Let us be clear: Despite the Cambridge Community Development Department’s findings to the contrary, the proposed amendments to Cambridge’s Multifamily Housing Zoning Ordinance are designed to curb the construction of much-needed housing.
It is not rocket science to say the increased setbacks and open-space and parking requirements will limit the buildable area and drive up building costs. A UCLA study earlier this year found that requiring underground parking for apartments added roughly $50,000 to $100,000 per unit. As the Housing Affordability Institute writes: “Depending on lot setback requirements, impervious surface limitations, elevation design requirements, and parking mandates, small lots may not be possible, even when permitted as a by-right condition.”
Scattered all around Cambridge are multifamily homes with small setbacks and limited amounts of open space — sometimes even none at all. Many of these buildings have been around for more than a century, often rubbing shoulders with a single-family home or triple-decker.
Rest assured, all of the inhabitants have remained safe and healthy, free from vapors or miasmas or whatever newfound argument anti-housing advocates have now seized upon.
These new requirements might sound reasonable on paper, but in aggregate, they work to reduce new housing here in Cambridge. If you cannot build on most of your lot, then you might not build at all.
This works out well for those who own their homes and are uncomfortable with the prospect of different views out their windows, different kinds of shadows, or (God forbid) new neighbors.
At the very least, when these amendments are voted upon by our City Council, let the proponents be honest — they do not want to share, and they do not want things to change. And they’d rather the rest of us continue to pay the price of a rampant housing shortage.
Noah Harper, AICP / Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
A stronger
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Its this kind of misinformation that causes much of the political consternation in the city these days.
If you actually listen to CDD’s presentation at the 6/25 and 9/16 Housing Committee meetings you can hear them explain why these changes wont change the forecasts for the number of units built. Because the developers were only looking at the MFZ zoning regs, NOT the city’s other requirements for permeable and greenfactor issues. CDD included all the regs in their estimates, and now they are trying to make all of them clearer in the MFZ so developers can make more informed decisions before purchasing the property.
Yes, let’s be clear: these amendments serve existing homeowners who want less neighborhood change, not the people who need housing.
The proposed changes to Cambridge’s multifamily zoning would make apartments harder and more expensive to build, worsening the housing shortage. That benefits homeowners by protecting and increasing property wealth while placing greater burdens on renters and most other residents.
I hope the City Council serves the broader public interest rather than entrenched wealth. Otherwise, Cambridge risks becoming an enclave for the affluent at the expense of residents, renters, and local businesses.
Local businesses need more customers with disposable income, not residents forced to spend most of their earnings on rent.
Too many people seem focused only on protecting their own interests, rather than on what benefits the city as a whole.
Every new requirement (smaller footprint due to larger setbacks, etc) is going to delay some projects, make other projects less likely to be built at all, and will keep housing more expensive. I want my son to live in Cambridge when he graduates – and I’m sure many people love their children and don’t want them to move far away because there is nothing they can afford. Stop trying to delay housing construction, enough.
This letter is NOT disinformation. Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler asked for modeling to show that staff’s proposed changes would not reduce the number of homes created.
The CDD’s conclusion of “no impact on unit counts” was therefore still being questioned, not established fact.
Anyone who listened to the discussion would know this. Leaving out that context, or making accusations without the full record, is itself disinformation.
Residents = Voters. And the Voters are who the council is supposed to represent, “Avg Joe”. Not the Developers, Not Outsiders who want to buy in but are not current residents. Please learn how Representational Democracy works.
The Developers and their investors do not have the interests of the people involved, they have their own agendas in profit profit profit. Many will buy, destroy and flip or if the economy takes an even worse drop nationally, leave razed lots or unfinished construction in their wake for banks to seize.
Building multi-million dollar units (as some of the developers want to do) will not help the population that wants in that you seem to speak for (which I am unsure is sincere). We have several lawsuits now from Developers who want to buck the existing zoning rules the city put in that enticed them to buy, fully knowing the requirements for affordable housing. They bought planning on trying to break the system in the courts, while pretending to follow the rules, so that it could be applied not just here but across the state.
