The carbon impact of building a home in Cambridge is the equivalent of planting approximately 450 trees. It is more than double the benefit of switching a household to an electric car. Given the positive carbon impact of building homes in transit-connected cities like Cambridge, urban infill is one of the most effective climate mitigations we can enact by far.
Household Emissions Modelling
Using national household surveys, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley developed econometric models of demand for energy, transportation, food, goods, and services that were used to derive average household carbon footprints. Using these models, we can analyze the…
A citizen group has come forward with a petition opposed to the Missing Middle Housing Petition. There are a number of both incorrect and misleading claims on both what the MMH petition will do, and what it won’t do. While engaging in a back-and-forth is rarely productive, for the purpose of folks who might be looking to understand whether there’s any truth to these claims, I wanted to try and just explain why … they’re (mostly) wrong.
- Claim: [The MMH petition will] allow for home demolitions, evictions, and displacements to add more, larger luxury housing.
Reality: This is what’s already…
On Tuesday, March 16th, the Cambridge Planning Board will hear a petition to redevelop a property to create “two new single-family residences with one located greater than 75 feet from the street line”. At a glance, this special permit feels unnecessary, but not harmful: it looks like a relatively normal case of building backyard infill. Unfortunately, when you look deeper, what you see is that the development is not only not adding housing: it is destroying existing housing, in favor of new, less affordable homes — and it’s happening that way because this is what Cambridge’s zoning demands.
The existing homes
The property…
Looking at commercial real estate listings for multi-family apartment buildings, it is really stressful to just have a vision of “who is going to be priced out of their apartments next.”
Case Study of a Property For Sale
Today’s example is a building advertised on commercial real estate listings as having a 3.57% cap rate, with a purchase price of $2.7M. Total net income after operating expenses is listed as $96000/year, with an average 1BR rent of $1800/month, and an average 2BR rent of $2300/month.
Now, for the current owners, these rents work fine. They’re pulling in $8000/month after expenses, and bought the property in 2001 for…
It seems like site work has been started at 55 Wheeler St, which is set to become the largest residential building by units in Cambridge, MA when completed. This site is an exciting opportunity for housing, but as usual, the process has been needlessly timid and fraught with delay.
Neighborhood Defenders
The Wheeler St. special permit approval happened in January of 2018 — which immediately triggered legal action to prevent the project, involving MassDEP and indicating the owner had failed to do appropriate due diligence related to the protected wetlands status on site.
I made a new graph today, and I was honestly kind of surprised by it. It’s “number of today’s existing units in various housing types, by decade built.”
Prior to the 1930s, we were creating lots of housing in 2-fam, 3-fam, and small apartment buildings. In the 1930s, that ended.
Over the course of the 1850s until the 1920s, Cambridge evolved from single family homes to modest sized apartments — 4–8 units — being the bulk of newly constructed units… And then it stopped.
Why? Well, there’s lots of potential reasons, but zoning was introduced in 1926.
It is really…
Like many Cambridge residents, I have long found Cambridge’s model of city government confusing. While growing up, I always expected that the power to enact change where I lived would be in the hands of elected individuals. In Cambridge, much of our government is instead run by an unelected official in the form of the City Manager. Given his position as an appointee who represents much of the day to day operations of the government, I would hope that the City Manager would take that role as one where he balances his responsibilities to the priorities of the Council, and…
Earlier today, I was reading a thread on a local neighborhood mailing list, and I came across this statement from one of our local City Councillors.
When I hear “lack of supply,” it sounds almost like an accusation, as if “we”, whoever is being addressed, are somehow deficient by not providing enough of X, whatever that may be, in this case desirable housing. … This is black history month, so here’s our “history” lesson for today: gentrification and displacement are largely a continuation of America’s racist policies. The problem is not a lack of supply but a lack of equity.¹
…
While much has been made of the tendency for new construction to fetch wild prices on both the rental and condo market, it is often easy to miss the more subtle introduction of new luxury housing via conversion of existing, more moderately priced homes into high-priced units.
In 2019, a two-family home at 384 Broadway in Cambridge, Massachusetts was sold for $2,070,000. The property had 3,683 square feet of livable space, and at least one of the two units had been on the rental market in 2016 for $2500 — a low-to-middle market price rent for a likely 3 bedroom…
Over the past several decades, a renewed interest in urban living and our high-powered university scene have turned Boston and Cambridge into a worldwide draw. With massive investment in the technology and biotech industries, companies have flocked to locate in and around Boston, connecting themselves to one of the country’s better public transportation networks and a constant source of new grads trained in the latest and greatest research in their fields.
The result of this drastically increased demand across the board is growth in population and desirability — but with relatively little growth in housing supply to match. Cambridge has…
