“The only difference between me and Dan Rather is his paycheck,” Dixon says wryly.

Through his campaign, Dixon says he hopes to return to a better time in Cambridge history.

Dixon says he recalls a time when Cambridge was full of “stable families and stable communities.”

But now, he says, Cambridge is a city dominated by higher-income, short-term residents. Much of his constituency has left Cambridge due to the increased cost of housing after rent control was ended by a statewide referendum in 1994, he says.

“There used to be a balance between people who lived here, people who worked here, and people who were educated here,” Dixon says.

When Dixon went into his neighborhood to campaign, he found that most residents were recent arrivals from cities all across the country, instead of Cambridge natives.

Like most council candidates, Dixon —who says he is “pro-tenant, but not anti-landlord”—would like to create more affordable housing.

Describing the city’s current Affordable Housing Trust Fund as “weak,” Dixon advocates the creation of an endowment which would provide greater funding for housing initiatives. Under Dixon’s proposal, income from the endowment would be used to support mortgages for first-time home buyers.

Dixon, who was home-schooled by his parents from kindergarten though high school and holds a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, also has ideas for major changes in education.

“You can’t have civilization without genuine education,” he says.

Dixon proposes that the City Council have greater control over education than the current state Proposition 2 1/2 requires. Instead of having the City Council simply approve or reject the School Committee’s budget, Dixon says he wants the council to be able to amend the school budget.

With the recent restructuring of Cambridge Rindge and Latin (CRLS), for example, Dixon says the School Committee has not gotten the job done.

“After a year, they still don’t have a fully developed plan,” he says.

In contrast to the restructuring plan,

he encourages more tracking in Cambridge’s public secondary education.