On a freezing evening in late February, Cambridge’s political elite descended upon City Hall for the first State of the City address in three years. Mayor E. Denise Simmons, whose title is a largely ceremonial addition to her job as a city councilor, was perched on a dais at the head of the City Council chamber, opposite the night’s headliner, Kimberly L. Driscoll, the state’s lieutenant governor. Sitting on the edge of the frame, barely visible to a television audience and stuck within the periphery of anyone in the crowd, was Yi-An Huang ’05, the city manager.

Huang, dressed in a dark blue suit and a green tie that hovered just a few shades below neon, spoke last. Where Simmons and Driscoll delivered their remarks with the flourish of seasoned politicians, Huang’s 20-minute speech was a tangle of numbers and staff acknowledgments and zoning policy buzzwords. He hardly looked up at the crowd; someone with their eyes closed could have mistaken the moment for a somewhat overeager college lecture, sans PowerPoint.

Huang is Cambridge’s eleventh city manager, and for all his stiffness, he sits atop a bureaucratic machine that employs nearly 4,000 staff. Every pothole that gets fixed, every police call that is made, and nearly every city dollar that gets spent — all of it, eventually, can be traced to the man who sits in a corner office on the first floor of City Hall.

Though Huang holds a level of direct control over day-to-day life in Cambridge that would make any lawmaker envious, his name has never been on a ballot. Instead, Huang owes his position to Cambridge’s nine-member City Council, which holds the power to hire and fire the city manager in a setup closely modeled on a corporation, with the council as the board and the city manager as chief executive. Except, of course, this corporation boasts an armed police force, a public schools system, and a population that approaches 120,000.

I met Huang, who is 42 and silver-haired, in City Hall for the first time in February, on the day before his speech at the State of the City. We spoke in his office as he prepared for a City Council meeting scheduled for that night. It was rush hour in Central Square. Peering out into the traffic just below Huang’s window, we talked about his relationship with city politics, with his job, with the Council. “I feel like I’ve tried to lean really hard away from this idea that the city manager is an independent source of political power,” Huang told me, and paused for a moment. “I think that’s a bit of a challenge.”

***

Cambridge’s first city manager was a man named John B. Atkinson, who entered the job in 1942 and held it for a decade. Atkinson, a Cambridge-born shoe salesman, earned a reputation for getting things done; it took until 1952 for the councilors to tire of him. “The City Council apparently felt that he had gained too much personal power,” Charles M. Sullivan, the executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission, told me. This tug-of-war, between a manager tasked with running the city and a City Council always suspicious of his authority, became standard practice. Three of the four managers who came after Atkinson were fired after clashing with councilors.

By the 1980s, though, it seemed like the manager had won. Robert W. Healy, a former deputy city manager, entered the job in 1981 and stayed for more than 30 years. Healy has snow-white hair and a baritone Boston accent, and like his predecessors, he was born and raised in Cambridge. Healy elevated two lieutenants to steer City Hall alongside him: Richard C. Rossi, who served as deputy city manager, and, later, Louis A. DePasquale, who became the assistant city manager for fiscal affairs. Together, the three dominated City Hall for the better part of a century. “They were a very effective team, because they focused on different things,” Ellen Semonoff, the assistant city manager for human services, told me. While Healy was manager, Rossi generally took charge of capital projects and public works, and DePasquale — who entered City Hall as a junior treasury staffer in the mid-1970s — came to manage city finances.

But Healy also amassed a reputation for accumulating power, and by his retirement, he had invested the manager role with an authority it has not seen before or since. By the mid-2000s, Healy had become the highest-paid municipal manager in Massachusetts and held the most valuable public pension in the state; under contracts he privately negotiated with the City Council, Cambridge also paid for Healy’s long-term care and life insurance. And in 2011 and 2012, Healy led the city to settle lawsuits from three women accusing him of workplace discrimination — at an ultimate cost to Cambridge of more than $10 million, with little backlash from councilors. “The Bob Healy from years ago wouldn’t even listen to the council,” Dennis J. Carlone, who left the City Council in 2023, told me. “Frankly, the council let him get away with it because he would balance the budget.” (Healy, in an email, wrote that he would let his 32-year tenure as city manager “speak for itself.”)

