Seidel: Urban Planning Focus

Urban planner Sam Seidel, a 39-year-old candidate for Cambridge City Council, hopes to unseat an incumbent in next week’s elections—no small order in a city with low political turnover. In entering this race, the progressive Democrat is willing to accept all the help he can get.

This becomes clear as a woman with an orange scarf and a brown dog walks down into the sparse basement of a house on Mt. Auburn Street, looking for campaign flyers. Noticing a new face in the room, she turns to introduce herself.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m Sam’s mom.”

Resources may not be pouring in from far afield—as of midsummer, Seidel had one-sixteenth the campaign funding of Cambridge’s mayor—but Seidel’s local aspirations are far from narrow.

Seidel’s political platform bears the thumbprint of an urban planner. Seidel, who holds a degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, proposes establishing wireless Internet throughout Cambridge and making the price of parking permits proportional to the size of vehicles that take up the city’s valuable curb space.

He says one of his greatest concerns is the relationship between the city and its universities. Despite the cultural and economic contributions that Harvard offers its neighbors, Seidel says he believes that the University’s effect on the city is not beneficent. Even so, he says Cambridge and its universities depend on each other.

“Part of what defines Cambridge, both within Cambridge itself and the world, is the fact that there are these two major universities here,” he says. “That is important for Cambridge’s position as a global city—a city that is recognized throughout the world.”

Seidel says that achieving the proper balance in this relationship requires “a complicated dance” because of Harvard’s facilities and the constraints they place on the geographically small city. As a nonprofit tax-exempt institution, Harvard uses public resources—like roads and sewage channels—with no legal requirement to pay for them. The University makes a voluntary annual payment to the city in lieu of taxes, but politicians frequently call on Harvard to contribute more.

“If Harvard has been here as long as Cambridge has,” Seidel says, “Cambridge has been here as long as Harvard has.”

He says institutions like Columbia University in New York City or Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., offer examples of the positive impact that a university can have on its surrounding community.

As an urban planner, Seidel says he believes that Harvard should share responsibility for creating affordable housing in Cambridge—partly because it is in the school’s own interest to do so.

Harvard, “at least anecdotally, is having trouble attracting junior faculty” because housing costs are “outrageous” to many young academics, Seidel says.

CLASSICAL CHALLENGER

Born in Manhattan, Seidel majored in the classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Studying Greek democracy and the Roman republic, he says, created in him a “sense of commitment to the public good and public service.” By the time he came to Cambridge to attend the Graduate School of Design in 1999, he planned to bring his experience in the ivory tower into the public arena.

The change in his trajectory came shortly after he graduated from Berkeley in 1988. Seidel traveled to Germany in order to learn the language and to continue training as a classics scholar. While in Berlin, Seidel watched the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre unfold on both East German and West German television.

“I could hear the differing versions of the same event,” Seidel says. “The pictures were identical—it was that student standing in front of the tank, trying to stop the tank. But the description of what was happening there was almost diametrically opposed.”

The experience galvanized him.

“It was at that very moment that I decided that I was not going to pursue being an academic classicist,” Seidel says. “My interest in politics was much greater than that, and I wanted to participate in that realm.”

Upon returning from Germany, he spent nine years in Washington, D.C. There, he earned a degree in public policy from Georgetown and worked for Congressional and Executive technology think-tanks.

Seidel says his political personality carries the mark of two primary influences: the liberal grassroots movement channeled through Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and Seidel’s own study of public policy and urban planning.

“I was certainly convinced out of that last election that we really need to start our conversation locally and bring it forward from there. I think Howard Dean both said that and exemplified that,” he says.

Despite his peripatetic path, Seidel’s political ambition is a local one. The odds are not in his favor, though.

“Generally, it’s very difficult for a challenger to unseat an incumbent,” Robert Winters, creator of the Cambridge Civic Journal and de facto dean of the Cambridge political scene, writes in an e-mail. According to Winters, it has been three election cycles since an incumbent lost a seat in 1999.

Glenn S. Koocher ’71, who will host local television coverage of the election, thinks that Seidel’s relatively recent arrival on the Cambridge scene may make it difficult for him to gain a place on the council.

“Taking a seat means taking a vote away from someone else,” Koocher says.

In a city whose political leaders can follow a dynastic line, this may be an uphill battle.

“People are tied to their brand. There are people who have been voting for [Mayor Michael A.] Sullivan, his father, and his uncle who wouldn’t change that if you threatened to beat them up,” Koocher says.

Winters and Koocher disagree over the quality of Seidel’s campaign. Winters describes Seidel as “the most credible challenger by far.” Koocher, on the other hand, feels that Seidel is “without a [political] base.”

“He appears like someone doing this as an intellectual exercise,” Koocher says.

But the thoughtful and soft-spoken Seidel casts off suggestions that his approach is too academic. He says he sees his candidacy as a “public service.”

“The current incumbents on the City Council need to know that their jobs aren’t for free, and they’re not forever. If I do nothing else, I make sure that the current council is working hard for [its] job because they know that there’s a qualified challenger who is running hard for their seat,” Seidel says.

That is a goal, surely, that even a mother would approve of.