Zoning In on the 2024 Cambridge City Council Up-Zoning Proposal

A group of Cambridge City Councillors has proposed a citywide up-zoning to enable more market rate housing to be built citywide.  They have presented their plan to the Council's Housing Committee and have presented here: May 8 CDD SLIDE DECK

KEY QUESTIONS
How much more population/housing does the city intend to have us acqure, taking into account environmental and infrastructure costs as well as critical issues of equity and financial cost. We need a number, and work from there. We also should prioritize current city-owned spaces that could be leased to public housing developers for 49 or 99-year periods for this purpose.

 FEATURES OF THIS PLAN
It would allow multi-family housing citywide and use dense zoning criteria (likely C-1 zoning) for residential districts citywide and allow increased heights to 6 stories everywhere if there are  10 units or more - the mandated 20% inclusionary housing. This would reduce minimum lot size, and green space allowances, and increase density, BZA oversight would be eliminated. All this housing would be without parking requirements.

WHAT IS THIS TRYING TO ACHIEVE?  
If this is about adding more affordable housing (a key city goal), this will not work, and indeed will make things worse by encouraging more market rate competition for public housing (subsidized housing) developers. What we need are details. What is the city’s target number, price, look, and feel for this new housing? If you address the target price, how far would one be off on our desired look and feel?  And how does that look and feel change impact demand? More interestingly – what is the motivation behind the housing goal? Is it utilitarian to have people live closer to their jobs? Or, is it in part based on wanting more people to be able to experience the character and feel of Cambridge? If the latter - then one must address the impact of zoning changes on that look and feel.

OTHER RATIONALES FOR THIS UP-ZONING
One of the goals of this zoning plan (in whereas #3) is to redress earlier “racist impacts” in the Cambridge historic zoning determinations. However, our  zoning districts were based largely on proximity to factories and chemical or other toxic factors. Moreover, people who participated in later neighborhood rezonings have noted that they were NOT done to exclude persons of color or persons of limited means but rather to correct the 1961 city-wide up zoning that resulted in a number of out-of-scale buildings, especially on Harvard St. such as that pictured later in the slide deck.

LIKELY ECONOMIC IMPACTS
We will see very little affordable housing from this proposal, just more very expensive units for the very wealthy, including increasing numbers of McMansions. Most of the increase in housing supply in the last 25 years is in large single family and expensive multifamily buildings as well as infill on existing affordable housing sites. This is likely to continue. As new buildings are erected, property values will rise still more, along with tax increases, impacting especially lower-income residents and seniors on fixed incomes.
 
The increase in supply likely to occur here is not enough to meet the increasing demand so prices would still go up. This is what economists debate all the time and usually do it best in hindsight. This is an issue we can’t run away from and can’t control, e.g. the market and resulting behavior in various interest rates, tax environments (both personal and property taxes), developer interests, and current as well is yet to be known homeowners. Nothing is static. Push in one place and something else pops up. Build more luxury housing or affordable housing? The mix also has huge impacts on the tax roll.  Most of our city’s tax burden is on 1,2,3 family homes. As these homes disappear and are replaced by condos with lower values with the same residential exemption, the city would be lowering our overall tax roll and that will have huge impacts in other areas of our many citywide needs.

This will take decades to all play out and by then mistakes that cannot be reversed will have taken place because of decisions made now.
 
LIKELY ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
 Increased urban density brings significant heat island impacts, a serious problem vis-a-vis Environmental and Health Equity in Cambridge and elsewhere. See this WSJ News piece on how urban growth fuels extreme heat. We also will see losses in green space and ample adjacent green spaces are also and especially critical to children. The further children must walk to reach these green spaces, the fewer positive benefits there are.
 
We also likely will see losses in mature shade trees, and for every shade tree that is removed, it takes 30-40 years to have comparable cooling benefits from a newly planted tree. With decreased setback (green space) requirements, there often is not room for existing trees, or possibly even new tree roots and branches to flourish. In addition, every time one tears down a building, even if one is replacing it with one that is a more environmentally sound net zero structure, it takes 10 or 15 years to recoup what is lost in terms of environmental costs (embodied energy) for new materials, transportation, and factory energy expenses. 

OTHER PROBLEMATIC RESULTS
Bullet point 4 (p.13) would allow homeowners to make changes to their homes (or developers to create new buildings) without the BZA, since this proposal seeks to eliminate discretionary review. This is troubling, giving a blank check to developers, leaving out core input from nearby residents and professionals who have a track record in addressing these kinds of issues. Often the BZA is the only opportunity that allow neighbors to address the design elements of proposed new adjacent buildings. 
 