The longer Healy stayed in office, the more he found himself running up against city councilors looking to assert themselves. “I think Bob and others would get frustrated at the idea that the council as a body, and individual councilors, could not differentiate between the mundane, the important, the long term, the short term, the unachievable, and so on,” said Craig Kelley, a former councilor. “I think he and subsequent managers operationally did not appreciate the flood of policy orders that the council would just deluge him with.”

Rossi succeeded Healy in July 2013, and DePasquale, in turn, replaced him three years later. Though the two served as city managers for less time than Healy, they largely struck a similar tone with the City Council. Tensions sometimes flared publicly. In 2020, the City Council clashed over a late-night, 18-month contract extension and raise for DePasquale. Two years later, the Council appointed a committee to conduct a wholesale review of Cambridge’s charter for the first time in decades. In one of its first votes, the group supported abolishing the city manager position entirely.

Nonetheless, in January 2022, the City Council launched a search for a successor to DePasquale after he announced his retirement. Alanna M. Mallon, a three-term councilor also serving as vice mayor, was tapped to manage the process. The City Council announced an open call for applications. Councilors — who would ultimately vote on who would lead the city — began to look for a change from the past 40 years. “There was sort of a desire to find someone who was going to question that status quo around, ‘Well, this is the way we’ve always done things,’” Mallon told me.

Some of the city’s rank and file felt the same way. An employee association, loosely labeled the ‘Reimagining the Workplace’ group, sent a two-page letter to the screening committee in early May, outlining a series of demands that city employees had for the next manager. These included renovation to city office space, “equity of benefits,” and a transition from “fear-based” to “learning-based” workplace culture, according to a copy of the letter. “For more than 40 years, the Cambridge City Council has chosen to hire the same type of leader for the manager position,” the letter read. “It is time to break the mold.”

***

Huang flew far beneath anyone’s radar when he applied for the job, according to four members of the initial screening committee, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential deliberations. He had never worked in municipal government, let alone Cambridge City Hall, and moved to Cambridge as a college student — far from an asset in a city where townies have often chafed at the universities next door.

Huang was born to Taiwanese immigrants in Lexington, an affluent suburb northwest of Boston best known for its role in the early American Revolution. He described his childhood as “idyllic,” if unremarkable. A yearbook entry from Huang’s senior year at Lexington High School shows a portrait of a bespectacled, round-faced 18-year-old alongside a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. and a Bible verse.

He arrived at Harvard in 2001 and concentrated in economics, but made his name as an activist. The AIDS epidemic was ravaging swaths of Africa, and Huang was drawn to student movements pressuring Congress to act against the disease. The Harvard AIDS Coalition, of which Huang became president, held rallies on campus and in Boston against the government’s delayed response to the epidemic. “He was clearly someone who had a job to do, and really wanted to get things done,” said Sarika P. Bansal ’06, a friend of Huang’s in college who was also in the AIDS Coalition.

At Harvard, Huang also met his wife, Kristin T. Lee ’07, at a religious mixer between two Christian student groups. Huang proposed before Lee graduated, and their engagement was featured in The Crimson’s 2007 Commencement issue.

Huang finished college and found himself disillusioned with activism. “There are these moments where you can see these social movements that have a tremendous impact, but between the big moments, there’s often just a lot of noise that advocates and activists are making,” Huang recalled thinking. “I was just, realistically, feeling like ‘oh, well, we, we didn’t actually make a very big impact.’” He joined a series of consulting firms after graduating before following his wife to Kenya for a year. While Kristin did research, Huang consulted for a healthcare-access group. They returned to Massachusetts in mid-2011 and settled in Cambridge. Huang attended Harvard Business School, then got a job as a project manager at Boston Medical Center, where he would spend the next decade.

In 2022, the manager search committee met several times in the Smith Campus Center throughout April and May to discuss applicants confidentially. Many of them were “the usual suspects,” one member of the committee told me, and the applicants included Iram Farooq, an assistant city manager; a handful of municipal managers from across the country; and Marjorie C. Decker, a local state representative and a former city councilor herself.

Members of the screening committee reviewed the resumes of applicants before conducting a straw poll, and Huang fared unremarkably in this initial round, the people on the committee said. His main weakness was his lack of experience. While virtually every other candidate had either worked in, or around, municipal government, not only did Huang have no background in managing any kind of local authority, but no one on the screening committee even knew who he was. “He came out of the blue,” one member of the committee told me.

