And the people need more roofs over their heads
In a recent opinion piece, Suzanne Preston Blier argued that Cambridge is threatened by the “wrong kind of growth” and that we must “preserve the soul of our communities…. [and] reclaim the ground beneath our feet.” In a follow-up, she wrote that the people who live in their communities do not get to decide what their neighborhoods become. She also notes that “democracy isn’t just about elections.”
These arguments ring hollow. There are more than 21,000 families on the Cambridge Housing Authority’s waitlist. Each of those families hopes for the day when they’ll secure stable, safe, and dignified housing. For most, that day will never come. But for some, there’s reason to hope: on February 10, the Cambridge City Council voted eight to one to legalize multi-family dwellings across the city. The City legalized the kind of housing that many people in Cambridge already rely on, and many hope to find. We legalized the kind of housing I was born in and spent the first years of my life in.
To Blier, apartment buildings represent the “wrong kind of growth.” For my parents, newly married and building a young family in Holyoke, an apartment represented the right kind of growth. We were part of the soul of that community.
Blier seems to dismiss the urgency of the housing crisis in her second piece (“We’re told to step aside because massive change is ‘urgent’ or simply about ‘adding more.’”). For those on the CHA waitlist, housing insecurity is not something you put in quotation marks. It’s something that you think about every hour of the day. My clients who are homeless or on fixed Social Security Disability payments know it well, too. As do my friends who debate leaving Cambridge as rent increases loom.
I do not pretend that there is a magic bullet for skyrocketing rents. The February multifamily ordinance will not solve everything. But it will lead to more homes. That means more roofs over people’s heads. It means that some will finally be able to get off CHA’s waitlist. And every person who finds stable housing matters.
Cambridge, like much of the country, has spent decades underbuilding, as if our parents’ children would never leave home. This chronic undersupply has caught up with us, with the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment hitting $3,600 per month. At the same time, the share of rent-burdened families in the city has paradoxically decreased because of the widespread displacement of middle-income families. These families have had their civic voice erased by rent hikes. I guess Blier was right—democracy isn’t just about elections, it’s about being able to live in the city in the first place.
On the campaign trail in Cambridge, people I talk to share the same story: they’re tired of housing policy that’s been rigged against them. They’re tired of being talked down to by the same people who pulled the ladder up after themselves. They’re tired of struggling to fulfill basic needs that are taken for granted in other countries. They don’t see Cambridge as soil that needs to be “reclaimed.” They see it as the place they want to raise their kids. The place they came to study or work and fell in love with. The place where they were born and lived their entire lives. They love this wonderful, diverse city that represents something good in a country on a bad course. These people are part of the soul of Cambridge, and they will vote in the upcoming City Council election.
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