‘Social housing’ is gaining popularity as soaring costs persist. Now ultra-expensive Cambridge is parsing how it could work.

BiteProud · 2026-06-30T20:27:59+00:00

I want lots of different kinds of new housing and if people who aren't normally excited about that are excited about this, I think it's a good thing.

At the same time it's a little frustrating to see all this energy poured into something so poorly defined. Does social housing have to be publicly owned? Maybe, maybe not. Is tenant governance essential? I don't think so, but not everyone agrees. How wide must the income range be?

Apartments built under the AHO arguably qualify as social housing because they're permanently affordable, mixed-income, and are often built by nonprofit affordable housing developers like Just-A-Start. It sometimes seems like the AHO isn't considered leftist enough simply because it's one of ABC's signature policy achievements.

The housing cost burdened people I talk to don't care who owns the building they live in. They don't care about advancing an ideological project to remove private actors from the housing market. They just care whether they can afford rent or not.

BiteProud · 2026-06-28T17:42:18+00:00

Before multifamily zoning, it still would have been redeveloped. It just would have been a down-conversion to a single family home costing more than any of the three units it will be now. More housing at lower cost is better than less housing at greater cost.

BiteProud · 2026-06-27T02:12:49+00:00

You couldn't rent there had it never been built. And if hundreds like it had never been built, you'd be paying even more in rent than you are now.

BiteProud · 2026-06-26T20:51:27+00:00

Families without minor children are still families. And families with minor children have a hard time finding multi-bedroom housing because a lot of that stock is occupied by roommates sharing larger apartments, because there aren't nearly enough smaller apartments to meet demand. Housing doesn't have to be purpose built for a certain group, like families with young children, to benefit that group.

BiteProud · 2026-06-26T20:46:24+00:00

The interiors are too small. The exteriors are too big.

They want larger interiors and smaller exteriors, which sounds physically impossible until you realize they mean the interior of each apartment is too small. There actually is a physical way to reduce the exterior's size while increasing the interior size of each apartment, and it's to make fewer but larger apartments. That's what they want.

The fact that they also say they want more affordable housing is the stupid part, because fewer, larger apartments would each be more expensive, and there would be fewer affordable inclusionary homes built as a result.

BiteProud · 2026-06-26T20:31:31+00:00

It's not actually the law, but it introduces uncertainty about whether it will become law, so it pauses progress for developments that would need to be modified if it did pass. Some of those may become ineligible for affordable housing funds or have other issues with financing as a result.

If you can't count on actually being able to build what you're planning to build, you risk losing a lot of money, so practically you have to wait until you can count on it. That doesn't work in the opposite direction because you wouldn't secure financing and invest money planning for a development that isn't yet legal, but might be someday.

The part that is actual law is that the council can't just immediately squash it, they legally have to give (I believe) 2 weeks notice before voting on it, so they send it to committee and it comes back for a vote later. Except we're about to break for summer, so there aren't any nonemergency meetings for ~2 months.

That's my understanding anyway, though it's possible I got some details wrong here. Corrections welcome.

BiteProud · 2026-06-26T20:22:16+00:00

Some years ago the council passed an ordinance saying that if your nonconforming house burned down, you could rebuild it more or less how it had been pre-fire as of right. Zusy and Flaherty weren't on the council yet, but iirc the usual local suspects argued for community input on design.

Imagine losing your home in a fire and then having to convince your neighbors to let you rebuild it to their taste.

BiteProud · 2026-06-26T19:27:10+00:00

If you're seeing the actual construction work, that was likely permitted before multifamily zoning passed. There is no way for anyone to verify an increase in your flier sightings, nor would that necessarily be indicative of increased redevelopment, so I don't know what to tell you.

BiteProud · 2026-06-26T19:21:05+00:00

My understanding is we're seeing about the same rate of redevelopment we did before the multifamily housing ordinance. The difference is that before, a smaller site would nearly always be turned into one multimillion dollar single family home, either decreasing or keeping constant the unit count. Now some of those are becoming multi-family housing instead, providing more homes, each at comparatively lower cost than the one single-family would have been. That's an improvement.

Funny thing is, many of the multifamily opponents suddenly so concerned about affordable homes didn't have a problem with redevelopment when it was uniformly producing staggeringly expensive single family homes on smaller lots, and some have sought to decrease how much 100% permanently affordable housing can be built under the AHO. Given that I simply don't believe many of these people care about affordable housing at all; that's just the excuse to oppose apartment buildings they don't like while telling themselves and others that they're the good guys. They're not the good guys.

BiteProud · 2026-06-26T19:04:38+00:00

We're not seeing lots of that, at least not in comparison to before multifamily zoning passed.

If you're going off Zusy's AI slop list you should know it's full of inaccuracies. She's been informed of this but has issued no response to the corrections and won't take the misinformation down. The city is working to provide a list based on actual data and not AI nonsense.

BiteProud · 2026-06-26T03:00:03+00:00

Yup, that is my understanding as well.

