In a memo released Thursday by the Cambridge Community Development Department (CDD), city officials recommended adjusting Cambridge’s inclusionary zoning requirement, which mandates that new residential developments of a certain size set aside 20 percent of their gross floor area for affordable housing units. The recommendations include temporarily lowering that percentage, providing tax abatements or allowing developers to contribute to the Affordable Housing Trust instead of including affordable units. All are designed to help kick start development by offering investors in projects better returns.
The memo was accompanied by a lengthy report from Boston consulting firm RKG Associates that modeled the impact of different policy proposals. Both highlight the importance of creating more affordable housing in the city as market rate housing grows, too.
The Community Development Department memo:
The CDD did not specify by how much the inclusionary zoning rate should be reduced. The RKG report said some parts of the city would be more sensitive to policy changes than others. A shift in rates would be unlikely to increase investor interest for large projects in West Cambridge, for instance.
The RKG report:
The city doesn’t recommend, however, reducing the requirement for projects in the C-1 residential district, by far the city’s largest, where buildings with inclusionary units are capped at six stories. It also warns against too large of a reduction in the inclusionary zoning percentage. “Setting the IHO [Inclusionary Housing Ordinance] percentage too low could have an impact on the goals of maintaining socioeconomic diversity and sustaining inclusive housing growth over time.”
Residents and policymakers have noted that there are some projects with inclusionary zoning units “in the pipeline” of the permitting process across the city. A crowd-sourced redevelopment tracker maintained by City Councillor Cathie Zusy suggests that about 15 percent of new non-subsidized units in the planning stages will be inclusionary. These mostly are part of very large projects.
The RKG report estimated that about 17 percent of units in projects built under inclusionary zoning rules between 2014 and 2024 were affordable. Those units, combined with units in subsidized all-affordable developments, meant 25 percent of new housing stock during the decade was considered affordable.
However, going forward nearly 35 percent of all new housing units would need to be affordable, RKG’s report said, if the city is to maintain its current level of socioeconomic diversity. It also said that prospective projects in the current market could be delayed by challenges in financing residential development.
The CDD will present the following policy changes to the Oct. 5 city council meeting:
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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So the whole thing has been nothing more than a cash grab for developers, neat. I wonder how many contribute to the campaigns of members on the council.
Easing the set-aside is pragmatic, not a giveaway. A 20% requirement on a project that never gets financed yields zero affordable units and zero homes.
Meanwhile, research keeps finding that new market-rate buildings ease rent pressure nearby. For example, This study found that new buildings lower nearby rents by 5 to 7 percent compared with locations slightly farther away or developed later, mainly because the buildings absorb many high-income households. https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/316/
Cambridge has a shortage, and we need to build.
Greed is a powerful force. There will never be enough for developers to enrich themselves and maximally extract from residents. No doubt a large proportion of support for the council and the MFH ordinances assumed that promotion of affordable housing would be connected to the policies. If that goes away, this becomes what it was all along… developers using the affordable housing as a trojan horse, while buying the city council for their own profits under our noses.
The Upjohn study was for low-income areas.
Also it’s just one study. It doesn’t cover all cities and situations, such as a built-out dense city that’s a very small part of the urban core doing a major upzoning while surrounded by other municipalities that don’t do something similar.
Reducing the inclusionary requirement while keeping the upzoning is a great way to anger the affordable housing advocates as well as the people who are concerned by very large buildings getting built very close to small buildings.
So why would this change have political support? Most voters are not developers who would benefit.
Hard and high requirements do slow down construction. In a very overheated housing market with extremely low supply (like Cambridge) we need to build, build, build and not have extra costs. Otherwise we get zero new housing units, aside from total renovations where a house is bought for $1mil and sold for $3mil. Just build more without any requirements or impediments
Greed is a powerful force. Here, affluent homeowners opposing new housing to protect and inflate their property values, while keeping others from affordable homes.
Developers build housing we need. Should they work for free?
NIMBY logic is backward: blocking development lets existing homeowners get richer by doing nothing. Then they call developers greedy for earning a profit by building something useful.
And here’s a study that shows the opposite, that upzoning does not always result in lower rents: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/realestate/affordable-housing-insurance-studies.html
“In cities that aggressively built housing in recent years, rents rose dramatically for low-income households and stabilized for wealthier ones.”
@LMNO More studies show that upzoning reduces housing costs, and the study you linked doesn’t support the sweeping claim that building more housing doesn’t help. That reading also conflicts with a far-larger body of better-identified causal research.
At minimum, the study suggests that market-rate housing improves affordability, but benefits reach the lowest-income households slowly and indirectly. That’s why we also need subsidized housing.
The bottom line is that the problem isn’t building more housing, it’s not building *enough*. The article you posted makes that point, too:
“Joel Berner, a senior economist for Realtor.com, argues that ultimately, once enough housing is built, renters will feel relief because as wealthier renters move into the newest units, the apartments they left behind become available for people of more modest means, a phenomenon known as filtering. ‘The only way to not be in a tight housing market is to build more,’ he said.”