“Their issue,” Healy says, “was that they needed to be able to occupy in 13 months. They had a timeline. I said, ‘We can do that.’”

Since Novartis picked Cambridge in 2003, Healy says, the company has become Cambridge’s largest private employer.

Healy has also prided himself on keeping Cambridge property taxes low. According to Healy, the tax rate—$8.48 per $1,000 of property value in the 2012 fiscal year—is “really the lowest of any city in Massachusetts.”

SERVING THE CITY

Healy pairs fiscal conservatism—at least relative to much of left-wing Cambridge—with liberal positions on social issues.

“We have a very wide variety of human service programs available for people of all ages and all incomes,” he says proudly.

He also took an early progressive stance on gay rights.

“That might sound like a very ordinary thing now, but it wasn’t 15 years ago,” Born says. “His commitment to those issues is stellar.”

On the issue of affordable housing, his viewpoint comes from personal experience. His family was forced out of their North Cambridge apartment when he was 10.

“The landlord’s daughter was getting married,” Healy remembers. “A nice man, but he just came to us and said, ‘Well, my daughter’s getting married and she needs this apartment.’ So we were out. And long story short, affordable housing in Cambridge was hard to find in 1953. We wound up out in Billerica.”

Healy lives with his wife in Lowell today. One of his sons is a Harvard University Police Department officer and the other is a Boston attorney. But though he has not lived in the city in decades, he has worked to ensure that others who want to live in Cambridge can do so.

He serves as the managing trustee of the Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust, which he says has created about 2,700 units of affordable housing to supplement the units offered by the Cambridge Housing Authority.

Even in a city with a $700,000 median price for a single-family home, Healy boasts, “Well over 10 percent of the units in the city are considered or qualify to be called affordable.”

A HANDS-ON HELPER

Harvard University President Drew G. Faust comments on Harvard’s relationship with the city manager. “He’s been a wonderful partner for Harvard,” she says. “It’s been a terrific relationship, and we’ll miss him a lot.”