Farewell to 'the People's Republic'
"A PLACE IS a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings," my neighbor's brother, an environmental philosopher, writes. As I prepare to depart the city of Cambridge, where I've lived and worked for over a decade, I'm drawn to these words as I reflect on the place and people I'm leaving.
I arrived in Cambridge from Berkeley on a sweltering July afternoon in 1993. Rent control was still in effect and the high-tech bubble that would emerge later in the '90s, fundamentally changing this and so many other cities, was still a technologist's pipe dream.
With a new administration in the White House, there was a buzz about town, a sense of hope and possibility. The People's Republic of Cambridge was alive and kicking.
I came to the area to launch a non-profit agency and to teach at Boston College Law School. I was, and remain, a social entrepreneur, committed to helping solve entrenched problems like environmental degradation in inner-city neighborhoods. Given the region's rich stock of nonprofit organizations and academic resources, Cambridge was the perfect place to be, a city of dreamers.
What a difference a decade makes. Whereas 10 years ago someone in their 20s making a modest nonprofit salary could afford to live in Cambridge, today it's no longer possible. For most nonprofit professionals and academics, not to mention others earning less than six figures, Cambridge is simply off-limits as a place to live and raise a family.
The modest condominium my wife and I stretched to afford in 1996 we sold eight years later for more than twice what we paid for it. It's no accident that the purchaser was a young mutual fund executive. Who else but a money manager could afford to buy in Cambridge?
The problem is, Cambridge appears to be losing the very qualities that have made it unique, a haven for idealists and rebels, for thinkers and writers, for iconoclasts and visionaries, jobs that tend not to command much compensation. With more million-dollar houses than any other comparable city in the country, Cambridge can no longer rightfully be called "the People's Republic." It's an anachronism.
I think for many who live in Cambridge what keeps them here is precisely this mix of characters, this openness to different ways of looking at the world and embrace of contrarian attitudes and ideologies. Yet now, like the fragile floodplain it once was, attracting all manner of wildlife and waterfowl, Cambridge finds itself threatened by the market's unmitigated forces and the cash of the highest bidder. Social activists need not apply.
As my family and I pack up our belongings to head for an old farmhouse in Vermont, I leave Cambridge knowing that my feelings have claimed this place, and been claimed by it -- by its root-buckled sidewalks and triple-deckers, the rumble of the T underfoot in Central Square, the annual rite of students receiving their diplomas then moving on, the perfect foil for us, the proud assemblage of full-timers who love this city because it's not fly-by-night but enduring in its rebellious spirit and diversity.
Still I wonder: Is Cambridge becoming less of a place and more of an idea of a place, of something that once was but is no longer? I'm not sure. But I hope that somehow Cambridge finds a way to hold onto its dreamers and agitators, its philosophers and folk singers. The city needs them. So does the world.
William Shutkin is president and CEO of the Orton Family Foundation and a research affiliate in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. 