The Cat in the Hat & Housing: Breaking Past Rules, Likely Outcomes

​We know well the image of the hat-wearing cat  in Dr. Seuss's classic children's books, the Cat in the Hat, and the Cat in the Hat Comes Back. The illustrations and text speak to breaking normative rules, making a mess, creating chaos, and  challenging the established order laid out by the “authorities” (the parents). At a recent Cambridge City Council meeting addressing the proposed citywide up-zoning (see above photo), Iram Farooq,  Director of Cambridge's Community Development Department, addressed councillors and residents alike in a Cat in the Hat Halloween costume. Whether the costume was disrespectful in this context, others will have to decide. However this also conforms with a 2024 linked-in ad by our city's lead zoning expert and department chair, Jeff Roberts seeking someone to "join the merry band of mischief-makers known as the Cambridge Zoning & Development Division." He added that if this sounds like "fun" individuals should apply. However, zoning language and its impacts are not intended to be either funny or fun.

Major up-zoning changes are serious business with both intended and unintended consequences,  including  sometimes irrevocable changes (in the case of demolitions or losses that cause environmental harm. Like Halloween (one time Devil's Night) zoning can have positive impacts (residents facing factory toxins) and negative impacts. In the 1950s new urban renewal policies led to the razing of lower income neighborhoods and tenants would have been forced out to make way for larger  highways or new very tall residential towers.

In some ways the Cat and the Hat context also is apt to the proposed citywide up-zoning that breaks with long established local and city wide residential zoning laws. To the key question of financial impacts of the upzoning to lowering our housing costs, she insisted that there was no way to know the outcomes. This is in some ways true since the current proposal is entirely dependent on market forces and the large numbers of outside investors seeking to profit on Cambridge's highly expensive and greatly in-demand housing stock.  As to infrastructure impacts on the proposal, other city staff noted  that available water might be in short supply in some areas depending on the location and proposed development, but increased vehicular traffic could be handled on existing streets 

All of this brings pause, pushing us to seek possible answers (and potential solutions) in what other progressive cities are doing. See also our recent blogpost, Zoning Lessons From Other Cities: Will We Heed Them? Evidence from other cities's upzoning proposals are great models, and should be required reading for Cambridge staff and elected officials before any plan is finalized and any vote takes place. The 2023 Urban Institute land use study reveals that in a study of 1,136 cities where zoning was loosened (allowing more multi-family housing in once single-family areas), rent increases, decreased (to 0.8%). Significantly, this same report observes that “outcomes vary by market segment” and that up-zoning also can“…reduce affordable housing in neighborhoods….” [emphasis added]. While the Urban Institute study authors of this study maintain that “the economic principles of supply and demand …should reduce scarcity and increase competition among sellers” (lowering housing purchase and rental costs), this has not happened in other high demand cities such as Vancouver, but indeed has pushed costs even higher. Urban Planner, Patrick Condon explains this in light of key differences in how urban land value (and investments) function versus  other commodities in addressing the Vancouver housing cost issue in a local business journal – the BIV (May 2023) among other important writings.  

As noted in an October 2024 publication ULI (read HERE) analysis by Boston/Cambridge  based authors, Scott Pollack and Susan Connelly, up-zoning in “densely built-out neighborhoods” such as those in Cambridge, does NOT see an increase in supply. They cite the lack of potential profit from in-fill housing projects, so for investors and home owners alike this does not make financial sense. According to this same ULI study

• The price of homes is so high right now that adding units to existing properties creates little-to-no additional residual value.
• Low financial viability made requiring affordability in the projects difficult and/or impossible;
• Yet the upzoning appears to have only impacted development on about 6% of the land deregulated, creating only slightly more development when compared to lots where the zoning was left alone.
• Far better results occurred in contexts where underutilized areas were addressed, as in the Assembly Square area, of Somerville. Indeed, they note that “[z]oning reform has proven highly successful in underutilized areas or those zoned for outdated uses.”
• “Existing, dense neighborhoods with small lots provide limited opportunities to create viable, larger parcels and projects that can cover today’s expensive construction market.” 

