May 7, 1998

Last week's Chronicle reported that a handful of neighbors were successful in stopping an affordable housing project on the corner of Upland Road and Walnut Avenue on the grounds that the current and proposed use of the building as eight apartments violated the zoning ordinance.

As a neighbor myself, I felt the project represented a rare opportunity of locating affordable housing in a section of the city where there isn't a lot of it. With the building's current status as formerly rent-controlled, multi-family housing, little would have changed under the CASCAP (Cambridge and Somerville Cooperative Apartment Program) proposal except the restoration of the deteriorated exterior of the building under the guidelines of the Massachusetts Historical Commission.

With troubled starts or non-starts for several affordable housing projects in the last several years, we have to ask ourselves what we could be doing better if affordable housing is to remain one of the top priorities of the city government. Is more and earlier neighborhood outreach the answer? I believe that in the case of the Avon Hill project, earlier outreach with full information about the project would have revealed greater support and less opposition. Opponents might have been assured that the likely future tenants were in fact already their neighbors, the many people in the Peabody and Agassiz neighborhoods who have lost, or are about to lose, their homes through skyrocketing rents or condo conversions.

But CASCAP, an experienced nonprofit developer, chose a quieter path, perhaps recognizing that a broad outreach strategy has only served to build opposition to other projects in other parts of the city. They recognized that with the success of the project dependent on a relatively thin financial margin, time meant money because of the added carrying costs incurred. The prospect of even a small delay to respond to the zoning question was able to force their withdrawal. It's too bad. It's too bad for the prospective tenants. It's too bad for the building which might have had a gorgeous restoration. And it's too bad for the whole neighborhood.

KATHLEEN LEAHY BORN

Walnut Avenue, city councilor

This article originally appeared in the Cambridge Chronicle.