MISREPRESENTATION
On p. 13 one of the stated aims is to legalize most of the city’s housing, but this is misstating the situation. All existing housing in Cambridge is legal. If a building burns down, the owner has every right to rebuild it to the same size. Pictures of 3 and 4 story apartment buildings (shown in the slide deck as support for a call for 6 stories) isn’t accurate or fair. Frost Terrace (public housing at Porter Square) was the result of discretionary review (Historical Commission and BZA) and considerable neighbor discussions and input. Frost Terrace included repurposing and preserving a significant historical building. The original proposal had similar massing but much less attractive architecture.

While proponents may cite other cities like Austin Texas as support, the latter has c.350 square miles compared to Cambridge at 6.6 square miles. And while Austin did a recent up-zoning to allow multi-family housing city wide and saw lowered rents (decreases of 6-7%), the building activity soon slowed to a crawl as it became less profitable for developers to build. In short, the circumstances in Cambridge are very different, and even in Austin, this has not been a silver bullet.  READ HERE
 
WE NEED MUCH MORE PROCESS AND A BETTER ONE 
No one from the city has reached out to let residents know about this consequential move. We should not make the mistake we made on AHO-2 where, in the view of many, with a proposal that was rushed into zoning language and all one could do was tweak it. 

ADDITIONAL IMPORTANT CHANGES  
·      It is important that the BZA continue to have an advisory role in new buildings.
·      It is important to limit the proposed six-story (with 20% inclusionary) housing structures to the AHO corridors and squares.
·      It is important for other up-zoning aims to draw up specific neighborhood by neighborhood plans on a case-by-case basis.
·      It is important that a 5-year report be done on the impacts of this decision. 

THE ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS OF MORE DEMOLITIONS 
A useful article  here: https://restoreoregon.org/2021/04/12/understanding-the-carbon-cost-of-demolition/

• "Conservatively speaking, residential and commercial demolitions in the City of Portland are responsible for 124,741 metric tons of C02 emissions per year, which amounts to approximately 4.5 percent of the City’s total annual reduction goal."
• "This study finds that it takes 10 to 80 years for a new building that is 30 percent more efficient than an average-performing existing building to overcome, through efficient operations, the negative climate change impacts related to the construction process.”
• "calling upon policy makers to acknowledge the environmental impact of sending usable buildings to landfills; strive for density without demolition; provide meaningful incentives for retention and reuse; and maintain or strengthen demolition review requirements for designated historic properties."

CONCLUSIONS
 
What we all are struggling with is how to address the fact that the city is going to change. Our success lies in the details of proposed actions. The city is either going to become (on the whole) more expensive (as demand outstrips supply), or it is going to LOOK very different (as more units are fit into a static 6 sq miles). Change is tough – and unavoidable – but it is important to think long term and get it right.

We have proposals in play to fit more housing into existing footprints, which seems like the best middle ground. However, the increase in supply is not enough to meet the increased demand so prices would still go up.


CCC SUPPORTS

• We support the creation of multi-family housing citywide with important caveats.
• We strongly support the creation of new units within existing structures, as delimited in the Donovan Petition (Advancing Housing Affordability)
• The vast scale of this citywide up-zoning will inevitably lead to teardowns of existing more affordable homes for McMansions across the city.
• Rather than bringing down housing costs, this will do the opposite by increasing property values and taxes due to the large investor interest in Cambridge, adding to the wealthy-poverty divide. We believe there also must be neighborhood input into what new plans look like and to addressing green space losses and heat island impacts.
• We believe it is important to protect buildings that provide character, history, and culture to the city and safeguard them from predatory developers.
• We must make sure that new housing is right for each context. While some neighborhoods with wider avenues may be able to accommodate such scale, smaller streets cannot. This cannot be a one-size-fits-all policy, but one with nuance and caveats for each unique setting.  
• It also important in each of our 13 Neighborhoods to look at both its unique history and broader infrastructure issues: water, sewer, electric lines, transportation, schools, libraries, fire, police, parks, open space, shops, and even religious edifices. Infrastructure planning is critical in each case. Right now, Boston Properties is being sued and an injunction is sought because a high-density property was allowed without adequate infrastructure. 

Below: Frost Terrace: Public Housing at Porter Square. It included the original historic home and trees, went through extensive design review process with neighbors, the CHC and the BZA.