Envision, never formally debated or adopted, nonetheless nears five-year mark as a ‘plan’

Time is running out on Envision Cambridge planning as the city’s “roadmap to the year 2030,” and politicians and city planners can’t seem to agree how to bring it back to life.

The former city councillor who pushed through the plan is pretty sure neither staff nor the City Council wants to.

“It was forced on the city, and frankly on the council too, because the public showed up to demand it,” said Dennis Carlone, an architect and urban designer who began his 10 years as a city councillor in 2014 pushing for the development master planning process that came to be known as Envision. “The city was not happy with me.”

Even if Envision was debated to bring to a formal vote, discussions with elected officials and city staff over several months of reporting show an abyss around how it is perceived as a tool: as a set of contradictions to resolve for a set of rules everyone can see and follow, or as a framework for case-by-case decision-making.

The council gave the plan 8-1 approval and $3.3 millon in funding in late 2015 for a three-year process beginning the next year.

There was cause for concern even before the report was filed. When draft recommendations for Envision arrived in October 2018, a policy order from Carlone won 7-2 agreement among councillors that they should be reviewed – six sets of recommendations in six committees. Carlone’s own Neighborhood & Long-Term Planning committee, co-chaired with then-councillor Quinton Zondervan, held a hearing to discuss “urban form recommendations,” but minutes show only one other committee followed through within the next 14 months: the Health and Environment Committee run by Zondervan and then-councillor Jan Devereux.

Hearings or no, Envision’s final report was released in November 2019, addressing almost every ailment with plans for climate resilience, housing, the economy, mobility, urban form and community well-being with 183 action items organized under 55 core strategies.

The plan was meant to guide Cambridge at a time of great possibilities and uncertainty, as the population and economy grew but housing affordability decreased and transportation options narrowed. Its suggestions – everything from building bike crossings across the Alewife Triangle to establishing voting education programs in public schools – came from 115 committee and working group members and 5,000 people engaged through street teams, boasted Utile, the Boston firm hired by the city, in the report.

Envision arrived shortly after municipal elections and shortly before the holidays. The new council wasn’t seated for long before the Covid pandemic arrived. For months, the main business of the city was dealing with Covid.

Carlone said he tried again to get the council focused when the report arrived.

“There were specific areas in the report that I wanted to get comments from the council on. They didn’t want to comment. Nothing got resolved,” Carlone said. “There was very little dialogue. I think I only held two or three meetings, because it led to nothing … To talk about what made sense and what didn’t, to talk about how to translate this into zoning, there seemed to be very little interest.”

Down the road

The city said questions about specifics such as shaping Massachusetts Avenue, the major corridor running through much of the city, needed to be kicked down that road – answered with the need for further study. “The answer was, ‘We’ll get to it,’” Carlone recalled. That work is underway now.

Mayors and city managers have come and gone in the meantime. As the years have passed and the goal trackers on the Envision dashboard have remained stagnant, citizens, activists and politicians ask what went wrong. There’s less than six years in the original Envision decade left in which to finalize the remaining 91.9 percent of action items.

There had never been a possibility that all goals would be met even under the best of circumstances, vice mayor Marc McGovern said. Because the council put Envision “on the back burner” as Covid arrived, he said, planned hearings on the report never materialized.

“Envision gave a whole lot of different recommendations and talked about a lot of different things; we’re not going to do every single one of them, right?” McGovern said. “Maybe there are some things that are less important now than they were four years ago. But also, even if we had tackled this right out of the gate, there were going to be some things in there that we were going to say, ‘Yeah, we don’t agree with that.’ But we should decide which ones we want to do and which ones we don’t want to do, so at least we have some clarity around where we’re going.”

The never-adopted

Criticism grew that Envision is just the latest of several incomplete or abandoned plans aimed at revitalizing and reinventing parts of Cambridge.

An open letter to the council by several neighborhood civic associations in 2021 placed Envision at the end of a long line of abandoned projects spanning the past 42 years, among them the Alewife Revitalization Plan, the Concord-Alewife Plan and K2C2.

“The results of the City Council’s unwillingness to approve Envision mean that in essence: Developers can exploit the city’s piecemeal, development-by-development approach, rather than following actual urban planning priorities, and we get poor results: Just look at the Triangle, East Cambridge, Inman Square,” the open letter says. “Developers can cherry-pick what they want. Developers’ amenities are accorded a higher merit than the needs identified by neighborhoods. Neighborhood associations and other community groups are addressing zoning, infrastructure and open space issues for which the city should be responsible.”

Under new city manager Yi-An Huang and with longtime Community Development official Iram Farooq leading the department as assistant city manager, some of those planning processes have been resurrected as part of newer studies, such as in and around Central Square.

Urban design more definitive

Before Carlone joined the council he consulted for 30 years on urban projects, including work in the 1970s as director of design for the East Cambridge Riverfront Project. That remaking of 40 acres of neglected land into a mixed-use area with new transit, retail such as the CambridgeSide mall, businesses including hotels and a showpiece canal won Carlone an award for Excellence in Urban Design from The American Institute of Architects.

