 Working Paper, author: Suzanne P. Blier, Harvard University Summary of essay findings: Aziz Sunderji’s “The Great Housing Debate” usefully maps the major arguments over housing supply, zoning, land, demand, and affordability through three broad approaches: 1) market realist approaches (legal capacity does not guarantee feasible or affordable construction); 2) conditional-supply approaches (additional housing helps, but its effects depend on scale, time, location, and complementary policies); and 3) supply-side approaches: restrictive regulation is the principal constraint, and liberalization is the main route to more housing and lower price pressure. Its framework is incomplete for a built-out city such as Cambridge. Because much of Cambridge’s redevelopment occurs on occupied parcels and in projects below the inclusionary-housing threshold, gross unit production conceals the loss of older, naturally more affordable homes, tenant displacement, expensive replacement housing, and environmental costs. The central Cambridge question is therefore not simply whether upzoning produces more units, but what kinds of units it produces, what they replace, who can afford them, and whether the net result advances affordability and inclusion. Key takeaways: • Cambridge aligns most strongly with Group 1, “Market Realist Approaches”: exceptionally expensive land, acquisition and construction costs, and developer choices determine what is actually built. Its resemblance to Group 2, “Supply Works - but Under Conditions,” remains limited and unproven. • Gross permit and unit counts are inadequate measures of success. Cambridge should report net units and bedrooms, demolitions, prior and replacement rents, tenant displacement, inclusionary production, and infrastructure and environmental effects. • Sunderji gives too little attention to preservation of existing, less expensive housing and to the environmental and livability consequences of demolition and redevelopment; both belong near the center of the analysis. • Cambridge housing demand is intensified by Harvard, MIT, other area institutions, high-paid biotechnology and information-technology employment, and wealthier newcomers able to outbid less affluent residents. Recent university downsizing may soften one part of demand, but it does not remove these larger structural pressures. • Building more housing improves conditions relative to not building, but the cost of newly constructed housing, affordability subsidies, environmental impacts, preservation of existing housing, and tenant protection remain essential. ____________________________________________ Why are housing costs so high—and why do experts who study the same evidence reach such different conclusions? This question is addressed by Aziz Sunderji in his wide-ranging article “Why Is Housing So Expensive? How Can We Fix It? The Great Debate,” Home Economics, July 2026.[i] His analysis is less a single argument than a map of the modern housing debate. By placing major studies alongside published rebuttals, this analysis shows that the disagreement is not simply between people who believe in supply and people who do not. The real disputes concern what causes scarcity, how strongly zoning affects prices, whether legal capacity becomes financially feasible construction, how quickly new housing reaches lower-income households, and how land values, demolition, finance, inequality, and developer behavior shape the outcome. To allow readers to explore this in greater detail, I have included a summary of the housing cost perspectives in Sunderji’s “The Great Debate” in the appendix, reorganized to feature first the most balanced of the approaches presented in this study into three broad approaches (top image and below, Plate 1 at bottom). The most balanced synthesis is that new housing improves conditions relative to not building at all, but subsidies, preservation, and tenant protection remain essential. Group 1, Market Realist Approaches, argues that legal permission to build does not guarantee that housing will be built quickly, affordably, or at all. Demand, land values, construction costs, demolition, financing, inequality, and developer timing may matter as much as zoning. The central disagreement surrounding this approach is whether land, demand, costs, and developer behavior are the primary limits on housing production, or complications that make meaningful zoning reform even more necessary.  Group 2, Supply Works—but Under Conditions, accepts that new housing generally relieves pressure, while emphasizing that the benefits vary by place, market segment, and time and cannot substitute for assistance to very-low-income households. The central disagreement is mainly about magnitude, distribution, and speed—not whether supply has any effect.  Group 3, Supply-Side Approaches, argues that strong demand becomes high prices chiefly when zoning and approval rules prevent the housing stock from expanding. Taken together, these writers contend that high housing costs arise when regulation prevents construction from keeping pace with demand, and that broader development rights would expand supply, widen access to prosperous places, and ease upward pressure on prices. Critics answer that legal reform alone does not guarantee affordability.  