A Vote for the Community

I grew up a block from a major university, constantly hearing my father badmouth the students who surrounded us. They hosted loud parties that lasted till the wee hours, crammed the streets with too many cars, drove the rents up by packing into small apartments and just generally didn’t care about our community. As students moved in, families moved out, and the neighborhood took on a transient character. “Student” sounds like an insult in my father’s mouth; he spits it out as though no further explanation were needed.

It is strange for me to realize that I am now one of the students that the neighbors must resent so bitterly. Here at Harvard, we generally live on campus, so we do not intrude into the Cambridge neighborhood. We don’t drive families out. We don’t disturb them with our music. We don’t crowd their streets with our cars. But we maintain a firm indifference to these communities, and I am sure that the Cantabrigians object to our presence as strenuously as my father did to the students in my town. Our consciousness is generally contained within Harvard, which makes sense, but we may not realize that after spending four years living in this city, we will have had very little contact with the community outside of Harvard’s gates. And we will have missed a lot.

One indication of this lack of community involvement is the fact that most Harvard students do not vote in Cambridge. We are not aware of local issues, still thinking of our hometowns as our homes. It seems wrong that having made the commitment to live in this city for four years, we feel comfortable remaining completely dissociated from the issues which deeply affect city residents. We spend our days educating ourselves about abstract questions, but allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring the day-to-day concerns of the community that we inhabit.

On this Election Day, it is already too late for students to register in Cambridge. But for those of us who are already registered here, Cambridge’s Ballot Question 1, the Community Preservation Act (CPA), presents a terrific opportunity to show support for the Cambridge community. The CPA offers state matching funds to be directed towards affordable housing, open space and historic preservation in exchange for a property tax surcharge. The CPA was enabled by the state legislature last year and will be instituted on a town-by-town basis following municipal votes. The CPA was designed to fight suburban sprawl and the loss of open space. Cambridge desperately needs this funding to help fight the affordable housing crisis that makes it so difficult for middle-class families to live in this area.

Unlike Boston and Newton, who are also voting on the CPA today, the City of Cambridge already has a $4.5 million per year affordable housing trust fund. Because of this fund, the property tax surcharge is waived. A “yes” vote on Question 1 is an easy choice. It wins the city almost $5 million in state money at no cost to residents. Unfortunately, because of the heavy advertising against the CPA in Boston and Newton and because the wording of the act includes the tax surcharge, Cambridge residents may not realize that they have the opportunity for free money. It is a very rare chance in the world of politics and one that we should jump at.

So if you already vote in Cambridge, vote to preserve the Cambridge community. The $5 million will go a long way toward preventing Cambridge from becoming a monolithic enclave of upper-middle-class professionals who move in as working families are pushed out. The racial, cultural and socio-economic diversity that makes Cambridge such a terrific place in which to live and go to school could easily evaporate if the city doesn’t take a stand to protect it. We may not live among our neighbors, but we do inhabit their larger community. We’ll live in this community four years, and we have an obligation to inform ourselves about the issues that affect it. And in the case of a no-brainer like this one, we owe it to the community to vote in its interests.

Sarah C. Spiegel ’02 is a social studies concentrator in Quincy House. She is co-director of the Phillips Brooks House Community Organizing Committee.