A loophole in a 40-year-old ballot initiative explains much of our love for development
After passage of Prop 2½, the state’s communities were reeling from lowered revenues. To keep services running and keep up with inflation, they latched onto a loophole: encouraging new construction that was exempt from tax limits.
It’s no coincidence that eight decades passed without the council holding a charter review
The incrementalism of the City Council’s charter change order is sad, but what elevates it to tragedy is how thoroughly the nature of our government stunts its own reform, and how blind the council as a whole seems in identifying the circular nature of the problem.
Should police be at Pride parades?
Over the weekend, the second annual Trans Resistance March and Rally took place. Noticeably missing, guiding and participating in the march from Nubian Square in Roxbury to the Franklin Park Playstead was the presence of police and law enforcement.
Few thousands lost to outdated rules is terrible, but compare it with fortunes cost by license con
Now that the City Council has updated Cambridge’s retail table of land uses and home occupations zoning – a process that began in 2015 – is it getting any closer to remembering the businesses victimized by buying worthless alcohol licenses?
‘Heart’ public safety idea is a start, but far more investment is needed against domestic violence
The immediate issue facing the City Council concerns creating a new first response to some calls for help that go to the 911 dispatch system. We hope the city will move forward to do so. But the first response is just that. We must build up the resources and systems available after that first response.
In deciding to keep its library buildings closed, Cambridge chose safety for staff and residents
Could the staff of Cambridge’s public libraries have been doing more in recent months? Should the main library have opened earlier? During a global pandemic, the city chose safety first.
Taxpayers need a real library reopening date
If casinos, bookstores, private coworking spaces, gyms, yoga studios and countless other for-profit businesses (many of which are much less safe than a library) were able to figure out reopenings long before now, why can’t a well-funded public service such as Cambridge’s public libraries?
Four ways the Affordable Housing Overlay zoning is being misused on a proposal for Walden Square
A seven-story building proposed for Walden Square violates the spirit of the Affordable Housing Overlay in terms of geography and building height and around parking issues and the cost of land.
Transform a golf course into a people’s park
Nothing against golf, but this is a matter of equity. The numbers tell the story: 50 acres reserved for the use of 8,000 people with 44,000 annual visitations; 10 acres reserved for the use of the general public with 500,000 visitations.
Century later, reparations would begin a healing from Oklahoma’s horrific Tulsa Race Massacre
The struggle for Black Tulsan survivors and their descendants to receive reparations has been a century-old controversy, one that is a pox on this country’s unwillingness to redress the human rights violation and generational loss of accumulated wealth.
