Cambridge attorney Dennis Benzan was elected to the city council in 2013 on a pledge to help residents find jobs in the city’s booming tech sector. In two short years, Benzan has zeroed in on a set of programs and initiatives aimed at preparing Cambridge students for the innovation economy.
For inspiration, Benzan looks to his own neighborhood off Columbia Street in the historically black and Latino Area IV section of Cambridge.
“You have high rents,” he says. “There’s massive displacement right at the edge of the city’s innovation district. For me, it’s an economic issue. It’s about how do we provide our community with training and education so they can afford to stay in the city.”
On paper, Cambridge is a prosperous city, with a median family income of $93,000, as compared to the state’s median family income of $84,000. But the wealth and booming tech sector in Cambridge mask deep inequalities, with much of the city’s black and Latino population living in low-income public housing developments.
When the children of those families graduate from high school or college and move out of their homes, many are forced to seek housing in communities with lower rents – Medford, Brockton, New Bedford.
“On one level you see a building boom in this city,” he said. “But local residents aren’t participating. Once the buildings go up, very few Cambridge-born resents are working inside them. The figures are in the single digits.”
While the city’s population is growing, the number of blacks living in Cambridge dropped from 13.5 percent in 2000 to 11.7 percent in 2010. The number of Asians living in Cambridge nearly doubled from 8 percent to 15 percent while the number of Latinos increased from 6.8 percent to 7.6 percent. Although the city is majority white, white students make up just 38 percent of the Cambridge Public Schools population.
STEAM education
The blacks and Latinos who make up the majority of the school population come from lower-income families. Benzan argues that those students need more resources to participate in the city’s economy. Last year, he teamed up with fellow councilor Nadeem Mazen and formed an Economic Development Committee to work on programs that help Cambridge students break into the tech sector.
“We brought all the stakeholders together — businesses and universities — and came up with recommendations,” he said.
Among the recommendations: schools ought to emphasize programs on Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) and establish a STEAM coordinating office, connecting corporations with city nonprofits and schools.
That office, named Expanded Learning STEAM Network, helps focus the efforts of disparate community service groups working to provide technology education through after-school programs.
“You have all these nonprofits working in silos,” he said. “We’re bringing them all to the table to coordinate efforts and share resources.”
Benzan’s efforts have won recruits, including fellow city councilors who have supported his programs.
“Dennis has been a great first-term councilor,” said Cambridge Mayor David Maher, who stopped by Benzan’s campaign kickoff last week. “He’s doing a great job. It’s great to have someone who grew up here and is an advocate for young people and people of color.”
Political history
Benzan’s first foray in electoral politics came in 1996, when he challenged then-state Rep. Alvin Thompson for the 28th Middlesex District seat, which includes much of Cambridge. Benzan lost by just 3 percentage points. During his follow-up effort in 1998, both he and Thompson were overwhelmed by Jarrett Barrios, who mounted a well-financed campaign.
An attorney with the Central Square-based firm Altman and Altman, Benzan bided his time until another opportunity presented itself. Then, in 2013, two councilors vacated their seats, leaving openings on the nine-seat council. In Cambridge, all councilors serve at-large in a weak mayor form of government, wherein councilors enact ordinances and vote on the budget and a town manager administers the city’s day-to-day affairs. When Benzan joined the fray, he was one of 17 newcomers vying for the openings. When the dust settled, he had finished 4th overall.
Born in Cambridge to a Dominican father and Puerto Rican mother, Benzan says he came into office last year with a genuine desire to work with his fellow council members, helping to broker a deal to elect the next mayor. Typically in Cambridge, where the councilors elect the mayor from within their ranks, that vote can take as long as two months. But in 2014, thanks in part to Benzan’s efforts, the election was done the same day the councilors were sworn in.
Benzan was elected vice mayor – not bad for the new kid on the block.
For the 2015 electoral season, Benzan’s campaign is reaching out to his 2013 supporters and asking for their number one votes. Cambridge’s city elections rely on of a proportional representation system, wherein voters rank candidates from one to four. To succeed, a candidate must secure a sufficient amount of number one votes.
“We’re talking to our number one voters, reminding them that we’re running and that all the things Dennis said he would accomplish, he has accomplished,” said Benzan’s campaign manager, Leandra De Los Santos.
A push for more housing
As 2015 passes the half-way mark, Benzan has shifted his attention to one of the city’s more vexing problems – the high cost of housing. As highly paid tech workers move into the city and compete with locals for housing, rising rents and home prices have forced much of the city’s middle class out. Benzan, who lives in Area IV with his wife and eight-year-old twins in a home he bought in 1996, has managed to hold on. He sees increased housing production as a way to alleviate pressure on the city’s housing market.
“We need to build more housing on city land,” he said. “A lot of people think our city is becoming too dense,” he said. “We all have to make sacrifices if we’re serious about creating more affordable housing. We have to be committed to building more housing.”
The city just approved a new 19-story building in Central Square on the site currently occupied by a McDonalds at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Douglass Street. It will be the first new housing developed in Central Square in 20 years, Benzan notes. Of the more than 200 units in the building, 47 will be permanently affordable.
Benzan says he’ll work to bring more dense apartment buildings, not just in Central Square, but also in other public transit-friendly areas of Cambridge. He points to several large surface parking lots in Central Square as examples of buildable lots. The inevitable loss of parking spaces is a worthwhile trade-off, he says.
“Across the country you’re seeing a move to reduce parking ratios,” he said. “It’s transit-oriented development. We’re looking seriously at that.”
Dominican concerns
Politics wouldn’t be politics in Cambridge without a healthy dose of international concerns. For Benzan, the Dominican government’s push to strip citizenship from Haitian descendants born in the Dominican Republic is cause for alarm.
“It’s creating conditions for terror and hatred against Haitians,” he said. “It’s no different than what we’re seeing in the United States, in North Carolina.”
Benzan once sued a Dominican nightclub after he and the Cambridge-based novelist Junot Diaz were refused admittance based on their skin color. Now he’s drafting a resolution for the Cambridge City Council to denounce the Dominican Republic’s actions against its Haitian-descended citizens. It’s a small gesture, but Benzan says it can ultimately have a far-reaching consequences for the nation’s tourism industry.
“This can impact the Dominican economy,” he said. “If tourists begin to boycott the Dominican Republic, it could have a significant impact.”
