Cambridge MA considers ending zoning for 1-2 family homes, allowing apartment buildings and row houses anywhere in the city.

The very reason the original 1-2 family home zoning was implemented in Cambridge and so many other suburbs around the country was to keep Blacks and poor people out.

So, yes, it's racist and classist.

The better solution would be to somewhat loosen zoning to allow some high density housing to be built without encouraging everyone to sell to developers and fundamentally change the nature of the neighborhood.

The idea that expensive neighborhoods must be destroyed because the people who made them possible had racist motivations in the last century is foolish.

End segregation by improving opportunities for racial minorities, not be destroying anything that you need money to acquire.

OP is clearly a Log Cabin-ite who will decry housing affordability but complain they can’t find employees to fill vacancies.

Expect cheap ugly looking apartment houses ruining charming neighborhoods.

unregulated building .... cambridge is the new houston!

r2 is racist

[quote]The very reason the original 1-2 family home zoning was implemented in Cambridge and so many other suburbs around the country was to keep Blacks and poor people out. So, yes, it's racist and classist.

People wanted out of the cities. Wanted green space. Parking. Privacy. A home of their own. A place to bring up children.

I hope they have better luck figuring out parking.

This is a car-centered country and if you have higher density housing, you’re going to have more cars and more parking wars.

I’m not a Log Cabinite. I’m a Democrat. But I often object to Progressive ideology where the analysis begins and ends by labeling some people privileged and others oppressed. The fact that zoning was originally intended, in part, to exclude racial minorities is interesting and zoning should be reconsidered without those motives, but the existence of racist motivation, especially in the past, is not the only or even the most important factor. Progressives consider it determinative.

It's still gonna be wicked expensive!

[quote] Are we still doing this shit? Claim everything is racist?

The original intent was explicitly racist. And that's why suburbs are so white. Are we going to pretend there's no racism here?

We should be allowing as much construction of new housing as possible. You know why rent is high? Why houses are expensive? Because we haven't been building nearly enough.

Good for Cambridge. Build up, densify.

The original intent may have included racism, but that was only one factor.

Suburbs are expensive because they are often attractive places to live. One of the things that makes them attracts low population density compared to urban areas. More people compete to live in them and the prices go up. Expensive places by definition exclude poor people.

The solution cannot be to destroy places poor people can’t afford. The solution has to be make fewer people poor.

“Makes them attractive is low population density.”

Densifying Cambridge is one solution, but doing so will change the character of the town in ways it is not equipped to accommodate. Why not increase the density in places that are already equipped with intense public transportation infrastructure that makes cars unnecessary?

Apartment buildings are desperately needed in the suburbs for a number of reasons. In fact, in suburb after suburb, you see lots of apartment buildings going up.

The main reason is, to keep the expensive schools funded, they need to expand their tax base. Without expanding, individual property taxes are rising way too fast. Adding more people to a town will also the help the businesses in that town. Also, the nation as a whole has a critical housing shortage, making existing housing far too expensive than it should be and intensifying the homeless crisis. Younger people see no path to home ownership.

Parts of Cambridge are near the subway and bus routes. Parts are not. Build up where it makes sense. Don’t build up where people will need cars.

Not racist; necessary. More multi-unit housing developments will cause problems with increased traffic and sc overcrowded schools.

Trying to prop up a growth-based economy while keeping the growing population out of your perfect little space is the height of hypocrisy. It's just shifting the inequality around.

[quote] Not racist; necessary. More multi-unit housing developments will cause problems with increased traffic and sc overcrowded schools.

They passed during the height of white flight. They were racist.

As for schools, around the country, school populations are decreasing dramatically. After the next two years, there will be another dramatic decline.

[quote]Local officials say single family neighborhoods are RACIST!! and they discriminate against poor people.

Demographics:

The West Village NYC: African American 2%

Tribeca NYC: African American 3%

The Upper East Side NYC: African American 3.6%

The Upper West Side NYC: African American 6.8%

Cambridge MA: African American 10.77%

As a resident of the greater Boston area for more than four decades, I can say that the cost of residential real estate in Cambridge is often greater than that of Brookline, Newton and all but the most expensive neighborhoods of Boston, on a per square foot basis. For a 1250 sq ft 2 br/2 bath condo that’s reasonably nice, you’ll pay in the neighborhood of $1.5 million in Cambridge.

No matter how much new housing is built, the real estate developers, who are major contributors to politicians’ election and re-election campaigns, will see to it that the vast majority of new housing stock is not “affordable.”

Another comment is that for many years, the Cambridgeport section of Cambridge had a substantial population of Black residents. Some of the residential real estate was publicly financed to make it affordable to lower income folks. At one time, even non-publicly-financed properties were less expensive there because the neighborhood had mixed-income residents. Now, even Cambridgeport is out of reach for many people.

[Quote] As for schools, around the country, school populations are decreasing dramatically. After the next two years, there will be another dramatic decline.

Two towns near where I live in NJ saw a large increase in population after housing developments of both single-family homes and apartment buildings. In one case a new junior high was built because the school population had increased by 17% in 2 years and in the other case the borough purchased what was previously a Catholic high school that had closed years earlier.

R24, the birth rate is near zero. The increase will not last

^ Good

Horseshit.

R25 with the arrival of millions of migrants many from a population that has a high birth rate increased housing in many communities will have an impact on schools and traffic.

R29, America is utterly desperate for immigrants of all types to do all the work.

The right may be anti-immigrant, but we need them for farming, construction, meat packing, etc etc

Progressives are destroying everything beautiful.

They need to be estopped.

It seems some of you have misinterpreted my musings, and for that I apologize. I sometimes forget that not everyone went to school in the, umm, Cambridge area like I did.

