It was a small but meaningful expression of the political savvy that has helped Azeem transform Cambridge’s approach to building new homes.

Since being elected in 2021, Azeem has helped write and pass some of the broadest housing reforms Cambridge, or anywhere else in Massachusetts, has seen in years — including the six-story zoning, which passed in February and is regarded as one of the most ambitious efforts to spur new housing by any city in the country.

“People support me because I write policies that have a real chance to make a difference in the housing crisis,” Azeem said. “If I wasn’t doing that, I wouldn’t be doing my job.”

Azeem’s political rise, and policy success, has coincided with housing emerging as one of the most important local issues in Massachusetts, and a growing movement of younger, politically engaged residents who are pushing for solutions. In Cambridge — which has some of the steepest rents in the nation — that is especially true.

To the younger residents advocating for more homes, Azeem is an ideal representative.

“Housing is the preeminent challenge in the lives of a lot of people who live here,” said Jarred Johnson, a local advocate who supports Azeem. “So when someone like Burhan comes along and presents a clear vision to deal with that problem and actually follows through on it, people respond to that.”

Azeem said his fixation on the housing shortage is personal. He was born in Pakistan, then moved to Staten Island, N.Y., when he was 4 after his parents won a visa lottery, hoping to pay off medical debt with new, better-paying jobs. In the United States, his family moved often, sometimes staying with friends in overcrowded apartments.

Azeem excelled in high school — a local newspaper once referred to him as a genius — and won a full scholarship to MIT, where he studied material science and engineering. These days, Azeem is the head of artificial intelligence at Tandem, a language learning startup.

Cambridge City Councilors Burhan Azeem (left) and Sumbul Siddiqui discussed their proposal to allow six-story buildings in Cambridge. Erin Clark/Globe Staff

His natural approach as an engineer is to look at Cambridge’s housing problem from an analytical perspective. The numbers bear out that Cambridge has too few homes for the number of people who want to live there, he said, and the city builds too slowly. Add the surge of well-paying biotech jobs over the last decade, and housing prices are going to explode.

Azeem estimates he has spent, conservatively, hundreds of hours poring over the city’s zoning code, and he’ll happily discuss floor-area-ratio (a measure of a building’s floor area in relation to the size of the land on which it sits) and other housing wonkery that quietly shapes cities. But he can expound, too, on big ideas, like why the country doesn’t build big infrastructure projects anymore, and how Greater Boston would be better off with a much larger MBTA.

“I get labeled as a dreamer because I look at issues like housing and transportation and suggest solutions that upend the status quo and get to the root of the problem,” Azeem said. “Well right now, the status quo is people spending half their income on housing, and a broken transportation system.”

Every April 1 on social media platforms, Azeem proposes that Cambridge become “MegaCambridge” by absorbing Boston. Last year, he put up billboards advertising the idea, and this year, he introduced a formal resolution at the City Council. It’s an April Fool’s joke, he said, but the message behind it — that cities should think and function more as a broader region instead of individual municipalities — is serious.

It is the combination of those two worlds of thinking, about the intricacies of zoning and big vision for what a city should be, that inform Azeem’s work on housing policy.

“We’ve been talking about ideas on housing for years and years,” said Councilor Mark McGovern. “Burhan made sure we actually did something with those conversations.”

In consecutive years, in 2022 and 2023, Azeem helped pass an ordinance that banned minimum parking requirements for new developments — lowering a major cost of new construction — and changes to the city’s affordable housing overlay to ease approvals of affordable projects as tall as 12 to 15 stories in some sections of the city.

Both of those proposals were controversial and passed the council by close margins. So when Azeem, along with councilor Sumbul Siddiqui, suggested the city allow buildings up to six stories tall on any lot, effectively ending single-family-only zoning in Cambridge and promoting dense housing in even lower-slung neighborhoods, it felt like a long shot. A few years prior, a similar proposal died in committee.

“When I first started talking to him about this, I was incredibly impressed with his economic substance, and thought he was enormously ignorant politically,” said Jason Furman, an influential Harvard economist and former adviser to President Barack Obama, whom Azeem consulted on the proposal. “I saw a guy obsessed with his idea who had no idea of the political hurdles he had to pass.”

But, Furman said, Azeem’s penchant for big ideas hides his political calculus.

“Clearly,” he said, “I was wrong.”

The Sacred Heart Rectory at 49 6th Street in East Cambridge is the future site of an affordable housing development that will have no parking spaces.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff

Indeed, the pro-housing movement can occasionally be known for that sort of thing: big ideas, with too little political acumen to persuade everyday voters. But Azeem has been adept at allying with politically savvy councilors to help push his ideas forward.

“Burhan’s superpower is that he is a regular person who is genuinely interested in connecting with the people he represents,” said Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of Abundant Housing, which Azeem helped found.

And it may work in his favor that he can be shy and is not a Type A backslapper like many other politicians, said Kanson-Benanav, because it means he tends to prefer one-on-one conversations, which can endear him to people. At his election night party in 2023, he spent most of the evening in the corner chatting with a few people, even as the crowd of 20- and 30-somethings loudly cheered and celebrated his reelection.

Still, his style and the scale of his ideas have rubbed some in town the wrong way.

The Cambridge Citizens Coalition, a local group that advocates for slower growth, has frequently criticized Azeem, saying his policies are reckless and will mainly lead to the development of expensive condominiums instead of housing affordable for everyday people. Last year, after Azeem himself bought a small multifamily property near Fresh Pond, they accused him of potentially profiting from his own upzoning proposal, which would enable a much larger property there.

The group declined to comment for this story.

But that is the nature of debate over local housing policy these days. Discussions can be personal, because the issue is so personal for so many people.

Azeem’s response is to talk with as many people as he can. He knows not everyone will agree with his ideas, but that’s not a reason to stop pushing for them. And sometimes it works. Like in February, when Azeem’s six-story zoning plan passed the City Council 8-1.

It’s the sort of proposal that could get people voted out of office in a lot of places. But here, it paid off, and Cambridge may never look the same.

“I would be doing a disservice to the people that elected me if I didn’t try to pass real solutions to our problems,” said Azeem. “That’s what politics should really be about, right?”

Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.