The Cambridge Historical Commission has become a de facto arbiter of the city’s landscape since the Multifamily Housing Ordinance (MFHO) passed in February 2025. Charles Sullivan, the commission’s long-time executive director, said he is trying to take things in stride, even as requests for historical review increased five-fold last year.
“There’s been a great many, over 340 queries at least, since the multifamily zoning was adopted in February 2025,” Sullivan said in an interview. “Many of [the queries] that I’ve signed off on are perfectly sound, attractive properties that, in the pre-zoning amendment days, would have been considered to be desirable for continued indefinite residential occupancy, but the amendments to the zoning changed the calculus for that kind of real estate in Cambridge.”
When the City Council passed the MFHO, it created a multifamily zoning district in most areas of Cambridge where developers can build up to four stories high by-right or up to six stories for buildings that include affordable units.
“People are very concerned when they learn a new four or six-story building can be built next to them and five feet from their property line and 45 to 70 feet tall,” Sullivan said. “That can be quite a daunting prospect. So, it’s safe to say it draws attention.”
Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, an advocate of affordable housing who voted for the MFHO in 2025, said this use of the historical commission is “not surprising.”
“When you allow more multifamily housing, more affordable units to be built in Cambridge, and take away the ways people can block that in the zoning, some folks are going to look for other avenues to try to prevent multifamily housing,” said Sobrinho-Wheeler in an interview. “I don’t think the historical commission is the right avenue for that.”
Some of the increase in requests for review comes from people wishing to demolish a building. To tear down a structure over 50 years old requires submitting a request for preliminary determination of significance through the commission. If deemed significant, demolition must be paused for a year, during which time the property could be proposed as a landmark, among other actions.
In 2025 alone, the commission reviewed 230 requests, an over 400% increase from the prior year. Through June of this year, the commission has already received 109 initial requests, triple the amount as of this time last year.
Landmark designations, which prevent the demolition of historically significant buildings and can be initiated by the commission or a petition of at least 10 registered voters in Cambridge, are also on the rise. Although approximately 2,500 structures in Cambridge are in the National Register of Historic Places — meaning they are significant enough to become landmarks — Sullivan said the commission uses the landmark designation sparingly. “We only use landmark designations when there is an actual threat to a building where it would be a tangible loss to the city if it were destroyed,” Sullivan said.
“Cambridge has had very strong protections around demolition for about 40 years, and so that has protected the community from a lot of development,” Sullivan said. “But City Council has now decided that housing development is a strong priority, and so we’ve responded constructively.”
A landmark effort
Landmark petitions from citizens have historically been uncommon, but the commission recently has seen two, on Lexington Avenue and Wyman Road.
In May, a group of over 30 petitioners from the west side of Lexington Ave. in West Cambridge submitted a request for a landmark designation study of 15 gambrel-roofed duplex houses, designed by architect Elmer Buckley between 1912 and 1913. These are all three-story Queen Anne-style three-deckers with gambrel roofs and what Sullivan called “some very sort of pleasing variety of exterior finishes and window porch arrangements. So the feeling in the neighborhood is that this is an important streetscape that should be protected.”
There were originally 16 of them, but one burned down in 2011. In 2021, the commission determined that one of the others, 68-70 Lexington Ave., was historically significant in response to demolition threats. Earlier this year, it approved a request to build a three-story rear addition behind 90 Lexington Ave. The 10-unit development was accepted on the condition that the main part of the house remains intact.
After that approval, the neighbors petitioned for landmark status. One petitioner, who asked not to be identified, said they “sought to see that all future projects on these properties would follow 90 Lexington’s example of preserving the existing buildings, so the unusual streetscape this set defines could remain intact.”
The petitioner added, “we believe that project’s primary virtue is that it retains the original historic structure — exactly what a landmark designation would ensure — while it also adds some housing units in a rear addition.”
However, on July 3 Sullivan issued a memo advising the commission to deny the landmarking request that said the houses are “a significant feature of Lexington Avenue, but protection should be sought either through amendments to the multifamily zoning or on a broader basis across West Cambridge.”
