Friendly Neighborhood Puppet Master
Support affordable housing, democracy, and your buddy Neil
Hi Mom! Hi Dad! Sorry I haven’t written much on here lately. I’ve been busy with school, work, and, well, this…
Last Saturday’s beautiful weather made it a perfect day for Neil Miller to knock on doors of registered voters. Whenever someone answered, he launched into his pitch, that a city election is approaching and he is working with A Better Cambridge to promote candidates who support affordable housing. He was in Cambridgeport, and the people he talks with are renters, most of whom moved to the city for work. A number of them take the time to engage with him – one puts down his golf clubs, another delays a walk with a friend. Most of them take the ABC candidate slate he offers, a couple of newcomers get voter registration forms, too. “We are definitely for more housing,” said Charlie, a renter on Watson Street who is in his mid-20s.
Miller, 29, doesn’t look like one of the puppet masters of Cambridge politics. He’s a slight, bespectacled redhead with a sprinkling of light freckles, wearing a rumpled plaid shirt with a recalcitrant button-down collar. But Miller is the campaign manager of A Better Cambridge’s Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee, or Super Pac. It paid for the cards he’s handing out, and it coordinates volunteers to canvass voters across the city. But the Super Pacs were fingered as having outsized influence on Cambridge’s City Council in a recent candidates’ forum, with one candidate even saying every candidate would toe the Super Pacs’ line.
If you have few bucks to chip in to a cause I’m probably spending too much time on, you can do that here.
Why I care
Cambridge, greater Boston, and many American cities face huge housing crises. You can talk numbers: Cambridge has added 40,000+ jobs in the last 40 years, but barely 1/3rd the number of homes. The human cost is even worse: folks forced out of the cities they grew up in, pushed away from their families. Landlords profiting off of competition for scarce homes between long-time residents and young people looking to start their career. Hour-long commutes clogging our roads and air. And, most tragically, neighbors who have no place at all of live, other than on the street or in subway stations.
Unlike most cities, Cambridge is actually doing something about it. Doing quite a lot, actually, with real results to show for it.
New permanent supportive public housing opened up this summer two blocks from my house, 61 units for neighbors who were homeless (or might have otherwise been). These are just a few of the 750 new affordable homes moving forward all around Cambridge, thanks to a law called the Affordable Housing Overlay and record funding for affordable housing.
In February, Cambridge went further than anywhere else in the country by ending exclusionary, single-family-only zoning and legalizing apartment buildings up to 6 stories in every neighborhood. Nowhere else has come close to doing this! Barely half a year has gone by, but already 100+ new homes are moving forward for people at a range of life situations and income levels. While small-scale development in Cambridge previously made the city less affordable (multi-unit buildings were down-converted into large, expensive houses), now the market is producing attainable homes that will start to catch up on the big housing shortage I mentioned above.
With a push from Cambridge, Massachusetts in August banned mandatory tenant-paid brokers’ fees. These were often equal to a full month of rent, paid upfront to move into a new home, which you’d never get back.
All of that can be reversed by the next City Council. One new candidate (who’s raised 4x any of his opponents) called people living close enough to walk to work “utopian” and argued that austerity demands we decrease funding for affordable housing. An incumbent Councillor who opposes allowing more housing recently said Cambridge needs to listen more to “white, educated, outspoken residents”.
What I’m doing
Mostly, knocking on doors and helping other people knock on doors. Our goal is to knock on 10,000 doors in this election (last time ABC IEPAC knocked on 7000). 23,500 people voted in the last election, so that would mean canvassing half of the voters in Cambridge!1 We are sharing information about eight candidates who will prioritize solving the housing crisis.
Specifically, we try to talk to people who are directly impacted by the housing crisis, since they’re also less likely to vote: renters, students, residents of affordable housing, and people who’ve recently moved. Turnout in local elections is low, but as Cambridge Day notes, turnout increased from 29.6% in 2019 to 34% in 2023. ABC has knocked on more and more doors each time, more renters have voted, and pro-housing, pro-tenant policies have advanced through the City Council. It’s what gives me a modicum of hope during Trump’s second term: Cambridge shows that democracy can work.
Besides canvassing, ABC IEPAC usually sends a postcard to voters, roughly a week before the election, listing the endorsed pro-housing candidates. So, I also help the campaign fundraise. Since you’ve read this far, I’ll ask again: a donation of any size would mean a ton to me personally. Fundraising is hard for us, for several reasons:
Our past supporters frequently move out of Cambridge! Both because of housing prices and because family and career obligations force them to.
ABC IEPAC doesn’t take donations from corporations or anyone with pressing business with the city. I.e. we aren’t “developer shills”
ABC IEPAC voluntarily caps individual donations at $500. Other IEPACs do not have this limitation. They can and do get giant donations from just a few people. For example:
Last election, the main anti-housing organization’s IEPAC got $20,000 just from 14 people who donated $1000 or more. Just one couple (that group’s founder) gave $7000.
This year, the anti-housing PAC’s biggest donor so far ($5000 contributed) is literally a toxic torts lawyer. He defends corporations who are being sued for poisoning people, and “serves as coordinating counsel for all toxic tort and product liability litigations for several of America’s largest corporations.”
(If you can’t donate but want to help in some other way, please message me! We are all-volunteer, I’m not getting paid and neither is anyone else, so we’d love your help canvassing or doing something else.)
I’ll be back soon with some great articles from the trenches of government bureaucracy. But whether you’re reading this as my friend or a subscriber I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet, I hope you can take a little bit of inspiration from Cambridge’s example.
Progress and democracy are possible, if we fight for it.
There are multiple people in each household, so one door = more than one voter on average.
I’m a big fan of yourssss. This is fantastic.