Citywide Up-Zoning Impacts (What Most Residents Do Not know)

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The proposed city-wide up-zoning likely will have broad impacts on our city:

WHAT MOST RESIDENTS DO NOT KNOW

• This up-zoning means that the 6 story (75 feet) structures allowable as of right in every neighborhood, and 9 stories on various “corridors” will be accompanied by even greater height allowances, that now will be enabled for all the AHO projects in every neighborhood. In short, A 6-story market rate (“luxury”) project, will enable a 9-story Public Housing (AHO) project at the same site in every city residential neighborhood.
• Why? Because the current AHO language, allows one to increase allowable Public Housing AHO heights everywhere whenever city zoning changes are made.
• All these structures (both market rate and publicly funded) will be without required parking, design oversight, or right to appeal.
• Moreover, if you live on or near one of the selected Public Housing (AHO) corridors, or one block away, your property or your neighbors could be built to 9 stories for the current AHO and 11 or 12 stories with the upzoning; the allowable Public Housing AHO heights for these same properties in turn will increase 2-3 stories more to perhaps 13-15 stories.
• These “corridor” streets where these tall 13-15 story structures will be allowed include: Albany Street, Alewife Brook Parkway, Bishop Allen Drive, Broadway, Cambridge Street, Concord Avenue, First Street, Fresh Pond Parkway, Massachusetts Avenue, Memorial Drive, Mount Auburn Street, Prospect Street, and Sidney Street. If you live on or near one of these streets, this change will impact your neighborhood specifically, and most significantly any site one street away which will have the same height allowances as the “corridor” itself, apparently.
• The “AHO Squares” of Central Square, Inman Square, Porter Square, and Harvard Square have been broadened too. Current work by resident groups seeking to address specific areas of potential growth like Central Square or North Mass Ave would be superseded by these changes.
• Instead of this market-driven path, we should follow our neighbor, Somerville, and create an actual plan, or require, like Cape Cod, that the City put together Form-Based Design Criteria for new buildings and developments for each neighborhood.

 
In addition, the financial, environmental, and neighborhood consequences are significant for such a change. Studies in places like Vancouver by urban planner Patrick Condon show that in high density high demand cities like Cambridge, increasing market rate housing, simply increases property values and housing prices for everyone (newcomers and current residents alike). We recommend you read his book, Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality and Urban Crisis, and others he has written.
 
FINANCIAL IMPACTS     

• Property values and related taxes no doubt will increase significantly in this plan. These taxes are what support the increasing Citywide taxes for our expensive schools and other projects as well as the sizably increased City staff numbers.
• How high might property values go with this upzoning? Most likely they will rise until outside investors decide Cambridge is no longer a viable place to park their money and/or various neighborhoods reach a “desirability” tipping point, and then the housing prices (and values) start to decline.
• The city’s finances are placing an increasing burden on local residents, both because the city has started paying higher interest on loans due to our increasing expenses, and because we now have 30% empty commercial buildings that no longer help pay the tax bill.
• Residents’ tax burdens will rise even more significantly, as property values rise with the upzoning. This is something that impacts lower income residents and seniors on fixed incomes even more.
• Note: it is very unlikely that current residents in existing 1-3 family units, will leave these homes to move into the new high rises (leaving their homes for others seeking to move up), unless the new housing is both larger and less expensive than they currently have, or include other desirable features like parking.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

• The city has yet to address the infrastructure impacts of this upzoning proposal – the need for additional schools, an enhanced electrical and water grid, to say nothing of inspectional services building staff, sanitation workers, grocery stores, libraries, and police. Such changes necessitate more property-specific space needs, as well as salaries, and administrative oversight. This grid doesn’t grow without concomitant environmental impacts.
• .Already there is a huge problem with sewers and water and electricity etc.  Most people know that and it is crucial that this be remedied to accomodate planned density increase BEFORE a citywide rezoning.
  
• The embodied carbon resulting from demolishing existing structures and creating and transporting new materials is significant and will take some 80 years to be recouped. The loss of green spaces and mature trees may be sizable too, with each mature shade tree taking 40-60 years to replace with a new tree, and then only if space has been left for a new tree to be planted.
• Since a significant number of the new housing allowed in this upzoning likely will involve single family and two-family housing that simply want to enlarge their foot print to the property borders without adding new units, this plan encourages the destruction of existing and critically important green spaces and mature trees.
• When a neighbors garden or green space is removed to add a new building, the whole neighborhood area loses key benefits that these provide one in terms of health impacts and climate-related temperature increases. Epidemiological studies bear out the impacts on children and lower income residents alike.

NEIGHBORHOOD IMPACTS

• All this goes against the goals of the Envision Report, as well as the desire to maintain our different neighborhoods. This upzoning instead seeks to homogenize the city into one even denser and taller “whole” with many of our historic buildings will be lost to both current and future city residents.
• Since interest rates have come down, and the state and federal governments are both adding financial means to build more housing, and encouraging restrictive zoning changes, likely far more housing will be built in the broader Boston area, decreasing the need or desirability for such a radical up-zoning here.
• Most of this new market rate housing will take place in what were once our “less expensive” denser neighborhoods – North Cambridge, the Port, Cambridgeport, East Cambridge, the Highlands, and Strawberry Hill. So while the issue of “inequity” is a key part of the argument for this upzoning, the impacts more likely will exacerbate existing problems.

HOUSING INEQUITIES

• “A roof over our head is more important than trees” one once heard by public housing proponents.  However, this upzoning is for market rate housing, not public housing. And since our city is already so dense, very few opportunities will arise that will enable large enough structures (4-6 stories or higher) to have the 9+ units required for “Inclusionary.” Indeed, many developers stop at 8 stories in order to avoid that burden.
• In this upzoning, a large number of current renters may be evicted or have their leases terminated because the principal way to add new housing in our already dense city is to remove existing homes and other structures and rebuild on these sites. These individuals will be forced from the city.
• Considering the weaking financial state of our City budget, will our funding for new AHO development decline? Added to the problem, AHO developers generally have not been required to include major building repairs or renovations in their costs, instead returning to Council for the sizable additional money for this. At some point this too will need to be reconsidered in our financial outlook.
• A good example for lack of  infrastructure preparation is the City approval of massive growth in North Point.  Once that started, the City had to dig up all of Gore Street, truly housing some of the first homes in EC, for four years to lay the sewer line to handle the refuse from North point.  Gore Street itself was not the focus of the new sewer line.
  

TRANSIT IMPACTS

• What we don’t have either in Cambridge or the Boston area is a viable public transportation system that would enable people to move around more easily. This is one of the main differences between Cambridge and places like New York City, Paris, Chicago and elsewhere.
• At present it is very difficult for many neighborhood residents to even get to their work sites or buy groceries without cars, and the upzoning plan will make this even more difficult as parking spaces become increasingly scarce and commute times increase.
• The number of Cambridge residents who are regular bicycle riders to work and other sites, has remained relatively stable, and quite low (roughly 7%) despite the increasing number of bicycle lanes. Many bicyclists and others still have and use cars.
• This means there is still a major need for cars as well as delivery trucks on the city streets. Market rate housing developers prefer to include onsite parking because they can increase the property price some $180K per unit. However, this further increases traffic on our already overburdened streets, especially in the denser neighborhoods.