The petitioners voluntarily withdrew the original petition without prejudice, allowing them to file again in the future. At the Historical Commission’s meeting on July 9, its members approved the withdrawal.
Another bid came from Wyman Rd., a private way in West Cambridge with six houses. After Commission staff deemed 9 Wyman Rd. not significant, authorizing its demolition, a 56-unit condominium building was proposed for its site. That prompted Liza Oliver and two others to petition the commission in April to designate the building as a landmark.
“I don’t think anybody in my neighborhood is against upzoning or getting rid of exclusionary, single-family zoning per se,” Oliver said. “But when we did learn … that it was actually indeed 56 condos that were going to go up in this one lot at the end of a tiny one-way cul-de-sac, that concerned us.”
Oliver discovered that 9 Wyman had been home to Harriet Boyd Hawes, who was an archeologist who discovered ancient cities, including a Minoan civilization, a war nurse in three global conflicts, and a labor rights activist in Cambridge. At a May 7 meeting, the commission rejected the landmarking petition. So the residents of Wyman Rd. tried again, petitioning to create a Neighborhood Conservation District (NCD), which received 260 signatures and included research on other former Wyman residents. Others who had lived on the street were Frank Wilcheck, a Nobel Prize laureate in physics, and the poet E. E. Cummings and his wife Marian Morehouse.
The commission again ruled to decline the proposal. Oliver said the neighborhood is “saddened” to see the demolition of the home at 9 Wyman.
Sullivan said the bar for creating a NCD is high. “Our smallest conservation district is about 200 buildings, 220 buildings. It really takes a very strong consensus among property owners to be able to move politically on establishing a conservation district. It’s a very long and involved process.”
Cathie Zusy, the sole city councillor to vote against the MFHO, said the commission’s future would have been “in jeopardy” had they supported the creation of an NCD. “The reality is the council gets to vote on whether a property is landmarked or whether a neighborhood becomes a conservation district and this council is going to vote that down. So this commission needs to be very strategic about what they choose to bring forward.”
The commission’s future
Oliver said the MFHO has created a situation where Cambridge residents who want to slow development for any reason have “no recourse except through the historical commission.”
The ordinance “is unfortunately kind of creating a zero sum game between development and what should be other priorities within the city, namely tree canopy, assessment of historical relevance, permeable surfaces for flooding,” Oliver said. She said a better-crafted MFHO “that had more controls in place — so that developers weren’t able to put the worst version of what can be done in a lot for the sake of development — would probably not be receiving the level of pushback that it is receiving right now.”
Oliver also expressed frustrations about a lack of transparency or clear methodology from the committee in making determinations of significance.
Patrick Barrett, a local developer who has sued the city over its inclusionary zoning provisions, was the lawyer for the company working on the 90 Lexington project. He said bringing such questions to the Historical Commission was unusual. “There’s something to be said about neighborhood concern about a project prompting the landmarking of a building — that’s typically not what the process is for.”
Zusy acknowledged that Cambridge residents are using the commission as a loophole to avoid development in their neighborhoods. “People are going to them as a last resort because they no longer have the opportunity to go to the planning board,” Zusy said. “It’s often their last ditch effort to have the properties that are close to them reconsidered, but it puts the historic commission in a terrible, terrible place.”
Sobrinho-Wheeler said advocates and critics of the MFHO agree that “the historical commission shouldn’t be the ones having to get all the pressure and the angry comments from people on both sides of this. We shouldn’t be putting them in that position.”
He added that he’s interested in finding a solution that lets the commission focus on the historical “and spend less time getting into the nitty gritty of specific development decisions.”
For his part, Sullivan said changes to the zoning regulations could help. “The way the zoning was adopted, it almost prescribes a cube with five foot setbacks in the sides and rear, 10 feet in the front, and either four or six stories, and a mass like that is very hard to work into a neighborhood context.”
“[More flexibility] would certainly help make some of these projects go down more easily in a neighborhood context,” Sullivan said.
A stronger
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