Submitted by blackdynomitesnewbag t3_11w1swa in CambridgeMA
I’ve submitted a zoning petition to restore Cambridge’s ability to build housing by relaxing height and density restrictions. See details at https://franklin.cx/petition/. It’s before the city council tomorrow to be referred to the Planning Board and Zoning Committee. If you like the plan and wish to show your support, email the city council at council@cambridgema.gov
Thanks!
I might be misinterpreting it, but it seems to be highly restrictive while being presented as relaxing restrictions. Maybe I just need some clarifications?
It seems to mandate a lot of open space on lots. The 10-15 foot front yard would basically outlaw 3-deckers built close to the street like these: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3733375,-71.1025584,3a,75y,136.43h,85.93t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sEP3hE4973XPibJpuqR5lMg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DEP3hE4973XPibJpuqR5lMg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D220.66273%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192
Is the minimum side yard on each side of the building? Even 7.5-feet on each side of the building would mean leaving 15-feet between buildings which is probably around a good bit more space than exists between 3-deckers in Cambridge. 15-feet would mean leaving 30 feet between buildings. To put that in perspective, a 3-decker is around 25-30 feet wide.
The minimum lot width is either 50 or 65 feet. That seems quite a bit wider than most lots with 3-deckers on them. Looking at the lots on Fayette St, they're around 40-45 feet wide. So I'd have to buy multiple lots in order to hit the minimum lot width of 50 or 65 feet.
The minimum lot sizes are either 5,000 or 6,000 sq ft. Most lots with 3 deckers seem to be smaller than that. In order to comply with this zoning, it seems like one would have to buy multiple buildings.
https://www.cambridgema.gov/PropertyDatabase/185461
58 Fayette St is a pretty standard Cambridge 3-decker. The lot size is 3,974 sq ft (well below your minimum lot size). It's already slightly above 1.0 FAR. It looks like it has around 20-25 feet in back, but it's against the property line on one side, has around 9 feet on the other side, and only set back from the sidewalk by about 5 feet.
Do driveways count as side-yards?
There's a 30% minimum private open space to lot area ratio in the petition. Do driveways count as open space? Is that 30% per unit or 30% total? Do shared yards count as "private open space" or does it have to be deeded to a unit? Do the front steps count as open space?
Again, maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but it looks like a petition to severely restrict building compared to what already exists. Looking around Cambridge's property maps, 50 foot widths aren't common, never mind 65 foot. For example: https://gis.cambridgema.gov/blockmaps/Block_114A.pdf. It looks like 40-foot is the common lot width in that neighborhood. Most don't have 15 foot front yards and don't have 7.5' side yards on both sides (never mind 15').
Looking around Cambridgeport, lots of places don't come close to having 20' back yards, are too close to the sidewalk, don't meet the minimum lot size, don't have the minimum side yards, etc.: https://gis.cambridgema.gov/map/Viewer.aspx?state=475487167367
Before people get to enthusiastic about this proposal, we should probably think about what the proposal is actually doing. It's definitely not making it easy to build 3-deckers like those that already exist in Cambridge. Requiring a 50 or 65 foot lot width seems to be making almost every lot non-conforming and therefore not relaxing zoning one bit. Requiring 7.5 or 15' side yards would mean using a lot less of the lot than is currently being used. Most lots don't hit the 5,000 or 6,000 sq ft minimum. How does this allow us to build more housing if only a tiny number of our lots comply?
It feels like these changes don't actually relax restrictions. For example, if I came up with a petition that said you can build anything you want and the only restriction is that the minimum lot with is 100 miles, that's not actually letting you build anything you want. Likewise, by setting/keeping the minimum lot with at 50 or 60 feet, it's setting a minimum lot width that's wider than basically any of our lots. Am I misinterpreting something that I don't understand?
EDIT: Back when the petitioner was running for city council, they proposed eliminating minimum lot sizes so I'm a bit surprised that they're keeping minimum lot sizes in this petition (https://web.archive.org/web/20200222194858/https://www.abettercambridgeaf.org/candq_charles). Maybe their thinking has changed over the past few years (we all change), but I guess I'd want to know more. At the time, they said they were "generally not" in support of the 100% Affordable Housing Overlay. They also seemed skeptical that Cambridge should be building more housing.
Yea this needs to be upvoted more. This petition is a complete NIMBY handout.
This is incorrect. See my response. https://www.reddit.com/r/CambridgeMA/comments/11w1swa/comment/jcze9wc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Edit: I actually earned a badge of honor by having the CCC send out a notice saying to not support my petition
ok fair. Given that CCC claims to support most of what is in your proposal, it is clear as day that they will not stop until every apartment building in this city has been torn down.
Here's the actual text from their email notice.
>Say NO to the Franklin Up-Zoning Petition - not on the merits but because we need the City to do a real City Plan with specific streets re.zoning, housing, green spaces, and other factors. Option: instead convene a 12 person committee: 3 members each from the Planning Board, the BZA, the Cambridge Historical Commission, and our Neighborhood Group leaders to work together to create a City Plan on behalf of City Council and CDD
It's self contradictory. Pretty clear that they'll never support any housing of any kind
oh my fucking god is that what they actually wrote? These people, who constantly complain about not being heard, want a committee formed exclusively of unelected, uncredentialed homeowners who clearly have a vested interest in preventing housing construction? My god. When you think these people can’t get worse, they somehow do.
I am the author of this petition. I think you have misinterpreted it as you said you may have.
