A Climate Solution: How Mothers Out Front Won A Green Roof Requirement in Cambridge, Mass.
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Mothers Out Front formed as a grass-roots climate action group powered by the volunteer efforts of moms. Photo courtesy Mothers Out Front
I arrived at our Cambridge Mothers Out Front meeting on November 19, 2018 with an idea: to figure out how to turn our city’s black roofs into green ones. Or as Diane Martin, my co-chair of our Green Roofs Task Force, puts it now, “we dared to imagine what our city could become if its rooftops were transformed by pollinator-friendly gardens, meadows, and a farm or two.” At that evening’s meeting, we debated the pros and cons of various climate-related proposals to be our next two-year campaign. By the time we headed home, an enthusiastic vote made green roofs the winner.
Eight years earlier, two moms had met not far from where we gathered that night. They’d shared concerns about their children’s future at a time of accelerating climate change. Soon, the two of them acted by founding Mothers Out Front (MOF), a grass-roots climate action group powered by the volunteer efforts of moms. Not too long after, moms in Cambridge met with other moms in living room house parties, teaching each other about climate change, then coming together to act to ensure a livable climate for all children. Over time, MOF grew its numbers in Massachusetts, then took its climate advocacy to other states, with moms and allies increasing our collective power as we pushed ahead with local, statewide and national campaigns.
Coming together in a campaign is what our Cambridge MOF Chapter did in choosing green roofs as two-year initiative. Once we did this, volunteers formed a task force and got to work setting goals and mapping the path we hoped would lead us to success.
Mothers Out Front formed as a grass-roots climate action group powered by the volunteer efforts of moms. Photo courtesy Mothers Out Front.
Our Campaign Timeline
Set our goal: To convince Cambridge’s nine-member City Council to pass a revised green roof zoning ordinance mandating vegetative and/or biosolar roofs for large new buildings, greater than 25,000 square feet of floor area. At first, we included significant rehab projects in our proposal, but dropped this item as we moved forward due to community feedback.
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Working with a supportive City Councillor, Dennis Carlone, we rewrote the City’s moribund green roofs zoning language that when passed in 2009 had no incentives for developers to create vegetative roofs. Consequently, our city had no green roofs in the intervening years. We saw this an enormous lost opportunity since green roofs provide systemic climate benefits for a dense urban area like ours. Had the city’s zoning ordinance mandated green roofs on new and highly renovated buildings from 2012 to 2019, Cambridge would have had an estimated 1.8 million square feet of green roof space on the total of 68 buildings constructed during that time. This finding is from an analysis that young people affiliated with Peace Rising did for Cambridge Mothers Out Front based on public records, including the Cambridge GIS buildings layer base map.
Mapped our path: By asking – and answering – key questions
Who are the decision makers? City Council, City Manager
Materials produced by Mothers out Front, analyzing climate vulnerability in Cambridge
Who are our potential allies? City Sprouts (a school-based garden organization), garden clubs, Mass Horticultural Society, Mount Auburn arborist, Green City Growers (a Cambridge group dedicated to growing local healthy food and offering it to the city’s most vulnerable families) Green Roofs for Healthy Cities (an industry association with lots of policy resources)
How will we reach out to and involve diverse communities around this goal? Show up and talk at churches, schools: what are green roofs, why are they important
What more do we need to know? How to push for ordinance to be enforced
How will we engage MOF people around this goal? Video, Tours of green roof gardens, fact sheet
With this roadmap in mind, we created the tools and began our outreach:
Made a Video: With a helping hand from our Emmy-winning Cambridge Father Out Front, John MacGibbon, we wrote and narrated, and he edited this short video explaining why we need green roofs in Cambridge. We made our video the centerpiece of our Cambridge MOF website on which we featured our green roofs campaign. As our campaign evolved, so, too, did the information on our website. Here is our Green Roofs page now.
Toured nearby green roofs: In photo, we are at the rooftop farm at Boston Medical Center; three of our City Councillors joined us on this tour, including then vice-mayor Jan Devereux and future mayor Sumbul Siddiqu.
Mothers Out Front touring the rooftop farm at Boston Medical Center. The project, by Recover Green Roofs, is a 2019 Green Roofs for Healthy Cities Award of Excellence Winner.
Wrote an op-ed for our local newspaper: in it, we explained why Cambridge needed to join other U.S. cities in putting vegetation on their roofs.
Created a fact sheet to show the benefits of green roofs: Each time we turned to residents to join us in providing public comment at various hearing, we sent them this fact sheet.
Met frequently with City Councillors: We had many meetings – in person and via Zoom – with each city councillor who would meet with us. (In Nov. 2019, two new councillors were voted in.) We gave each councillor a visual 19-page pdf document with research we compiled about other U.S. cities with green roof policies in place. Channels of communication stayed wide open throughout the campaign.
