9 Up-zoning Lessons for Cambridge and Other Urban Areas

Cambridge resident and Urban Planner, Christopher Zegras has written an important letter to the Cambridge Planning Board about 9 serious problems in the new city up-zoning after their recent meeting.

These problems, he writes, include: 

1. Confounding multi-family with up to 6-stories, as of right. Why 6? Why not 12? Or 4?
2. “As of right,” out of context, will destroy already dense neighborhoods. 
3. Focus should be where infrastructure is available, such as the dense travel corridors, with mass transit (e.g., Mass Ave) and the empty and/or underutilized lands.
4. No parking requirements is absurd and planning as wishful thinking.
5. City should do detailed microsimulation modeling (based on sound microeconomic theory) to predict where supply will arise and what the implications will be, in multiple dimensions. The slide titled "What does this change do?" is not based on any clear analysis.
6. Many of the laudable objectives presented (e.g., bringing existing housing into code, etc.), can be done without this complete de-zoning of the city. 
7. What's the point of the review if there is no "risk"? 
8. The collection of "smaller residential projects", in aggregate, can have impacts just as large (if not larger) than a single large project.... 
9. Overall, it's very surprising that our city proposes basically throwing planning out the window: Eliminate any constraints and let the market decide!

Zegras also observes the following in this same letter:

Specifically, the city must do a lot more work before approving such drastic and unprecedented changes to our city’s development possibilities and trajectory.  Understandably, and obviously, affordable housing is a major concern in Cambridge (and greater Boston, and the state, and the nation, …). Cambridge can and should do it’s part, ideally in a coordinated fashion with the rest of Greater Boston (e.g., Brookline, Somerville, Milton, Belmont, etc.). That said, I also recognize the challenges (given our regional governance, or lack thereof) to such regional housing coordination. 
  
In the meantime, and at bare minimum, the city must start with a clear articulation of what it hopes to achieve by changing our zoning. As far as I can tell we have (or should have), at least, three basic “performance categories”: economic (employment, housing, commercial, office, etc.); infrastructure and services (roads, mobility, sanitation, electricity, education, etc.); environment (emissions, greenspaces, etc.). And, there is a clear distributional dimension within and across all of these (i.e., who “wins”, who “loses”). 
  
Any change in zoning should be articulated in direct reference to these multi-dimensional performance dimensions (or other ones that we, the city, choose). And, then, any proposals that are made should clearly and rigorously be assessed in terms of their predicted impacts on them (e.g., housing prices, parking demand, school slots, roadway congestion, transit ridership, vehicle emissions, retail profits, etc.). 
  
We have seen, from the Planning Board (at least last Tuesday), only one proposal: laissez faire (“as of right”). It’s an interesting proposal, but compared to what?  We deserve at least three scenarios, e.g.,: 

1. Do nothing (i.e., business as usual).
2. Laissez faire (basically, current proposal for 6 stories, ‘as of right’).
3. Corridor (e.g., Mass Ave) and or transit station-area densification.

These (and/or others) should then be evaluated through the same process/methods, and with the same evaluation rubric. In other words, come up with a reasonable evaluation framework (monetization of all benefits and costs; multicriteria analysis; whatever) and implement a transparent analytical approach (e.g., an integrated microsimulation model with a visualization component) so that we can all see what will likely happen over, say, the next 20 years under each scenario. That would be the basis for well-informed deliberation, publicly, among the alternatives so that we can make well-informed choices about the desired future of our city and how we might get there. 

Absent such an approach, it’s impossible for this resident of Cambridge to accept the proposal being made; at least based on what was presented at the PB meeting, which did not show any anticipated impacts in any relevant dimension of concern (not even, say, estimated impact on housing prices vis-à-vis business as usual, which is, presumably the main justification for the proposal). 
  
The above basic suggestion is ‘Planning 101’. Cambridge is a sophisticated city, with significant resources (financial, intellectual, social, etc.), it can and must do better.  These are important lessons that the City Council and the City itself should follow.
               *published with author's permission

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Lessons from NINE (9) Urban Areas: the Importance of Using Data  

“9 Lessons” is also the subject of an important article by Garima Jain & Jessica Espey in the journal Urban Sustainability (2002: 2, 7) titled “Lessons from nine urban areas using data to drive local sustainable development.” HERE
 
Among other things that they observe is the fact that “local-level indicators must be included in any future development framework, because local governments are the primary point of institutional contact for the majority of individuals.” The quote is from A Million Voices: The World We Want. UNDG Millennium Development Goals Task Force 1–172 (2013).
 
The authors of the report “…hypothesize that a data-based approach to the governance of local sustainable development, which aims to improve the quality and utility of local data on sustainable development outcomes and harness the opportunities afforded by the data revolution, offers a promise of more targeted, impactful action towards local sustainable development outcomes.” They note in turn that “…local governments continue to face several issues in taking advantage of this data revolution. Across both developing and developed countries, local governments lack the requisite financial resources to generate locally relevant data, build statistical systems, and foster capacity and skills. *see sources below.
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Jain and Espey note in this article that “Without necessary investments in local data systems, local governments will struggle to monitor progress on urban SDG targets and broader local sustainable development objectives.”
 
Cambridge has been a key beneficiary of the drive to create critical data and make these data available. We are fortunate here to have this data available to us on line in a readily accessible way. We also now have new technologies – AI, ChatGPT and others – that enable us to mine and analyze this data. 
Sources:
Espey, J., Mesa, N., Ruckstuhl, S. & Prakash, M. One NYC and the SDGs: A City Strategy with Global Relevance. in Smarter New York City (ed. D’Almeida, A.). 35–58 (Columbia University Press, 2018).
 
Simon, D. et al. Developing and testing the Urban Sustainable Development Goal’s targets and indicators – a five-city study. Environ. Urban. 28, 49–63 (2015).

Conclusions:

As Prof. Chris Zegras notes (his point 9): “…it's very surprising that our city proposes basically throwing planning out the window: Eliminate any constraints and let the market decide!” Following in the lines of Professors Garmina Jain and Jessica Espey, in Cambridge we have the data to do both smart and thoughtful planning as well as up-zoning the right way. Present and future residents deserve this from us.