>It seems to mandate a lot of open space on lots. The 10-15 foot front yard would basically outlaw 3-deckers built close to the street like these
That distance is from the street line. It's mostly occupied by sidewalks. The table of allowed dimensions had equations for determining setbacks, but then there were footnotes that set a hard minimums. I removed the equations and moved the hard minimums to the table.
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>Is the minimum side yard on each side of the building? Even 7.5-feet on each side of the building would mean leaving 15-feet between buildings which is probably around a good bit more space than exists between 3-deckers in Cambridge
Each side, for a total of 15 feet between buildings. It seems like a lot, but it really isn't, especially once you start to consider things like safety, emergency egress, fire fighting. Either way, it's less restrictive than the current zoning. It's also the sideyard set back that the AHO uses. Additionally, depending on the zone, there are existing provisions in the zoning text that allow buildings to share what would otherwise be exterior walls if they have no windows. Zoning is complicated.
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>The minimum lot width is either 50 or 65 feet. That seems quite a bit wider than most lots with 3-deckers on them. Looking at the lots on Fayette St, they're around 40-45 feet wide. So I'd have to buy multiple lots in order to hit the minimum lot width of 50 or 65 feet
It's plenty of space for a double wide triple-decker like the one in which I live
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>Do driveways count as side-yards?
Yes
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>There's a 30% minimum private open space to lot area ratio in the petition. Do driveways count as open space? Is that 30% per unit or 30% total? Do shared yards count as "private open space" or does it have to be deeded to a unit? Do the front steps count as open space?
30% is a decrease in many residential zones. I didn't increase open space requirements in any zone. Shared yards do count. I believe front steps also count, but don't quote me on that.
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>Again, maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but it looks like a petition to severely restrict building compared to what already exists.
This is factually incorrect
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>Back when the petitioner was running for city council, they proposed eliminating minimum lot sizes so I'm a bit surprised that they're keeping minimum lot sizes in this petition
I did propose that, with a number of other things. There are unfortunate legal reasons why the lot area per dueling unit has to stay at or above 1200sqft. If you take a look at my reasonings PDF, you can see the full explanation. I was able to mostly get around that problem by adding a footnote that nearly sets it to zero for residential buildings.
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>At the time, they said they were "generally not" in support of the 100% Affordable Housing Overlay.
This is unfortunately true. I had misguided reasons for speaking against it, but I changed my mind in or just after December of 2020, then publicly spoke in support when it was reintroduced. It helped that the city made the main change that I wanted to see that was causing me to reserve support, which was increasing the minimum open space in residential neighborhoods to 30%.
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>They also seemed skeptical that Cambridge should be building more housing.
This is factually incorrect
Zoning is very very complicated. I tried to simply it, but the more I read the more I saw why I couldn't. You make one change here, and it cascades into a bunch of other changes. Before you know it, you've made an even bigger mess than what was already there.
Here's my website. It contains the summary, a FAQ, and links to PDFs of the full petition text and my reasonings behind each amendment.
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Edit: I actually earned a badge of honor by having the CCC send out a notice saying to not support my petition
I updated the summary on my website to make it much clearer that every change is in fact less restrictive.
Yeah, you're definitely missing something. I'm the petitioner and author. I need to reread your comment and will address each point
It’s expected that a city led plan is “supposed” to be released “soon” that will apparently be more bold than this.
Maybe this will push them to do it sooner
It is very clear that at least a couple councillors (Nolan, Carlone, potentially others) plan to try to "upzone" the city without changing other aspects of the zoning code that make multifamily housing uneconomical to build.
The city could allow 6-plexes citywide tomorrow and every single one of those projects would still being going in front of the BZA for a dimensional variance.
The way I see it we are no where even close to fixing this problem. They can't even do the upzoning, let alone everything else.
There was a citizens petition filed in Jan or Feb that basically did that, the Doug Brown petition. It changed the table of uses to allow multi-families everywhere without changing the table of dimensional standards. He tried to submit it without signatures, so it failed by default.
A lot of people are not interested in a good-faith discussion on this issue. The people who wrote this city's zoning code knew exactly what they were doing. It didn't escape anyone's notice that almost all of the existing multifamily housing stock in Cambridge would be made illegal.
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Their goal was to remake the city into a dull, soulless suburb. The layers of laws that prevent apartment construction are numerous and complex. They probably only failed to see it through because there are simply too many existing apartment builds for the culture of urbanism to be stamped out.
It got close though. A lot of property owners took off the top floors of their buildings mid 20th century to save on taxes
Forgive me I’d this is a stupid question— I only follow these issues a bit. How is this different from the work being done by other groups like A Better Cambridge?
It’s in the same category. They had a much more ambitious proposal a year or two ago that didn’t pass. My goal is to try and break the ice jam with something modest
Is this something new? I thought there was already an amendment to the Affordable Housing Overlay that’s going before the committee tomorrow. I’ve voiced my support for that amendment by email.
I understand you are the author of this proposal. What is your affiliation/credential by the way?
This is in fact new and not related to the AHO amendments.
I am the author of this petition and this is my solo endeavor. I'm on the board of The Cambridge Residence Alliance and Green Cambridge. I'm a co-founder and the treasurer of Upgrade Cambridge. I'm also a member of The Port Organizing Group. I have a technical degree from MIT which lends itself to understanding and making zoning amendments, however it is not civil engineering or urban planning based. I've been involved in Cambridge politics since 2018. I've seen a few zoning petitions go by and have used what I learned from them when crafting this one. I've met with city staff from the CDC about previous zoning proposals, and briefly with the Cambridge Director of Zoning & Development about my current proposal.
Love it!
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monmostly t1_jcxu2m1 wrote
I read the petition. This seems reasonable and much needed. Good luck to you!