Building Our Way to Equity: A Convenient Fallacy
Over the last dozen years or so, I’ve watched my small, wealthy, city of Cambridge MA grapple with how to create a more resilient and equitable community. How to provide more affordable housing. How to encourage more sustainable transportation. And the response to these problems is always the same: build. Build more bike lanes, separate them from cars, raise pedestrian crosswalks. Build more housing, mandate affordable units. Build. Build. Build.
We spend millions ripping up and realigning streets to enhance our bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure. Yet the relationship between vehicle drivers, cyclists and pedestrians remains tense, and a local pedestrian or cyclist still gets killed every year. Why? Because we’re trying to build our way out of the problem instead of addressing the behavioral changes that would actually create a safer city.
We are all-in on spending money for pedestrian ‘improvements,’ but we don’t actually enforce the rules that will make pedestrians safe. Since Cambridge adopted Vision Zero in 2016, the city speed limit has been reduced to 20 miles per hour. Hand-held phone use is prohibited while driving. But I’ve never seen those laws enforced. Recently, I entered the crosswalk on Concord Ave. State law requires a vehicle to stop before any pedestrian in the cross walk. But no law can protect me from two tons of velocitized steel, and so when I stepped off the curb and signaled intent to cross, I hesitated to ensure the approaching car actually stopped. A Lexus streamed through, at more than twenty miles per hour, the driver chatting and holding her phone. Regardless what the law says, if I’d exercised my right-of-way, I’d be dead.
Our build, build, build approach to housing is even more disingenuous. More new housing units were built in Cambridge in the decade of 2010–2020 than any time since the 1920’s; thousands of condos; millions of square feet of new construction. Our population increased — some — but the new units did not absorb the increased demand, nor come anywhere close to meeting our future demand. Add in the reality that, unless a dwelling unit in Cambridge is subsidized, it’s unaffordable to anyone without a top income.
How is it that we can build so much and not dent housing demand? Because family sizes are shrinking, so we have fewer people in each dwelling unit. Because the city has long history of two and three family dwellings, many of which are now being converted into singles. Because the city has restrictive zoning that makes ancillary dwellings difficult. Because we limit congregate living. Because we are unwilling to upset any aspect of the status quo — i.e. current homeowners and voters — in order to achieve broader objectives.
The Cambridge City Council is a dedicated and responsive body — usually. Yet when I wrote to each of my councilors and outlined five ways we could both increase the city’s population and provide more housing opportunities by better utilizing our existing housing stock, not one of them even responded. New housing units bring in additional tax revenue without threatening their constituents, but rethinking our existing stock to shelter more people without new construction upsets existing, entrenched, Cambridge residents without bringing in any new revenue. Viable, sustainable change for our city: dead on arrival.
We will never build our way to an equitable society as long as the general needs of the many take a backseat to the wealthy few. As long as the rich and entitled find favor with the City of Cambridge; as long as they can motor as they please, unhindered, and turn two and three family houses into grand singles, as long as the clout of money trumps the lip service of fairness, we’ll never achieve the equitable society we proclaim to want.
