What Did Cambridge Zoning Reform Actually Change?

Cambridge is one of the most expensive places to live in Massachusetts, with rents that run higher than Boston’s. So when the city decided to do something big about affordability, it went bigger than almost anywhere else in the country.

A year and a half later, we’re seeing what that looks like on the ground.

Some of it is exactly what the city hoped for. Some of it is the kind of thing you can only call an unintended consequence.

Here’s what changed. In February 2025, Cambridge passed what’s called the Multifamily Housing Ordinance (MFHO), which eliminated exclusionary single-family zoning across the city. In plain terms, anywhere you could previously build only a single-family home, you can now build multifamily by right, meaning no variance and minimal input from neighbors or city boards. You can go up to four stories by right, or up to six stories if you set aside a certain share of affordable units.

The thinking behind it is straightforward. It’s an argument a lot of us in the industry make. The biggest driver of the affordability crisis is housing supply. The Boston area has a lot of people and not a lot of land, so prices have climbed for years and outpaced construction.

Rent control is floated as one answer, but the supply-side view is that if you make it easier to build, you increase supply, which helps stabilize both rents and sale prices. So Cambridge threw out the old rules, and the building followed. This year, the city has permitted around 400 new homes, many of them the small and mid-sized multifamily projects that simply weren’t allowed before.

But you always have to think about the law of unintended consequences. New development changes the character of a neighborhood, and that’s exactly what has some residents upset. The starkest example is a project at 9 Wyman Road in Huron Village, west of Harvard Square. A developer wants to tear down a single-family house on a tree-lined cul-de-sac of big, expensive homes and put up a 56-unit, six-story apartment building just feet from the neighbors. Those neighbors started a “Stop 9 Wyman” website and asked the historical commission to landmark the house and halt the demolition. There’s even talk of a lawsuit.

That historical-commission angle turns out to be the real story of the moment. Since the ordinance passed, the Cambridge Historical Commission has quietly become an arbiter of what gets built in the area. Its longtime executive director, Charles Sullivan, says requests for historical review jumped fivefold, with more than 340 queries since February 2025.

What residents lean on instead is an older preservation rule. To tear down any building more than 50 years old, a developer must first file for a determination of significance, and if the commission deems it significant, demolition can be paused for up to a year while the property is considered for landmark status. For neighbors who’ve lost their say through zoning, it’s one of the few ways left to push back.

The bigger picture shows a city that hadn’t built much in decades. Averaging about 350 new homes a year between 2023 and 2025, down from more than 800 a year a decade ago, it’s being changed in a hurry. This same tension is playing out across Massachusetts, from the MBTA Communities Act pushing towns near transit to add housing, to fights over traffic and strain on power grids and sewer systems. Cambridge is just the most dramatic version of it.

The building is happening, and I guess we’ll see whether it turns out to be a good thing.

You can watch the full video above, or feel free to skip to the topics that interest you most using the timestamps below:

00:00 — Cambridge’s Housing Problem

01:19 — What MFHO Changed

03:50 — Unintended Consequences

04:58 — The Wyman Fight

06:08 — Historical Commission

08:51 — Building Boom

09:35 — Beyond Cambridge

11:22 — Final Thoughts

If you’d like to discuss this topic, or anything else about the Cambridge area and the real estate market in general, I’d love to have a conversation with you. Call or text me at (857) 210-9925, email me at lou@c21revolution.com, or visit lousellscambridge.com. Look forward to talking to you soon.