Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview with the conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. In that interview, he was asked to explain to a hypothetical democratic socialist where they were going wrong. In response, he argued, “With housing, the problem is mostly the government,” and cited the Cambridge City Council as an example of a body that was supposedly addressing the housing crisis by getting rid of regulations.

I’m both a Cambridge city councilor and a democratic socialist. I’ve fought for social housing and stronger tenant protections, and I voted for the Multifamily Housing Zoning Ordinance that Auchincloss mischaracterizes. So I can confidently say that he and other corporate Democrats, unfortunately, misunderstand both the cause of the housing crisis faced by cities like Cambridge and communities around the country and what our city council has done to tackle it.

The housing problems in Cambridge are case studies in the worst excesses of capitalism. Walking around Cambridge before the city council passed the Multifamily Housing Zoning Ordinance last year, it was not uncommon to see private luxury developers tearing down older, more affordable triple-deckers and replacing them with more profitable $4 million McMansions. If that doesn’t sound like a socialist economy that needed to be liberated from centralized government development, it’s because it definitely wasn’t. The Multifamily Housing Zoning Ordinance was an effort to better regulate the housing market to produce more affordable housing, including hundreds more deed-restricted affordable homes that would be managed by the city under our inclusionary zoning requirements.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the two current city councilors who strongly opposed the Multifamily Housing Zoning Ordinance are neither of the two democratic socialists on the council. In fact, they are two of the more conservative members.

When Auchincloss says, “With housing, the problem is mostly the government,” he could not be more wrong. Our housing crisis hasn’t been brought on by the government; it’s been caused by politicians at the state and federal level — both Republicans and corporate Democrats — too often abdicating their responsibility to legislate when it comes to housing. What we’re left with in this vacuum is hundreds of cities and towns across the country each taking housing policy into their own hands. Some of them, like Cambridge, have taken bold action to address the housing crisis. Others, like Marblehead, are trying to do nothing — especially when it comes to zoning.

The reason cities and towns are left battling among themselves in the thunderdome of housing policy is that state and federal governments have refused to take meaningful action to address the housing crisis. To give just one example, for years the state legislature in Massachusetts has been unable to pass a real estate transfer-fee bill allowing communities to place a small fee on the sale of multimillion-dollar homes to fund affordable housing.

Even worse, state and federal governments empower bad actors at the same time they tie the hands of cities that want to take stronger action to combat the housing crisis. While Massachusetts has preempted cities and towns from passing most tenant protections like just-cause eviction or tenant opportunity to purchase, it has given municipalities free rein when it comes to zoning.

Most communities in Massachusetts have used that near-absolute power to pass bans on building apartments — or any other kind of multifamily housing — within their borders. When the state government has tried to weigh in, like with the MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) Communities Act requiring that cities create at least one zone that theoretically allows multifamily housing near transit, their efforts have often been tepid and easily circumvented by exclusionary towns.

For an example of that phenomenon playing out, look no further than Newton, the city where Auchincloss served for five years as a city councilor. After a local election shaped by backlash to a rezoning plan, Newton scaled back its efforts to comply with the MBTA Communities Act in 2023. Its new plan focused on just a handful of village centers, but it was still enough to comply with the state’s minimum zoning standards. Newton is still far from accomplishing anything as bold as Cambridge when it comes to housing.

Maybe it needs more democratic socialists on the city council to get there.