Cambridge City Council Election Opinions?

[secretlyironic.livejournal.com]

Anyone have a favorite for the Cambridge City Council Elections? (Those of you who live on the Cambridge side of Camberville?) I'd love to hear opinions. 

Comments

[cos]

At my house we're fans of Minka vanBeuzekom because she's so energetic and on top of everything and constantly doing stuff. We've also been impressed by newcomer Nadeem Mazon, who seems smart and focused on keeping housing affordable for diverse kinds of residents and on the interests of arts, sciences, and music in the city.

As always, Robert Winter's Cambridge Civic Pages site has a lot of information if you want to research the candidates.

[secretlyironic.livejournal.com]

That IS useful!

My vote is mostly swayed by housing and development policy right now; I want more units built, especially in the low-and-middle end.

So far I'm liking:
Minka vanBeuzekom
Craig Kelley
Janneke House (mentions diversity of housing types, which is important to me)
Leland Cheung (I'm familiar with him from his work on the North Mass Ave development/zoning)
Dennis Carlone (urban planning degree!)
Logan Leslie (in favor of more housing development)
Ken Reeves (urban planning degree, focus on "Median income housing")

Seems OK:
Tim Toomey (more bike infrastructure, diverse housing)

Denise Simmons (affordable housing policy aimed at increasing number of subsidized units rather than increasing supply of reasonably-priced market rate units... this is OK but not a great policy either. My neighbor's mom likes Denise, though, and I respect her, so she could still be quite good)

Mushtaque Mirza (Again, wants more subsidized housing, which seems like a less-than-stellar way to increase affordability)


And I disagree with:
David Maher (he seems like a nice guy but he wants less density and ample parking, while I'd rather have more)
Gary Mello (I like his idea of pushing city insurance toward Cambridge Health Alliance, but he's opposed to multi-unit housing development)

The others don't have enough detail for me to form an opinion...

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

P.S. Mervan Osborne seems amazing for school committee. I'm a little concerned that his experience is all in private schools, but I know of Beacon Academy from other contexts and it is an amazingly successful project.

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

Ken Reeves is also a strong schools supporter, and a supporter of innovative plans to help students.

[cos]

Contact Nadeem for more info, I think you'd like him too.

[siderea]

I really want to like Nadeem, and I started out thinking he sounded pretty cool. But by the end of his page on Winter's site and checking out his own website, he's absolutely hammered my mental button labeled "clueless privileged idealist technocrat dilettant". (I didn't even know I had a button labeled "clueless privileged idealist technocrat dilettant".) "Brain drain"? Really?

Is there some reason to believe that I'm wrong? Is there evidence that he knows poor people exist? People who don't and aren't ever going to know calculus? People with disabilities which greatly compromise their ability to compete in the market place?

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine who DOES know those things thinks highly of him, but I don't have anything in linkable form to that effect.

[siderea]

FYI, James Lee has quite a bit about housing on his page there, but you have to scroll down. The first time you come to a heading about affordable housing, keep scrolling: there's a second longer one, that's easy to miss if you stop at the first one. It's somewhat poorly organized; I am guessing it was cut-and-pasted from a page with interior links, where the short bit is a link to the long bit, and it all made more sense.

It may still be inadequate for you to make a decision -- he's pretty cautiously vague about exactly how he'd like to support it, but I give him props for saying he sees it as something that has tradeoffs that need to be considered carefully.