The New York Times Editorial Board published a splashy interactive piece on housing affordability mid-May. They argued America stopped building enough homes in the latter half of the 20th century, and cities that resumed building are the ones where prices have softened. The piece pointedly noted that many of the worst offenders have been progressive cities whose zoning policies benefited older, wealthier homeowners at everyone else's expense. It mapped price-to-income ratios across the country and demonstrated just how historically extreme our crisis is.

Hover over "Cambridge, Mass." and you get this summary of unaffordability: a 6.5x price-to-income (PTI) ratio for a single-family home. That’s compared to San Francisco’s 12.4x, Boston at 6.4x, Austin’s 4.6x, and Minneapolis at 3.9x. That seemed off to us.

Two things jumped out. First, that's not Cambridge! It's a Cambridge-Newton-Framingham metropolitan division, which encompasses a large statistical area including dozens of suburban towns in Middlesex County, nearly to the New Hampshire border. This includes places where you can still buy a single-family home for under $650,000. The City of Cambridge is a very different market.

Second, the Times's methodology focuses on single-family homes (SFH) in those broader metropolitan areas. SFH are usually defined as detached residences on their own parcels for one household, without shared entrances/utilities - as opposed to multifamily homes.

These two decisions normalize the data nationwide, but necessarily skews the picture for cities, which tend to have more apartment buildings.

So, 6.5x PTI is historically high. But when we control for Cambridge’s city limits, things actually look a lot worse.

Single-Family: Apples-to-Apples

Since the NYT methodology uses single-family home prices, let's start there. Using arm's-length SFH sales from the Cambridge Property Database (2022–2024, adjusted to 2024 dollars) and the 2024 American Community Survey (census.gov) for household income: 

The city-level single-family PTI more than doubles the metro figure. The nationwide PTI was 2.5x in 1950. Today, it’s 4.9x. Cambridge's SFH market is nearly three times that threshold.

The metropolitan division includes suburban communities with far more affordable single-family stock. Someone actually shopping for a single-family house in Cambridge would of course encounter higher prices. But single-family homes are rare in most Cambridge neighborhoods. They're a luxury good.

According to the city's FY2026 assessment roll, single-family homes make up just 17.4% of Cambridge's ~21,595 private residential properties*. Count by housing units instead of properties (so, a 3-family building counts as three residences, not one) and the share drops to 7.1% of the city's roughly 52,800 residential homes*.

The distribution varies dramatically by neighborhood. West Cambridge, where Exclusionary Zoning and strict Floor Area Ratio requirements persisted until recently, is over one fifth single-family (21.1%). East Cambridge, by contrast, is just 2.4%.

*Our 17.4% figure uses assessment roll (SFH properties / all residential properties). The 7.1% unit-based figure uses the city’s official total housing unit count by neighborhood (CDD) for denominator, but subtracts dorms/university housing. The SFH numerator (code 101, 3,736 properties) is reliable in both framings. Full methodology linked below.

Beyond Single-Family: Expanding on The Times's Methodology

When looking at all property type sales, the affordability picture changes:

The observed condo PTI is 6.5x - by coincidence, exactly the metro's single-family figure. Condos account for 75% of all residential sales in Cambridge. They are the market here, and they are what pull the all-residential PTI down from the stratospheric SFH level to a merely severe 7.7x.

By comparison, the average Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) (which applies various statistical techniques to smooth data, account for seasonality, etc.) for Cambridge in 2024 was $1,021,000, for a PTI of 7.1x.

Overall, this isn't meant to be a head-to-head comparison to the Times's number. We're mixing property types rather than single-family; we used Cambridge's city boundaries rather than a statistical area. It does, however, demonstrate why it was so important that Cambridge just ended single-family-only Exclusionary Zoning city-wide in 2025, and calls into question attempts to block redevelopment of single-family homes into apartments.

Have We Been Building?

So, if we need to build more housing of all kinds, how are we doing so far? Our analysis shows that, for 2016-2025, Cambridge permitted a similar number of units (18.0 per 1,000 households) as NYT’s regional metro area housing starts (18.9 average annual housing starts per 1,000 households). However, Cambridge experienced a long period of downconversions (for example - an apartment building demolished in favor of one or two townhomes), in part incentivized by the old zoning.

When accounting for demolitions and downconversions, we see 10.8 net units per 1,000 households over the past decade. We are behind:

*Our denominator for households is pegged to 2024, the most recent complete year for ACS census data, like most of this analysis.

** The NYT piece does not expand on their housing starts methodology, so there is no comparator here.

Cambridge Needs To Build More (Multifamily) Housing

1. Single-family homes in Cambridge are a luxury good. Cambridge's single-family PTI is 13.6x vs. the NYT's analysis's metro's 6.5x. Until last year, zoning practically banned anything but single-family homes in some neighborhoods of Cambridge.
2. Multifamily homes in Cambridge are as affordable as single-family homes in the greater region. At 6.5x PTI, observed condo sales actually matched the NYT's estimate for the broader metro area's single-family home benchmark.
3. Production is low. Net housing starts have dropped dramatically in recent years, putting Cambridge way behind even our laggardly region.

A 6.5x condo PTI is still way above the ~3x range historically considered healthy. But the data from our own city, analyzed at a finer grain than the Times's metro-level view, shows that the path to less unaffordable runs through more housing: specifically, more multifamily housing.

Cambridge is a city with declining commercial property values and shrinking growth in the tax base that anticipates a greater dependence on property taxes in the future. Thousands of families languish on the Cambridge Housing Authority housing assistance waitlist. Rent is very high. Permitting 62 (net) homes a year, like we did in 2025, is not enough.

It is incumbent on the City to continue to lower barriers to building more multifamily housing in Cambridge.

This analysis is not meant as a critique of the NYT's work, but an extension of the conversation they began, through a Cambridge lens.

Thanks for reading!

Data sources: Cambridge Property Database FY2026 (Socrata), Cambridge Open Data Portal housing permits, U.S. Census Bureau ACS 1-Year 2024, Zillow ZHVI, BLS CPI-U. All Cambridge-specific prices in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars. 

Full sources and methodology in this git repository.