Social housing in Cambridge leaped forward this week as the city manager created a task force and, maybe, just maybe, summoned the city’s first social housing project into being.
The term “social housing” popped up through November’s elections as part of Cambridge’s restless quest to add homes to a city that might have 40,000 more residents by 2050. As described by councillor Ayah Al-Zubi on Monday during acceptance of a staff report and task force member recommendations, social housing is stock that is “publicly owned, permanently affordable and controlled and governed by the people who live there.”
The task force is meant to answer how Cantabrigians think about social housing and how to make it possible. “To be more concrete, what is a project that we could actually turn into reality?” city manager Yi-An Huang said.
Two days later, the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority advanced its plans to take over a project at 2400 Massachusetts Ave., North Cambridge, that was pitched in 2024 as providing 56 homes and retail. In April, when the CRA talked about this project and one nearby at 2326 Massachusetts Ave., the language came near a description of social housing.
Tom Evans, the authority’s executive director, was then fresh from an April 14 panel called “Beyond Urban Renewal: Retooling Redevelopment Authorities to Create Social Housing in Massachusetts.” It discussed the findings of a study prompted by the CRA and supported by the Cambridge Community Foundation. Cambridge mayor Sumbul Siddiqui gave opening remarks.
Now Evans is named to the social housing task force, along with Siddiqui, Al-Zubi and councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, among others, and acknowledged Wednesday that 2400 Massachusetts Ave. could be the project Huang seeks.
“We did not make a direct-line connection between social housing and this property,” said Evans of the Wednesday meeting of the CRA. “There was more of a commitment that we should do a process so the community can have input.”
Enthusiasm among the council and the public suggests “presumably a social housing project at this site would be desired,” Evans said.
Listening sessions and developer input
The project goals so far are for 2400 Massachusetts Ave. to be mixed-use, meaning it will have ground-floor retail; that the homes will be for a mix of incomes; and include some component of affordable homeownership, Evans said. “If there’s public agency involvement in the mixed-income structure and some element of control, such as homeownership, it starts to look and feel like a lot of people’s definitions of social housing,” he said.
The process will start with listening sessions this summer and a request for information from developers to get their thoughts. “We’re interested in seeing if there are different building technologies that might be applicable,” Evans said. “We just want to learn from the development community before we make commitments to do something that might turn out to be infeasible.”
Some form of CRA financial support is likely for the project, as “even just basic, straight housing is very difficult to finance right now,” Evans said.
There’s also follow-up coming for the April 14 panel, where Evans committed to linking with other redevelopment authorities to understand what they’re working on. He reached out to more than a half-dozen to gauge interest and got a strong response, he said. The Cambridge Community Foundation also has expressed ongoing interest in social housing.
Taking shape since 2023
The push began with state representative Mike Connolly, who introduced legislation called the Massachusetts Social Housing Act in 2023 – a way for the state to move toward swift construction of the 200,000 homes urged by the governor two years earlier. Connolly’s plan called for $100 million to be raised through bonding and funneled to projects through the MassHousing agency.
A pilot program is included in the state Affordable Homes Act signed into law in August 2024, and Connolly worked over the past year on shaping it. “A lot of of that work helped bring us to this moment, where the city of Cambridge task force is kicking off with a real chance to model what social housing could look like in Massachusetts,” Connolly said Wednesday, noting that Somerville mayor Jake Wilson also wants his city leading in social housing through the pilot.
Cambridge’s task force process would prepare a proposal for funding via the pilot program, Connolly said. Wilson has been in conversation with Connolly and the administration on opportunities for Somerville to participate.
Roots in the New Deal
Connolly is an adviser to the task force, which emerged from a council request to Huang in September. Councillors held two committee hearings, including one with the Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition, Cambridge Housing Authority, Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard and the CRA.
“A big part of it is getting public housing back to its roots in the New Deal era – having public housing where people of all income levels and all backgrounds can live together,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. “Because there’s no need to pay back investors, you can use the income from rents to have great community spaces and green spaces and expand affordability.”
From the attention and energy put into social housing over the past months – including in November’s election – “this clearly was a priority of of the whole City Council,” councillor Patty Nolan said. “I think it’s a priority of the whole city.”
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