What put Huang on the map was his interview. After a series of initial rankings, the screening committee interviewed many of the candidates by Zoom, before conducting a ranked-choice vote and narrowing the field to a set of finalists that would be presented to the City Council. Huang came across as sharp, people on the committee told me, with a knowledge of the city charter and an intimate understanding of what life in Cambridge was actually like. “This guy does live here, he does know what he’s doing, he’s raised his kids here, he’s sending his kids to public schools here,” another member of the screening committee recalled thinking, “and I thought there was value to that.” By the end of May, Huang — alongside three others — was announced as a finalist for the job.

Throughout the process, Huang worked to make up for the enormous gap in experience between him and his competition. Mallon, the vice mayor who ran the search process, remembered meeting Huang at the State of the City event that April, just weeks before the screening committee met in April 2022. Huang introduced himself to Mallon in the parlor of the mayor’s office, and Mallon remembered the brief conversation when she voted for Huang in June. “When I saw his name come through as one of the four, I was like ‘I remember meeting him, and he was very nice,’” she told me. “I just remember having a really nice feeling about him.”

Huang’s first public appearance as a finalist came on May 31, 2022, at a forum held in the auditorium of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the city’s high school. Speaking at a podium for slightly less than an hour, Huang appeared composed and optimistic, if somewhat cerebral; he praised the city’s response to Covid-19, its pilot of guaranteed income, and the Cambridge Police Department. He spoke of “a vision for a Cambridge where we are serving the most vulnerable, and allowing them to thrive to a much greater extent” — introducing it not as his own, but as “the vision that the City Council, and the community, have put forward.” In June, the City Council voted to hire Huang as city manager, and he took office after Labor Day.

By Frank S. Zhou

Today, the executive suite on the first floor of City Hall may be better versed in corporate lingo than at any point in Cambridge’s nearly 400-year history. Huang brought on a part-time ‘Strategic Advisor’ who worked with him at BMC, as well as a chief of staff. The human resources department is now led by a chief people officer, and Cambridge now boasts a deputy chief operating officer. (Three months after entering office, Huang also announced that Owen O’Riordan, the deputy city manager, would take on the additional title of chief operating officer.)

City officials who I spoke to largely praised the internal changes Huang made, although many admitted that when he first entered the job, his business school experience was apparent. “He definitely approaches things differently with that sort of background,” Kathy Watkins, the new deputy city manager said. Huang, for his part, rejected the corporate label when I asked him about it, and noted that he “has never worked in a real, for-profit corporate structure.” (BMC is part of a not-for-profit hospital system, albeit one with more than 15,000 employees and a leadership website that lists 14 MBAs.) “There are parallels to corporate structures,” Huang told me of the city administration, but later qualified: “I think we’re held accountable for a lot more than corporations are held accountable for.”

***

The journalist Caryl Rivers came to Cambridge in 1970, and after walking through Harvard Square, she wrote in a column for The New York Times of “separate worlds that jostle each other” throughout the city — worlds of town and gown, industrial smokestacks and ivory towers, dense apartments and sprawling Victorians. Cambridge has been a city compartmentalized since far before Huang entered City Hall, but his time in office — unflashy and technocratic as it may be — has, if nothing else, coincided with a city steadily transformed.

Residents who make some 911 calls can now expect, in addition to police, a team of unarmed responders from the city’s Community Safety Department. The City Council debated the first comprehensive review of Cambridge’s governing charter in nearly a century. Cambridge has upzoned, abolishing single-family zoning and paving the way for thousands of new units of housing. Families who live in the city can now send their children to free preschool, and targets for buildings in Cambridge to limit carbon emissions have been strengthened.

Huang is quick to acknowledge these changes, but he doesn’t spend much time lingering on the question of who, exactly, can take credit for them. “It’s more of a dance than a rigid set of rules. And I think it ends up being very contextual on the issue,” he told me. Huang used the example of housing: he credits councilors for driving the process of overhauling Cambridge’s zoning ordinances, but stressed that city officials were involved throughout the process. When it comes to City Council policies, he said, “you absolutely need professional staff and administration to be supporting to make sure that these are workable, that they make sense, that the actual implementation is going to happen. And I think that’s the dance that we’re navigating.”

