Groups Combine Forces to Challenge Development in City

On most winter afternoons the light in Michael L. Charney's apartment just off Kirkland Street is blocked by William James Hall.

Charney seems to have adjusted to life in the shadow of Harvard's ivory tower, but with a new proposal to build the Knafel Center for the Humanities just across the street from William James, he says he feels his neighborhood's character slipping away.

"Do you want to see the sunlight when you walk down the street?" he asked. "Do you want to be blown over by the wind funneling between the buildings?"

But Charney, who is now acting chair of the Campaign to Stop Knafel, is one of the many Cantabrigians beginning to question the city's current growth patterns.

In Alewife, Central Square, Cambridgeport and nearly everywhere in between, community leaders are voicing concerns with what they say is capricious and ill-planned development.

A year ago, a group of locals worried about these recent trends formed the Cambridge Residents for Growth Management (CRGM), an organization designed to focus on citywide rezoning as a means to control over-development.

The group put together a petition outlining their rezoning proposals, which in September faced a vote by the City Council.

According to John R. Pitkin, a Cambridge consultant and one of the petition's original signers. Cambridge's perceived over-development stems from a range of problems, including the city's high proportion of tax-exempt institutions, a 36-year-old zoning code and a continuing transition from family-owned businesses to national chains.

But after getting mixed results in the City Council chambers, Pitkin said that the CRGM is beginning to focus on combining the forces of the city's collection of neighborhood development groups, such as Charney's Campaign to Stop Knafel.

"It seemed like the logical next step was to pull people together from different neighborhoods," Pitkin said. "These are all cross-cutting issues--no neighborhood can address any of those issues on its own."

And for the grass-roots community activists like Charney, the communication and momentum that comes from a citywide group is productive.

"The fact is that other people have been troubled by University expansion," Charney said. "Its very helpful to speak and meet with people who have had to fight similar battles."

Other neighborhood leaders echoed Charney's enthusiasm, but were careful to point out that there is a difference between city-wide activism and local activism.

Lisa Birk works with the Alewife Study Group, a North Cambridge neighborhood organization that has been fighting development in this corner of the city.

"Zoning is absolutely the base of the issue, but ours has some peculiarities because it's a flood plain and it has some contamination," she said. "Cambridge has a problem city-wide, but it plays it self out differently in each neighborhood."

For Charney, the nature of this city-wide problem is clear.

"The over-all question is of sustainability," he said. "How dense a city do you want to have?"

And while Charney suggested that Harvard may be trying to put together a Knafel Center plan to "slip underneath the radar," Mary Power, Harvard's director of community relations said that, like other community members, the University is concerned with the city's development patterns.

"The growth management discussion is a very important one for the City of Cambridge and it is one that Harvard needs to be a part of," she said. "It's in our interest because Harvard wants to be a part of the community."

Power said that the University recently asked the City Manager to include it on a city-wide panel to address issues of growth management that is expected to be announced sometime next week.

While Pitkin said that Harvard has been "inconsistent" on growth policy, he said there is widespread concern for overdevelopment in the city. For CRGM, the problem is that support does not translate into action.

"People are saying good things, but only action will solve the problem," he said.

Yet Pitkin insisted that action is exactly what his group is designed to produce.

"We need to build a coalition and persuade the city administration that we need to make the reforms," he said. "It's our job to keep the pressure on so this will stay on the front burner."