Zoning is again a hot topic in Cambridge. Information is flying, but like any issue, facts and context matter. We can’t speak to zoning history everywhere in America, but we can speak to Cambridge zoning history.
We are an old city. The first zoning ordinance only went on our books in 1924, almost 300 years after the city was founded. By then, much of the city was already built up, including the majority of single-family homes as well as our beloved two-family homes and triple-deckers. Zoning had nothing to do with the development of the historic neighborhoods in the city. And those ordinances (and subsequent major revisions in 1943, 1977 and 2001) did not deter the building of the newer four-plus unit buildings that house almost 75 percent of Cantabrigians today. Nor, as the recent construction boom at North Point and Alewife prove, does it prohibit large-scale housing development.
A Boston Globe headline from nearly 100 years ago offers insight into what actually did prompt the first zoning ordinance: “Factories, Not Colleges, Make Cambridge Famous.”
The article pointed out that there were a whopping 200 factories employing 21,000 workers within city boundaries. As a lively article in the The Cambridge Historian (published by the Cambridge Historical Society in 2016) put it, “Cambridge provided meat for the freezer, soap for the laundry, cars for the garage and candy for the children.” Unfortunately, as the article notes, “Depending on wind direction, the smells were enough to cloud the heads and turn the stomach of most citizens.”
Stench, as described above, not discrimination, was the catalyst for the three-year process that led to Cambridge’s first zoning ordinances. What people back then didn’t know was that the foul meat processing (offal) and other smells signaled serious environmental contamination. That legacy of industrial pollution has taken tens of millions of dollars over decades to clean up.
Cambridge even figures in one of the two foundational U.S. Supreme Court cases on zoning. In 1928, the court ruled against the city, which had wrongly classified a commercial property as residential. While the city lost, the ruling reaffirmed an important point, namely that municipalities could enact zoning laws as long as they promoted “health, safety, convenience or general welfare.”
Times change, and zoning needs to change too. There are no foul-smelling factories left in Cambridge, but there are serious issues to take into account, such as climate resiliency, fire safety, infrastructure capacity, the tree canopy and historic preservation. Getting rid of zoning, as some propose, does not get rid of the issues inherent in a densely packed and built-out urban environment.
The Cambridge Citizens Coalition supports ending single-family zoning in the city. We think it’s possible to build more housing units throughout the city without triggering a rash of tear-downs and displacement. It should be easier to divide larger homes into two units, legalizing apartments within homes and, when possible, building new, 21st century versions of Cambridge’s iconic two-family homes and triple-deckers.
Along the major corridors, larger buildings can fit into the urban landscape.
What the coalition does not endorse, however, is allowing developers to call all the shots. We respect the need for setbacks; we want a robust tree canopy to mitigate urban heat island impacts; and we believe that new buildings, even while bigger, shouldn’t overwhelm their older neighbors. The Missing Middle petition now before the City Council is a top priority of The National Association of Home Builders. It is a perfect example of neoliberalism run amok, i.e. let the all-powerful market decide everything, everywhere. It hearkens back to the days when making money trumped the needs of residents.
We believe Cambridge can continue to build housing and meet the Envision Cambridge goals – including the urgent need for more affordable housing units. The city also must rethink its housing strategy by putting serious resources into helping residents become homeowners. The lack of minority homeownership is pivotal to the pernicious wealth gap throughout the country. Just as modern-day Cambridge had to redress industrial pollution of the past, we must deal with historic racist policies, such as redlining and even the GI Bill, that have historically limited Black homeownership.
What gets lost in the searing rhetoric of the current debate is that Cambridge is a historic city of neighborhoods. We live cheek by jowl.
We need new housing but, please, don’t do it on the backs of our neighbors who will be displaced by even more gentrification.
Maps of Cambridge zoning and other data provide a unique lens into these issues, but the data must be accurate.
Map 1 shows a corrected version of the map published by the group A Better Cambridge using their data (source unknown) beside a 2020 map detailing Cambridge redlining. These data show that in Cambridge there appears to be no overall correlation between redlining and racial diversity in neighborhoods consistent with our zoning history.
Map 2 includes the original A Better Cambridge map published along with comparison maps of neighborhood income changes in the past five years (showing gentrification impacts) and our low- and medium-income neighborhoods that now and going forward are likely to be hit hardest by any upzoning changes.
It’s easy to judge people who came before us; to think that their problems weren’t as serious as those we face today. But those who came before us dealt with an environmental crisis in the city and used zoning to help make the city sustainable for generations. Zoning can work going forward, if we have the wisdom to adapt without trashing what came before us.
Suzanne Preston Blier, publishing for the Cambridge Citizens Coalition, of which she is president.
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Peace Be Unto You
Zoning in the history of Cambridge has something to do with the plight of the local homeless mosaic and sector. The use of pro- modern zoning by Cambrige’s rich folk and their running ilks, spells out death,suffering and more poverty for the homeless. The rich here in Cambridge view the presence of homelessness in the community as being a luxury for them. Exclusionary zoning must end here in Cambridge. The continuation of exclusionary zoning sponsored by the local rich, represents a continous barrier and road, block in the way of establishing homeless and racial social-economic equity.
