The Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition is made up of community members and representatives from organizations working for housing justice in Cambridge. Our projects include educating community members about social housing, supporting rent control initiatives, developing a community land trust in Cambridge and increasing access to safe, fair and low-cost housing through campaigns. Our work aims to center Bipoc, no-income, low-income and other marginalized community members.
The Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition wishes to express strong support of the revised Affordable Housing Overlay known popularly as AHO 2.
Our support comes from our commitment to housing as a human right and what that means for the working class. Currently, there are unmet needs in Cambridge, including the 6,500 people who live and work in Cambridge who are on the Cambridge Housing Authority waitlist. There are people surviving poverty in public, commonly referred to as the homeless. There are countless invisible and rent-burdened tenants, among many others struggling with the weight of the local housing crisis.
If Cambridge does not explicitly carve out housing that is affordable, we risk other challenges concerning the working class. Some of these challenges involve transportation into Cambridge. Where will the caretakers (such as travel nurses, nurse assistants and au pairs) live? Or will they be forced to travel hours to work in Cambridge from more distant but affordable cities? That arrangement wouldn’t be very environmentally sound, and there are many more concerns. Without the AHO 2’s thoughtful upzoning to allow more affordable housing in Cambridge, the city will continue to grow more economically homogeneous and inevitably racially homogenous– which harms the true character of the city.
To be clear, this zoning proposal is only one part of the solution we seek to address the myriad housing crises in Cambridge. We want future policies and programs that include provisions for tenant support and services. We want to see explicit provisions for social-housing initiatives. We want to see funding preferences for community land trusts, cooperative housing and support for things such as the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. The second AHO is a meaningful step toward developing more units for the working class of Cambridge today, though. We are happy it has been put forward and support it resolutely.
Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition
A stronger
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So a strategy to actively discourage market rate housing and a laundry list of DSA talking points. If you guys just don’t want anymore housing to be built you don’t need to make a new coalition Cambridge’s cup already over runneth.
Dear Mr. Levy,
Here is a letter from an anonymous individual or group of individuals.There are no names, street addresses, or other identifying information on their website. Nor do we know where the money to create this site came from, or if this anonymous group will be supporting candidates (a violation of state law). Either such name and location information should be on their website or submitted with the posts that are published.
Dear CHJC person(s): there is much to admire in the goals laid out on your website, so it is strange that there is no insight from the website as to who the organizers are, where they live, and where the funding is coming from for this work.
One goal, that “all future housing policy should center on the needs of Black, brown, and no income, low income, and moderate income people” is an interesting and an important one but the AHO 2.0 is deeply problematic from this vantage.
Rather than requiring the city to buy needed property for such housing and then leasing it to the affordable housing developers, the AHO 2.0 will make things worse. These developers will monetarily benefit in perpetuity from the rents that accrue – this after charging tax payers nearly $1 million each per unit and often the land on which it is built as well. The AHO 2.0 does not help tenants to build equity through owning their own units. The AHO 2.0 does nothing to stop the gentrification that is forcing out more and more of our black, brown and/or lower income residents to leave the city. Note however that the language of your plan is problematic since many of our newer and wealthier residents are Asian.
Note that the AHO 2.0 will exacerbate environmental and health inequities by removing critically needed green spaces and mature tree and adding to the already sizable heat island impacts. The clogged streets around these developments will also be devastating for the environment as these tenants and others search the streets far longer periods of time looking for critically needed parking (so that they can keep needed jobs).
Equally if not more importantly, the AFFH assessment you propose seems to be the wrong place to start. What we need first is an actual city plan that addresses proposed changes in both our commercial and housing sector on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. Right now we have no city plan and the multi-million dollar Envision Report has proven to be a waste of time and money because our City Council does not feel it should support the proposals in this document, a work that s does NOT require or propose anything like the ill-conceived AHO 2.0.
The City Council pro-developer super majority now in place (the group that is promoting AHO 2.0) has done nothing to replace commercial interests that are gobbling up city land with a plan to focus on neighborhood housing, nor have these councillors sought to require that these same commercial interests and our universities to build area housing for a large segment of their staff and/or students along with the necessary transportation.
Wealthy developers will love making Cambridge the next Manhattan, the future direction is clear.