Which of these approaches best explains housing costs in Cambridge? The city provides a strong test case as to whether broad upzoning can create meaningful new supply in a city where land is exceptionally expensive, nearly every parcel is already occupied, and redevelopment often requires demolition. Cambridge is already an exceptionally compact and densely developed city. It occupies only about 6.4 square miles of land and, using 2020 Census figures, ranks as the fifth-densest incorporated U.S. city with more than 100,000 residents, at approximately 18,500 residents per square mile.[ii] The February 2025 Multi-Family Housing (MFH) citywide upzoning ordinance removed minimum lot sizes, density limits, residential unit limits, and residential floor-area limits across much of the city, while making multifamily housing broadly permissible. The ordinance also allowed new buildings or renovated structures to extend to five feet from the property line at the sides and rear, extended what could count as open space to porches, balconies, and rooftops. The theory behind Cambridge’s MFH upzoning is essentially the supply-side one: more legal capacity should produce more homes, ease competition for existing units, and generate additional inclusionary housing.[iii] This raises a broader planning question. Cambridge formally identifies Envision Cambridge as its citywide comprehensive plan and organizes its goals under six broad areas: climate and the environment, housing, the economy, mobility, urban form, and community wellbeing.[iv] These goals are not always mutually reinforcing. In some locations, increased housing production may conflict with objectives involving affordability, historic and neighborhood character, tree canopy, climate resilience, transportation capacity, commercial vitality, and residents’ quality of life. Yet the MFH ordinance greatly expanded as-of-right development capacity citywide without establishing a clear neighborhood-scale or parcel-level process for weighing these competing objectives. In that sense, the reform shifts important decisions away from comprehensive, neighborhood- and site-sensitive planning and toward market forces and broadly granted development entitlements. Yet Cambridge also illustrates why the “limits of upzoning” literature cannot be treated as peripheral. This is not Auckland expanding across large areas of underused land. Much of Cambridge’s new capacity sits beneath existing houses, two-family homes, triple-deckers, and small apartment buildings. To use that capacity, a developer may first have to pay a redevelopment price for an already valuable property, remove functioning housing, relocate tenants, and then finance substantially more expensive infill construction. Cambridge therefore needs to distinguish legal capacity from feasible capacity and gross production from net production. A twelve-unit building replacing three existing apartments produces nine net new homes, not twelve—and the affordability calculation changes again if the demolished apartments were relatively inexpensive, family-sized, or occupied by long-term tenants. Cambridge’s highly differentiated housing market also complicates the supply-side moving-chain theory. The city’s 2025 housing-stock data identify only 3,798 single-family homes among 58,966 total housing units—a mere 6.4 percent of the housing stock.[v] These properties constitute a scarce and highly sought market, particularly when they include historic architecture, gardens, quiet streets, and larger family-sized interiors. Newly constructed apartments and condominiums may therefore be imperfect substitutes for the homes sought by affluent buyers who specifically value detached or historic Cambridge houses. New multifamily construction can still create useful moving chains within the apartment and condominium markets, but it may do relatively little to loosen demand for this increasingly rare category. The strength of a moving chain depends not simply on the number of new units created, but on whether households regard the new and existing homes as genuine substitutes. Cambridge’s upzoning may also be changing who competes for its limited supply of land. Properties are increasingly attractive not only to prospective residents but also to developers and investors based outside the city—and, in some documented cases, outside Massachusetts or the United States—who see newly expanded development rights as a financial opportunity. This additional investor demand can raise acquisition prices and redevelopment expectations even before new housing is built. It also places local homebuyers, small property owners, and affordable housing developers in competition with purchasers who have greater access to capital and who evaluate a property primarily according to its redevelopment potential. The relevant question is whether the added development value is captured principally through speculative acquisition and high-end redevelopment rather than through housing that advances Cambridge’s affordability goals. Sunderji’s overview article, with its discussion of supply, moving chains, and nearby rents, also gives too little attention to other lines of research asking whether upzoning changes the social composition of neighborhoods even when it increases housing production. A 2025 study of New York neighborhood rezonings found that upzoned areas added housing but also became, over time, whiter, more highly educated, and more affluent, with rising housing prices—evidence that additional supply and gentrification can occur simultaneously.