Local Politics Thread

Local elections are being held tomorrow, Tuesday Nov. 5th, across a number of local municipalities. Housing has become the defining issue, a point which was highlighted in a recent Globe editorial suggesting which candidates (and organizations) to follow and vote for if you are interested in making enough space for newcomers:

Housing is on the Ballot in Tuesday's Local Elections

If you live in Cambridge, I hope you'll join me in supporting the slate of candidates endorsed by A Better Cambridge Action Fund. They are [(I) denotes incumbent]:
  • Burhan Azeem
  • Alanna Mallon (I)
  • Marc McGovern (I)
  • Risa Mednick
  • Adriane Musgrave
  • Sumbul Siddiqui (I)
  • Denise Simmons (I)
  • Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler
  • Tim Toomey (I)
Because of Massachusetts law (noted in the previous post), six votes of nine are required to enact any zoning changes. This has hamstrung efforts by activists to get zoning relief passed, like the 100% affordable housing overlay, and dimmed prospects for broad-based reform. For more info on the affordable housing overlay, this site serves as an excellent primer: https://www.ahoreality.org/
 
Cambridge's election results came in, and I am pleased to report that 6 of the 9 candidates endorsed by A Better Cambridge won! There are two newcomers: Jivan Sobonho-Wheeler (on the ABC slate) and Patty Nolan, replacing Jan Devereux (outgoing) and Craig Kelley (who barely lost to Dennis Carlone).

The immediate policy implication is that the Affordable Housing Overlay now has the votes to pass. It remains to be seen if there will be new amendments or if previous amendments will be shed, but we can expect some version of it to make it through the council chambers and significantly reduce the costs to build 100% affordable housing in the city.

Reading the tea leaves a bit, there are a number of very positive signs for the pro-housing camp that came from this election cycle:
  • Sumbul Siddiqui won in the first round of voting, showing that voters strongly supported her move to proceed with the Sullivan Courthouse redevelopment. This also implies that her un-endorsements from Cambridge Resident's Alliance and Our Revolution didn't affect her in the least.
  • The ABC slate picked up more first-place votes and outperformed all of the other slates, showing the strength of the pro-housing message
  • All 8 members of the incoming council who responded to ABC's questionnaire (that is, everyone but Dennis Carlone) voiced support for a number of pro-housing measures, and there is likely to be consensus on those moving forward:
    • Reducing/eliminating parking minimums
    • Eliminating single family zoning (aka triple-deckers everywhere)
    • Increasing money in the affordable housing fund
    • Increasing tenant protections
    • Rezonings in corridors and business districts (like the current Harvard Square proposal)
  • The unity among the ABC candidates who didn't get elected ultimately helped advance the other slate-mates
    • A special shout-out to Burhan Azeem, who led serious efforts in getting MIT students, young people, and other newcomers registered to vote. Although he finished behind Kelley, his voters helped elect the rest of the ABC slate (Adrianne Musgrave finished right behind him, as well).
In the future, I expect there will still be vigorous discussion over market-rate developments, and how the council can extract the most value from developer-led spot rezones. However, there seems to be momentum toward an evolving understanding of the pitfalls of this approach and the constraints it places on supply, and it will be interesting to see what proposals the city council comes up with this cycle.
 
cden4 said:
Basically, the neighbors are convinced that building more (paid) off-street parking will make the overused (free) on-street parking less full. Too bad economics disproves that. Until the City tackles the resident parking permit program, this will continue to be an issue.
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completely agree with your opinion!
 
Legislative transparency is good. I wonder to what extent this is a response to the efforts by state auditor Diana DiZoglio to review activities in the General Court.
 
I’m amazed there’s no discussion here at all so far about the mayors race. Maybe that because we tend to discuss things in threads that aren’t specific to politics, but I also think it’s because this particular thread is buried away at the bottom of the page. I think the state and local politics discussions should be kept somewhere under “Greater Boston” (the section at the top of the forum webpage). The “local architecture events” section or whatever it’s called hardly ever has any updates, and it gets a whole section. Politics has a ton of relevance for this board, because political decisions govern everything from architecture to infrastructure.

My take on Kraft. I don't like his father, and think he’s a right winger and a hypocrite (and that’s with his Zionism aside, which is its own issue). I think it’s great that his billionaire son has spent many years doing nice work for a poor community in the inner city. However, that hardly equates to having any sort of claim to knowing the issues of a major American city and justifying waltzing into a race and purchasing the mayors seat, just because he has the privilege to decide he wants to “do something“.

I will also say, lest that be framed as anti-rich per se, that I don’t subscribe to the idea that wealthy people are necessarily too out of touch to be effective leaders. In many cases I very much agree with the theory that people who actually have a stake in the game will always operate out of narrow interests, and that someone who’s rich enough to not have worldly concerns can operate with a freedom of bias. In some cases. However, that is not the case here. My issue with Kraft, beyond his obvious political conservatism, isn’t that he’s just a rich guy. It’s that he really does represent a very ugly trend in the world, which is the total takeover of politics by billionaires. On that principle alone, I oppose him. However, even more importantly, if he was so interested in the actual city of Boston, he would have been living here for his entire adult life, and not in one of the wealthiest suburbs on the Eastern seaboard. The fact that he only even bothered to swoop in here in late 2023, clearly with the only purpose of establishing residency (and I don’t even think he sold his primary residence in Chestnut Hill), rings so utterly hollow and speaks to a level of entitlement that is typical for his class, and of which I’m sure he is fully unaware. Actually, I’m sure he’s a reasonably decent man, but nevertheless simply cannot get out of his own biased way no matter much he claims to understand his own privilege. The very fact of a guy who has the means to do so just blindly buys a condo in Boston a year before the election, and then running against the mayor after having no political experience and really knowing not very much about the city whatsoever, speaks to an arrogance that I find unforgivable.

I do think Wu is only a so-so mayor, but she represents the only political leader of Boston I’ve ever seen who doesn’t represent some version of tired old Mass politics. She’s too technocratic, she has made herself needlessly the enemy of the "business community" (I'm with her on a lot of that, but no need to publicly rub it in the way she does, just not smart), she’s not visible enough on the ground (hell, I’m her neighbor and she’s never doing anything like speaking events around here as far as I know), and I am not much of a fan of a lot of the bureaucracy increases and style of elevating young college grads with quasi-nonsense majors to leadership positions in City Hall. Despite that, I support her, because she is FRESH. Kraft will never make progress on housing. The reality is, you really can’t “listen to the community” in Boston if you want to actually make meaningful change. People love talking about the community as if it’s this wonderful progressive thing, but the community in Boston means conservatism and opposition to progress in almost every case. That’s as true in Roxbury as it is in Charlestown. I do worry that Kraft’s coziness with “inner city communities” will leverage out of touch white elites to fancy that he’s progressive, and not recognize that he’s actually aligning himself with the same forces of conservatism that have beaten back countless of housing developments across the city for years. But it’s Wu’s race to lose. We’ll see what happens.
 
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I currently have an uncle-in-law staying at my house who lives in Beacon Hill and wants to run for the city council seat for District 8 (everything from the West End to Fenway) and watches a lot of Fox News and got very cozy with Josh Kraft at his announcement event and I just found out about this political ambition last night. Ask me anything!!

🙃 🙃 🙃 🙃 🙃
 
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