Finance, not sustainability, motivates cities

Cambridge, Massachusetts, has one of the most educated populations in the world, being home to Harvard and MIT. Nonetheless, its management seems extremely outdated: there is a duopoly on Internet access (Verizon and Comcast are the only providers, and both do not cover the entire city, i.e. effective monopolies), many streets are worse than those in “developing nations”, and though the city’s fresh water reservoirs have not been full for several years, the municipal government has allowed a building boom.

The lack of foresight and the poor management of Cambridge are emblematic of many systems of governance. Developers feed on speculative real estate bubbles, and contribute large amounts more or less directly to City operations. The more obvious ones are funding campaign funds for aspiring City Councilors who will support their development plans, but a number of back channels are alleged to exist (I witnessed a gift of two tickets to a sports game).

Climate Change is one of the buzz words of the moment, and Cambridge claims to be “green” by requiring new buildings be NEt Zero or at least Silver LEED certification, and now gas stations citywide will be required to display a Warning sign, alerting drivers to the environmental and health impacts of gasoline combustion engines. There are only a dozen gas stations in the city… is not the carbon cost of producing those signs as great or greater than what savings may be generated by drivers seeing them?

Does nobody realize the Carbon cost of building millions of square feet for new lab/research space, and dwellings for 20,000 new entrants into the City? This dwarfs the entire City contribution to Carbon emissions over several years! And what about water? Has any City official run an assessment of the added drain on our already scarce resource?

As long as Finance rules the City, and until we put a halt to Growth (and development), it will be profound hypocrisy to claim any least “greening” of Cambridge, MA.