We presented an online Green Roof forum: In October, 2020, just before we took our Green Roofs petition out to the Cambridge community to gather signatures to take to the City Clerk, as the first step to getting our proposal on the City Council agenda, we hosted an online forum for city residents. We invited three guest speakers – the rooftop farmer from Boston Medical Center, Pete Ellis, the project director of our local green roofer, Recover Green Roofs, and Elizabeth Hart Morris, a roofer, national advocate for green roofs, board member of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, and a major force in Portland, Oregon’s campaign for green roofs. In November, during the pandemic, we were able to get more than 450 residents to sign their names to our printed Green Roofs petition.
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Narrated PowerPoint presentations for public hearings: We invited our experts (see above) to join us. Peace Rising’s analysis also helped us develop a compelling environmental justice argument to support our green roofs petition. We’d seen an overlap in the location of new development with the three neighborhoods in Cambridge that experienced the greatest urban heat island effect, had the least tree canopy, lacked neighborhood open space, and suffered from food insecurity during Covid-19. When we presented our zoning petition to the City Council, its ordinance committee, and the Cambridge Planning Board, we demonstrated how green roofs would provide primary benefits to these three sections of Cambridge where climate mitigation and resiliency are critical.
The Living Architecture Performance Tool Certified Silver green roof on Harvard Business School’s McArthur McCollum Building, just across the Charles River in Boston. Photo courtesy Recover Green Roofs.
After our petition was introduced at a City Council meeting in Dec. 2020, our MOF Green Roofs team called on residents to write their City Councillors and speak at public hearings. They were with us as we made our way through our first ordinance hearing – with a request that we work to refine the language in our petition by working with the city’s Community Development Department (we had two lengthy Zoom meetings) – a Planning Board meeting, a return to the ordinance committee, followed by two City Council meetings, at which a number of amendments were debated and acted on. Along the way, we added to our task force a local architect, R. Philip Dowds, who had dealt with the city on various zoning regulations for decades. He assisted us in refining our petition based on feedback we’d received. City Councillors amended our petition as it moved along, adding a solar-only option for new residential buildings and exempting 100% affordable housing developments. Despite arguments about the cost savings that would result in affordable housing developments, the City Council voted to exempt affordable housing despite these arguments to keep them in the mandate. Developers who do not to meet the city’s green roof requirements are obligated to make a payment-in-lieu-of into the Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust to be used for green roofs on buildings covered by this fund. At this point, there are no details, yet, on the payment in lieu of since this was left by the City Council in the hands of the Community Development Department, and they have not determined the formula, yet. It should be roughly comparable to the cost of the green roof system.
Here is our revised Green Roof Ordinance that passed the City Council on May 3, 2021 (The city has not yet put this revised language into its zoning ordinance, but our revised ordinance went into effect on June 1, 2021:
2.000 - DEFINITIONS
Green Roof. A layer of living vegetation planted in a minimum of four inches of growth medium over a waterproofing system that is installed on top of a flat or slightly sloped roof, and is not intended for use or occupancy. (Also known as a vegetated roof.)
1. Green Roof, Biosolar. Green roof surfacing and solar technologies intermingled in an area of roof.
22.30 - GREEN ROOFS
22.31 Purpose and Applicability. This section requires new construction of buildings equaling or exceeding 25,000 square feet of gross floor area to include green or biosolar green roofing on much or most of the available roof area. Available roof is the entire area of the roof as visible in plan view, but excluding the following:
Areas having a slope greater than 3 in 12.
Areas designed and managed for code-compliant access and use by building occupants or the general public.
Vehicular parking decks.
22.32 Requirement. Of the available roof area as calculated by 22.31, at least 80% of that area shall be devoted to green or biosolar green roof construction. Isolated intrusions into green roof surfacing that are less than 4 square feet in plan area, inclusive of penthouses and head houses, roof hatches, elevator over-rides, vent stacks, skylights, and mechanical and electrical equipment, may be counted as contributing to the required green roof area.
22.33 Exemption. By special permit of the Planning Board, green roof construction may be reduced below the area required by 22.32, provided that each square foot so exempted be compensated by a unit price contribution to The Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust. This unit price amount shall be roughly comparable to the average price of a green roofing over-burden systems; and shall be calculated, and occasionally revised as needed, by the Cambridge Community Development Department. All such funds contributed to the Trust shall be dedicated to the design and incorporation of green roofing and biosolar roofs into new or existing affordable housing developments.
In early May, 2021, after what was at times heated debate, six of the nine councillors voted in favor of our revised and amended Green Roof petition. The ordinance went into effect on June 1, 2021, which makes Cambridge, MA the first New England city to require developers in its city to build vegetative or biosolar (vegetative and solar integrated together) roofs into their design plans.
Melissa Ludtke, an award-winning journalist with Sports Illustrated, CBS News, Time, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, volunteers with Mothers Out Front, a grass-roots, mom-led climate advocacy organization. She is writing her third book, about Ludtke v. Kuhn, the 1978 federal legal case in which she was the plaintiff and the court ordered Major League Baseball to open locker rooms to female reporters, enabling them to report alongside the male reporters.
