A Better Cambridge

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ACTION ALERT: Support More Housing in Mid-Cambridge, Oppose MCNCD Renewal

The Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Conservation District (MCNCD) is up for renewal, giving Cambridge a chance to end an exclusionary relic that has suppressed housing for four decades. Show up Monday, June 22 and tell the Historical Commission staff that you support letting it expire.

 

What's Happening

The Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Conservation District, a body with the power to block multifamily housing in one of Cambridge's most desirable neighborhoods, is under study for renewal. The next meeting and comment deadline is Monday, June 22. A Better Cambridge urges you to attend the online meeting and submit written comment in opposition.

What is the MCNCD?

The MCNCD is an anti-housing design review commission with the power to block development in Mid-Cambridge. Its charter’s explicit goal is to “prevent excessive infill development," a mandate to block housing. In a city like Cambridge facing a severe housing shortage, that mandate is indefensible, but deleting this language won’t change the underlying dynamic. 

CHC’s Executive Director described NCDs in a 2014 interview as "successful" at their goal of "preventing infill development." In recent City Council testimony, he characterized projects like the apartment buildings that have come before the MCNCD as "brutal intrusions," described the commission's role as "necessary filtering," and welcomed the volume of contested cases as "quality control." That is the institution Cambridge City Council is being asked to renew.

A History of Exclusion

The MCNCD did not emerge in a vacuum. It is part of a long pattern of Cambridge neighborhoods using zoning and quasi-regulatory bodies to lock in the housing status quo for the benefit of existing property owners. The MCNCD, established in 1985, is an example of Cambridge homeowners trying to pull up the ladder behind them.

Cambridge recognized this pattern and acted: the 2025 Multifamily Housing Ordinance ended citywide exclusionary zoning and residential segregation. But the NCDs remain as a historical artifact, a carve-out that allows a few neighborhoods to burden or block multifamily housing. The MCNCD is the planning equivalent of a grandfather clause for exclusion with the explicit goal of delaying and denying infill housing, increasing uncertainty and driving up housing costs on the roughly 2300 parcels subject to this massive NCD’s jurisdiction, from Central to Harvard to Inman Square.

The MCNCD in Action: 60 Ellery Street

Consider 60 Ellery Street, an apartment project enabled by Cambridge's multifamily zoning reforms. Rather than a straightforward path to approval and construction, the project was subjected to open-ended MCNCD subcommittee review, with neighbors attempting to use the process to delay, burden, and effectively kill the project on procedural grounds.

The “Architects Committee” spent months of meetings haggling over facade shape and exterior materials, requiring the builder to return month after month without a final approval. The resulting proposal looks different but not objectively better, at the cost of the better part of a year of project timeline. Moreover, the “Architects Committee” appears nowhere in the NCD Ordinance, let alone delegating final approval to this one-person “committee.” This is not preservation but arbitrary aesthetics deployed as a weapon to drive up costs and deter multifamily housing.

Structural Problems

  • Arbitrary and Conflicting Guidelines. The NCDs have a conflicting set of guidelines, and their training materials make the legally dubious claim that they can ignore their existing mandate not to consider the size and shape of a building by leaving such grounds out of any written decisions. The Land Court struck down Brookline’s NCD Ordinance, finding it in part a home rule violation not permitted by state law.
  • Accountability Gaps. Some commission members were permitted to serve for decades, skirting term limit rules, and only remedied recently when these repeated violations were pointed out.
  • Renter Exclusion. Renters make up 2/3 of Cambridge residents. Despite that fact, renters have been significantly underrepresented on the commission, while a small group of homeowners have rotated through for years. 
  • Process as Punishment. The MCNCD imposes no firm timeline on project approvals. Keeping a project in review indefinitely is itself a tool of opposition that drives up costs.
  • Open Meeting Law Issues. Questions have been raised as to whether the MCNCD Commissioners have privately deliberated by email. Such private deliberations would constitute a clear violation of the Massachusetts Open Meeting Law.
  • Harm to Affordability. Analysis has shown that Neighborhood Conservation Districts reduce infill housing and increase housing costs in Cambridge, consistent with their original intent.

 What You Can Do: