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As a predominantly pro-housing Cambridge City Council is set to take office in January, some have turned their attention to patching the holes in the city’s zoning code — tightening the restrictions on institutional development in residential neighborhoods.

When the City Council voted to eliminate single-family zoning citywide in February, they struck an exemption to the Dover Amendment, a state law that already allowed educational and religious institutions to develop larger properties. But Cambridge’s exemption to the amendment had previously barred institutions like Harvard from aggressively expanding their property.

Without the city’s exemption in place, councilors have expressed concern that Cambridge’s neighborhoods are now left vulnerable to wealthy institutions looking for new property.

Councilor Catherine “Cathie” Zusy said that, for the incoming Council, it is “imperative that we reinstitute some guidelines.”

“I think that one of the reasons that Harvard and MIT and the City of Cambridge have such a healthy relationship right now is because there are guardrails,” Zusy said.

The Council began weighing the elimination of single-family zoning in March 2024, and Zusy — who began her term on the Council in September 2024 after the death of Joan F. Pickett — has criticized the upzoning for leaving “holes” that developers can take advantage of.

Harvard Chabad — a campus Jewish organization — pushed to expand their existing Banks St. property last year, but were rejected by Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeal in May 2024. But after the upzoning was passed, Chabad was able to green-light the development of a five-story increase.

Zusy was the sole dissenter to the zoning ordinance in February, and has repeatedly attributed her opposition to a potential increase in luxury housing development, a lack of environmental protections, and the elimination of the Dover Amendment exemption.

Councilor Burhan Azeem — one of the Council’s most vocal proponents of the upzoning — argued that the Dover Amendment exemption has been overutilized by critics of multifamily zoning.

“I think that the main cudgel that people are using is, ‘because of this Dover Amendment, the multifamily housing ordinance was not well thought through,’” Azeem said.

“It was in the first slides from the first Housing Committee meeting,” he said, “I think that if some Councilor wanted to claim that they didn’t know, that’s on them. It was very clearly spelled out.”

City Solicitor Megan B. Bayer wrote in a June legal analysis provided to the Council that, with the language of the approved upzoning, they “cannot prohibit religious uses and non-profit educational uses anywhere in the City” and would need to amend the ordinance.

The Council failed to fully discuss removing the exemption to the Dover Amendment and understand the repercussions of the decision, according to Councilor Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80.

“During the discussions, it was brought up by city staff in a couple memos, it was brought up by some members of the public, but honestly, we did not fully discuss it,” Nolan said.

Nolan said that there is a legitimate concern that institutions will begin purchasing land in residential neighborhoods, and that the Council must have conversations with institutions moving forward.

“I think the real question is, what are their intentions?” Nolan said, “For Harvard and MIT there's so many other ways that we're bound together as a city, that we need to have those conversations with them.”

The goal of the upzoning was to “create as much housing as possible for residents in our community, regardless of university affiliation,” according to Melissa A. Peters, the city’s assistant city manager for community development.

“Removal of the Dover Amendment exception was a known consequence of the zoning changes, but was not the purpose of them,” she wrote in an email.

In a September meeting of the Neighborhood & Long Term Planning, Public Facilities, Arts & Celebration Committee, MIT spokesperson Sarah E. Gallop said MIT had no plans to make use of its allowed development in Cambridge.

“Can you imagine our asserting rights to do something that you don't really want us to do?” Gallop said, “That doesn’t make for good community.”

Thomas J. Lucey, who represented Harvard at the meeting, said that Harvard similarly does not plan to expand into Cambridge. The University has reached their goal of being able to house 50 percent of graduate students, he said.

“We have a very mature campus. It’s a very stable campus,” Lucey said, “So the notion that we’d be expanding in Cambridge just isn't accurate.”

Still, Zusy said that — even when revisiting zoning restrictions for these institutions — the Council needs to work to support more graduate student housing to prevent students from competing with Cambridge residents in an already oversaturated housing market.

“There are 8,000 graduate students that live off campus. We want Harvard and MIT to build more housing, and we need to make it easier,” Zusy said.

—Staff writer Mackenzie L. Boucher can be reached at mackenzie.boucher@thecrimson.com.