It took time for that dance, as Huang called it, to become more graceful. Much of Huang’s job comes down to sitting in front of councilors — at Monday night meetings, committee hearings, and countless trips up and down the City Hall elevator — and absorbing their questions, frustrations, and dozens of policy orders, often while televised. Huang gradually settled into the role; over time, his remarks to councilors have become less interspersed with stutters of “um” and “like.” His notes, which are often laid out in front of him when speaking in the council chamber, see progressively less use in front of the City Council. “He really knows more detail than he did at the beginning,” Diane P. LeBlanc, a former city clerk, told me.

Sitting in his office in February, I asked Huang if he thinks he’s changed since becoming city manager. “It’s hard not to say I’ve changed, because I was so new to this,” he admitted. The administrative sides of Huang’s job — implementing programs, executing council orders — were natural callbacks to his time at BMC. “I think the public sphere of the role, the politics,” he said, “is really different.”

***

Early in the afternoon of Jan. 4, 2023, Huang was sitting in his office when he got a call from Christine Elow, the city’s police commissioner. A police officer on duty had shot a civilian having a mental health crisis while responding to a 911 call, Elow said. Details were scarce but incoming.

What Huang did not yet know — but, alongside the rest of the city, would soon find out — is that earlier that day, Cambridge police had responded to a call reporting that a 20-year-old University of Massachusetts Boston student named Arif Sayed Faisal was in a Cambridgeport alley, cutting himself with a knife. Police arrived and Faisal ran, eventually reaching a private backyard. Faisal turned and, still holding the knife, approached a young officer named Liam McMahon. McMahon fired his gun, killing Faisal.

Huang is a cautious speaker when being recorded, and he spent many of our interviews talking in circles the way that only a business school-trained consultant can. He’s honest in a practiced way, as if running sentences through risk management training. But I sensed a shift when bringing up the events after Faisal’s death. “That whole period, and the conversations with the community, with the Council, were incredibly difficult,” Huang said.

The last time Cambridge police killed someone was in 2002, after a three-hour standoff involving a hatchet. The day of Faisal’s death was slow, and Huang and Sumbul Siddiqui, the mayor, issued a taciturn statement on the night of Jan. 4. The two wrote that they were “deeply saddened” by the shooting and pledged a “thorough and transparent investigation” by the Middlesex District Attorney’s office. A simultaneous press release signed by Elow and Marianne Ryan, the district attorney, named Faisal as the victim. McMahon was quickly placed on leave pending an investigation into the shooting, but his name was not released to the public.

Meanwhile, pressure on Huang and his administration to respond more forcefully, and to name McMahon, began to ramp up. On Jan. 5, dozens of people rallied in front of City Hall and protested Faisal’s death as an act of police brutality. Protestors holding signs demanding “JUSTICE FOR SAYED FAISAL” and “STOP POLICE BRUTALITY” crowded into the building’s lobby, just steps from Huang’s office.

People close to Huang described the aftermath of Faisal’s shooting as a whirlwind. “Going through the Faisal shooting was something that caused him to just learn so quickly on the job, about just the public aspect of his job,” O’Riordan, who was deputy city manager until last July, told me. “You have to perform on a fairly constant basis, in really difficult circumstances.”

More than a hundred protesters gathered in the Harvard Square Pit for a demonstration following the fatal shooting of Sayed Faisal by a Cambridge Police Department officer. By Ryan H. Doan-Nguyen

Several days after the shooting, Huang and Siddiqui announced a town hall-style “community meeting” about the incident. Protests were swelling in Cambridge and city staff were still working to hammer out a response. “I don’t know that anybody was excited about holding this event,” Huang told me. “We knew we were walking into a really difficult night,” he added.

The meeting was held on the evening of Jan. 12 at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. school in Riverside, a four-story building whose sandstone walls loom over anyone who walks in. It was pouring when Huang got there. He appeared alongside Elow and Brian Corr, the executive director of the city’s Peace Commission. Siddiqui briefly spoke to open the meeting, and Ryan, who was sitting in the audience, intermittently came up to the stage to answer questions. For Huang, who had spent the previous week behind the scenes, largely insulated as chaos unfolded in Cambridge, this was his first chance to directly face the public in response to the shooting.

