“We are in a place where in the next few years it’ll become a rarity for seniors to afford to live here,” said City Council candidate Jefferson R. Smith. “What we should be doing is looking a little bit deeper into where that senior housing can be located, and what are good, cheap, affordable options, and what the city can be doing to make sure that seniors can stay in their homes.”

NO SILVER BULLET

While the issue of affordable housing has recently been a cause for debate within the Council, in part because of the Kendall Square rezoning, Cambridge has struggled to provide affordable housing to low-income residents for decades.

In 1971, a grassroots coalition of tenants gathered on the steps of Cambridge City Hall to call on the City Council for the implementation of rent control. Their demands were met, and for the next 24 years, the city enforced strict caps on rent increases. In 1994, after intense lobbying from landlords, Massachusetts residents voted to abolish rent control in cities and towns across the state, including Cambridge. The end of rent control resulted in an upsurge of property value in Cambridge, adding almost $2 billion to the value of the city’s housing stock over the next 10 years, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. In a 1995 Crimson article, former City Councilor Anthony D. Galluccio called these prices “artificially inflated.”

According to candidate Elie Yarden, rent control can “make an orderly market for people who need a place to live, who need shelter.” Yarden said he supports the return of rent control.

Although rent control established affordable housing for Cambridge’s low-income residents, other Council candidates say it disincentivized development in the city and hindered the increase of housing stock.

“[Rent control] introduces so many distortions to the market. It incentivized landlords to not upkeep on the properties–to not try to benefit their properties,” Leslie said.

The end of rent control opened the city up to developers, but some councillors said that the new housing favored wealthier residents and pushed low-income families out of the city.

“What happened in Cambridge since the abolition of rent control has been an enormous new supply of condominiums that cater mainly to singles,” said candidate James Lee.

After the abolishment of rent control, the Council implemented the Inclusionary Housing Program, which requires that developers set aside 15 percent of a building’s proposed units as affordable housing units. Since its inception in 1988, inclusionary zoning has created more than 450 units of affordable housing.

Leslie called the Inclusionary Housing Program a “holdover from rent control” and said that the program should be considered a “tool in the kit bag” for alleviating Cambridge’s housing pressures.

According to Leslie, the issue of affordable housing in Cambridge is one which, in the end, offers no obvious solution.

“There’s no silver bullet,” he said.

INCREASING HOUSING STOCK

For many of the candidates, the responsibility for the lack of affordable housing in Cambridge falls on the city’s two largest universities: Harvard and MIT.