It is a city comfortably settled, it is a city ripe for development, it is
city in need of housing for families and those with low incomes, it is a
city that hopes to lower rents and create housing by building
towers for the wealthy, it is a city dedicated to improving the lives of its
current residents, it is a city committed to bringing in new people and new
revenue streams at the expense of current residents, it is a city whose roads
and T-stations are already overcrowded, it is a city that wants to believe more
capacity remains, it is a city that needs a citywide study to determine the
city’s future, it is a city that wants to blindly step on the gas to keep
things moving. It is a city still liveable, it is a city whose liveability is
on the selling block.
Whatever you believe about the City of
Cambridge: believe this…it is on the cusp of change. Big change. The kind of
change that comes when you add over 18 million square feet of NEW development
to a city already densely populated. That’s 18 million square feet of new labs,
offices and residences, ADDITIONAL to what’s here today! Which will generate
over 100,000 ADDITIONAL car and transit trips a day.
If the Community Development Department
hadn’t spent most of its time and psychic energy trying to bring in more
development, rather than helping us prepare for the future, we in the community who care about such things might actually be
engaged in a sensible discussion on what the City of Cambridge should be doing
to prepare for this virtual tsunami on the horizon. We might be studying
possible impacts on our schools, on our air quality, on our city streets, on
city services, and on dozens of other aspects of our lives.
But instead, rather than study and
anticipate the impacts of all this developmental activity, our civic leaders
appear to be caught up in a dance that has them pandering to it, inviting more
in, treating developers as the solution rather than just more of the same
problem. And the Community Development Department, our agents of change and
preservation, often appears to be working more for the interests of development than the community, as if maximizing developer profits was the only way to gain
concessions for the city.
There’s an interesting parallel you can
draw between what’s happening here in Cambridge and the effort nationally of
rich and powerful interests to control the debate as they maximize their
profits (or tax advantages). Isn’t this the same as their trickle-down economic
theory—that we’ll award some lucky millionaire the rights to build 15 story
apartment towers with 130 apartments, and thus help him earn many extra millions of
dollars, as long as he doles out 15-20 of those apartments for our poorer
citizens? Isn’t that another way of saying we should live off the largess of
our job creators, eating whatever crumbs trickle down to us, and in
return we tax them less than we tax their secretaries?
But fear not! We’ll not spend a second
of time pondering the fate of our schools or the congestion of our roads,
rather we’ll argue and plead our case against the gradual diminishment of
Cambridge one zoning petition at a time, one preliminary set of recommendations
at a time, one City Council hearing at a time, one Oped at a time. All in the interest of the destiny and long-term well-being of this city we love.
There were two meetings last week that
reflected this tale of two Cambridges in the flesh. Meeting Number One was held
by the Central Square Advisory Committee, overseen and guided by the Community Development
Department (CDD). In which the committee publically reviewed their final draft of
recommendations for the rezoning of Central Square. Meeting Number Two, held by
the Cambridge Residents Alliance, was a community-led forum on transportation.
In Meeting Number One, The Community
Development Department offered a long involved presentation with slides, but
the ugly truth could not be hidden. They were recommending building heights of
140 feet in a Central Square neighborhood that had long served as a buffer zone
between the square and the neighborhood. Now they were zoning for 14 or
15 or 16-story apartment towers in an overlay district that essentially expanded the
Central Square footprint to include the two streets that run parallel to Mass Ave. on
either side. This overlay district was designed so that city-owned land, a
series of parking lots and a two-story garage, could now be sold off to
developers and, possibly, used for residential projects.
So what, you might ask, is the big deal? There must be tradeoffs for having such out-of-scale buildings casting shadows on our
neighborhood… Of course there is, the community gets back a set percentage
of the units, usually 11-15%, to be set aside for low- or middle-income folks.
What if the neighborhood doesn’t want
the shadows, or the noise, or the congestion, or the added newcomers further
crowding an already crowded T-ride?
And what if the neighbors actually do want the low- and middle-income units that come with the towers?
Let’s build
them ourselves! Only not as towers. Once we let go of satisfying the gluttony
of developers we can actually look at building structures appropriate to the
site and to the neighborhood. We can be just as resourceful as the developers,
since we'll be building small and efficient instead of big and expensive. “We”
being the City of Cambridge, of course—with PCA funds, or by digging up all possible
sources of funding before we’d ever think of defacing the neighborhood with
sky-blocking towers.
In the other meeting, Meeting Number
two, late Saturday afternoon, men and women who not surprisingly support the
city building its own small-scale affordable housing communities, were gathering to present a forum on the grim future realities of real estate and transportation in
Cambridge. Hoping that by presenting the facts, they might also help shape the
city’s future. Right now, the millions
of dollars that come with development are driving both the discussion and the city’s
actions, they're certainly not driven by the needs of the city or its residents.
In Meeting Number One, Cambridge was served up as a side of beef to be chopped up into its different cuts. 140 feet of height in one district, 160 feet of height in the next. Or should we call them Rib Cut and Pork Chop?
In Meeting Number Two, Cambridge was seen as a gem whose facets can be easily scratched, and thus need protection. It's our very diversity and liveability, now at risk from over-development, that makes us so attractive to those who would come in to share our city, all the more reason for not allowing market realities to dominate our thinking or treat us roughly.
Meeting Number One continued to ignore the fact that 18 million new square
feet of development is coming to Cambridge. Bringing more cars, bicyclists,
T-riders and bus passengers than the present systems can handle.
Meeting Number Two attempted to
thwart the misguided lurch towards weakening our zoning protections, that was coming out of Meeting Number One .
Meeting Number Two envisioned a Cambridge
whose delicate intertwining of races, economic groups—blue collar and white—is a rare and beautiful thing that needs to be protected, while Meeting Number
One saw a Cambridge whose liveability, liberality and academic propinquity were
merely happy underpinnings of its highly sexy, and highly priced, real estate
market. And too much of a good thing can't be all bad, can it?
In the end, of course, one vision will
win out. Whether it’s the Voice of Money finally convincing us to let the investors and
big developers make more money off our city so that a few of us can eke out better
lives. Or if it’s the Voice of Reason asking us to be good stewards of this
city we have been handed down. A voice that believes the abiding principle in
steering Cambridge towards the future must be borrowed from the Hippocratic
oath, “First, Do No Harm!”
There were two meetings last week that
were sharply focused on where we see Cambridge evolving. They were also sharply
divided, one calling for expanding higher-rise development, the other calling
for a temporary halt to all up-zoning, so we can study and prepare for what the future is sending our way.
Which meeting spoke to you?
Cambridge is Two Cities
It is a city comfortably settled, it is a city ripe for development, it is
city in need of housing. It is a city that hopes to create housing by building
towers for the wealthy, it is a city dedicated to improving the lives of its
current residents, it is a city committed to bringing in new people and new
revenue streams at the expense of current residents, it is a city whose roads
and T-stations are already overcrowded, it is a city that wants to believe more
capacity remains, it is a city that badly needs a citywide study, it is a city
that wants to blindly keep things moving. It is a city still liveable, it is a
city whose liveability is on the selling block. It is a city some of us love, it is a
city some would love to develop.
Posts
Who gave the rich and powerful, not to mention angry
conservatives, the right to set both the agenda and the topic of discussion for
America’s civil intercourse? And who decided they were allowed to purchase
outright the entire American political process, as they attempted to do this
last election? Happily, there were a lot of votes they couldn’t buy. And a lot
of discerning voters they couldn’t instruct on what to believe. But they made
such a racket clamoring for their negative agenda, the media seemed unable to
hear or discern the quieter voices engaged in the process. 
