BEUDO + AHO = Performance Art – a message from Patrick Barrett
June 11, 2023
Mayor Siddiqui and Cambridge City Council,
I am asking you to do a couple of things tomorrow night but first and foremost I ask that you attempt to take a look at the current state of our city. We are teetering on breaking into a billion dollar budget where our schools consistently underperform and nearly 8% of families have abandoned the system in just the last couple of years, small and large businesses are still failing at an accelerated rate burdened by excess pandemic debt and an ecosystem that has evaporated, Kendall Square is facing a 30% vacancy rate, drug dealers own Central Square emboldened enough to mug and strip a man naked in broad daylight for failure to pay a drug debt, and the general sense among those who do the work is that we are currently leaderless. Where in all of this is our City Council, Manager, and Department Heads? In truth many of you have little to no substantive connection to the City at all. Most of you do not have young or school aged children. Most of you do not now nor have you ever run a business in Cambridge. Most have not built the home they live in or any structure in Cambridge. Some have lived here generationally and that is terrific but we are talking policy and whether you’ve lived here for a day or seven centuries there are those with “skin in the game” and those that have none. Most, if not all of you, are activists each having their own area of “expertise” where the actual power to drive policy on these issues rests with the State or Federal government not the Cambridge City Council. Thus as stewards of the city you’ve very little that directly impacts you regarding schools, business, development, crime or even the lofty goals of your activism. Do any of you own or live in a BEUDO property? Are any of you currently on the waiting list for affordable housing? Do any of you have a child waiting to take algebra in 8th grade only to find out that has been taken off the table? I could go on for days … this takes me to Monday night:
1) The AHO has always bothered me. It is a set of rules specially designed for a small group of developers with direct access to municipal funds that allows them to ignore anachronistic and obtuse zoning rules everyone else has to obey. If you are a homeowner and want to add additional bedroom or play room for your growing family it likely means a variance or special permit you’re never going to get but for the AHO developer there is no such impediment. It seems an odd result that home owners and property owners should face such steep headwinds for minor quality of life adjustments and that for a small group of developers they can simply do whatever they like. The amendment to the AHO is another reminder to me that when it comes to housing policy and zoning we really are just winging it. Anyone who builds anything (which is none of you currently on the Council) knows very well that 12-15 stories or infinity stories as previously contemplated is highly likely to produce nothing. Your current inclusionary zoning is so horribly broken your director of CDD is doing backflips to hide this fact. When San Francisco reduces from 25% to 12% and says it still doesn’t work you can bet the same rules apply here or worse. Lastly, you received a communication from Susan Connelly last week that is the most coherent salient and informative communication I’ve ever read on the subject and you’d all be wise to read what she says and listen to her. 100% spot on. I hope you hit the pause button on this one and become a serious legislative body again. I do not care about heights, density, or anything else the so called NIMBY folk are accused of (the whole nimby v yimby game is another level of performance art) but I do care about results and like the 99.9% of Cambridge citizens who are not City Councillors it is baffling that we should face so many real immediate issues and yet you’ve chosen to not address any of them but instead have spent a year or more on what is essentially small town theatre.
2) BEUDO is another performative piece of legislation on the docket for Monday night. Will it reduce greenhouse gases in commercial and residential buildings? Of course not. The grid is 80-85% fossil fuel based and likely to stay so well past the 2030’s. CDD identified 20 buildings as the largest producers of GHGs in the city all of which are labs that will be exempt of gas hook up bans and are well capitalized enough to weather this new tax. Why focus on 20 buildings producing more than 50% of our GHGs when you can draft an incoherent set of rules that will devastate the least able to bear it? BUEDO will make residents and business owners rip out perfectly functional HVAC equipment, displace commercial and residential tenants, and further compress our economy during the worst commercial financing conditions of our time. This is obviously the work of people who do not trouble themselves with the details. Further, the amount of resources Eversource will now have to redirect to Cambridge will deny essential resources to other communities on the State’s 2050 timeline and create more havoc when the infrastructure we need rapidly needs to be located within our communities. You still haven’t even addressed the building to building or citywide infrastructure needed for any of this to work; unless of course this was all just about the tax. One billion dollar budget and you need a new tax? Really? Further, our 6.32 square mile billion dollar city will be pushing the remaining 10,559 square miles to the side so we can not only be “first” but the only one out in front of the State. This isn’t “green washing,” it’s “green bullying” and something as a City and as individual residents we should only feel shame in being a part of. To anyone watching, and there weren’t many, the entire “process” was a sham. CDD has ceased to adequately function for at least a decade now but their “work” on BEUDO highlighted a deep and powerful incompetence that I personally found stunning. However I think much like the Council, CDD is also primarily comprised of activists. Thus we have lots of policy and very little substance. In the end this will hurt any individual with a commercial or residential property swept up in a tax scheme they cannot comply with. In effect Cambridge is sending a message through this Council to pack up and leave … only MIT and Harvard need apply. Message heard. In the meantime I ask that you vote Zondervan’s amendment down. CDD did not include it for good reason and what little policy was shaped by a transparent process with actual stakeholders ought to be preserved if for no other reason to not add more drama to the second act.
