“Enough Nerds in This District”: Burhan Azeem's Bet on a Technical Campaign

Digging into the nuts and bolts of policy with Cambridge's Vice Mayor and State Senate Candidate

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ben Orenstein: You spent quite a lot of time in municipal government. I’m curious where you hit the wall of local power. What would you like to have done in Cambridge that you couldn’t do without Beacon Hill support?

Burhan Azeem: Well, I think that’s the right question. I’ve been in local office now for five years, and I think the pro of that is that, I hate to say it, you can have both someone young and with experience. Me and Erika got elected at the same time, roughly, and so it’s been a good journey over there. When I ran for office the first time, I said, here are the five things I want to do, on housing, on transit, on universal pre-K. I’ve done all five that I said I would do, so it feels like a natural time to go up.

I think the state has both deeper and wider powers. For the most part, zoning is a local conversation, but the state can just override it on housing policy. And especially once we get outside of Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston, where there’s a fight, and it’s hard, but generally we want more housing, and get out to other places, I think it’s just a place where you need state-level action.

And on transportation: love a good bike lane, but with a bike lane you can’t do too much. The way most people will get around as we add more people is through mass transit, especially the T, and fundamentally we do need to fix that. I’m a big believer in building more housing, and I think people kind of have a point, which is: if you’re mainly getting around by car... well, I like to say the car is an anti-density technology. That’s not a judgment on the value of a car, but just to say the more people you have, the harder it is to find a parking spot, the more traffic you have. That’s just a fact. Whereas the more people you have near a bus stop or a train station, the more buses you can run, the shorter the headways. The more people you have near the train, the more money it has to add more stations and expand.

So fundamentally, if we live in a world where you believe you just can’t build transit, that it’s just something the state doesn’t know how to do, then actually housing is kind of zero-sum. It’s not completely zero-sum; I think there’s value to it. But it’s a really, really hard nut to crack. Whereas if we could just build transit quickly and cheaply, then the whole housing conversation becomes a lot easier. Both on that end, but also, and I think sometimes people use this as a way of pushing off responsibility, there’s a positive version too, which is: if you could just get from downtown Boston to Worcester really quickly, that opens up a lot more space and a lot more availability, and it seems like a very doable thing.

So the main two things are housing and transit. But also, we did universal pre-K in Cambridge, and I’d love to bring that statewide. And if you want to go really deep in the weeds, I think there’s a whole conversation on AI policy, where states are really governing. But the two big people on AI policy, Scott Wiener and Alex Bores, are both stepping down from their state houses. Scott is running for Congress; Alex didn’t quite make it in New York. And I think there’s still a place where the only rules that get written will be at the state level, and there are only a couple of people who have real thoughts on what we can do. I would say that’s very niche, not a top interest for voters, but a place where I have interest.

Ben: That makes sense. So concretely, if transit is a big unlock for housing, and we want to get to Worcester fast, what are you thinking?

Burhan: I’d say two things. There’s the grand vision, and then there’s how you specifically get there, step by step. The grand vision, what everyone talks about, would be high-speed rail to Worcester. But I will say: I sent out this mailer that said we should expand the Red Line from Alewife to Arlington, which was in the original plan, and the Green Line to West Medford. And I did not feel like it was a big thing. It’s two stations. And then I saw people on Reddit commenting, “I just don’t think Burhan can deliver on this.” And I thought: you’re in a place where it’s unimaginable to have two extra stops. I’m not even talking about a whole new line. I get where they’re coming from, but that’s a pretty big bummer, you know? And obviously, people promise high-speed rail forever and things like that.

So I’d start with something very tangible. At Porter Square, there’s the Gift of the Wind, this art installation. It kind of looks like a windmill; you’ve probably seen it. And it’s just in a state of disrepair. It cost $300,000 to build the first time, and now, when you ask about the repairs, they say it costs about $300,000. It reminds me of the Golden Gate Bridge, where it was cheaper to build the bridge than it was to add the nets underneath it, just because of how bad we’ve gotten at building things.