Why don’t you “center” MIT meeting their obligation to house ALL of their graduate students on land MIT already own, in housing that is attractive and truly affordable?? That would free up traditional family-sized units in Cambridge currently housing 1000 grad students, who would probably be happier were MIT to offer better alternatives than what they currently do. What about all the empty office buildings?? Who are the tenants you have spoken with or are supposedly working with?? Do you think those of us living in what is already by far the most dense housing in Cambridge really appreciate your advocating for doubling down on density where we already live (and you don’t)?? [So someone’s “au pairs” can live nearer their wealthy Cambridge employers?? Yikes! Spoken like a true bourgeois…] Too much erroneous information to respond to here, but do you even know what the household demographics are for the CHA?? 52% “Black/African-American,” according to the most recently available annual report. The problem – shared by both black and white (and everybody else) – is an across-the-board affordability – and income – crisis which is regional (and national) in scope. Solutions exist, but alienating and dividing already polarized communities by doubling density down on poor people, in the name of “serving” these same people, in the way you suggest, only irresponsibly exacerbates an unnecessary backlash among our neighbors, who I happen to know actually DO support affordability. This, in your quest for what looks a lot like like performative “virtue signaling” by people who sound more like academics than the “working class” whose interests you claim to understand, represent, and even speak for – as if working class people can’t figure that out for themselves?? The enlargement of the AHO is a catastrophe. First and foremost for those of us living in housing likely to be significantly dumped on. Take a good look at the prison complex called Walden Square and the additional buildings Winn Residential want to cram in there, one of which is on top of a tot lot tenants are not even allowed to use, that is leased to an outside company. Are you kidding?? This is the AHO you all – well-heeled “liberal” homeowners, of “virtuous” intent – want to subject the rest of us to. Please think again.
Do 12 story buildings make Manhattan? I’m going to say no, but even if it did, more housing is a good thing.
Thank you to the Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition for your resolute support of affordable housing!
For those asking, former City Council candidate Tonia Hicks spoke on behalf of the Coalition at public comment.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/10/28/cambridge-city-council-candidate-hicks/
On another note, MIT grad students would love more affordable student housing, but the MIT admin has told them that neighborhood opposition has made it impossible to build additional dorms.
If MIT are really telling grad students that “neighborhood opposition has made it impossible to build additional dorms,” then they’re lying. Where is the evidence for that? As long as they build it on land they already own – and it frees up space in three deckers (traditional family housing in neighborhoods) for Cantabrigians – who would supposedly object?? I’d like to see the evidence for that. Sounds like a ruse. I don’t believe this “story” for one minute. In any case, it is political cowardice on the part of the city council that has blocked this common sense and morally just plan, not any alleged “opposition” from anyone in any neighborhood. Besides, when has “neighborhood opposition” ever stopped anything MIT have ever wanted to do??
Once again the bitter NIMBYs come out in force to shout “No, no no!” at any and all policy proposals, while neglecting to offer alternatives of their own. Just admit that you don’t care about solutions, you just want to complain.
“[So someone’s “au pairs” can live nearer their wealthy Cambridge employers?? Yikes! Spoken like a true bourgeois…]”
Is that really the “true bourgeois” position or is the truly bourgeois position to simply not care at all where your workers live, preserving mansion zoning, and preventing affordable housing. There are certainly a lot more bourgeois communities do the latter than building affordable housing for their workers.
It is you here who seems to have contempt for the idea of housing more working class people and combined with your comments about the racial demographics of public housing, that comes across pretty explicitly racist as well.
There are a number of smart things proposed by this group on their website, but simply limiting new housing to income-limited housing is NOT the way to go. That will make every other property worth far more, making housing costs rise even further, along with taxes. Many people on fixed incomes will be forced out. Also no mention is made of the fact that the decision by this irresponsible, ideologically driven council to end parking minimums is what made it harder for affordable housing developers to acquire property – leading to the push to upend AHO 1.0 and create the vastly more neighborhood impactful AHO 2.0. That said any group should have at least the names of their leaders (and locations) listed somewhere on their website and this one does not. One person spoke at city council but neither that person nor any other are listed on the website, or indications of where their funding is coming from.