Dennis Carlone

Dennis J. Carlone, a longtime Cambridge resident and progressive candidate, is seeking re-election to his fourth term on the Cambridge City Council this week.

“My vision for the future of our city is shaped by living here, raising my family here, and working on Cambridge's most innovative architectural and urban planning projects for nearly 40 years,” Carlone wrote on his personal website.

Carlone holds a master’s degree in architecture and urban design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and previously taught at Lesley University as an adjunct professor.

Throughout his councilor career, Carlone has focused on creating sustainability initiatives and citywide planning efforts in the face of rising housing prices. In a 2017 interview with The Crimson, he said he fears for his children’s housing security if prices continue to rise.

“My children can’t live here once they have kids unless something dramatic changes,” Carlone said at the time.

On his website, Carlone outlined two diverging visions for Cambridge’s future.

“One vision is of high tech luxury skyscrapers where only the rich can afford to live,” Carlone wrote. “The second is one where communities thrive and residents can afford to raise a family, run a small business and not be forced out of the city.”

Carlone considers himself in the second camp, having opened continuous negotiations for more affordable housing. He led the East Cambridge Riverfront Plan, a project reclaiming 40 acres of underutilized land, transforming it into a mixed-use housing development.

The project, completed in 1978, received more than one billion dollars in investments and eventually opened up new public spaces at the river’s edge around East Cambridge, including the CambridgeSide shopping mall. This project earned the American Institute of Architects Award for Excellence in Urban Design, according to Carlone’s website.

Despite these efforts, Carlone did not complete a mandatory questionnaire to participate in an affordable housing public forum hosted at the Cambridge Public Library in September. More than 15 other City Council candidates spoke at the event.

Carlone also recently voted down a controversial mixed-use development that would expand affordable housing. As of early September, Carlone’s approval rating sits below 30 percent in an Emerson College poll of registered voters in Cambridge.

Since 2014, Carlone has called on the City Council to create a citywide master plan — an overarching vision that many of Cambridge’s peer cities, including New York City and Boston, have implemented.

“Here we are in the middle of major development, major change, major traffic, lack of open space — all these issues, and we don’t even have a strategy to tie it all together,” Carlone said in the 2017 interview.

During the 2016-2017 term, Carlone chaired the Council’s Ordinance Committee, focusing on initiatives to mitigate traffic and promote bike and pedestrian safety across Cambridge. According to the city council website, he helped institute Cambridge’s plastic bag ban and the city’s Net Zero Action Plan, which aims at putting Cambridge on the path to carbon neutrality.

“My background in architecture and urban design taught me how to bring people together, how to understand all the issues and then come up with a scheme or a philosophy that addresses most, if not all, things,” Carlone said in 2017.