I have a lot of ideas on how we can make construction cheaper, but that is a great, small, tangible litmus test. I think it’s about procurement. We write really complicated rules that mean not many people can bid for government contracts. We have ways of writing all these other requirements around who we hire and how we hire them that build up the cost. We make it really difficult to just have a permanent team whose responsibility is to do this cheaply, versus getting punished if they try to push too hard, so their job is just to do it, even if it takes infinite time and infinite money. So there’s a whole bunch of management, procurement, and contracting stuff that’s really boring. But the measure of success, in a small, immediate way you can see, is: can we fix the Gift of the Wind for less than the cost of actually building it the first time?

Ben: Inflation-adjusted?

Burhan: Inflation-adjusted, yeah.

Ben: I love hearing the focus on the nuts and bolts and the unsexy stuff, because I think that’s really important. But I’d imagine for each of the things you’re pointing at, there’s some political constituency that has pushed it to be that way, so you’re most likely always fighting somebody on this. It’s easy to say we should fix these things, but if other people are pushing against it, how do you still win, or compromise?

Burhan: I think that’s a great question. I would say a couple of things. One is: someone needs to focus on the nuts and bolts. You only get one state senator, but the State Senate and the State House are kind of a team. And my little critique of them is: you have a bunch of lawyers and policy people, which is fantastic, but everyone just writes “let there be public transit, let there be housing,” and then we’re 50th out of 50 in terms of building housing.¹

So I really think it’s not just that we don’t want to do the right things. It’s that you have to care about the nuts and bolts. And at least in my opinion, I’m working really hard to give myself a demotion: I make more at the local level than I would at the State House. I really do think you can have a profound difference by focusing on the nuts and bolts.

To your point, yes, there are different constituencies, but that’s why I would focus on this specific case of the Gift of the Wind. It’s really hard to say “we’re going to do huge amounts of government procurement reform,” and then people say, “Who are you, Burhan? Will this even make a difference?” Even the proponents say, “I don’t believe this will work.” We talked about the two train-stop extensions. But no one cares about this one little thing, this one little art installation on one project. So I’m not saying we should change all of these rules for everything. Just change it for this one small installation. Make it a special exemption, and let’s just see if we can build it cheaper. Then that’s proof of point, and we can go from there. The other side of it is: the State House, and people in politics in general, love doing pilot programs. So give me this little pilot program, and let’s prove the concept that you can actually build things cheaper if you want to. And once we have that proof point, we can talk about what the next step is.

Ben: You alluded to state-level housing ideas as maybe a next step here. What’s your magic wand, if you could get something passed? And maybe two things: pie in the sky, if you could pass anything, and then a concrete first step, similar to the transit thing.

Burhan: I think it’s actually kind of one and the same in this case. The MBTA Communities Act had good intentions. It had the potential to solve our housing crisis. And it was just one of the worst pieces of legislation I think has ever been written in the State House.

Ben: Say more. Why?

Burhan: I say that with a lot of pain, because I spent five years defending it. When Milton decided not to implement it, we were on the ground organizing. When Marblehead, you know, was there. We were on the ground organizing in Weston when they tried to rezone over just industrial land that’s never going to be developed. So I say it in that context: I think you could not write a piece of legislation more meant to maximize conflict and minimize impact than the MBTA Communities Act. A: it basically had no effect on Cambridge and Somerville. B: it left out Boston. C: it asked a bunch of suburbs to rezone for housing when they didn’t want to, so they had malicious compliance. And D, I think most importantly, winning in housing is not “I’m really excited for this development,” because it does kind of suck. You have construction, you have noise, you have traffic. There are real downsides. Instead, it’s more like, “Yeah, we kind of have to do this.” It’s like eating broccoli: I get it, you’ve just got to do it sometimes. And that’s fine. But instead of having an affirmative vote in every single community, it’s just asking for conflict to spread all over the place.

