Cambridge officials aren’t paying for big, ambitious socialist-style spending by digging grubby old rubles and kopecks out from the couch cushions. iStock illustration

The Soviet Union collapsed more than 30 years ago, but the People’s Republic of Cambridge lives on. 

Home to Harvard and MIT, the city remains one of the few places in America where an endorsement by the Democratic Socialists of America could boost, not hurt your chances of landing a seat on the Cambridge City Council. 

At one point Cambridge had its own, full-time peace commissioner, “presumably to keep the city out of any nuclear exchanges,” Universal Hub once noted. 

Sure, history is filled with failed socialist utopias. But it would be hard to say that Cambridge isn’t doing its level best to back up its beliefs in social justice with cold, hard cash. 

There’s the freshly launched, $22 million initiative, “Rise Up Cambridge,” that will start funneling $500 a month to low-income families with children, while another $50 million is being teed up to pay for bike lanes on Massachusetts Avenue. 

That will keep the working classes safe as they cycle about, and if it infuriates the petty bourgeois shopkeepers along the bustling commercial corridor by taking away parking spaces, so much the better!  

Then we come to the piece de resistance – a proposal for the city to launch its own municipal broadband service. 

Giving Comcast – and the private sector – a run for its money won’t come cheap: The price tag is $150 million to $190 million to cable up every single household, business and government building in the city of 117,000, not to mention the cost of operating it. 

Of course, in a city already fully wired, that has led to questions about the point of the whole exercise, but it’s the principle of the matter, of beating those running dogs of capitalism at their own game. 

After all, if Khrushchev was here, do you think he would be worried about competition, markets and other capitalist nonsense? Nyet! “We will bury you,” is what he’d tell those greedsters at Comcast. 

Cambridge’s Big Secret 

Of course, one minor difference or detail between the Cambridge of today and the old Soviet Union – or that matter – Cuba back in the good old days is that Cambridge has money to burn, and lots of it. 

So where, you ask, is all this money coming from? How is it that Cambridge is rolling in the green while state revenues plunge and neighboring Boston eyes a potential fiscal cliff as companies bail from its downtown office towers? 

Well, if you think the money came from collective farming on Cambridge rooftops, you would be sorely mistaken. Ditto for efforts to get the comrades over at Harvard to pay some taxes – they have bigger world issues to worry it. 

Rather, all this extra money, accounting for 65 percent of the real estate taxes paid in Cambridge, comes from commercial properties. And the city’s huge cluster of lab and research space – measured in the tens of millions of square feet – is a leading taxpayer, notes Ben Compaine, who served on the City Manager’s Broadband Task Force from 2014 to 2016. (Not coincidentally, he warns the municipal broadband idea could turn into a “huge money pit.”) 

The values of homes and condos in Cambridge – more than a few owned by executives and researchers in the city’s biotech sector – also help fill city coffers, with the median home value having long ago passed the $1 million mark. 

Scott Van Voorhis

“Cambridge is in fact swimming in cash, thanks to all that Kendall Sqare commercial real estate and rising residential home values,” Compaine said. 

All that money, in turn, is a byproduct of not just capitalism, but of one of the most successful centers of capitalism in the world – which just happens to be located in lefty, hipster Cambridge. Skeptical? Then just start tallying all the major national and international life sciences companies with either headquarters or major research operations in the city. 

When it comes to politics and culture, the People’s Republic of Cambridge is alive and well. Just don’t ask too many questions about who is footing the bill for this fantasy. 

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.