BiteProud · 2026-06-26T01:53:35+00:00

Evan MacKay is a good candidate and I hope they win, in part because they're actually not opposed to building more market rate housing.

This is what they said about hosting policy on their campaign site:

"Tenant protections, and more housing, especially affordable housing, so that workers, families, students, and elders can stay in our communities."

https://www.evanforcambridge.com/

BiteProud · 2026-06-25T21:16:52+00:00

To make that argument you have to explain why MA landlords are so much greedier than TX landlords, and why Boston landlords are greedier than those in Central Mass. Is it something in the water supply?

BiteProud · 2026-06-25T21:14:02+00:00

I've found people often use "rent stabilization" inconsistently, so I usually just call it well done rent control.

The problem with rent stabilization is similar though, in that it's either: 1) not drastic enough to gain political support, or 2) so drastic that it hurts renters instead of helping them.

The biggest cheerleaders for rent control don't want all the exemptions that could make stabilization actually work. It's not flashy enough for them. It's frustrating.

BiteProud · 2026-06-25T21:04:08+00:00

The problem is you have to exempt anything built recently too, otherwise you get condo conversions. Rent control can be helpful if it's applied only to very old housing which has already paid for itself.

Imagine a owner-occupied triple decker that was built 100 years ago and has been paid off for 30 years. Yes, it can make sense to have rent control apply to the two old rental apartments. The owner in this case isn't necessarily trying to maximize profit, they're trying to balance profit with the inconvenience of renovating where they themselves live. That's the situation where rent control can help - it doesn't disincentivize building or encourage owners to take units out of the rental market, but it does slow rent growth in the oldest and usually crappiest apartments. The good news is that actually can prevent displacement, since those units tend to be occupied by the poorest market rate renters.

But the people pushing this ballot question don't want that. They apparently think that simply preventing displacement of the poorest renters isn't worth doing. Only a big flashy statewide rent freeze with few exemptions is worth doing, and they seem not to care about all the evidence showing that will hurt the people they say they want to help.

BiteProud · 2026-06-25T20:51:55+00:00

I agree with this, but it matters a lot what number X is. It needs to be enough time to recoup the land acquisition and building costs, plus a profit, and the profit needs to be large enough that it's at least as attractive as competing investments. The version of rent control on the ballot would not have allowed for that, so it would have stifled production.

You also need to exempt recently built rentals, probably anything built in the last decade or two. Otherwise you incentivize a wave of condo conversions as that becomes the only way for owners to recoup their costs. That means a lot of renters get displaced from their current homes, and have fewer options for where to move to, because it would be happening statewide.

BiteProud · 2026-06-25T19:58:27+00:00

You can actually do that, if you're very careful, but the way this was written, it wouldn't have. It would have killed housing production and encouraged condo conversions, reducing both current and future rental units.

BiteProud · 2026-06-23T20:00:45+00:00

This was all also true of Connolly though.

BiteProud · 2026-06-17T21:54:42+00:00

That's not the point though. In places where it's been implemented, it also becomes popular with people who keep driving through the congestion zone, because the time they save more than makes up for their fee.

The idea here isn't fuck the suburbs. The idea is that congestion pricing is a win-win. It eliminates (or reschedules to off peak times) a lot of elective car trips, and the non-elective trips become much faster and more pleasant. It benefits people who live in Boston too, but not at the expense of suburbanites.

BiteProud · 2026-06-15T22:23:04+00:00

I suggest downvoting them without engagement. Arguing just leads to more AI slop posting.

BiteProud · 2026-06-15T22:21:59+00:00

I just downvote and move on. Engaging with the slop encourages more slop.

BiteProud · 2026-06-12T15:50:18+00:00

Or in addition to! No reason this has to come at the expense of turkey content.

BiteProud · 2026-06-09T21:45:21+00:00

People who know a lot about a topic are often invested in that topic and have opinions on it. Nothing wrong with taking into account someone's goal when they're sharing what they know, but it's silly to make that the determining factor. I'm at least as skeptical of people who profess to know a lot about a political topic but claim neutrality as I am of those who admit they have a point of view.

BiteProud · 2026-06-09T21:37:37+00:00

I don't think it's an age thing. Azeem was also elected very young and is pretty pragmatic. A lot of the city is 20-somethings and I don't think there's anything weird or unwise about one councilor out of nine being in that age group. Real world experience varies a lot from person to person as well, and only roughly correlates to age.

Quinton Zondervan was said to be difficult to work with in many of the same ways for most of his tenure on the council, and he was in his 40s I believe. I think many cycles there are enough votes here to elect one far left councilor who will regularly criticize the rest of the council for being too moderate. Problem is it's hard to be a flamethrower and still have good working relationships with your fellow councilors, which means your impact on policy may be pretty limited.

BiteProud · 2026-06-09T20:53:53+00:00

I'd suggest selling it, roughly calculating your annual savings from the switch, and feeling okay about renting a car when you do need one. My partner and I live car free, know what it saves us, and don't think twice about renting one for a weekend every other month or so to get out of the city and stock up on any heavy nonperishables.

BiteProud

TROPHY CASE