Instead, what you should have done is take the spirit of the MBTA Communities Act and go really small. An eighth of a mile near every transit stop, for the commuter rail or for the T, you can just build, kind of like what we did in Cambridge, six stories of housing. That would build the 200,000 units basically overnight. It’s a very small amount of land we’d be talking about; most people would not be abutting it. And I think it would just solve this. Just do a statewide standard: this is the rule. And then we can put this in the past. But instead, because we decided to make it community opt-in, and we decided to leave out Boston, and we didn’t want to push Cambridge and Somerville because we’re already doing the right thing, we got a piece of legislation that I think is going to do less than the starter homes ballot question that I put forward.

Ben: Presumably, though, this was compromise legislation, due to lots of parties involved with political power and influence who are maybe still around. So how does a new senator get a Communities Act 2.0 passed, assuming those powers are still there?

Burhan: The question I would keep coming back to is: there actually is political will sometimes. Housing is the biggest issue. The governor talks about it the whole time. When Zohran and Trump met, the one thing they said is, “We need to build more housing in New York.” I just think the answers are wrong. The State House right now has a bunch of things they’re looking at in terms of housing, and they’re actually really difficult conversations. The State Senate wants to end single-family-only zoning across Massachusetts and allow duplexes to be built anywhere. So you could still build a single-family home, but you can also build a duplex. That’s a really hard conversation in a lot of suburbs, a lot of different places. And I just don’t think it’s going to have the impact. If you have a single-family home, let’s say it’s worth a million dollars, and you’re going to replace it with a duplex, you probably need to take down the single-family home. So you’re losing a million dollars. And then you have to build at least two units, where construction cost is, let’s say we’re being generous, $500,000 a unit. You have to sell them both for at least a million dollars or more. So the economics of it are actually quite poor. I think it’ll have a decent chunk of impact, more impact than the MBTA Communities Act, but it’s just not that big. Whereas we have empty parking lots near every commuter rail station, for the most part. Just build housing on that. And 200,000 units is not that many units in a state that has four or five million units.

So I think there actually is political will on this specific housing question. We just keep funneling it into ideas that sound like we’re really moving forward, but when you look at the unit count at the end of the day, which is what matters, they’re just not impactful.

Ben: So it sounds like your position is that the specific ideas are what’s holding us back. There’s political will for housing improvements, but we’re going about it the wrong way.

Burhan: I think that’s my critique of policy in general, and this is how policymaking works. First: it’s hard to do anything at all. Second: you very quickly have a values question. Are you pro-housing or anti-housing? And it’s super hard to even get a majority on those issues. So basically, first you do nothing at all on anything; that’s kind of the default. Then, if you do anything, it’s with the slimmest of majorities. The third part, which we don’t get to, is: let’s say you have a pro-housing majority, or a pro-transit majority. Is that specific thing you’re doing actually that valuable?

I’m a very big proponent of green energy and fighting climate change. In Cambridge, we’ve had the most aggressive building deregulation rules in the country, so I’ve definitely taken my share of tough votes, and that was a five-four vote. And then I look at pro-transit. Okay, we want to make the T better. What’s the big thing we want to do? Electrify the buses. And that is a terrible idea. And I don’t say that lightly; I would love electric buses. But getting anything done for the MBTA in the first place is really, really hard. That would be at the bottom of my priority list. Basically: taking the bus is already greener than taking a car. I think all of us understand that. Two: as we talk about all the time, the T has a limited budget. Everyone, when you ask about this, says, “We should expand the T and do electric buses.” And I say: that’s fantastic. When is it happening? Instead, we took the limited budget that we do have for the T, and we’re now spending it on converting to battery electric buses, retrofitting every bus station to have charging. And MBTA buses now need to go charge for a couple of hours, so that’s time they’re off the road. You’re talking about spending hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, retrofitting the system. And at the same time, so many bus routes here, from the ones that are parallel to the Green Line to the 94, which goes from Davis to Medford, are all on the chopping block. And it’s because you don’t have infinite money. You don’t even have enough money, and now we’re putting it into this thing that will marginally make the buses people do use more green, but then fewer people will use the buses. So I’m just not sure that’s the right direction. And I think you see that time and time again with the actual policy that we pass.

