Scott Van Voorhis
Goodbye, People’s Republic of Cambridge; you’ll be sorely missed by columnists and right-wing wits everywhere.
Maybe it’s time to rethink Cambridge’s old reputation as a loony bin of ultra-left ideas after the watershed City Council elections earlier this month.
A coalition of neighborhood activists, determined to slam the brakes on Cambridge’s development boom and pretty much ban new high-end apartment towers, failed miserably in its attempt to take over the City Council.
“We must stop the over-development train that is running swiftly down the track,” shouts the Cambridge Residents Alliance on its website.
Instead, a “Unity Slate” of veteran city councilors mostly won the day in a victory for a more common-sense, market-based approach to the challenges faced by a city that has become a global hotspot for the life science and tech industries.
All the new researchers and techies that have flocked to Kendall Square and East Cambridge to work in the giant new labs and office complexes have swelled Cambridge’s population, helping drive home prices and rents through the roof.
The outcome of Cambridge’s City Council election, in turn, ensures that the city will continue to try to shape, not shut down, new development, including a wave of expensive new apartments being built across the city.
The Revolution That Wasn’t
The Cambridge Residents Alliance, or CRA as it is known, had high hopes for November’s city elections, having put up a slate of five candidates – dubbed the “fab five” – in hopes of forcing its anti-big-development agenda on the city. Instead, just one of the five candidates backed by the group made it onto the council, Jan Devereux.
Maybe the grassroots passion and anger over new development just didn’t materialize as the activist group had hoped. But it’s also hard not to see in the vote a rejection as well of the anti-everything agenda pushed by the Cambridge Residents Association.
And what was that agenda?
Where many of us see jobs, progress and the advancement of science and technology in the millions of square feet of new labs and office space in Kendall Square and across Cambridge, the CRA instead sees greedy corporations and developers flooding the city streets with unwanted traffic and overwhelming the streetscape with mega projects.
All that development, in turn, is also driving up home prices and rents, the group contends, with new luxury apartment towers and buildings steadily gentrifying Cambridge neighborhoods and forcing out long-time residents.
“Bio-tech and high-tech corporations are bringing thousands of new, highly paid employees to Cambridge, many of whom want to live here,” the group declares in a manifesto on the supposed perils of Cambridge’s development market. “With more than 18 million square feet of new office, lab and high-end residential space projected, redevelopment is putting tremendous pressure on the housing market.”
Basically, the CRA wants to slow down or cut down to size what it sees as the source of all these problems – the building boom that is making Cambridge such a destination, both for the world’s top companies and their employees. And the group takes an even harder line on some of the new, high-end apartment projects taking shape; it wants to push developers to build affordable housing instead.
Basically, it’s a vision of using government – in this case, the Cambridge City Council – to force its will on the local economy and the housing market, curbing some forms of development and ordering up others – such as more subsidized housing.
Where Vision Meets Reality
OK, it would be great if Big Daddy city government could simply set things straight with our messed-up housing market, setting all those greedy luxury apartment developers straight, but things don’t work that way in the real world. If anything, the plans put forth by Cambridge activists would have the opposite effect, making the city even more unaffordable while killing valuable jobs. It would simply make available housing in Cambridge even more of a scarce commodity, further driving up costs to buyers and renters.
The problem isn’t that too many high-end apartments are getting built in Cambridge. Rather, it’s that the city – like the rest of the state – has been far too restrictive for far too long when it comes to letting new housing of every type get built.
Stifling zoning rules – combined with predictably combative neighborhood activists and outright NIMBY opposition – make building any project an endurance test while taking badly needed development sites out of circulation. The result has been a shortage of building sites, which, in turn, keeps the lid on how much can be built while driving up the cost of raw real estate, especially in a city like Cambridge.
Faced with such hassles and costs, developers predictably opt for more expensive, luxury units.
The only solutions is to build our way out of this mess – not, as in the case of the Cambridge activists and their anti-development platform, killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Don’t take my word for it. Northeastern University economist and housing market guru Barry Bluestone took on the Cambridge antis in an op-ed piece in the Cambridge Chronicle in the run-up to the Cambridge City Council elections earlier this month.
Bluestone took some heat for the piece. At one point, he got a little carried away and questioned whether support for the Cambridge Residents Association was in part driven by city landlords and real estate speculators looking to keep the supply of new housing down and prices up.
But the main point stands strong.
“The constraints on development in the past have led precisely to the exorbitant home prices and rents we have today,” Bluestone wrote in a response to his critics. “We can only change that trajectory through innovative housing designs and zoning regulations that permit a lot more housing in the city. Otherwise, only the rich will be living here a decade from now.”