[vi] Recent Urban Institute work likewise cautions that upzoning should be paired with affordable housing and anti-displacement measures and notes evidence that added supply may increase the out-migration of low- and moderate-income households unless they have access to subsidized housing.[vii] The omission of existing, naturally more affordable housing is even more consequential for Cambridge. Older housing is not necessarily affordable in an absolute sense, but it is often less expensive than newly constructed housing because its original development costs have long been absorbed and because it may lack the amenities and finishes commanded by the newest buildings. It may also contain larger family apartments, informal arrangements, or long-term tenants paying below current asking rents. Demolishing such housing can remove affordability that does not appear in the city’s official count of income-restricted units. Preservation research generally finds that retaining existing affordable housing prevents displacement and is often less costly than replacing it through new construction. Cambridge itself recognizes acquisition, rehabilitation, adaptive reuse, and preservation as core affordable-housing strategies, and its Affordable Housing Trust has financed both creation and preservation.[viii] This does not mean Cambridge should preserve every existing building or reject added supply. Preserving every existing building could also prevent appropriate additions to the housing stock, and some redevelopment produces a substantial net gain. The better question is what each project replaces and what it adds. A parking lot converted to fifty apartments is fundamentally different from three occupied, moderately priced family apartments replaced by ten luxury units and two inclusionary units. Both may count as “new housing,” but their effects on supply, affordability, displacement, household capacity, and neighborhood composition are not equivalent. Cambridge’s inclusionary requirement partly addresses this problem: projects of ten or more units must devote 20 percent of residential floor area to affordable housing. But the ten-unit threshold may also discourage smaller projects from crossing the ten-unit inclusionary-housing threshold, particularly where no added development entitlement compensates for it. Cambridge thus combines an unusually permissive physical zoning envelope with a substantial affordability charge and relatively weak preservation protections for unrestricted but lower-cost existing homes.[ix] The emerging project pipeline reinforces this concern. The Cambridge Redevelopment Tracker, a crowdsourced inventory created by the office of City Councillor Zusy, identifies 99 active or potential projects since passage of the Multifamily Housing Ordinance. The tracker is a continuously updated, crowdsourced inventory rather than an official city database. Its entries draw on public records, permit filings, property information, and community reports; Councillor Zusy’s office invites corrections and revises entries when errors are identified. The figures should therefore be read as a transparent, dated snapshot of the redevelopment pipeline, not as a final or infallible accounting.[x] Its published project-size categories currently account for 98 of those projects and categorize them by anticipated net change. Seventeen create no net new units, although they may replace existing homes with larger structures; 34 add one to three new units; and 33 add four to nine new units. No project adds 10 to 19 new units, while two add 20 to 24 new units and 12 add at least 25 new units. Thus, 84 of the 98 projects currently classified by size—approximately 86 percent—produce fewer than ten net new units or none at all. Only 14 projects add ten or more new units, although 12 of those are substantially larger projects. These figures show that the redevelopment pipeline is dominated numerically by small changes, often involving demolition or replacement on already developed residential sites, even though a comparatively small number of large projects may ultimately account for much of the total unit production. Because Cambridge applies its inclusionary requirement according to the size and residential floor area of a qualifying project, rather than simply its net-unit increase, the tracker’s net-change categories do not by themselves establish how many affordable units are required. The projects are also unevenly distributed across Cambridge. We can see this the accompanying map of part of Mid-Cambridge projects (Plate 2) which is based on a visual created by Cambridge landscape architect, Elena Saporta,  Indeed, a substantial share of the tracked redevelopment is concentrated in neighborhoods that have historically contained comparatively less expensive housing but larger residential lots. This pattern suggests that the effects of upzoning—including demolition, construction activity, displacement pressure, tree and open-space loss, and other environmental changes—may fall more heavily on some parts of the city than on others. It also raises questions of environmental equity, particularly where additional impervious surface, reduced tree canopy, heat-island exposure, and flood vulnerability are already concerns. In addition to Mid-Cambridge, with seven tracked redevelopment residential projects, neighborhoods experiencing substantial redevelopment activity include North Cambridge, with 11; Riverside, 14; Strawberry Hill, 14; Neighborhood Nine, particularly its western section, 13; West Cambridge, particularly its western section, 10; and Cambridge Highlands, seven. Together, these neighborhoods contain 76 of the 99 geographically identified projects—approximately 77 percent of the total. By contrast, the more densely developed neighborhoods of East Cambridge, with six projects, Baldwin, with two, and the Port, with two, generally contain smaller parcels that may be less readily redeveloped under the new dimensional rules. All three also contain substantial amounts of income-restricted housing, which may affect both redevelopment patterns and the composition of their housing stock. In short, Cambridge should not evaluate the impact of the 2025 MFH upzoning using only three measures—new permits, new buildings, and new inclusionary units. It should track, parcel by parcel, the homes and bedrooms demolished; prior rents and occupancy; gross and net units created; the size and rent of replacement units; tenant displacement and relocation; the share of proposed projects that gain historical approval, obtain financing, and begin construction; neighborhood changes in income, race, tenure, and family composition; and the experiences of residents whose leases are terminated or who leave the city as redevelopment proceeds. Cambridge should also measure tree-canopy loss, added impervious surface on each property, increased neighborhood flood exposure, heat-island effects, embodied carbon from demolition and reconstruction[xi], and the loss of existing solar investments. These impacts should be considered alongside the possible regional environmental benefits of allowing more people to live near jobs and transit. The city should additionally evaluate whether water, sewer, electrical, waste, school, fire, police, and transit infrastructure can accommodate additional building intensity and residents. Because Cambridge has removed minimum parking requirements, it should track changes in household vehicle ownership and street-parking demand, and whether transit and bicycle infrastructure can absorb the resulting travel needs. The core Cambridge question is therefore not simply whether upzoning “works.” It is: Does the reform create enough economically feasible, net new housing to moderate prices while preserving—or replacing—the existing homes, affordability, and residents most vulnerable to redevelopment? Sunderji’s three broad traditions help frame that question, but the Cambridge case reveals two largely missing dimensions: housing preservation and environmental consequences. Supply, subsidy, and tenant protection are not enough if policy ignores the homes, affordability, environmental assets, and established communities lost through redevelopment. Conclusions: Where Cambridge Fits—and What Sunderji Leaves Out Cambridge fits most clearly within Group 1, “Market Realist Approaches.” It is a nearly fully developed city with exceptionally expensive land, substantial acquisition and demolition costs, high construction and financing costs, and property owners who decide whether and when newly granted development rights will be used. These conditions mean that additional zoning capacity may raise redevelopment value without quickly producing housing that is either abundant or affordable. Cambridge shares only a qualified connection with Group 2, “Supply Works—but Under Conditions.” In theory, additional homes can reduce competition relative to what would have occurred without them. In practice, however, the city has not yet demonstrated that the recent upzoning is bringing housing prices down. As of July 2026, the Cambridge Redevelopment Tracker identifies 99 active or potential projects geographically, while its published project-size categories currently account for 98. Of those 98 projects, 84—approximately 86 percent—create fewer than ten net new units or no new units at all. Because Cambridge determines inclusionary applicability from the size and residential floor area of a qualifying project, these net-change figures do not establish that every small project falls outside the requirement. They do show, however, that the pipeline is dominated numerically by projects involving relatively small net changes. Because the tracker is crowdsourced and the project pipeline is changing, these figures should be treated as a dated snapshot rather than a final accounting. The result may be an enlarged single-family house or one to three high-priced condominiums—often priced above $1 million each—rather than a meaningful increase in moderately priced or income-restricted housing. Cambridge also differs from many of the metropolitan cases in Sunderji’s survey because demand here is unusually concentrated and affluent. Harvard, MIT, and other area colleges and research institutions have long attracted students, faculty, staff, investment, and associated businesses.