A Quagmire in Cambridge

The first things that meet the eye when one drives from Boston into Kendall Square are the new office buildings and the well-manicured shrubs on the traffic circle spelling "Welcome to Cambridge." Immediately behind this facade, however, are a few lonely old buildings and acres of barren, weed-filled ground that have been the object of a broiling ten-year controversy which still has no end in sight.

In 1964, the City of Cambridge lured the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) into Kendall Square to develop a $60 million electronic research center that was to help pave America's way to the moon and provide a gleeful MIT with a wealth of related research jobs. To make way for NASA the city relocated some businesses and tore down others, resulting in the loss to Cambridge of nearly 3000 jobs.

Five years later, America had reached the moon and NASA had not even begun construction. Harried by spending cuts and encouraged by President Nixon maneuvering against Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), the space agency pulled out. It willed the land to the Department of Transportation, which put its regional headquarters on a five acre plot and, two years later, decided to leave the remaining 24 acres of empty land to Cambridge.

The Cambridge City Council, angry that the NASA jobs had never materialized while potentially revenue-producing land remained undeveloped, ordered the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority (CRA) to come up with a development plan that would provide the best and quickest returns to the city.

The resulting CRA "concept plan" called for 1700 apartment units, a million square feet of office space and seven high-rise towers that would have turned the Kendall Square area into something resembling downtown Boston. The plan enraged the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee (CTOC), Hard Times, and other groups of residents who pointed to the severe need for low income housing and blue collar employment that the CRA had ignored.

The City Council voted down the CRA plan in July 1973, calling instead for the development of light industry in the area. Four plans and 16 months later, the City Council finally voted last October 9 to accept the "Neighborhood Plan," a compromise mix of light industry, retail and office space, and relatively expensive housing.

But the Council's 5-4 vote on the plan, which needs at least a 6-3 vote for the zoning changes it will require, indicates the extent of bitterness that remains and foreshadows the amount of controversy yet to come.

For example, the plan, which was authored by MIT in conjunction with the Kendall Square Businessman's Association and the East Cambridge Planning Team, has drawn strong criticism from the CTOC.

CTOC spokesman Jeffrey Petrocelly says that the Neighborhood Plan, which includes upper-middle income housing to accommodate an overflow of MIT faculty, extensive retail development, and a hotel complex in addition to the light industrial development required in the City Council order, will "change the economic picture of Cambridge."

Instead, he says, the area should be devoted totally to the development of job-producing light industry, with only minor supportive retail and housing development for the workers it would bring.

However, Walter Milne, assistant to the president at MIT, points to the difficulty in keeping light industry in Cambridge. "For years, blue collar jobs have been disappearing and the number of service-oriented jobs has been growing. The trend is irreversible," Milne says.

"The CTOC has a kind of looking-backwards, reactionary view. In 1910, the 30 per cent of the work force that was in agriculture started shifting into manufacturing, and there was a lot of resistance to it," Milne says. "The same type of thing is happening in industry today, and it's useless for the CTOC to oppose it."

While Petrocelly admits that the service industries are absorbing blue collar jobs, he says that the flight of small Cambridge firms to industrial centers in both the south and abroad has a much greater immediate impact on working class unemployment in the city.

"The city just isn't doing enough to keep light industry here," Petrocelly says. "We still have the resources and an adequate market to support light industry. If a publisher wants to sell his books in Cambridge and Boston, doesn't it make sense to print the books here, rather than carting them up from some factory down south?"

Even more galling to the CTOC, however, is MIT's strong desire for middle-and upper-income housing in Kendall Square. The CTOC argues that such housing, which is too expensive for most blue collar workers, will cause a "ripple effect" that will raise real estate costs in nearby working class neighborhoods even faster than they are rising now.

However, Milne says middle-income housing is necessary if only to achieve a proper social "mix and balance." While Petrocelly points to U.S. census figures showing 5000 units of substandard housing in Cambridge, Milne says, "In the past six years, four out of five new housing units built in Cambridge have been subsidized, low income units. In terms of balance, it's time for more middle-income units. You have to look at the total picture of what Cambridge has been doing."

It is just this "total picture" of Cambridge that both sides are so worried about. Advocates of the Neighborhood Plan see Kendall Square turning into an ugly and dangerous "industrial wasteland" that should be cleaned up with wealth producing development.

Critics of the plan say that MIT is trying to turn Cambridge into a "luxury city" by forcing blue collar workers out of their jobs and houses.

Development of Kendall Square is crucial for both sides, because it is, in many ways, the heart of East Cambridge. Located at the foot of the Longfellow Bridge and above a major stop on the MBTA, it is a gateway to the wealth that looms in the massive buildings in downtown Boston directly across the Charles.

Nestled between the laboratories of MIT and the small factories that are the lifeblood of the East Cambridge working-class neighborhoods, it is also caught between two strange bed-fellows who coexist in an uneasy, often antagonistic truce.

Kendall Square's 24 barren acres are an unfortunate byproduct of this truce, and it will take many months of angry fighting over bids from developers, zoning changes, and environmental studies on housing and industry before the heart of Cambridge can start beating again.