Ben: Where do you see the biggest daylight between you and the other candidates in this race, given you’re all similarly politically aligned, I would guess?

Burhan: I think it really, really is on the policy direction piece. I think values align; we’re 90% similar. But what really matters, to some extent, is the focus areas you have. Erika is a fighter: for every thing you’re a little bit upset about in life, there’s a bad guy, and she wants to fight that bad guy. Christine is kind of the insider: “I know how things on Beacon Hill work; I can make incremental change in a good direction.” Matt is the local guy: “I understand the nuances of Somerville, and I’ve been here forever.” He’s a very nice person. I like Matt a lot.

And then mine is: Massachusetts is really great in a lot of different ways, and yet in the places I care about and feel I have expertise in, the built environment (housing, transit, utility costs), we are the worst in the country. It’s not just 50th out of 50 in terms of building more housing, and third overall in housing costs after San Francisco and New York. It’s the T: half of all light rail accidents in the country happen in the MBTA system.² And then we talk about expansion. And then we have the third-highest utility costs after Hawaii,³ which is expensive for a very specific reason. It’s actually really bad, and I don’t even see the incremental progress. And I don’t even think it’s a bad-guys problem, where, yes, Eversource makes a bunch of profit, and there’s a whole bunch of bad incentives, and we should fix that. But if Eversource or National Grid made 0% profit, we’d go from the third most expensive utilities to, like, seventh. It’s just not the single biggest factor. I really think we have profoundly written ourselves into a bad corner with a bunch of good intentions. You just write all these things, and they don’t make sense together.

Ben: Is this the “everything bagel” of liberal politics situation? Every project has to accomplish ten different goals, including social change?

Burhan: Partially, but I think it’s also simpler than that. I think it’s profoundly misunderstanding and not caring about outcomes. I’ll give you an example with the T, and then utility costs. With the T, you might say, “Oh, it’s unions or something like this.” And I think marginally that makes an impact on cost. But fundamentally, I think the biggest problem is the way we structure the MBTA. Montreal had the same problem: it was not expanding its REM. And you know what they did? This very profound thing: they just hired a permanent team. They said, “Your job is to expand our system.” We don’t have that at the MBTA; instead, we hire a bunch of consultants who consult for every project. And they said, “You’re going to design a station, and you can customize it 10% every time, but 90% of it will stay the same, and your job is to build a station every six months.” And actually, those three things were enough. You have a permanent team, so they all get to know each other, they know who’s great at their job, and they get better at their jobs over time. You’re building a station every six months, so you know where to source your materials, and you become cheaper and better and more reliable at sourcing them, and you know where to store them, and all these logistical things. And you’re given a timeline of every six months, so you know exactly how to plan ahead, and you just build it on a clock.

Whereas whenever we do a transit project, it’s an ad hoc special unicorn butterfly, where we hire a bunch of new people because we don’t have the in-house capacity, we’re figuring out how to get all these materials for the first time because we don’t usually do expansions, and it’s all on an undetermined timeline. How long have we been talking about fixing I-90? It’s been forever, and every time, it gets cancelled. No one would ever build a team like this, but we have the wildest structure of all time. And I think there are much simpler and more foundational fixes we can make. We are a very rich country, much richer than the rest of the world. We can actually have nicer things than the rest of the world. And the fact that we can’t even build a train stop where much, much poorer places can isn’t just “oh, we’re doing too many good things.” It’s that we actually can’t even do the very, very simple things well.

Ben: I feel like I’m listening to an argument mostly for state capacity increases.

Burhan: Yeah, I think it’s a state capacity and a State House capacity increase. It’s not that the MBTA doesn’t realize there are all these problems; there are really smart people there. But the rules that govern how the MBTA works prevent them from doing this sort of stuff.

Ben: So we need low-level rules changes to unlock the capacity building. So it sounds like your position is less that we can’t do these things, and more that we’ve saddled ourselves with regulations and rules that prevent us from doing them well. Is that generally correct?

Burhan: Yeah.

Ben: Great. That’s good news.