The meeting was a disaster. It went well over time, tensions ran high, and Huang’s varied attempts at explanation and emotional understanding were met with angry chants from the crowd. As the crowd grew angrier, Huang’s responses became increasingly clipped and stumbling, peppered with apologies. “We can keep moving. I don’t think I have a good answer that you would be willing to listen to,” he said at one point, after a resident asked why the police department should remain armed. Huang eventually stopped speaking at all, instead standing stone-faced on stage as residents and activists continued to rip into him and Elow. “Regardless of what the intention was for y’all to host this, it’s clearly not doing that. So it’s failed in that sense,” one woman said. Nearly three and a half hours in, Huang approached the podium and, audibly hoarse, ended the meeting.

One of the people who came to the MLK Jr. school that night was Fatema Ahmad, the executive director of the Muslim Justice League, a nonprofit in Boston. I called Ahmad in late July and asked her what she took away from the meeting. “What became clear to people pretty quickly is, the City Council doesn’t have power,” Ahmad said. She added, “the lack of direct accountability in Cambridge makes this kind of stuff really hard.”

***

On Feb. 11, 2023, more than a month after Faisal was shot, Huang attended the Martin Luther King Jr. brunch at MIT, hosted by the Cambridge chapter of the NAACP. The MLK Jr. brunch has been an annual event for more than three decades, and speakers that morning included Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Kenneth E. Reeves ’72, a former mayor of Cambridge and one of the city’s most prominent Black politicians. A number of city staff also attended, including Elow, O’Riordan, and Lee Gianetti, the city’s director of communications. Huang, who had been invited by the NAACP, brought his young children.

Instead of a low-stakes opportunity to rub shoulders with Cambridge’s establishment figures, Huang again found his response to the Faisal shooting in the spotlight. A Boston Globe editorial released several hours before the breakfast slammed Huang as “happily insulated from public accountability” over the shooting and called on the City Council to “keep political pressure on the manager and the police.” Siddiqui told the Globe that she supported releasing the name of the officer who killed Faisal, but that the decision was ultimately Huang’s. At the NAACP breakfast, a number of high-profile speakers blasted Cambridge’s response to Faisal’s shooting in some way, at times head-on. “We deserve more information now,” Warren said, and added, “secrecy does not serve justice.” Pressley, who said she was, “like many of you, angered by his murder,” was even more blunt: “Cambridge, we need you to lead.”

For those close to Huang, the breakfast and Globe editorial came as a sudden embarrassment. “There was shock,” B. Kimmerman, Huang’s chief of staff, told me. Though Huang had already weathered weeks of public backlash over his response to the shooting, the MLK Jr. breakfast amplified it further. “I just hadn’t expected to be in the spotlight that prominently, and so that was definitely a wake-up call,” he recalled. His decision not to name McMahon was now his to assume responsibility for, Huang realized, and it came with a price — an enormous change for a man who, until less than eight months ago, had spent his whole adult life within the cocoon of corporate anonymity.

Protests around the shooting continued into March, and Huang began convening regular meetings early in the morning, “just to kind of track what was happening with protesters,” Elizabeth M. Speakman, who was serving as Cambridge’s director of community safety, told me. The prospect of activists occupying City Hall became a particular source of worry; officials began to discuss contingency plans for such a move, particularly if any protest stretched overnight. Later that month, Huang allowed city staff to request a meeting with protestors as an attempt to de-escalate. His goal was, as he explained to me, for the meeting to be “a conversation,” where city officials and protesters “can sit in a room, and we can talk to each other as people.” A group of activists agreed to speak with Huang, Speakman, and Gianetti in the City Hall annex, a tall, brick building on Broadway.

As they met, more than a hundred protesters gathered outside, chanting so loudly that they could be heard from where Huang was sitting. Inside the meeting, “there wasn’t a lot of discussion back-and-forth,” Speakman recalled. More than a dozen activists, many of whom were students, handed Huang a petition demanding that the city name the police officer who shot Faisal. Eventually, Huang, Speakman, and Gianetti stepped out of the room while activists conferred; once everyone understood that Huang had little interest in releasing the officer’s name, the meeting ended. The entire meeting lasted roughly an hour, and Huang left it frustrated. “I’ve been an activist before, but I deeply cared about the outcome when I was engaging. It wasn’t, ‘these are fixed demands, and they cannot be changed,’” he recalled.

Ryan, the district attorney, had asked Huang not to release the name until her investigation was over. But a city-commissioned analysis, issued in July 2023 by the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, concluded that McMahon’s name could have been “legally and ethically” released in the weeks after Faisal was killed.

