot reject it outright; it can either send it to council with a recommendation or it can decide not to act, meaning the petition will expire 90 days after the hearing.
The impact on residents
Brown’s petition coincided with the Cambridge Housing Department presenting to council its 5-year AHO report, which says that the overlay is responsible for over a thousand new affordable units across 16 buildings being constructed or in some stage of the permitting process. One such project, 52 New Street in Neighborhood Nine, recently opened to tenants. Councillor Marc McGovern went to the development Monday and met a new tenant, a woman who immigrated to the United States from Haiti with her children and had recently lost her husband.
“And now [she] has this incredibly beautiful, stable apartment that she can afford, next to the largest public park in the city, and across the street from a new $300 million school. That woman’s life did a 180-degree turn, right?” McGovern told Cambridge Day. Without the overlay, the 106-unit building she now lives in would have had to be smaller. “If we only had 80 units, would she have been one of the ones that got cut out?”
Brown’s amendments could mean several other buildings started under the AHO but that haven’t finished their permitting will have to redesign their specs to comply. The same is true for any developers seeking building permits, Warnick said in an email to Cambridge Day. As long as the petition is pending before the council and the Planning Board “housing builders would need to show that they are compliant with the zoning petition in order to obtain a building permit,” Warnick said.
The ordinance committee can advance the petition with an unfavorable recommendation back to council, but councillors will likely not have the opportunity to fully vote it down until their summer meeting August 3.
Flaherty looks to modify MHO
Flaherty’s policy order takes on what is colloquially known as the Multifamily Housing (MFH) Ordinance, two zoning petitions approved in February 2025. It allows for four-story residential buildings in most areas of the city, with the opportunity for developers to build up to six stories as long as the project meets certain affordability requirements. It also abolished single-family and two-family only zoning restrictions and eased setback requirements, allowing developers to build out to five feet from the sides and rear of their lots.
Flaherty’s order asks Cambridge’s Community Development Department (CDD) to draft new language that would require new housing to have wider setbacks from the lot line, open space on the ground level, and parking above a certain number of units.
Flaherty campaigned to repeal last year’s MFH changes, claiming that they will lead to developers converting existing homes into units that are intentionally designed to evade existing affordability requirements. He and his co-sponsor on the policy order, Councillor Cathie Zusy, are the only councillors publicly against the policy, though, and have instead opted for amending it rather than attempting to abolish it completely.
“I’m not proposing that we rescind [the MHO],” Zusy told Cambridge Day. “I just feel like, you have a rough draft of [a] good policy, it makes sense to improve upon what you’ve got.” Zusy was the lone councillor to vote against last year’s MFH changes.
But their proposal received support from many public commenters, some of whom said they were jarred by the speed with which developers have acted on the MFH changes and what they might mean for the local environment.
“The city is spending tens of millions to reduce combined sewer overflows. If new housing strips away permeable soil and mature trees that absorb rain, we undo that investment,” said Karen Brushett at public comment. “Cambridge can build both the affordable housing we need and the flood resiliency our community deserves.”
Affordability of the new units was also a concern. Cambridge’s Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance requires new buildings with at least 10 units or more than 10,000 square feet of floorspace to set aside 20 percent of total floorspace for affordable units, but smaller projects can sell all their units at market-rate.
“Friends of mine have had to leave the city due to the incredibly high cost of living,” said Luca Palma Poth, a recent Cambridge Rindge and Latin School graduate, during the public comment period. “The multifamily housing ordinance is actively making this worse by creating luxury four-story units.”
Flaherty and Zusy’s proposed changes are not focused on affordability but design. They include increasing setbacks, limiting wall lengths, requiring open space to be at ground level (as opposed to green roofs contributing to existing open space requirements), and re-introducing off-street parking requirements, which council abolished in 2022, for buildings of a certain size.
Other councillors balked at the proposal, saying it would restrict the production of badly needed new housing units, both market rate and affordable McGovern also noted that one of the ideas in the policy order, which floats restricting six-story buildings to major thoroughfares, could prevent affordable units from coming to smaller residential streets.
“You are pushing those inclusionary units, those low-income folks out to the thoroughfares, the corridors, and not within neighborhoods,” McGovern said. “I thought one of the points that we all agreed on was that we wanted to do away with exclusionary zoning, which did exactly that.”
Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, co-chair of the housing committee, said the amendments would have prevented many types of Cambridge residences from being built.
“If someone doesn’t want live in a house like mine that has less than a ten-foot setback, no one is forcing them to,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. “What is wrong with the house I live in? What is wrong with the houses most of us live in?”
Zusy said she was surprised by the negative reaction from other councillors, who she thought would be more willing to collaborate on improving the MFH ordinance.
“I know my colleagues have been visiting sites of potential development around the city, and to me, it’s just so obvious that we need to make the ordinance better,” she said. “I was really disappointed.”
The council did agree to forward the policy order to committee, where it will be considered June 25 along with other incoming zoning recommendations developed by city staff.
Brown, who did not respond to requests for comment, has authored or co-authored three successful zoning petitions between 2015 and 2021.
Brown’s petition leverages a Massachusetts state law that allows for changes to municipal zoning to be initiated so long as the petitioner is able to obtain the signatures of 10 registered voters. Brown’s filing includes 13 signatures, mostly from fellow residents of West Cambridge or Neighborhood Nine.
McGovern told Cambridge Day that the city should consider filing a home rule petition with the Mass. Legislature to increase the requirements for such resident petitions.
“It’s something we have to talk about,” he said. “I’m not saying this because I have issues with this particular petition. I’ve been saying this for a couple of years now.”
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