“Residents” includes renters being priced out, kids who can’t afford to stay in the city where they grew up, and seniors who can’t downsize in their own neighborhood. Representing residents means counting all of them, not just people who already own homes.
Developers are allowed to make money. That is their business, not a moral failing. The real question is whether the rules direct that profit toward what the city needs. A developer builds homes that otherwise would not exist.
Instead, the people worth scrutinizing are wealthy homeowners who benefit from rising property values while blocking others from finding homes.
Scarcity is not neutral. When a city adds too little housing, prices rise for everyone. The people shut out are often the workers, teachers, and nurses the city relies on. Calling for more homes is not taking developers’ side. It is taking the next resident’s side.
Voters? Voters elected a City Council that is largely pro–zoning reform and decisively rejected several anti-development candidates.
Housing affordability is clearly a public priority. In city surveys, 66% of respondents identified the high cost of market-rate housing as the top issue they want the City to address over the next two years, and residents consistently rank affordability as their No. 1 concern.
What Cambridge voters have rejected is the status quo of blocking development. With good reason: that approach has helped create the housing crisis.
Legalizing multifamily housing citywide is not a handout to developers. It also enables small builders, homeowners, and nonprofits to create housing, while inclusionary requirements remain in place. Developers make money doing something we need: building housing. Are they supposed to do it for free?
Predictions of razed lots, bank seizures, and only multimillion-dollar units are NIMBY hyperbole and unsupported speculation.
Claims of new “multimillion dollar units” is also NIMBY hyperbole. The multimillion-dollar units are the single-family houses that wealthy homeowners are trying to protect.
It also ignore the evidence: new housing, even *market-rate* housing lowers nearby rents. This has been shown in many studies in many cities. But NIMBYs ignore actual evidence.
This article dismisses people’s valid concerns by mocking and misrepresenting them.
You say, “different views out their windows”, but what this zoning actually allows is a 74-foot-tall cube 5 feet from the neighboring fence, extending the full width of the property. In other words, the “different views” will be a brick wall, so tall and wide and close that there’s no way to see anything else.
“multifamily homes with small setbacks…rubbing shoulders with a single-family home or triple-decker” — yes, those exist in Cambridge. But “small” and “rubbing shoulders” are subjective terms. Nothing close to the size and setbacks allowed by the Feb 2025 upzoning exists in Cambridge.
This zoning was sold as “re-legalized triple-deckers”. It fooled me. I supported it because I thought triple-deckers and 4-story brick apartments were a good idea. Unfortunately I didn’t see the details until it was too late. A 4-story building would be dwarfed by what’s now allowed.
I won’t even address the “vapors or miasmas” rhetoric because there’s no way to argue with a straw man.
Yes, zoning restrictions restrict what can be built. But I fail to see how a very slight rollback to the major increase in buildability from the Feb 2025 upzoning turns into a crisis of nothing ever getting built. Is this upzoning some kind of beautiful perfect cutoff, at or above which equals affordability, and a hair below means housing crisis?
Noah, what do you see out your bedroom window? If it’s not a brick wall, does that make you racist and anti-poor?
NIMBY arguments often rely on hyperbole and worst-case renderings that bear little resemblance to what would actually be built.
Zoning sets a ceiling. It does not require every lot to become a 74-foot slab. Pointing to the most extreme theoretical building and presenting it as “the new Cambridge” is a scare tactic.
Cambridge is already a dense city. Its triple-deckers were once seen as radical and out of scale, built shoulder to shoulder, with minimal setbacks. Today, no one calls them a brick wall. They are part of what people love about Cambridge.
And rollbacks are rarely “very slight” in practice. Every added restriction on height, setbacks, or lot coverage reduces the number of projects that can pencil out.
Cambridge has spent decades learning what housing scarcity does to rents.
The housing crisis will not be solved by continuing the policies that created it.
Good. We need to slow down. Move fast and break things should not be used on our city. We need to slow down and reform this to actually achieve the results we (the residents) are looking for.