[xii] Although Harvard, MIT, and some related institutions are currently restraining hiring[xiii] or reducing staffing[xiv], this near-term contraction[xv] does not erase their enduring role in attracting students, employees, investment, laboratories, and associated businesses. The biotechnology and information-technology sectors[xvi] add another large population of highly paid workers, while wealthier newcomers from outside Cambridge can outbid less affluent local residents for a limited stock of homes. In that setting, new market-rate construction may accommodate affluent demand without necessarily preventing the displacement of existing residents. The appropriate test of Cambridge’s policy is therefore not whether some new units appear, but whether the reform produces a substantial net increase in homes that a broader range of residents can afford. That assessment must include what is demolished, whether tenants are displaced, whether projects remain below the inclusionary threshold, what new units cost, how many bedrooms are gained or lost, and which environmental and neighborhood assets disappear in the process. The relevant measure of success is not how much development Cambridge legally permits, but whether redevelopment produces a meaningful net gain in housing that a broader range of residents can afford without sacrificing existing affordability, established communities, and environmental resilience. Appendix:
Overview of the principal authors and approaches addressed in Sunderji Group 1: Market Realist Approaches: Markets, Land, and the Limits of Upzoning The Market Realist Approach holds that permission to build is not the same as actual construction. Whether housing is built—and whether it is affordable—depends not only on zoning, but also on demand, land prices, acquisition and demolition costs, financing, construction expenses, inequality, and developer incentives and timing. This group includes: Patrick Condon: added development rights are capitalized into land prices; cities should capture rezoning gains for permanently affordable housing; Thomas Davidoff and Saku Aura: high prices often reflect scarce land and strong demand; local upzoning may yield modest price reductions; Rebecca Diamond: skilled workers follow high wages, raise rents, and help create amenities that further increase demand; supply determines the severity of the price effect; Others include: Yonah Freemark: Chicago upzoning increased land and condominium values without producing additional housing within the study period; Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer and Todd Sinai: “superstar cities” are scarce desirable goods increasingly bid up by affluent households; Greg Howard and Jack Liebersohn: rents rose as demand shifted toward places where housing is difficult to expand; Schuyler Louie, John Mondragon and Johannes Wieland: income growth, rather than measured supply constraints, best explains differences in housing-price growth. Cameron Murray: landowners control development timing; profitable projects may be withheld while owners wait for higher returns, leaving zoned capacity unused; Anthony Orlando and Christian Redfearn: growing cities exhaust inexpensive land and shift toward more costly infill and tall construction, reducing supply elasticity even without tighter zoning; Vincent Rollet: zoning reform increases redevelopment, but slowly; demolition, fixed costs, and migration diffuse the affordability gains over decades; Michael Storper and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: high-income growth and inequality drive unaffordability; upzoning may replace older housing and accelerate gentrification; Jessica Trounstine: zoning restricts supply, but its deeper significance lies in its use by affluent white homeowners to preserve exclusion and unequal access to public goods; Raven Molloy, Charles Nathanson and Andrew Paciorek: regulation has a larger effect on property prices than on rents and explains only part of the affordability problem. Their critics are: Albert Saiz; Guren, McKay, Nakamura and Steinsson; Jason Barr; Michael Manville, Michael Lens and Paavo Monkkonen; Shertzer, Twinam and Walsh; Michael Wiebe; Russil Wvong; Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy; Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O’Regan; Stuart Donovan and Matthew Maltman—answer that demand and costs do not make zoning irrelevant. High demand becomes extreme scarcity when supply cannot respond; modest or short-lived upzonings are poor tests; broad, economically usable reforms have increased construction and moderated rents. The central disagreement is whether land, demand, costs, and developer behavior are the main constraints on housing production, or whether they strengthen the case for broad and economically meaningful zoning reform. Group 2: Supply Works—but Under Conditions The Conditional Supply Approach holds that new housing generally eases market pressure, but its effects vary by location, housing type, market segment, and time. Additional supply can improve affordability, but it cannot replace direct assistance for very-low-income households.Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O’Regan: the newer evidence supports supply, but supply remains necessary rather than sufficient; Cristina Bratu, Oskari Harjunen and Tuukka Saarimaa: Helsinki moving chains reach lower-income households within a year or two; social housing reaches them more directly; Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy: Auckland’s broad upzoning created economically feasible capacity, substantially increased permits, and lowered rents relative to the estimated counterfactual; Xiaodi Li: New York towers create some amenity demand, but the supply effect dominates and nearby rents decline modestly; Evan Mast, Brian Asquith and Davin Reed: new market-rate buildings reduce nearby rent pressure and initiate moving chains reaching lower-income neighborhoods; Kate Pennington: San Francisco construction lowers nearby rents and reduces displacement and eviction risk; Jenny Schuetz: America has two problems—too few homes and too little income; zoning reform addresses scarcity, while subsidies address poverty. Responses: Anthony Damiano and Chris Frenier respond that effects vary by submarket and may raise rents in lower-priced segments. Damiano further argues that the benefits are too small and too concentrated above the bottom of the market to resolve severe affordability. Cameron Murray and Tim Helm question whether some studies identify supply effects rather than demand-driven construction and dispute the Auckland counterfactual. Clayton Nall argues that empirical evidence alone will not settle a debate shaped by values, fairness, and distrust of development. Greenaway-McGrevy, Stuart Donovan and Matthew Maltman defend the Auckland findings; Been, Ellen and O’Regan argue that critics understate the cumulative evidence that constrained supply worsens affordability. The central disagreement concerns how large the benefits are, who receives them, and how quickly they appear—not whether added supply has any effect at all. The most balanced conclusion is that new housing generally improves conditions compared with not building, but it must be paired with subsidies, preservation, and tenant protections. Group 3: Supply-Side Approaches: Regulation as the Central Constraint The Supply-Side Deregulation Approach holds that strong demand produces especially high housing costs when zoning and approval barriers prevent supply from expanding. Bryan Caplan: regulation manufactures scarcity; extensive deregulation could produce very large price reductions; Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag: high housing costs have interrupted regional income convergence and increasingly exclude lower-wage workers from prosperous places; Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko: large gaps between housing prices and construction costs indicate barriers to entry—a regulatory or zoning tax; Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti: housing constraints prevent workers from moving to productive cities and impose a national economic cost; Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson and Marc Dunkelman: progressive cities created scarcity through decades of procedural and regulatory barriers; Michael Manville, Michael Lens and Paavo Monkkonen: demand is the motor, but supply determines whether growth produces more homes or higher rents; Edward Pinto and Tobias Peter: legalizing small lots, townhouses, duplexes, and other “light-touch density” would restore less expensive forms of housing and support filtering; Albert Saiz: geography and regulation jointly determine supply elasticity; constrained cities translate demand into prices rather than construction. Responses in Group 3 are the scholars and writers challenging the claim that regulation is the central cause of high housing costs: Cameron Murray: disputes Glaeser and Gyourko’s “zoning tax,” arguing the price-cost gap may reflect land economics rather than regulation; Brendan O’Flaherty: says heterogenous land, indivisible lots, city-specific costs, and measurement error can create the same apparent gap; Raven Molloy: argues regulation explains less of the affordability problem when rents, rather than asset prices, are examined; Nathaniel Baum-Snow: emphasizes depletion of well-located land and the closing of the suburban development frontier; Brian Greaney: re-estimates Hsieh and Moretti’s model and finds the claimed national productivity gains from deregulation largely