The AHO: A First Year Report

Top left: Walden Square II, top right: Jefferson Park; bottom left: Frost Terrace; bottom center: Finch (Concord Ave.), Bottom right; New Street.

*A version of this text also appeared August 19, 2021 in CCC’s Cambridge Day AHO report Op Ed.  Please read and donate to this important local newspaper and others. Below we also address initial response to this Report.


Authors of the August 13, 2021 Cambridge Day and Cambridge Chronicle opinion pieces on the AHO (Affordable Housing Overlay) address perceived successes over the last year, but omit key details, such as where the 350 units are located, initiation dates, or related impacts. The AHO ordinance itself requires no annual review, leaving this up to others. While the Cambridge Citizens Coalition (CCC) along with many residents opposed the AHO’s passage, once ordained, we were eager to see and potentially support its outcomes.
 
Below is our overview of the AHO successes and questions in this initial period.
 
AHO Pluses

• The AHO made some Cambridge residents think more seriously about housing affordability.
• The AHO made Cambridge itself begin to address this issue Citywide.
• Thanks in large part to one former City Councillor, New Street was transformed from a proposed storage unit complex to affordable housing.

 
Finding AHO-specific examples that meet stated goals is harder to do, but it is not hard to guess what sites are being referenced by the authors:
 
Jefferson Park (underway): Plans call for demolishing all eleven buildings, a six-story residence, and a group of three-to-four story “low rise” buildings, then rebuilding here to rehouse these tenants while adding some 114-120 units to bring the site to 289 units from the current c.175 units. Many of the mature trees that gave Jefferson Park its name will be lost. Had 40B permitting been used, fewer trees would go.
 
New Street (construction stage): This 107-unit project was well underway when the City Council voted not to support more store units at this site with a scattering of affordable units as sweetener (summer 2019 - before the AHO was ordained). Eventually the owner transformed the use to affordable units. While not an AHO goal-based project per se, New Street represents a positive outcome.
 
Walden Square: (planning stage). This proposed 103-unit project expands Winn Properties’ existing Walden Square affordable housing development onto their parking lot and simply adds more density to an existing affordable housing development, so non-profit developers are not competing here with market rate investors, and it further segregates affordable housing residents and ,leaves them with few amenities.
 
Other current affordable housing projects are also important to this overview:
 
2072 Mass Ave (planning stage). Plans for this proposed 49-unit development have not been finalized, but this project (Capstone Properties, employed NOT the AHO, but instead long available Massachusetts Chapter 40B comprehensive permitting was employed. Had AHO guidelines been used, some neighborhood opposition might be dissipated.
 
Rindge Tower (in process): The expansion of Rindge Tower, like Jefferson Park, was planned pre-AHO and is proceeding outside the scope of AHO and the developers are adding greater height and density on an existing affordable housing site, to be managed by private entities and segregating affordable housing tenants from other city residents.
 
Frost Terrace (completed - 40 homes) created by for profit Capstone Properties and the Finch Cambridge development on Concord Ave. (98 homes - Homeowners Rehab Inc) are also in play, but neither was built under the AHO.
 
None of the above examples represents viable AHO “success stories,” created through the AHO or achieved as the AHO intended, in providing non-profit developers a means to compete with market rate investors to purchase sites citywide in wealthier neighborhoods.
 
None-the-less, we can learn much about the AHO results to date vis-à-vis current and potential impacts.

• The AHO has done nothing to address ongoing gentrification and the loss of long-term residents due to escalating housing costs.
• The AHO has done nothing to address our growing City housing unit vacancy concerns, with vacancies rising from 3,259 (6.9%) in 2010 to 4,343 (8.1%) in 2020, an increase of 1,084 over this past decade or 33% according to the according to the 2020 Census.
• The AHO units remain extraordinarily expensive to build – at over $500,000-750,000 per unit, funds that could have been used more wisely to build housing units on City-owned land.
• While AHO proponents argue correctly that every unit “counts,” in truth, due to state and federal AHO funding requirements, only about 70% of our affordable housing units go to applicants who were city residents. Our wait list of circa 20,000 people is long because people from every municipality, even out-of-state, are eligible to apply for Cambridge affordable housing. If we spent City money – rather than seeking state and/or federal funding - all the units could go to Cambridge residents. See the Plan of Lincoln, Mass. as one such model.
• The AHO has done nothing to encourage our City government to build on its own land and create units without outside funding - which would enable our affordable housing to designate units for Cambridge residents only (or certain groups of City employees, such as teachers, fire fighters and police officers). This is what the Town of Lincoln has been able to do.
• Instead, by funding AHO developments through State and Federal funds, if someone’s child returns home to live or a resident gets a promotion, the resident may lose the unit.
• The AHO is promoting a significant densification of existing affordable housing developments, segregating tenants, and too often without core amenities like parking, green spaces, shade trees, nearby grocery stores, adding to environmental justice and health disparity concerns such as asthma.
• Since AHO developments are now “as of right,” the kind of project-improving critique from neighborhood residents and our judiciary boards is missing.  
• Because the AHO does not require annual review, the City will not have an opportunity to redress issues that arise early on around these developments.