Yours In Peace
Hasson Rashid
Concerned Citizen/ Resident
Cambridge,MA
Thank you Hasson for your comment. This opinion piece was about the HISTORY of zoning (the past) in Cambridge. We both agree that we do not want to promote more inequities and homelessness in new zoning policies going forward. This is why I do not support the MMH citywide up-zoning petition to add more luxury housing here because it will not only remove key open spaces and trees in our many neighborhoods (particularly harmful in already dense neighborhoods) but also will promote the ongoing gentrification of our low- and middle-income neighborhoods. Sadly much of our housing problem is based on financial inequities and as a city we need to do much more to add affordable housing on city-owned land (or for the city to purchase existing housing and other properties for this purpose). This issue has little to do with zoning per se, but with the will of the city to use its sizable financial resources for this purpose. We now know that in highly dense/highly desirable cities like Cambridge (Vancouver, San Francisco and others), that adding more luxury (market rate) housing simply makes it more expensive for everyone and forces out some of those who long have lived here.
Peace,
Dear Ms Blier, I don’t contest your opinion(s) concerning upper class housing anxieties. What is needed is common ground to balance anxieties and build upon. The upper classes should be allowed to have the type of housing that they want, without excluding the homeless, and lower classes should be allowed to have the kind of housing that they need. I know that for the homeless it is long range housing, constructed and developed from the ground up. I also know that exclusionary zoning is one of beastly challengers that prevent the homeless from obtaining permanent fair,etc., housing. Even unoccupied and abandon, etc.,city property is zoned to prevent the kind of homeless housing that I have been refering too, that is below market rate homeless housing. Proactive legislation will end the exclusionary zoning game, once and for all, and all is needed here in Cambridge is the political will to move on it. The goverment has obligations and responsiblities, to the poor and rich alike, and all in between. I’m optimistic and it’s inevitable that we will all get what we desire and need, according to President Bidens and Rep. Maxine Waters post modern historical political efforts.
Yours In Peace
Hasson Rashid
Concerned Citizen/ Resident
Cambridge,MA
I have been reading with great interest this exchange which was talking about the history of zoning. What I find problematic in general are binary arguments- for and against, yes-no, black-white, racial redlining or not. Neat little boxes. Not all zoning was specifically to keep people of color out of certain neighborhoods. The history of zoning identified different characteristics and factors like industrial, marshland, dumps, slaughterhouses etc- all affecting health and well-being of residents (most of whom were newly arrived immigrants). I suspect banks wouldn’t want to lend in areas prone to fires, for example. In some neighborhoods at the turn of the 20th C some middle class blacks actually purchased foreclosed properties from some Jewish owners. While there admittedly was classic redlining, not everything can be categorically identified as such. Immigrants tend to live initially in familiar communities. Social Mobility needs to be studied more, not branded. Statistics are being weaponized.
I too, do not support the Missing Middle plan. As you state, Mr. Rachid, “The upper classes should be allowed to have the type of housing that they want, without excluding the homeless, and lower classes should be allowed to have the kind of housing that they need.”
If only that could happen. Luxury housing units are automatically exclusionary. There is less opportunity for affordable housing. The MMH is looking for units plunked down in people’s back yards, strips of gardens, replaced garages and encouraging the tear-downs of vintage houses for their non-conforming land. Because most buildings are less than 10 units, there is no incentive or requirement to include affordable units or design reviews for that matter. Period. This would create a feeding frenzy for developers and for those rich homeowners who can add FAR to their personal houses, build those very mcMansions people are trying to eliminate. Have current special permits and variances been creatively used? NO. Why not AMEND current zoning measures to allow more flexibility instead of adding yet another competing layer to the AHO.
Missing Middle it seems, doesn’t refer to middle class who won’t qualify for these new units anyway, but to Mid-rise smaller housing which the city is full of and helps identify Cambridge! We have affordable housing. The question is how to keep it. Can the city help with mortgage supplements for first time home buyers? Can they have MORE rent to buy programs? Can they rezone to allow for group-housing, multi-families which don’t get turned into duplexes for the wealthy by developers? If they take a 6-bedroom building, are they required to return 6 bedrooms?
We need better zoning with the underserved in mind, not eliminate it altogether. But not at the expense of trees and open space to which the underserved is entitled, nor disrespect prior generations who have worked for their properties. And for those who have verbalized that the “baby-boomers are the problem”, please remember our fellow Cantabridgian who, according to the Globe, is donating his 4-unit Victorian house to Just-a-start for homeownership programs.
There should be incentives where Mr. Rashid gets his wish of the rich get what they want and the lower-classes get what they want. But with finite city land- with a golf course and ponds, it is the developers (marketplace, and thousands of new Kendall Sq employees) who are calling the shots.