In the end, McMahon’s name did not become public until Oct. 5, 2023, nine months and a day after Faisal died, when a judicial inquest commissioned by Ryan was released. “Officer McMahon’s decision to fire his weapon was objectively reasonable,” Judge John Coffey, who oversaw the inquest, wrote in his ruling.

By then, protests around Faisal had quietly faded — still existent, but a far cry from the front-page, hundred-person marches of the previous winter. Huang, for his part, emerged from the affair unsettled. “I think Yi-An was a different city manager after the shooting,” O’Riordan told me. “I think he might say that himself.”

When we spoke, Huang framed the decision around whether to name McMahon as an issue of policy, a regulatory challenge to be navigated more than anything else. “It’d been so long since anything like this had happened, we didn’t have anything written, or any real policy regarding what to do in the aftermath,” he said. “I didn’t feel like releasing the name was going to be moving us forward in any meaningful way,” Huang added, “recognizing that we were going to release the name when the investigation was complete and all the information was going to come out.”

***

For city councilors constantly running for re-election, the role of a city manager can be politically convenient. Hard votes can be avoided when councilors instead blame the manager for blocking change. For much of the last half-century, “the Council was giving into political winds,” said Burhan Azeem, a councilor since 2022. “They didn’t need to have a backbone. They would just say that, ‘this is popular,’ and then secretly tell the city manager, ‘hey, this is okay, right?’ And then the city manager would kill it, and he would be the bad guy. And then the City Council would say, ‘oh, we tried, we just can’t.’”

Huang’s ascent fundamentally changed that calculus. Where Healy, Rossi, and DePasquale came into the manager’s office with a deep knowledge of City Hall and an understanding of council dynamics, Huang — even after the Faisal shooting — was new, and often more deferential. The power dynamic between the manager and the City Council has “dramatically shifted, a rebalance towards the Council,” Azeem told me, and people close to Huang characterized this shift as largely deliberate. “The first year, he was — as he should be — listening a lot, being pretty cautious,” Denise A. Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, said.

Huang has distinguished himself from Healy, Rossi, and DePasquale in other ways that indicate deference to the City Council. Huang agreed to a lower salary, adjusted for inflation, than Rossi or DePasquale, as well as stricter limits on sick days and vacation time. Huang had a stricter buyout clause and fewer payouts in his contract, making it cheaper for the City Council to fire him. The enormous retirement benefits which became a hallmark of Healy’s contract are also gone from Huang’s.

When I spoke to Huang, he insisted that his job is to be “in the center of the Council” — a phrase that, I learned, is somewhat of a euphemism for the fact that, at least on paper, he needs a majority of councilors to support him on any given issue. Throughout our conversations, Huang was adamant that his job is to defer to the City Council, and that councilors should set the direction for the city.

City Council decisions in Cambridge are often unanimous, and if not, they tend to see only an occasional dissenting vote or two. That holds true even for major and contentious issues: When Cambridge underwent a high-profile zoning overhaul last February, ending more than a year of back-and-forth dealmaking, only one councilor voted against the measure. A resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip passed unanimously. Local budgets, a resolution on transgender rights, and traffic cameras sail through.

Huang is careful to maintain his image as separate from the City Council’s politics; to hear him describe it, his role is to be almost above the fray. Huang insisted that by not being an elected official, his ambition for Cambridge “is much more nuanced and complex, and reflects the fact that I’m not bound by the need to communicate some political talking point that will get people to vote for me.” Huang views his job as “bridging the gap between a council that’s elected every two years, and then city staff,” Jane Licurse, Huang’s strategic advisor, told me.

That image is complicated by the day-to-day reality of Huang’s role. Among the most powerful tools that a city manager wields over the City Council in Cambridge is the budget. In a city that recently spent nearly $1 billion, it takes a small army of analysts and number-crunchers to sort out exactly where money should go, and Huang’s control over the budget gives him a powerful lever over councilors. “The City Council only votes on the budget,” David Kale, who served as budget director under several managers, told me. “They either can decrease it, they either can reject it, or they basically can vote no.”