3) Gas Hook-Up ban. The final act in local theatre production is another light on substance heavy on pain for small businesses and especially those in the restaurant industry. I do not think there is anyone on the City Council who works in or owns a restaurant; yet another example of no skin in the game. We should absolutely NOT sign on the pilot program. We passed the specialized stretch code and we are about to pass BEUDO. We do not need any further constraints on small businesses. The pain of the pandemic which this Council absolutely exacerbated in yet another performative opera of incompetence is still very much with us. Restaurants will be feeling this pain for a generation. In Central Square only 11% of restaurants received any relief and even the ones that did closed. Gas hook-ups are essential to many different types of cuisine and are still industry standard though I do recall Councillor Nolan and Susan Rasmussen both stating the “high end” chefs prefer induction. I asked at the time for a source and am still waiting. It might be worth mentioning that induction stoves cost more, require specialized pots and pans, and are about 4-5 times more costly to fix … I know I know … details right? This type of prohibition was blocked by the Ninth Circuit court fought by a Restaurant lobby only a few short months ago. Lastly, the pilot will not affect medical facilities nor will it affect labs and that is how we know that this is yet another piece of performance art. Gas stoves are used by many Cambridge residents and chefs, and it’s hard to imagine in the home of Julia Childs we could be so neglectful to this industry. Do not approve this policy order and do not join this so called pilot program … you’ve all done enough damage for one Monday.
There is so much more going on in our city besides affordable housing and regurgitated faux environmental policies that are currently failing everywhere they’ve been adopted. No matter what we do we cannot be “The First.” However we do have it within us to be The Model, but only if we pull back and get serious people in the room. We can get to better places on housing, environmental issues, crime/policing, and more but not with activists who only read the CliffsNotes nor a Community Development Department that is at its core broken. In the meantime please vote down Zondervan’s amendment and put the breaks on any AHO amendment to merge this policy with a comprehensive strategy that includes market rate housing and fixes inclusionary; a real housing policy for Cambridge. I would be remiss in not mentioning that this year will be C2’s tenth birthday. Ten years have passed since we had the chance to rezone and create thousands of new housing units in one of the last places in Cambridge to truly redevelop, but instead of working on that we push a bunch of nonsense that will produce nothing but distrust and enmity among residents; why? I’m not really much of a critic of the arts but this is absolutely the worst play I’ve ever seen.
PS: to those who act, perform, sing, and dance in actual theatre I love you and mean no harm.
Respectfully,
Patrick W. Barrett III
Today’s my birthday and we’ll be celebrating it with a hike in Concord (as well as the grading of Final Exams). This is also premier day on CCTV for the video “Cambridge City Charter: From Town Meeting to Plan E” that John Pitkin, Gregorio Leon, and I have been working on for the last several months. John and I do most of the narration with an assist from our good friend (and former city councillor) Jim Braude. You can watch it on CCTV Channel 9 at 5:30pm (just in case Public Comment gets either boring or annoying) and at several other times this week. Special thanks to the CCTV staff, Diane LeBlanc, Alyssa Pacy, Charlie Sullivan and all of the wonderful people at the Cambridge Historical Commission. We have more “Civic View” programs planned. [