The difference between his work in East Cambridge in 1976 and Envision is that it was “urban design,” with zoning specifics enacted into law, Carlone said. It provided for “enormous power to redirect projects,” which he and Cambridge’s then-director of urban design Roger Boothe applied to, for instance, reject 25 designs for the mall before finding one to approve. “You don’t see that in Envision.”

“Words in a planning study can be interpreted in multiple ways,” Carlone said, which is why he added to the 2015 policy order calling for Envision that it was to include urban design. He doesn’t think it does, which is why Envision has intractable conflicts. “You have to resolve the conflicts, and I truly believe you can’t do that until you have drawings and studies and get approval and then you do zoning,” he said. “Typically, the zoning doesn’t come after urban design. It’s already been resolved.”

Same scenario, different takeaways

In the clash of views about what Envision is intended to do, McGovern and a city development official coincidentally gave the same examples of its contradictions – and drew opposite conclusions from it.

“There’s a lot in the report that’s a little contradictory, right – the environmental piece and the piece that talks about how we need a lot more open space, and then you’ve got a housing piece that says we need to build a lot more housing, and how do those things fit together? The plan was to start to have those discussions,” McGovern said, again identifying the Covid pandemic as what disrupted those plans. Since then, “people use Envision when they want to do certain things and when it’s convenient to make their case. And then if it’s something that they disagree with, they say, ‘Oh, well, Envision doesn’t call for that.’ And these are the same people!”

Melissa Peters, director of community planning for Community Development, said all departments in the city use Envision “as a blueprint for operationalizing our work.”

“Envision Cambridge is intended to be a flexible plan, so priorities do change. And they have changed,” Peters said. “Some things we didn’t predict, like the pandemic, and we’re currently in a market downturn. Envision is intended to be able to be adaptable to what the priority is at the time, so it really is a loose framework.”

She described the same contradiction as McGovern:

“There’s obviously going to be an inherent conflict at times. And the idea for Envision was not to solve all of those conflicts at that level, but to give decision-makers and policymakers, staff, council, the tools and information to apply that to a specific setting or locality. So, for instance, we might have a goal on increasing housing production, as well as increasing open space. And so the decision might come up to purchase land in a neighborhood, and we have two goals. You may be able only to do one of those on this particular site. How do we balance that?” Peters said.

“Oftentimes there’s this misconception that Envision should have all the answers, but really it’s a framework to use in decision-making when we get specific projects,” Peters said.

Precedence for frameworks

The conclusion isn’t surprising: It’s the same as in 2014 arrived at by Brian Murphy, Farooq’s predecessor in development, when asked why the so-called K2C2 processes never came to the point of formal discussion and adoption: “It’s happening, but in segments rather than in one fell swoop.” Carlone recalls Murphy saying it in testimony to the council too that year: “He literally said, ‘We’re not doing planning like we used to, we’re letting developers develop their own plans.’ And I said, ‘That’s the opposite of planning.’”

The city has seen years of bitter, parcel-by-parcel clashes, with some decrying what they saw as “spot zoning” and receiving the answer that what they were seeing was actually “contract zoning” based around negotiating community benefits with a developer.

Envision doesn’t promise to end that, Carlone said, and he’s not sure at this stage how it gets resolved.

“It’s very hard to vote on something that has conflicting information, and that’s why you do that urban design,” Carlone said. “If we approve the Envision study as it was originally done, what do you do with the conflicting information?”

Visions for Envision

Although politicians, city officials and residents might disagree on the scale of Envision’s problems, there is some common ground on suggestions for next steps.

Every person interviewed for this story was, at the very least, unwilling to abandon Envision entirely, and wanted some kind of clarity for where Envision should go from here, whether that come from a soon-to-be-released study or a council roundtable.

Community Development is working on a five-year progress report as “a way to continue to communicate with the community about where we are and where we need to go,” Peters said. “We constantly are referring to what work we are doing and how it relates to Envision Cambridge. So that’s also sometimes why I think it’s difficult to take credit for all of these actions, because it really is a broad, comprehensive plan. But we certainly use Envision as the foundational blueprint for all the work that we do.”

“The first thing is that we need to have a roundtable, we have to get together as a group and say, okay, what’s the plan with this, what do we want to do? Like, you know, do we want to start having committee meetings?” McGovern said. “Should the expectation be that anybody who chairs a committee should start scheduling meetings on Envision? What’s the city administration’s appetite for tackling this? So I think that’s something we should do relatively soon.”

Part of what’s held Envision back is “something that has plagued Cambridge, which is we’re really great at doing reports and studying and research, and we’re not as good at accountability and implementation,” councillor Patty Nolan said. “With the current council, I’m hopeful that we are much more willing to be focused on that and understand the tradeoffs that we make in our decisions, which is also something that is difficult to acknowledge, that even Cambridge, with all of our resources, has to make tradeoffs.”

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