In short, the current proposal to radically up-zone our residential neighborhoods will not lead to much if any new housing, and may have undesirable impacts, by not only making housing here more expensive, but also dramatically changing current city demographics. We need smart, thoughtful policies not "cat-in-the-hat" chaos that are unlikely to achieve the impacts one wants, and will likely do great harm. 

A November 2024 study of Housing and Racial Demographics Analysis in New York focused on up-zoning outcomes in city neighborhoods based on 2010-2022 census data found that those areas with high levels of new housing construction (many due to up-zonings)  “overwhelmingly saw a rise in the White share of their population, and drops in the Black and Hispanic shares” (emphasis added).  Moreover, “in neighborhoods with lower-to-moderate levels of new housing development the White share decreased, and the Hispanic share increased, while the Black share either increased or decreased more slowly than it did in the high-growth areas or citywide.” As this study points out, many of the latter neighborhoods “…have landmark or zoning protections that moderate and carefully control the scale and extent of new development.”

Similar outcomes can be seen in Cambridge whereas we have shown in the past, Neighborhood Conservation Districts (NCD) see housing costs rising less rapidly than in those parts of the city without NCDs.

The proposed Cambridge proposed plan likely will increase housing costs (and property values) – making it harder to create affordable housing, and more difficult to bring down home ownership and rental costs. As the authors of three studies cited here make clear, free market policies do not always make housing cheaper, can often also have the reverse impact. Indeed

• In Cambridge, MA the highest rents and salaries are now in East Cambridge.
• East Cambridge also has the highest number and density of new homes built.
• Many East Cambridge units likely were purchased by investors who do not live here.
• In the province of Ottawa, Canada, 85% of newly built condos have gone to investors.  Read more HERE

 None of the upzoning studies addressed here speak to the negative environmental impacts that such up-zoning will have on neighborhoods with the attendant loss of private property green spaces and trees, however related heat island impacts will also be felt.
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CONCLUSIONS:
The current Cambridge citywide up-zoning proposal likely will have notably diverse and unpredictable outcomes in some parts of the city it may add even more high density housing (particularly our once lower income neighborhoods). In other cases it likely will lead to a decrease in the number of homes, as investors simply buy up more one, two, and three family homes to create much larger (far more expensive) single family housing and luxury condos, enhancing gentrification and demographic disparities and shifts even further. Our current plan  ill likely increase racial disparities, forcing more Black and Hispanic residents out, to be replaced by a whiter, wealthier population. Our earlier blog post Los Angeles decided to maintain 72% of its neighborhoods as single family only because the city could not “handle all that growth.” Read more HERE and  HERE 

The city's up-zoning proposal as intended, will also make it more difficult to control outcomes as it shifts the city voluntary boards or agencies toward less control, and our neighborhoods to more disruption, and potential free fall: In key ways this proposal seeks to counter thoughtful planning, replacing long standing policy to drivers based  solely on the market differing significantly from other progressive cities such as Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Vancouver – as well as Somerville and Boston. These other centers have initiated strategic upzoning plans that are structured around a set of givens (and specific intended outcomes and results). Cambridge’s up-zoning plan as currently written is driven almost entirely by investor and developer interests and what appears to be a simultaneously neo-Liberal and Libertarian framework. This is not the kind of thoughtful housing plan that current and future residents deserve.

While The Cat in the Hat may be a clever children’s story of chaos, disorder, and bedlam as rules are being thrown out (providing here some necessary comic relief), city planning and zoning are serious business. Dr. Seuss's  famous hat-wearing cat was able to magically change  the children's messy and chaotic house  back to “normal” before the parents returned. That kind of magic wand reset is not possible in an historically house rich city such as Cambridge. Once  historic homes are destroyed, they are gone forever, and often their one-time residents are forced to move on as well.