A blow against NIMBYism and for sane and decent housing policy in….Cambridge?

In part because of who I’m connected with on social media, and in part because it seems to be where most of the action is, I tend to follow local housing and land-use politics more closely in West Coast jurisdictions. In many ways, the housing politics of expensive East Coast cities tends to be 5-10 years behind the West Coast. Lazy, empirically incorrect folk theories of housing like “new market rate housing makes housing more expensive overall” seem to too often go unchallenged in a way they no longer do in West Coast jurisdictions, and reform efforts at the state level tend to a lower priority, less likely to pass, and weaker when they do pass.

So I was very pleasantly surprised to learn about Cambridge, MA’s significant zoning reforms, passed last week. Kriston Capps has the story:

At first glance, the dramatic housing reform passed by Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a sudden about-face.

For years, the affluent Boston suburb has been one of the epicenters of the US affordable housing crisis. Home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the city of 118,000 offers a mix of grand historic homes, traditional New England “triple-deckers” and modest apartment buildings for students and locals. As gorgeous as it is, there just aren’t enough homes: The average rent in Cambridge runs to $3,375 a month, according to Zillow, 69% higher than the US average and outpacing rents in similar higher-ed enclaves such as Berkeley, California. Housing restrictions are so tight that over the next 15 years, the city had expected to build just 350 units. Cambridge added so few new homes in 2023 that you can count them on one hand — five units total.

So when the city council passed a new zoning reform in February that allows property owners and developers to build up to four stories, by right, citywide — with an option for an additional two stories on top — Cambridge leapfrogged other localities that have eased restrictions on apartment buildings.

“We’re really rezoning for six stories in the whole city,” says Cambridge City Council member Burhan Azeem, who describes it as “the most comprehensive citywide rezoning” in the entire US.

Developers can now construct apartment buildings up to 75 feet tall in neighborhoods that were previously restricted to single-family homes. The change is “monumental on a national scale,” according to Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of the nonprofit Abundant Housing MA.

A lot of much ballyhooed “ending exclusionary single family zoning” efforts have been ineffective at producing new homes, probably by design, as various limits (envelope, number of units, etc) persist that make such developments financially unfeasible. It’s safe to say the physical limits here avoid that issue. There is some inclusionary zoning here, which (whatever its merits when done well) has been used as a faux-progressive poison pill to prevent upzones from being effective. People whom I tend to trust think Cambridge’s approach to IZ shouldn’t have this suppressive effect to a considerable degree; from what I can gather there’s some good reasons for that optimism. This probably surpasses Spokane for the most serious and likely impactful “ending exclusionary zoning in single family only zones” passed so far in the United States.

How this happened in Cambridge, especially given how ineffective Boston has been on zoning and housing policy reforms, is an important question. Back to Capps:

Back in 2012, during the early days of the YIMBY movement, Kanson-Benanav founded a group called A Better Cambridge to push back against an effort to reduce the allowable height of new construction in the city’s Central Square. The same proposal would also stop new development on surface parking lots. This kind of repeated downzoning over time has led to the condition seen in Cambridge — and New York, Seattle and scores of other cities — where existing buildings are taller and more dense than the law allows for new construction.

A volunteer organization, ABC has canvased for pro-housing candidates over the last four election cycles. (Kanson-Benanav stepped down as chair in 2019 when he moved to Jamaica Plain, but he remains a passionate Cantabrigian advocate.) It’s not just that organizers lobbied and persuaded candidates to adopt pro-housing positions (although they’ve done that). The movement has also cultivated its own champions: Azeem, now a second-term council member, previously served on the board of ABC and founded Affordable Housing MA (the statewide organization that Kanson-Benanav has led since 2021). In the 2023 local election, A Better Cambridge endorsed nine candidates; six of them now hold council seats, among them Azeem and Sumbul Siddiqui, who co-chair the housing committee.

Between this and watching the pro-housing movement in Berkeley leapfrog efforts in larger Bay Area cities, I wonder if college towns have something of a political advantage on this issue. Capps also reports on one the NIMBY frustrations, which contains this horrifying bit twisted NIMBY logic:

Other arguments tapped into town-gown tensions between Cambridge’s student population and its older homeowners. Suzanne Blier, a Harvard professor of African art history and a board member (and president-elect) of the Cambridge Citizen Coalition, used ChatGPT to analyze the city’s demographics, arguing that if you exclude shorter-term residents attending college (as well as graduate students, post-docs and interns), the average age of a Cambridge resident rises to 42-to-46 years old, not the more inclusive age of 30.6 — a number, she writes, “often used in an ageist and disparaging manner to negate the views of older residents who attend meetings.”

This effort to push back against the view, supported by high quality research political science research, that government by public hearings and community meetings is undemocratic, as it entrenches and deepens the political power and influence of an unrepresentative minority, give away the show. “If you ignore entire demographics that tend to disagree with our views, they’re not unrepresentative at all!” Of course the implied premise is that length of tenure is what matters for real belonging and citizenship, a view that is in conflict with the basic human right of freedom of movement. Alongside the Berkeley NIMBY lawsuit contending that college students should treated as a form of industrial pollution, it’s deeply disturbing how easy it is for college town NIMBYs to adopt the view that students are subhumans whose interests are irrelevant. That this one comes from a distinguished Harvard professor makes it worse.

Anyway, good for the Cambridge City Council, and congrats to A Better Cambridge and everyone else who has been working for this.