| Demands that the city of Cambridge pull the plug on plans to redevelop a 22-story Cambridge ex-courthouse are an ill-conceived, unfair attempt at an end run around the developer’s good-faith engagement in the city’s permitting process.
Not much more than a Cambridge City Council vote over a lease on 420 parking spaces in a nearby city garage stands between developer Leggat McCall and the start of construction to convert the former Sullivan Courthouse into 430,000 square feet of office space and 24 affordable apartments. Securing a lease on the spots is a key condition of the project’s 2014 special permit.
Now, neighborhood group The East Cambridge Planning Team and Democratic state Rep. Mike Connolly are going for a Hail Mary, calling for the city council to reject Leggat McCall’s parking spot lease in favor of an ill-defined affordable housing proposal.
The price of leased parking spots have nothing to do with the content of a building those spots will serve. For Cambridge councilors to reject the lease at this stage based on community opposition to the renovations would be an insult to every developer who goes through the city’s permitting process and would do a disservice to the city’s efforts to craft rules-based, transparent and predictable land use policies and decision-making processes.
Affordable housing is desperately needed in Cambridge, and everywhere else in the state. However, the right way to go about creating it is to create policies, plans and programs to help such projects get built. If the neighborhood wanted affordable housing on the courthouse site, it should have asked the city to zone for it, or pushed the city to make a deal with a developer or the state to make it happen. With renovations to gut the building and remove asbestos estimated to cost around $50 million, it would be no mean feat to come up with the kind of funding necessary, but it could be done.
As President Donald Trump and his administration demonstrate every day, the norms and rules that govern our institutions and our trust in them are fragile things. If people make a habit of trashing them in single-minded pursuit of any goal, no matter how noble, we will quickly find ourselves opening the door to an unsavory, chaotic form of development where it won’t matter what a neighborhood needs or what is fair. Instead, what will matter is who one’s friends are, and how much money one has at one’s disposal. And that’s the kind of environment that will send investment fleeing.
Instead of continuing to fulminate against a project that has been permitted for five years, we hope Connolly and the East Cambridge Planning Team will turn their prodigious energy towards pushing the city council to pass proposed overlay zoning that would give builders of affordable housing a needed boost, as we discussed in this space last week.
