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A Better Cambridge, a pro-development housing advocacy group, brought candidates together to make their pitch for proposals to tackle the city’s housing affordability problem.
There, moderators from ABC — an influential nonprofit, associated with a super PAC, whose endorsements often define the slate of more progressive candidates in elections — asked contenders to stake out their positions on rezoning neighborhoods to increase their density and expanding social housing while conserving the historical character of the city.
With some hoping to win a valuable endorsement from the ABC, 15 of the 20 city council candidates came to the forum after filling out a survey meant to help the organization decide its endorsement picks.
The upcoming city council is currently overseeing several rezonings of main thoroughfares in the city, including Central Square, northern Massachusetts Avenue, and Cambridge Street.
The effort in Central Square, which is the official downtown area of Cambridge, has brought up questions over whether the area is ready for rezoning, and just how tall the city should allow new developments to be.
Asked about their approach to the rezoning of Central Square and whether they would support allowing 18-story buildings in the area, most candidates deferred to “community input.”
After several candidates gave longer answers on whether it would be appropriate to allow 18-story buildings in Central, Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern — who is running for his seventh term on the Council — won applause with his one-word response: “Yes.”
“In general, I favor building big and tall along the main arteries,” challenger Peter Hsu said.
Sitting councilor Ayesha M. Wilson said she was “not afraid of height, but what I am worrying about is not investing in community input.”
A majority of the candidates in attendance were incumbents, including Wilson, McGovern, Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80, Burhan Azeem, Sumbul Siddiqui, Jivan G. Sobrinho-Wheeler, Catherine “Cathie” Zusy, and Cambridge Mayor E. Denise Simmons.
The other seven candidates comprised challengers Hsu, Ned S. Melanson, Ayah Al-Zubi ’23, Zion N. Sherin, Stanislav Rivkin, Dana R. Bullister, and write-in Louise Venden.
Though Simmons was scheduled to participate in the second half of the forum, she arrived close to the end, citing “a family that has been ensnared in a fast evolving situation” with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Though Simmons said the situation involved imminent threats from ICE, she did not indicate that there had been a detention or arrest.
As they discussed specific affordable housing policies the candidates would support, several cited social housing developments, or mixed-income public housing, as a priority.
Melanson proposed “using public funds to pay for those affordable units, which I think is really important to me.”
“We could beg and plead the market to build affordable units, but my own experience in my life is that the market’s just going to do what the market’s going to do,” he added.
In an interview after the forum, Sobrinho-Wheeler explained that, in Cambridge, social housing developments could be funded using the Affordable Housing Trust.
“That is what we do now for 100 percent affordable housing. We could think about that for social housing as well, or have another fund,” he added.
Asked about the balance of maintaining historical structures with continued development of affordable housing units, the majority of candidates said that the two objectives do not have to be in opposition.
“We are going to talk to experts and professionals in terms of defining historic, because similar to medicine and life, we want to achieve some kind of balance,” Hsu said. “And the balance is more housing, neighborhood preservation.”
While McGovern agreed, he questioned if all Cambridge history ought to be conserved.
“I understand you know about the neighborhood characteristics,” he said, “but we also have to understand why that happens and the history of zoning in this country, and in this city, is not always something that we should be terribly proud of.”
—Staff writer Dionise Guerra-Carrillo can be reached at dionise.guerracarrillo@thecrimson.com.
— Staff writer Jack B. Reardon can be reached at jack.reardon@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @JackBReardon.
