City Council Candidates Contest Multifamily Housing Ordinance in Cambridgeport Election Forum

Several challengers in Cambridge’s upcoming city council election roundly criticized incumbents for passing the landmark Multifamily Housing Ordinance earlier this year at a candidates’ forum Wednesday night, dismissing it as a “one size fits all” approach.

The forum, hosted by the Cambridgeport Neighborhood Association inside the Lyndon B. Johnson public housing complex, brought nearly all candidates for Council and the School Committee together to make a campaign pitch to Cambridgeport residents.

Though there were no questions put forth to the 35 candidates present, several Council challengers took the two-and-half minute speech allotted to each participant to explicitly attack the ordinance — and almost every incumbent who voted for it used their time to defend it.

The housing ordinance, passed this February, eliminated all single-family zoning across Cambridge, making it the largest city to do so across the region as the council sought to combat a severe housing shortage in Cambridge.

But the policy has remained contested by some residents who argue that multifamily housing, particularly the taller buildings that it makes easier to develop, can disrupt the scale of residential neighborhoods.

Zion Sherin, a challenger for Council, called the zoning reform “ridiculous” and will “destroy neighborhoods.”

“If you talk to most people, they do support multifamily housing. What was passed was not multifamily housing,” Zion said. “It was the allowance of commercial size apartment buildings to be put up in every neighborhood being called multifamily.”

Elizabeth Bisio, another challenger, said in her speech that the “one size fits all” approach of the ordinance does not protect “what makes our neighborhood special.”

Almost all of those who voted for the policy earlier this year, however, included explicit defenses of it in their own speeches. Councilor Burhan Azeem said he is “very proud that we got it over the finish line.”

Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler said in his speech at the forum that after his February vote to pass the ordinance, “I went home and I looked up how many stories this building was, and guess what? It is 12 stories tall, and I love living next to it.”

The irony was not lost on some that the indirect debate was itself unfolding inside a 12-story, affordable housing complex.

“I’m a little surprised by some of the things that I’m hearing — that tall buildings don’t belong in neighborhoods, that tall buildings don't belong on residential streets,” incumbent candidate Marc C. McGovern said. “When we’re sitting in a 12-story building in a residential neighborhood that was built in 1966.”

“I don’t think there’s anybody in this room or in this neighborhood that would say that this building and the people who live in it are a detriment to this neighborhood,” he added. “I just really have to push back on that. I’m proud of my housing stance.”

For the School Committee portion of the forum, racial and socio-economic-based achievement gaps in the city’s public school system defined nearly every candidate’s speech. There, incumbents and challengers alike criticized the current state of Cambridge public schools.

School Committee member Caroline M.L. Hunter said that Cambridge schools “haven’t done a good job” teaching children how to read, “particularly for black and brown children, for immigrant children, for children with individualized education programs.”

Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard and challenger candidate Lilly Havstad said that the district had wrongly overinvested its budget in “market-driven solutions.”

“We’re not putting it where it matters most,” she said. “We are buying too many products rather than investing the money in our educators who are working with our students on a day-to-day basis.”

Incumbent Richard Harding Jr. also called out the racial achievement gap an injustice in his speech.

“We live in the most innovative square mile in the world, and the reality is that a kid in Mumbai has a better chance of working in Kendall Square than a kid at one of our schools,” he said.

Other candidates said they hoped to make the committee more transparent, accusing it of poor communication with the public.

“It has been my experience that the School Committee is not accessible, accountable, responsive, or transparent,” challenger Jessica D. Goetz said.

“If the district had truly communicated with the community, we might have avoided the frustrations and perhaps the sudden closure of the school,” challenger Jia-Jing Lee said, referencing last year’s vote to close the Kennedy-Longfellow school.

“Whether it’s controlled choice of the enrollment, the budget, or the curriculum, we need to sit together and truly listen and make the decisions together,” she added.

—Staff writer Dionise Guerra-Carrillo can be reached at dionise.guerracarrillo@thecrimson.com.