Home Demolitions: Impacts of the Feb 10, 2025 Citywide Upzoning

Demolitions are one of the clearest signals of development pressure. They erase existing homes or commercial buildings and set the stage for new projects, reshaping affordability, neighborhood character, and embodied carbon in the process. Looking at Cambridge’s demolition permit data, two years stand out: 2024 and 2025. The  Harvard Crimson earlier reported on this as well (9.1.25) but without going more deeply into the data. 
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According to Cambridge Historical Commission Executive Director, Charles Sullivan, there has been a 10-fold increase in the number of properties that have come before the Historical Commission to review for possible demolition. 

You can find the data on the 244 demolition permits below:

244 Demolition Examples - Excel

In 2024 the city recorded forty-seven demolitions, the highest count in recent years. The surge reflected both pent-up demand and the anticipation of zoning changes that would reshape redevelopment possibilities. By contrast, 2025 has not slowed down. Through late September there have already been thirty-three demolitions, showing that activity remains elevated even if slightly below the record pace of the prior year. Month by month the story is visible: a wave of demolitions swept through the fall of 2024 as projects lined up ahead of the City Council’s upzoning vote; the winter months saw a dip, as colder weather often slows construction logistics; and the spring and summer of 2025 brought a steady renewal of demolition activity. A dashed line in the monthly trend marks February 10, 2025, the date of the upzoning vote. Before that date, demolitions accelerated in the lead up; after it, the pace continued at a slightly lower but still steady level.
What kinds of buildings coming down tells an even clearer story. From September 2024 through September 2025, single-family and two-family houses (SFH/TFH)  made up the largest share of demolitions. These scattered losses, one or two units at a time, were by far the most common. Multifamily teardowns were fewer, but when they did occur the impact was greater, eliminating far more homes at once. Commercial demolitions added another layer, concentrated along Cambridge’s corridors where whole blocks are being prepared for redevelopment. The pattern holds across the periods: in the lead up to the zoning change, SFH/TFH demolitions dominated, and after February 10 they continued to do so, with overall counts dipping only modestly.

What we see in the graph below is the sizable increase in single-family and two-family homes in large part because these bring the greatest financial return to investors and developers in Cambridge (with investors increasingly paying cash, and coming from outside the area and the U.S. itself). In short the upzoning has NOT benefitted our own Cambridge residents in need of homes.  We note that commercial buildings are also not facing the same degree of interest as the residential units. 

The largest number are found in zip code 02138 (West Cambridge, Neighborhood Nine, Strawberry Hill, Baldwin, and parts of  Riverside and Mid-Cambridge) which also happens to be the largest part of the city geographically. One can get a sense of the distribution by zip code in the graph below.  While some of these are sizable additions to homes, many others are full demolitions. And since the largest financial remuneration in Cambridge comes from LARGER single family homes, post February 10, we are seeing a sky-rocketing of this number in 02138. In the lead up to the upzoning, from September 2024 through December 2024 as investors realized what was likely to happen, we see sharp rises in numbers in 02138 and 02140, with a short hiatus in the dead of winter, but to rise significantly too in 02138, 02139, and 02140 in February through May 2025 in the core upzoning decision making period.  In short, the upzoning has led to the purchase and demolition especially of existing single family and two family homes to build larger ones nearly to the property line, eliminating earlier green spaces and trees. This is made  clear in the graph below.

Residents in these neighborhoods have been deeply distressed to see this happen. Many have contacted Councillors who have provided no support or help. The impact on these neighbors is huge, not only in asbestos particles during demolitions and noise, but also in terms of their own greatly increased property values, which mean that neighbors will have to pay sharply increased property taxes, causing real hardship to seniors and others on fixed incomes.  

​Neighbors try to band together but to little impact. 

As this neighborhood flier expressly notes: "The City Council calls this affordable housing. What a joke. It is a developers' windfall."

And this is exactly what is happening. Some progressive cities required developers to return a percentage of the profits to the city to help our existing residents. 

These examples and the larger numbers of demolitions in play, though, only capture part of the picture. Each demolition can mean a lease cut short, a family asked to leave, tenants displaced while a site waits for financing. Each one is also a blow to Cambridge’s historic character, as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century houses are erased forever. And each one represents a climate cost, releasing the embodied carbon of structures that once stood, even as the city struggles to meet its emissions targets.
Taken together, the data shows a city out of balance. The 2024 surge marked a high-water point for teardowns, and 2025 is keeping pace. The February 10 upzoning clearly mattered, spurring developers to act, but so do the larger cycles of investment and speculation that continue to drive this effort. Watching these permits is one way to see how quickly the city’s fabric is being altered, and to underline how urgently Cambridge needs to balance growth with preservation, affordability, and environmental care.