By Julian J. Giordano

Around the middle of last February, as Cambridge found itself in the middle of another budget cycle, Huang informed the City Council that he intended to end funding to the Transition Wellness Center, a homeless shelter run out of two floors of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. The Spaulding Hospital is a stooped, unassuming brick building in Mid-Cambridge, and the TWC was placed there in 2020 as a temporary shelter. Federal stimulus funds were used to support the shelter, which started up amid a rising tide of homelessness during the pandemic. When federal funds ran out, Cambridge planned to close the TWC.

The decision to end funding for the TWC, which by then contained 58 beds and housed 22 people, spurred a loud and public campaign to keep the shelter open. Residents and supporters of the TWC crowded into City Council meetings during the public comment period for weeks to lobby for the shelter. Marc McGovern, the vice mayor, emerged as a particularly strong opponent of the closure and introduced a measure to keep it open. When I spoke to McGovern last summer, he was still furious. “If we’re going to need to save money from the budget, I don’t want that money to be saved on the backs of the most vulnerable people, right? And so, find another way to save the money that isn’t going to put 58 people on the street,” he told me.

Even in the face of such heated opposition, Huang refused to budge. The City Council narrowly voted in April to consider extending funding for the shelter, and Huang publicly opposed the move. Holdout councilors largely relented by May, and the City Council voted to endorse the closure that month. Huang “had a very direct role” in deciding to close the TWC, Semonoff, the assistant city manager, told me. “He delivered the message. He had me deliver the message. I would say he was very much involved in that,” she said.

Ultimately, by the final vote, the City Council had little choice but move on, even as homeless residents spent hours testifying and councilors grew increasingly heated, towards each other and towards Huang. “We don’t have the authority to add money to the budget, so the only thing we could do was to try to pressure him to do it, which we tried obviously to do, unsuccessfully,” McGovern said. There was some compromise, largely in the form of a voucher program that Cambridge gave TWC residents to help them move elsewhere. But the moment called back to an earlier form of politics, where the manager’s word was virtually final.“That was a really hard conversation, because in the middle of a tough fight, really close to an election,” Azeem said, “everyone wants to do what’s politically easy.”

***

The last time I met Huang was in late July, when City Hall felt remarkably quiet. Huang appeared oddly relaxed as he let me into his office — perhaps a product of the City Council’s summer recess, which by then was in full swing. (Scheduling our interview, I noticed, was significantly easier this time.)

Sitting across from him at the long, wooden table opposite his desk, I asked Huang if, three years into the job, he has his own vision for where Cambridge should go. Huang is a careful speaker, and he measured his words before answering. “I don’t think I have an answer the way a politician would have an answer,” he said.

For a man who insists he is apolitical, Huang, throughout our interviews, had a habit of comparing himself to the politicians on the City Council. Huang became city manager and wanted to “make sure we actually got to outcomes,” he told me earlier this year, “and that is something we’re trying to communicate to the Council more. Because the nature of their political lives is that once they finish the process of getting something passed, they celebrate and move on.” The real work, Huang said, is “for the city administration to actually implement and do a good job, and for what we do to feel like it’s part of a cohesive picture of how we’re moving the city forward.”

People around Huang generally agree that he isn’t a politician, despite holding a job often described as the city’s most powerful. At his core, he is a bureaucrat — a well-paid, powerful, and highly-scrutinized one, but a bureaucrat nonetheless. “He thinks things through from a managerial lens, as opposed to a political lens where you’re trying to make as many people happy as you can,” Sal DiDomenico, a state senator from Cambridge, told me. In particular, Huang appears happiest away from the spotlight. “I don’t see him at public events. If he were a politician, he would be out there,” said Geeta Pradhan, the president of the Cambridge Community Foundation. “He’s not clamoring to take the glory for something good that’s happened.”

Huang speaks in terms of an implicit differentiation; the job of executing the City Council’s policies is, to him, distinct from political decisionmaking itself. Throughout our conversations, he remained adamant about that relationship, in which his job is to execute and the Council’s to steer. When we spoke in June, I asked Huang how he manages to preserve that boundary when the two sides find themselves in direct conflict, and whether he thinks he’s ever had to take charge.

“We’ve had those conversations. I mean, those are always hard conversations,” Huang said. “Everybody wants a more collaborative relationship. You want to be on the same page.”

In response, I asked Huang if he thought that dynamic is efficient.

Huang paused for a moment, only to come back with his own question: “What would be the alternative?”

—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.