disappear; Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis: argue that the decline in regional income convergence is driven mainly by top-income divergence, weakening Ganong and Shoag’s broader claim; Thomas Davidoff: argues standard supply-constraint measures are entangled with demand and do not cleanly isolate the effect of regulation; Chandler Lutz and Ben Sand: challenge Saiz’s measure of land unavailability and identify significant measurement error; Michael Storper and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose: argue that inequality and high-income economic growth, not zoning alone, drive unaffordability, and that upzoning may worsen gentrification; Hannah Story Brown: says the “abundance” argument understates corporate interests and the failure of public provision; Sandeep Vaheesan: argues deregulation overlooks market power, profit expectations, land ownership, and the need for public investment. The proponents answer that endogeneity and imperfect measurement do not make regulation harmless. Demand may initially produce political resistance to development, after which regulation deepens the shortage. Critics answer that legal reform alone does not guarantee financing, construction, or affordability. The most balanced conclusion is that regulation is neither the sole cause nor a minor detail. It influences whether demand, land scarcity, and economic growth produce additional homes or still higher prices, but zoning reform must be paired with feasible project economics and direct affordability measures. In summary: These authors broadly argue that restrictive zoning and approval systems convert strong demand into scarcity, higher prices, and exclusion, while deregulation and more flexible housing types allow supply to respond and reduce those pressures. Sources [i] Aziz Sunderji, “Why Is Housing So Expensive? How Can We Fix It? The Great Debate,” Home Economics, July 2026, https://homeeconomics.us/the-great-debate [ii] U.S. Census Bureau, “Cambridge city, Massachusetts,” 2020 Decennial Census: population 118,403; land area 6.4 square miles, https://data.census.gov/profile/Cambridge_city%2C_Middlesex_County%2C_Massachusetts?g=060XX00US2501711000 [iii] City of Cambridge Community Development Department, “Zoning for Multifamily Housing,” https://www.cambridgema.gov/cdd/projects/zoning/multifamilyhousing [iv] City of Cambridge Community Development Department, “Envision Cambridge,” roadmap to 2030 and citywide plan organized around six planning topics: Climate and Environment, Housing, Economy, Mobility, Urban Form, and Community Wellbeing, https://www.cambridgema.gov/envision [v] City of Cambridge Community Development Department, “Housing Stock and Residential Properties by Neighborhood: 2025,” Cambridge Open Data Portal, https://data.cambridgema.gov/Housing/Housing-Stock-and-Residential-Properties-by-Neighb/wiba-69ua/about_data [vi] Kim et al., “Upzoning and Gentrification: Heterogeneous Impacts of Neighbourhood-Level Upzoning in New York City,” Urban Studies (published online December 2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241298199 [vii] Urban Institute, “How Upzoning Affects Housing Supply: Evidence and Implications for Designing Zoning Reform That Works,” June 1, 2026, https://housingmatters.urban.org/how-upzoning-affects-housing-supply [viii] Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, “Proactive Preservation of Unsubsidized Affordable Housing: Emerging Practices,” https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-areas/working-papers/proactive-preservation-unsubsidized-affordable-housing-emerging [ix] City of Cambridge Community Development Department, “Inclusionary Housing,” https://www.cambridgema.gov/cdd/housing/inclusionaryhousing [x] Councillor Zusy’s Office, “Cambridge Redevelopment Tracker,” accessed July 2026. Crowdsourced inventory of active and potential Cambridge redevelopments identified since passage of the Multifamily Housing Ordinance. https://cambridge-redev-tracker.pages.dev/ [xi] Restore Oregon, “Understanding the Carbon Cost of Demolition,” April 12, 2021, https://restoreoregon.org/2021/04/12/understanding-the-carbon-cost-of-demolition/ [xii] City of Cambridge Community Development Department, “Economic Success Spurs Expanded Budget,” 2024, https://www.cambridgema.gov/digital/stories/2024/cityviewsummer2024/economicsuccessspursexpandedbudget [xiii] Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Hiring Freeze for Non-Essential Positions,” February 14, 2025, https://orgchart.mit.edu/letters/hiring-freeze-non-essential-positions [xiv] Harvard University, “Financial Stewardship Update,” July 14, 2025, https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2025/financial-stewardship-update/ [xv] Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, “FAS Workforce Planning: A First Step,” July 14, 2026, https://www.fas.harvard.edu/news/2026/07/fas-workforce-planning-first-step [xvi] City of Cambridge Community Development Department, “Top 25 Employers,” updated annually, https://www.cambridgema.gov/cdd/factsandmaps/economicdata/top25employers
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