CambridgeToday received the following Letter to the Editor from reader Brian Maloney, in regards to an affordable housing proposal on Chalmers Street:
1. No neighbourhood can be exempt from change.
2. No neighbourhood should experience sudden, radical change.
The longer that we ignore No. 1, the more often that No. 2 happens.
A neighbourhood should be able to grow slowly and iteratively over time. Detached houses should build new backyard cottages. Large lots should become apartments. Street parking should become wider sidewalks, bus lanes, bike lanes, and parkettes with ample shade. Continue this slow, iterative growth for decades, and you have an immensely wealthy, close-knit community where a wide range of housing and lifestyle options are available.
By blocking this slow, iterative change over decades through zoning and community meetings, we have seen skyrocketing prices, inequality, and a severe lack of options for anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to inherit property.
This proposal does not count as slow, iterative change. But since change has been denied for so long, and the suffering is so high as a result, the dam of housing denial and delay cannot hold it back.
The next generation faces two choices for how they begin their independent lives in 2025: beg and scrape in a city that refuses to change for them, or leave to one that does.
This neighbourhood and Cambridge as a whole have to face this choice. It is not an abstract argument; it is happening in real time in the demographic change of our region. Urban centres that choose to allow growth will gain more power, wealth, and vitality at our expense.
Due to shrinking family sizes and a refusal to evolve over time, this neighbourhood now has fewer people in it than when it was built.
It can scarcely be called “crowded”. What has changed since it was built: property values. Claims of traffic, congestion, shadows, or fear of the less wealthy are yet another attempt by those who own land to kick the rungs out of the ladder beneath them.
Past generations used to plant trees that they would never live to sit beneath their shade. We have inherited those trees and refused to plant any more.
A city is more than just a store of personal wealth; it is supposed to be a place where you can grow, live, and pass it on to the next generation.
I know how expensive and unsustainable a single unit of subsidized housing is in our current system. We cannot afford to build it for everyone currently on that waiting list.
We wouldn’t need to have this painful and expensive conversation if slow, iterative change was embraced by this city and not rejected at every turn. If people are rightly concerned about large towers and looming shadows, the answer is simple: radical, disruptive change only happens when small, widely dispersed growth is not allowed.
If we don't want shocking change in our cities, then we need to learn how to tolerate gradual change. Everywhere. Long-dead neighbours took a risk and approved the house you live in. Why deny it for the next?
Brian Maloney,
Cambridge