Perhaps the following image will help better make my point in terms you can all understand.

So many people posting with so much ignorance of Cambridge. It was never a streetcar suburb—much less what you nuts think of as “suburbia.” It was built up as a separate, smaller city. Think Brooklyn as it was against Manhattan, or Oakland as it was against SF.

Cambridge ALWAYS had its rich, poor and in-between sections. It had its WASP, Irish, Quebecois, Portuguese, Black, Italian and Chinese sections.

Both sides of my family were in Cambridge back to post-Civil War days. Some were well off and some poor—some came from other areas in Boston and I others arrived as immigrants. Some lived in the good parts of town and others on the wrong side of Mass Ave.

Most of you are just trafficking in generic stereotypes, not based on any actual history.

R33, we are going upon statistics and you have real experience.

I grew up in an integrated neighborhood. Police and pundits referred to me as a remnant while I thought we were mixed.

As a bigot, this was confusing. People I respected set me straight.

r8 Townhomes don't prevent people from having space, backyards, etc. And a low rise apartment in a more residential area is not a big deal.

Yeah I don’t know what the hell people are talking about in this thread about the suburbs. That has nothing to do with Cambridge. Cambridge is a city.

And in my opinion, they are using racism as a way to make new developments for white people.

Just look at Somerville and South Boston. Nasty old 200 year old double triple decker apartments being sold as condos for 600k-$1 million.

They’re trying to make more room for young yuppies.

Cambridge is a city now, but it’s actually a suburb of Boston

R38 So is Lynn. There’s nothing suburban about Lynn.

I'm sure Cambridge has a metric fuckton of NIMBYs, so I wouldn't expect much to change. Maybe on some major streets. And it'll all be "luxury" multifamily. But no one is getting their SFH torn down for Section 8 apartments or whatever the fuck some here are expecting.

R38 actually, and literally, it isn’t.

R41, just because it’s a city doesn’t mean it can’t be a suburb of a bigger city.

White Plains is basically a suburb of NYC. So are Newark and Jersey City

Here are the Merriam-Webster definitions of “suburb(s).” There’s more than one definition.

suburb noun

1a : an outlying part of a city or town

b : a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city

c suburbs plural : the residential area on the outskirts of a city or large town

2 suburbs plural : the near vicinity : ENVIRONS

Boston and Cambridge border each other, but Cambridge is NOT considered a suburb.

Most of Cambridge is quite urban.

There is nowhere left to build in Cambridge.

R45 That’s what some of us thought before developers bought and tore down a lot of industrial buildings in East Cambridge and replaced them with expensive condos and apartment buildings. There’s nearly always more space for wealthy and generous developers. Cities and towns have been known to sell municipal property at bargain prices to developers who are then very generous contributors to the campaign funds of the politicians who got the deal done.

No one who actual lives there would describe it as a suburb. I trust the people and not your generic dictionary reference.

[Quote] There is nowhere left to build in Cambridge.

There will be with rezoning which will allow single family homes and commercial properties to be replaced by apartment buildings

R44, see R43

This is not just liberal Cambridge - it’s a national trend and sensible response to our severe housing shortage.

We don’t have a severe housing shortage; we have a fucked up housing by location!

There are plenty of exurban houses out there wherein nobody with a job will move.

The white-flight neighborhoods are reaping what they’ve sown.

R51, Actually, since the whites moved back to cities over the last 20 years; there isn’t urban housing left any more

I'm surprised DL has so much ignorance about exclusionary zoning and the like. (The bitching over whether Cambridge is a "suburb" tracks, however.)

[quote]The fact that zoning was originally intended, in part, to exclude racial minorities is interesting and zoning should be reconsidered without those motives, but the existence of racist motivation, especially in the past, is not the only or even the most important factor. Progressives consider it determinative.

No, progressive consider it determinative in part, which I say as a YIMBY advocate for over a decade now. The main point was, is, and always will be constructing enough housing for people to live, and we've HUGELY fucked that up, given how insane real estate prices have gotten in major markets – in many cases due largely to overly, needlessly restrictive zoning restrictions.

[quote]Parts of Cambridge are near the subway and bus routes. Parts are not. Build up where it makes sense.

That concept is now so routine that it has its own acronym: TOD, for transit-oriented development. But you are entirely correct. Other cities that have retrofitted rail networks have explicitly done so in areas likely to generate a ton of daily trips, and by necessity that requires being within walking (or at least biking) distance of a stop.

[quote]And in my opinion, they are using racism as a way to make new developments for white people.

You should revisit that opinion. (In my opinion.) How, exactly, does NOT building housing help people of color in any way? That's rhetorical: it doesn't. Further, if you bothered to even look at many of these new development proposals, you'll see that most contain a mandatory percentage of units designated as affordable (meaning you can only make a maximum of X to qualify for it). Building more housing produces NOAH, short for naturally occurring affordable housing. NOT building it does jack shit.

This isn't rocket science, cunts.

Is there no architect that replicate William Levitt and Levittown for the modern city?

We have a huge supply of empty lots all over Las Vegas and North Las Vegas that need to be put together on paper for a low housing initiative.

I'm glad there doesn't seem to be confusion over whether Cambridge is "outlawing" single-family housing: they're not. They're copying what Minneapolis and Austin have done in recent years: eliminating single-family-ONLY residential areas. (You can still build it, but most understandably will not.)

Btw since someone mentioned it upthread: the reason why they're adding so much housing is because Americans in general have so strongly shifted away from suburban life, if at all possible – and at present it often is not, given that urban public schools are generally subpar. I know quite a few gay parents faced with the troubling question of whether to remain in a major urban area's safe confines, or relocate to a much more conservative suburb solely for the schools. I even know a few couples who've broken up over it, at least as a primary issue.