Urban planner Sam Seidel, a 39-year-old candidate for Cambridge City
Council, hopes to unseat an incumbent in next week’s elections—no small
order in a city with low political turnover. In entering this race, the
progressive Democrat is willing to accept all the help he can get.
This becomes clear as a woman with an orange scarf and a brown
dog walks down into the sparse basement of a house on Mt. Auburn
Street, looking for campaign flyers. Noticing a new face in the room,
she turns to introduce herself.
“Hi,” she says. “I’m Sam’s mom.”
Resources may not be pouring in from far afield—as of
midsummer, Seidel had one-sixteenth the campaign funding of Cambridge’s
mayor—but Seidel’s local aspirations are far from narrow.
Seidel’s political platform bears the thumbprint of an urban
planner. Seidel, who holds a degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of
Design, proposes establishing wireless Internet throughout Cambridge
and making the price of parking permits proportional to the size of
vehicles that take up the city’s valuable curb space.
He says one of his greatest concerns is the relationship
between the city and its universities. Despite the cultural and
economic contributions that Harvard offers its neighbors, Seidel says
he believes that the University’s effect on the city is not beneficent.
Even so, he says Cambridge and its universities depend on each other.
“Part of what defines Cambridge, both within Cambridge itself
and the world, is the fact that there are these two major universities
here,” he says. “That is important for Cambridge’s position as a global
city—a city that is recognized throughout the world.”
Seidel says that achieving the proper balance in this
relationship requires “a complicated dance” because of Harvard’s
facilities and the constraints they place on the geographically small
city. As a nonprofit tax-exempt institution, Harvard uses public
resources—like roads and sewage channels—with no legal requirement to
pay for them. The University makes a voluntary annual payment to the
city in lieu of taxes, but politicians frequently call on Harvard to
contribute more.
“If Harvard has been here as long as Cambridge has,” Seidel says, “Cambridge has been here as long as Harvard has.”
He says institutions like Columbia University in New York City
or Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., offer examples of the positive
impact that a university can have on its surrounding community.
As an urban planner, Seidel says he believes that Harvard
should share responsibility for creating affordable housing in
Cambridge—partly because it is in the school’s own interest to do so.
Harvard, “at least anecdotally, is having trouble attracting
junior faculty” because housing costs are “outrageous” to many young
academics, Seidel says.
CLASSICAL CHALLENGER
Born in Manhattan, Seidel majored in the classics at the
University of California, Berkeley. Studying Greek democracy and the
Roman republic, he says, created in him a “sense of commitment to the
public good and public service.” By the time he came to Cambridge to
attend the Graduate School of Design in 1999, he planned to bring his
experience in the ivory tower into the public arena.
The change in his trajectory came shortly after he graduated
from Berkeley in 1988. Seidel traveled to Germany in order to learn the
language and to continue training as a classics scholar. While in
Berlin, Seidel watched the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre
unfold on both East German and West German television.
“I could hear the differing versions of the same event,”
Seidel says. “The pictures were identical—it was that student standing
in front of the tank, trying to stop the tank. But the description of
what was happening there was almost diametrically opposed.”
The experience galvanized him.
“It was at that very moment that I decided that I was not going
to pursue being an academic classicist,” Seidel says. “My interest in
politics was much greater than that, and I wanted to participate in
that realm.”
Upon returning from Germany, he spent nine years in
Washington, D.C. There, he earned a degree in public policy from
Georgetown and worked for Congressional and Executive technology
think-tanks.
Seidel says his political personality carries the mark of two
primary influences: the liberal grassroots movement channeled through
Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and Seidel’s own study of
public policy and urban planning.
“I was certainly convinced out of that last election that we
really need to start our conversation locally and bring it forward from
there. I think Howard Dean both said that and exemplified that,” he
says.
Despite his peripatetic path, Seidel’s political ambition is a local one. The odds are not in his favor, though.
“Generally, it’s very difficult for a challenger to unseat an
incumbent,” Robert Winters, creator of the Cambridge Civic Journal and
de facto dean of the Cambridge political scene, writes in an e-mail.
According to Winters, it has been three election cycles since an
incumbent lost a seat in 1999.
Glenn S. Koocher ’71, who will host local television coverage
of the election, thinks that Seidel’s relatively recent arrival on the
Cambridge scene may make it difficult for him to gain a place on the
council.
“Taking a seat means taking a vote away from someone else,” Koocher says.
In a city whose political leaders can follow a dynastic line, this may be an uphill battle.
“People are tied to their brand. There are people who have been
voting for [Mayor Michael A.] Sullivan, his father, and his uncle who
wouldn’t change that if you threatened to beat them up,” Koocher says.
Winters and Koocher disagree over the quality of Seidel’s
campaign. Winters describes Seidel as “the most credible challenger by
far.” Koocher, on the other hand, feels that Seidel is “without a
[political] base.”
“He appears like someone doing this as an intellectual exercise,” Koocher says.
But the thoughtful and soft-spoken Seidel casts off suggestions
that his approach is too academic. He says he sees his candidacy as a
“public service.”
“The current incumbents on the City Council need to know that
their jobs aren’t for free, and they’re not forever. If I do nothing
else, I make sure that the current council is working hard for [its]
job because they know that there’s a qualified challenger who is
running hard for their seat,” Seidel says.
That is a goal, surely, that even a mother would approve of.
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