Burhan: Yeah. I mean, I guess we’ll rewrite the rules. I think it is very possible. I’m very, very optimistic, actually. Forty years is most of our lifetime, no matter how old you are, so people think, “I just don’t think it’s fixable; it hasn’t been tractable in my lifetime.” But in the realm of a government, that’s not that long. Governments run for much longer. We realized: hey, this is a metro region that is built for transit, and mass transit in particular, because our roads are all kind of messy. And so we built the first subway system in North America. We figured out how to put the trains underground and not suffocate from all the steam. And we were dramatically expanding up until the 1980s. We added 20 stations a decade. And now everyone is focused on Trump, and before that, kind of Bush, and we forget there was this era where we basically said, “The private sector is better; let’s just fire a bunch of government employees and hire consultants.” The thought was that it would increase capacity, because all these private sector people are better. But actually, it just messed things up, because consultants are there for twelve or eighteen months, and then we added all these other rules that we were afraid of, you know?

It’s very fixable. And you see things get better all the time. In Cambridge, the Cambridge Housing Authority was trying to build units once, and it was $1.1 million a unit. And then we just changed the procurement process, and it dropped by $100,000 a unit. It was still super expensive; we can’t change all the stuff that the State House can change. But it’s crazy: you can change one rule and save $100,000 a unit. Things are very doable, you know?

Ben: Is this the kind of pitch you’re giving on the doors, or is it simpler, smaller things? Does this resonate with the average door-knock conversation?

Burhan: The average door-knock conversation is very brief; you’re mostly just introducing yourself. That’s just one interaction. But I would say, yeah, it’s a core focus. If you look at our Instagram, it’s very technical, very positive, hopefully. I very much believe that our problems can be fixed, and we get a huge amount of attention. I think we’ve gotten two or three million people who have viewed our Instagram and Facebook videos, which is congressional-level attention for a low-level state senate race. And kind of the bet I’m taking is that there are enough nerds in this district that we can make a technical argument and get away with it. But it’s nice to talk about solutions, not just complain about problems, you know?

Ben: Can I be selfish a little bit and ask you some Somerville questions?

Burhan: Sure.

Ben: Can we accomplish a Cambridge-like upzoning in Somerville?

Burhan: A Cambridge-like upzoning. That’s a good question. Well, I would say it’s hard. It really was incredibly difficult on the Cambridge side. People see the final vote, eight to one, and they think it was an easy thing to do. But before I got elected, there was a vote for missing-middle housing, which was triple-deckers, and it crashed and burned. It did not even get enough votes to get a final vote, because it was just so unpopular. So there’s an incredible amount of work you do. It really took a year of my life, where every day I woke up and asked, “How do I build support for this?”

So I think the first step is finding your champions in City Hall who really want to do this. You need a group of people who deeply want to do this and are willing to spend a bunch of time and political capital on it. It’s about persuading your neighbors. It’s about figuring out how to write the rules, getting staff on board, getting anyone else who’s invested in the system on board, and making sure it works for them. There’s a huge amount of constituent groups you have to win over.

And then on the other side, there are structural advantages and disadvantages. Somerville is structurally, just based on demographics, more pro-housing than Cambridge, so you have better bones. But having district councilors makes it a little bit harder, because a particular development in a particular neighborhood really affects that councilor in a way it doesn’t in Cambridge, where we’re all elected at large. So you have pros and cons you need to figure out. But at least one part is done: forever, our zoning code was a hundred pages of dimensional requirements, and I narrowed it down to seven or eight pages. I wrote all that, so at least that part’s done for you guys. You can copy and paste it and make whatever twists you want.

But I think it’s a long road. And mostly, you want not only people who will support it — I think there are a lot of great Somerville city councilors who will probably support some sort of rezoning — but you also need people who are willing to spend an insane amount of time really understanding it, making the case, and persuading not only their colleagues but the entire public. I think that should be the focus.

Ben: Is that where you would start in Somerville housing policy, or would you look for your fix-the-sculpture-for-cheaper project in Somerville first?