To be fair, some people, among them then City Councillor, Craig Kelley, did anticipate these likely AHO outcomes, but proponents of the AHO and City staff advocating for this ordinance simply overlooked the concerns and anticipated problems. CCC supports a far more wholistic and result-driven approach to housing affordability questions than the AHO has offered to date.
 
CCC’s key concerns about the AHO still remain: 1) the lack of independent project design review (the AHO removed Planning Board oversight); 2) existing tools that could be and still are used, notably Mass. state 40B to consolidate affordable housing project development;  3) the lack of viable neighborhood input on design; 4) the allowance of non-porous surfaces such as porches and roof decks to count as “open space”; 5)  the frequent removal of green spaces (and mature trees) in AHO developments, raising issues of environmental equity; 6) issues of resident parking for those needing cars to get to work; 7) lack of transparency and potential conflict of interest in the selection and funding of AHO developers; 8) those units funded in part by state and federal resources must include non-Cambridge resident applicants (roughly 30 percent of units go to these non-residents) making it harder for local residents to find housing, and 9) the lack of built-in regular accountability (annual reporting) of AHO projects. For the most part, these concerns were on target. Note: the Cambridge Chronicle photograph shows 881 Mass Ave. which has market rate apartments.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Response to the Cambridge Day AHO Op Ed. to date

• To date most private and pubic response to our published AHO report has been very positive, thanking us for this thoughtful overview.
• However, one commenter to the Op Ed claims CCC is opposed to outsiders; far from it, but Cambridge surveys show widespread concern over rising city housing prices, and the growing list of residents in need. In order to take care of Cambridge residents, the process would have to bypass a bigger audience wanting to live here. How do we accommodate everyone fairly?
• Local developer, landlord, and zoning attorney, P. Barrett offers a contradictory view to our post on Facebook. He states that the AHO does exactly what it was supposed to do, but then he offers to write zoning for the City that he claims would do what the AHO already is supposedly achieving. He follows this with highly personal attacks that deserve no comment and are based largely on false information.
• Seven ABC  affiliates (includingABC-IE Pac donors), Jess Sheehan, Will MacArthur, James Zall, Loren Crowe, J. Anton Aiello, and Jesse Kanson-Benanov, and Chris Schmidt (the latter, a leader in this group) argue on Facebook, Cambridge Day, and/or Twitter that building on City land in order to better serve our residents in need is somehow an "explicitly anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-working class position"(to quote Sheehan). As noted on our post, these issues are complicated. No one is saying Cambridge should be for current Cambridge residents in financial need only. As we take care of the many Cambridge residents (the unhoused and others) a lot of issues come into play. What we need is a holistic, city and area-wide approach. How do we accommodate everyone fairly? How do we do any of this in the most cost effective and transparent way, and in a manner that will promote both environmental and health equity?  The City could use its own land to build more housing for the same roughly 70-30 percent Cambridge residents to national applicants with or without state and federal funds. Indeed, urban planners like Vancouver-based Patrick Condon, are strongly advocating the use of City owned land for housing developments because it is less likely to increase property values, e.g. housing cost increases for renters and owners alike. What we need is a thoughtful way to address what the AHO has and has not done this first year, and how it can be made more effective in meeting its stated goals, while looking at other available options for advancing housing affordability in the city and in the area. In the case of Jefferson Park, for example, using 40B might have allowed the creation of more affordable housing than with the AHO supporting greater environmental equity. ABC to dates seems more interested in attacking than in a thoughtful discussion of our city's housing needs and solutions which is where I hope we can turn the discussion in the future.
• More comments and responses are found on the CambridgeDay site where the article appeared. 
• Monday 8.23.21 ABC ally Loren Crowe tweets "CCC founder Suzanne Blier recently published, under her own name, a nativist, reactionary screed complaining that outsiders are clogging up our affordable housing waitlist. She wants to *reject* federal and state housing funds so we wouldn't have to allow non-locals to move in." This patently false statement (reposted by ABC-IE treasurer Christopher Schmidt, is then used to attack CCC and our supported Councillors, as well as to recycle and spread a lie  ABC had circulated earlier that CCC had misappropriated rally identified with gun violence to address trees. The permit for the rally was obtained by Mothers Out Front, who took a lead. The 14 groups involved worked closely with My Brothers Keeper to create the joint flier and to organize the events so that the two would not conflict, our groups, stepping back so that the other group could rally first. Rather than address what is in the AHO report itself, ABC seeks to spread lies, distortions, and vitriol rather than the initial failures of the AHO itself. 

DONATE TO CCC-IE's City Council Election Campaign