People not Profiteers!
Prioritizing a Livable Cambridge
POLICIES THAT MATTER ON:
1. The Environment - safeguard trees and green spaces in every neighborhood.
2. Housing - stop gentrification and displacement; create a real path to home ownership
3. Smart Growth - create a plan for smart growth (people before profits)
4. Neighborhoods before profits (retain and build on naturally affordable longterm sustainable housing)
5. Policies for equity (infrastructure, housing, transportation, environment, policing)
Join our fight!
On policing in Cambridge, CCC supports the proponents of HEART being included in all decisions involving the reorganization of policing as it impacts African American residents and other vulnerable populations. The exclusion of residents especially impacted by police resources needs to be addressed. The HEART (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team) petition is rich with ideas and should provide the framework for dialogue with HEART proponents at the table.
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On the Environment: Cambridge's tree canopy is in massive decline – nearly a 20% loss in the last ten years.
Trees and green spaces are critical to not only our local and broader survival (global warming among others), but also to larger issues of environmental justice and equity. While often this loss is the result of development and a thirst for ever larger homes, the City also can pose problems. City policy stipulates a need to preserve our tree canopy, too often related actions do the opposite . Tree demolition NEWS is nott good - we (and our future) lost on the Tobin School trees at recent Planning Board and BZA meetings. Now up the massive Volpe project in East Cambridge. Alas the Volpe tree plan isn't even attempting to mitigate the removal of mature trees (144), much less address comparable on site tree caliper loss. The latter is problematic because new trees that survive (many don’t) take fifty years to grow to maturity. Moreover, the proposed Volpe payment into the tree fund will shift the "burden" from a commercial property owner to the City and would result in our paying the cost of planting, maintaining, and watering such trees off-side for their life cycle. How to help: The Planning Board meets Tuesday July 20 at 6:30 PM to consider the Volpe plan. Please: write and speak up about protecting this large tree canopy. Write the Planning board by Monday the 19th at noon – care of: sjoseph@cambridgema.gov Speaker’s sign-up: https://cambridgema.iqm2.com/Citizens/Detail_Meeting.aspx?ID=3934 Read CCC's Op-Ed: Throw Some Shade Cambridge's Way published in Cambridge Day and the Cambridge Chronicle. " It may be that one of the healthiest places you could live in Cambridge is filled with dead people. Mount Auburn Cemetery’s roughly 5,000 trees provide the kind of canopy that is sorely lacking in most of the city. Using 2009 as a baseline, Cambridge’s tree canopy has shrunk by over 16 acres every year. As a result, only about a quarter of the city is now shaded. And at the rate we’re going, by 2030 as much as 83% of the city could be without any tree canopy at all.... [read the rest on line]. Scientific studies shows how critical trees are to the environment, and one just recently that quantifies how tree shade can cancel urban heat island effect. |
On Housing: Cambridge's housing costs are prohibitive. We remain strong supporters of affordable housing.
More and more multi-family homes (often with long-time renters) are gobbled up outside developers, gut rehabbed and sold to the highest bidder, driving up neighborhood property values, along with taxes, rents and more. The whole city is being hit, and more and more of our longtime residents - including many African Americans - are being forced out. That needs to stop! In the summer of 2021 our members our working alongside other residents and experts to resubmit a modified version of the 2020 Donovan Housing Zoning Petition (Citizens Petition to Create More Cambridge Affordable Housing) that we submitted to City Council the summer of 2020. This petition which called for the end of zoning designating areas of exclusively single family housing (the first such petition to do so here) was delayed at City Hall through a combination of factors (threatening its passage) and was withdrawn. CCC members began working with residents and experts around the city to submit a new one (news shortly). Also in 2021 CCC helped publicize and our members showed up in force to support the JUNE 17 Housing Justice rally at City Hall organized by Black Response Cambridge and other groups in which CCC and other groups participated opposing recent efforts to UPZONE the City benefitting out-of-town investors and developers by adding greater density through MORE Luxury (Market Rate) Housing. Happily this up-zoning petition was opposed by the Cambridge Planning Board and will be let elapse. In 2019 we opposed parts of the ill-named "Affordable Housing Overlay" petition because it did not do enough to promote building greater height and density housing on our major corridors (consistent with the best urban policy practices nationally, it sidestepped the roles of adjudicatory bodies here (Planning Board and BZA), and because it left these projects under the control of for profit and non-profit Housing Developers and the unelected City Manager, under a process that long has lacked transparency. What we know now is that the outcomes have NOT been good. These developers are simply building more densely on properties they already own, and or, as before they are using existing state 40B processes. |
WE ARE ALREADY IN A HOUSING CRISIS - DO WE REALLY WANT TO MAKE IT WORSE?!
Assault on Neighborhood Conservation Efforts
This petition has been introduced and forwarded by City Council to the Ordinance Committee. This petition ,that one could call the "Neighborhood Conservation District" (NGC) Assault Petition, was received from an individual often allied with the pro-developer political Pac calling itself "A Better Cambridge (ABC)." The petition seeks to gut Cambridge's long standing architectural preservation means, local areas established by neighbors to preserve the unique eclectic mix of housing in their area. What this petition does? It removes the right of citizens to petition the City on this matter, enabling City Council (who already must approve any new Conservation District after the study period, to stop the process before it even starts. Citizens will lose long established rights. And, Council (not citizens) can change the language of established districts, and have redefined criteria for existing Boards, from District residents who bring professional knowledge to these issues, to simply ones ownership status. Who benefits? Largely out-of-time developers, and non-resident monied investors (many of whom represent national and global financial interests), and those seeking to build large McMansions inconsistent with our long-standing local neighborhoods. Why this matters? Cambridge, founded in 1630, one of the oldest planned cities in America. Its history, and the legacy of its rich architecture matters - whether we are talking about workers cottages or more elite residences, workplaces, or one time battlegrounds. Because Cambridge neighborhoods matter, and this is just one more effort (based in part on a national drive) to end restrictions on developers and investors to build more luxury housing in this already very dense and very historic city - further gentrifying these areas, and forcing out long term lower income residents. We know that Neighborhood Conservation Districts help to keep rental and housing costs more stable, but this is not just about economic issues, and we know that our tourism economy and local businesses are dependent on our unique historical and architectural legacy; This petition is also about environmental sustainability - maintaining sound architecture. Please write City Council at: council@cambridgema.gov and CC the City Clerk at: cityclerk@cambridgema.gov
Read: the "Neighborhood Conservation District Assault Petition" at www.cccoalition.org/docsinfo.html
Read: the "Neighborhood Conservation District Assault Petition" at www.cccoalition.org/docsinfo.html