Burhan: I think Somerville’s already done this cheaper project. On Broadway, there’s a project that’s 50% affordable, and it’s a really great TIF and all. It’s really great, and I think it’s worth it.

And I think you sometimes get yourself into lose-lose situations, like with a tower, if you try to do individual projects. Fundamentally, housing is kind of a game theory problem. Whatever you think about the actual tower, if I was near it, I’d think it’s a bad deal. Okay, so I have to show up to a special permit meeting and say, “Yeah, this is great,” and put up with all the noise and the construction and the traffic and all the things you have to put up with. And does someone in Gilman Square have to build a tower? Does someone in all the other parts of the city have to do theirs? Because one building is not going to solve the housing crisis; it’s marginally impactful. Instead, if I say and do the right thing, and show up to a special permit meeting and say I want this to happen, I get all the negative consequences, and everyone else doesn’t have to do their part.

I think that’s why citywide rules, or, even better, statewide rules, are really impactful: then we’re all in this together, and if everyone did their part, it’s not so much. And you avoid that game theory problem. That’s fundamentally why, if you look at the population, everyone’s the same. But at the local level, housing is extremely controversial, while at the state level, housing is a fifty-fifty issue. Basically every governor in the country is pro-housing. You get to congressional Democrats — I’ll go even further: Democrat or Republican, everyone in Congress is very, very pro-housing. And you wonder: how can we have such a difference of opinion among politicians when the people voting for them are the same? I think it fundamentally is the game theory problem: the bigger the polity, the more it makes sense to pass pro-housing legislation. Every special permit everywhere is almost always net unpopular, and the bigger the rezoning, the more popular it will be. I think that’s even why the MBTA Communities Act is popular in Weston, even though Weston voted not to comply with it, or to comply with it only on paper. People do want it. It’s just very rational: you would prefer to spread out the diffuse benefits and concentrated harm. You would like it to be as spread out as possible.

Ben: Gotcha. So it is the my-backyard problem: spread it over a lot of backyards a little bit, and the problem goes away.

Burhan: Fundamentally, yeah. Getting 200,000 units, to take the most extreme example, in a state of four to five million units is probably one extra unit of housing every two or three blocks. That’s barely noticeable. If you talked about it that way, I’m sure people wouldn’t mind. But there are reasons we end up with versions that are harder.

Ben: It seems like some projects here locally are having trouble penciling with 20% inclusionary zoning, and Somerville has been weighing tax relief for certain developers in exchange for affordable units. Do you like the subsidize-around-the-inclusionary-zoning approach, or do you think maybe the rate is off? Any thoughts on that?

Burhan: I would say there are two different questions here. One is: is the math working? And I think fundamentally the answer is no. From Chelsea, close by, to San Francisco, another very left city, people have been reducing inclusionary numbers because buildings were not penciling. Part of it is that you have options; that doesn’t mean you have to lower the inclusionary. You have three options, fundamentally. One: you can lower it. Two: you can do what Cambridge did, which is a massive upzoning. We have buildings at 20% in Cambridge that are penciling, because you’re going from, like 9 Wyman Street, one single-family home to 56 units, and all of a sudden there’s enough surplus value, and the land value is divided among enough units, that it actually pencils. Though even in Cambridge, that only works in those mega-projects. It does not work for a 12-unit project or something.

And then the third option, which I really like, is what you’re talking about: tax increment financing. In my mind, if we’re getting really nerdy and in the weeds, it’s kind of like a pseudo land value tax. Say you have two cases: one triple-decker, and one empty parking lot. Now you want to build, let’s say, 15 units, with 20% inclusionary or whatever. The way tax increment financing works: let’s say the triple-decker is paying, I’m making up numbers for simplicity, $20,000 a year in taxes. If you built the 15-unit building, it would pay five times that: $100,000 a year in taxes. Well, that’s $80,000 a year you wouldn’t have if the building didn’t exist. So just say: you don’t have to pay those additional $80,000 a year in taxes for the first fifteen years after the building is constructed. That’s basically $80,000 a year they can add to their margins, which helps the inclusionary pencil a little bit better. I think tax increment financing is roughly equivalent to about a five to seven percent reduction in inclusionary. So I would not say it’s the same as what Chelsea or SF did. SF reduced to 5% inclusionary, or 3% or something like this. It’s basically reducing inclusionary from 20 to 15 or 13 percent. But you see how that’s worth $80,000.

