A Planning Board member speaks out on the Urgency of the Missing Middle petition

The HLS Professor on Updating Cambridge’s Racist, Classist Zoning Ordinance

Prof. Bowie speaks out against our racist zoning code at the MMH hearing.

Cambridge’s 8-member Planning Board held two hearings on the Missing Middle Petition (MMH) in March and April (continued in May) of 2021.

At those hearings, Harvard Law professor Niko Bowie argued that the petition’s needs are urgent — today’s status quo is deeply flawed and stems from a racist history.

→ Unfortunately, in the end, 5 members voted against recommending MMH to City Council, with 3 members (including Prof. Bowie) opposing their decision.

There’s still time to tell City Council you’d like to see the end of our exclusionary and racist zoning laws. Email them and CC us so we know you spoke out. Copy/paste these emails: council@cambridgema.gov cambridgemmh@gmail.com

Since Professor Bowie spoke better than we usually do about our own petition, here are some highlights of what he said on March 30 (11-minute video):

On the missing middle petition:

• I like this petition.
• Right now, Cambridge law makes it illegal to build certain types of housing that looks a lot like existing housing.
• The question as I see it is … why should existing law continue to forbid people from building housing?

On the “racist and classist” history of Cambridge zoning:

• So one of the things I did when reading this proposal was look up the history of why does Cambridge make it illegal to build housing as dense as it currently exists.
• Cities across the country, including in Cambridge, made it illegal to build densely for racist and classist reasons.
• It was not about public health, it was about this century-long disgust of apartments and the people who live in them.
• Zoning began in the South. Southern cities tried to segregate black people by race explicitly. In 1917, the Supreme Court held that racial zoning ordinances were unconstitutional. [Prof. Bowie cites Richard Rothstein’s Color of Law on this point.]
• The year after this [Supreme Court case], … planners from all over the country, including Cambridge, discussed how do we comply?
• In Massachusetts, zoning follows immediately after this conversation. This is not just this nationwide thing that happened elsewhere, it’s very much Cambridge and the Cambridge planning board. [Gesticulates] This Board.
• [On Cambridge’s debates over its initial zoning ordinance, 1920–24]: The debate over the zoning ordinance is why should the city have this power to restrict people form building as densely as they want to build? Why not allow them to live next to one another or where they want to live?
• [Cont.]: The argument against it is that when apartments come the people in the apartments injure the people near them. That we need to preserve the character of our neighborhood.
• Cambridge passes the zoning ordinance in 1924 — the thing that we are debating whether to amend [with MMH] — the irony is that it gets struck down by the Supreme Court.
• The Supreme Court had said, “It’s fine to get rid of apartment houses because everyone knows the apartment house is a mere parasite.”
• But it struck down Cambridge’s ordinance because it wasn’t sufficiently connected to the health, safety and welfare of the Community.
• All of my colleagues … at Harvard Law School [are writing about this trend]. If you just look at the most recent edition of the Harvard Law Review, all the articles are about housing.
• Molly Brady wrote an article, “Turning Neighbors into Nuisances,” which is entirely about how the origin of zoning has this history of this real disgust for apartment buildings and the people who live in them.
• Noah Kazis has written about how zoning restricts women’s access to the workplace. So density is really good for lowering the wage gap.

Yes, racist redlining is related to zoning:

• Some of the speakers [at the public hearing for MMH] mentioned that redlining has nothing to do with zoning. But if you at the first redlining maps, which is a decade after Cambridge adopts its zoning ordinance, it very much maps onto the zoning map as originally proposed by this body.
• You see that the red areas of the 1930s [redlining] maps, It’s like “uh-oh” this is the area that not only is unrestricted, but this is the area that has an infiltration of black people or an infiltration of Italians.

Our zoning is fundamentally built on exclusion:

• Nothing that I’m saying here is new or unknown.
• But I think it’s worth putting into perspective what we are doing when we’re talking about amending the zoning ordinance.
• We’re amending something that is fundamentally flawed.
• It is fundamentally built on this concept of exclusion. It is fundamentally about saying that we do not want it to be legal for people to build densely because of how that will affect us and what the concentration of outside will do to our neighborhoods.

Opponents to MMH sound a lot like Trump:

• It’s really discouraging to hear comments that resonate with the Wall Street Journal op-ed from last summer in which Donald Trump and Ben Carson wrote that they will protect America’s suburbs. They called the elimination of zoning a “radical social-engineering project” that would “compel the construction of high-density ‘stack and pack’ apartment buildings in residential neighborhoods.”
• They could be speaking in Cambridge. And I do not like their politics when it comes to housing. Because I think it is antithetical to Cambridge’s values of inclusion and of a welcoming community of people who don’t currently live here but who want to.

Zoning was created to exclude:

• The bottom line here is that zoning was created to exclude. To keep people out of Cambridge.

The burden of persuasion should be on those upholding the status quo. Why?

• And I really think that the burden of persuasion here shouldn’t be on this petition. The burden of persuasion should be on why do we continue to make it illegal to build housing?
• This petition is a step in the right direction. But it’s still going to leave a lot of restrictions that are unjustified in the 21st Century.

Please also check out what Professor Bowie said on May 11 — 16-min video containing this gem: “I would really strongly encourage you all to read a book!”

Note: The bulleted quotations above were transcribed by hand and may contain errors. Please email Eugenia at schraa@gmail.com if you notice any errors.