But then if you had an empty parking lot, where people in general want more development than on a triple-decker, well, the parking lot is probably paying, let’s say, $5,000 a year in taxes, because it’s based on property values, and there’s no property there. So instead they get basically $95,000 a year. So you see how it’s also serving as a pseudo land value tax: the less you’ve done with your land, the more of an incentive we’re creating for you to actually do something valuable. And the more you’ve actually done something productive — yeah, we don’t want to incentivize as many teardowns of more valuable structures, where it’s more likely something negative is happening to the people living there. Instead, we really want to prioritize empty houses, or empty lots, or single-family homes where the person who lives there is selling their home, and it’s a better scenario, you know?

Ben: Okay, so the TIF incentivizes more development on lots that have less value currently, because the delta between the taxes is bigger.

Burhan: Yeah. You have to go three levels of nerdery deep there: you have to know inclusionary, you have to know tax abatements, and you have to know land value tax. And then you can talk about how this is kind of pseudo the same. So, yeah.

Ben: So it’s less that you’re actually taxing the value of the land. It’s, “Hey, by the way, you could get another $95,000 of tax abatements if you develop this thing.” It’s kind of a reverse.

Burhan: Yeah, it’s basically the opposite. Instead of actively taxing the land, you’re giving a reward for someone to actually invest in it.

Ben: Gotcha. Cool. Let me come up on the end here. If you’re elected and we’re at the end of your first term, what is an honest way to judge whether you have succeeded?

Burhan: That’s a good question. It’s both a long and a short answer. Legislative power definitely compounds the longer you’re there, and whoever gets in will be new. But my goal is to really focus on a few tangible aspects. In terms of transit, I gave you the example with that art installation; the Gift of the Wind is what I was talking about. In terms of housing, I actually think something bigger is possible. The real goal is: can we take all this momentum behind people wanting to do something on housing and actually channel it into better policy? If you see a delta between the old ideas and ideas that sound and look more like mine, then probably it’s not that I was critical to getting something passed. Instead, I was able to take something that was going to get passed, where I understood there was energy for it, and shape it in that direction. So I think those are two reasonable expectations for the first term.

I always hesitate to overpromise at the beginning, but I think the four-to-six-year timeframe is much, much more positive. I fundamentally do believe that’s a timescale on which we could pass something dramatic on housing that will make an impact. And I would consider it a failure, point blank, if in four to six years we don’t have big housing legislation. And two: I think that’s around the time you can really work through all the pieces to understand the structure of the T, and pass a really big cleanup legislation that could change how they hire, how they manage, and how they procure, such that you could have quite a lot lower costs across the board. And I think it’s also around the realm where you can change the funding formula, so they’re not always fighting for every dollar and trying to minimize their debts, but instead actively getting toward zero debt.

Ben: Thank you for the time!

1. Massachusetts ranks near the bottom nationally in housing production, though not literally last. A Pioneer Institute analysis of 2024 Census data found the state issued 201 building permits per 100,000 residents, the sixth-lowest rate in the country, against a national average of 281 (State House News Service). A May 2026 Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce report found Massachusetts had the lowest per-capita housing production among its economic competitor states, at less than half the rate of any of them (Boston Chamber).

2. The figure likely comes from the Federal Transit Administration’s 2022 Safety Management Inspection, which found that from 2017 to 2021, the MBTA accounted for 38 percent of all light rail collisions in the United States, and 94 percent of the associated injuries (FTA report; NBC Boston).

3. Massachusetts residential electricity rates rank among the three or four highest in the nation depending on the month, per U.S. Energy Information Administration data, behind Hawaii and California, and at times Connecticut (EIA data via VoltFlow; Electric Choice).