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By William C. Shelton

In 2016, the Somerville Planning Board approved a Union Square Neighborhood Plan that was inimical to what Union Square neighbors said they wanted – and to the objectives set in the City’s Comprehensive Plan, SomerVision. At a hearing on Thursday, the Planning Board and City Council’s Land Use Committee will consider whether they should compound the error.

At issue is whether one of Union Square’s most important blocks should be rezoned to accommodate a real estate developer, the Hamilton Company. Hamilton acquired its considerable capital – and unsavory reputation – over seven decades of buying and managing several thousand Boston rental units.

For much of that period, Allston-Brighton tenant organizers and Jamaica Plain’s City Life/Vida Urbana identified Hamilton as a slumlord. Hamilton was often at or near the top of annual complaints verified by Boston’s Inspectional Services Department.

More recently, Hamilton acquired all the properties in the block that runs from Dunkin Donuts up to Midnite Convenience. It proposes a large residential development there. We can anticipate that its units would be priced at a level that few existing Somerville residents who are not already paying top-of-the-market prices could afford.

This would continue a pattern.

SomerVision 2030 illustrated the relative frequency of values expressed by Somerville residents by their size in a word cloud.

SomerVision 2030

In 2009, planning staff began conducting a series of workshops to prepare for the City’s first comprehensive plan. They asked Somerville residents what was most important to them. The most common responses were “community,” “diversity,” “green space,” and “affordability.”

Informed by those values, a 66-person steering committee chose principles and goals that would guide neighborhood planning and citywide zoning. In 2012, the planning staff published SomerVision 2030. Among its goals was the creation by 2030 of

• 30,000 new jobs,
• 125 new acres of publicly accessible open space, and
• 6,000 new housing units.

The amount of development needed to meet the jobs goal dominated that required for the housing goal because committee members were aware of Somerville’s gross imbalance between residential and commercial land uses. And of the resulting workers/jobs, open space/population, income-distribution, housing-affordability, and age imbalances.

Union Square Neighborhood Plan

The next year, the mayor appointed a Union Square Citizens’ Advisory Committee to select a Union Square Master Developer. In 2014, eleven out of thirteen committee members recommended a firm called Gerding Edlin. The Somerville Redevelopment Authority selected Union Square Station Associates (US2).

Realizing that there was no current Union Square redevelopment plan, the mayor asked the developer to pay for one. US2’s hired consultants conducted sessions in which hundreds of residents and small-business owners shared their hopes and preferences.

They said they wanted to keep the built environment at human scale, limit neighborhood housing development to the 850 new units specified in SomerVision 2030, preserve artist space, expand usable open space, and greatly increase job-creating and municipal-income-generating commercial development. Union Square’s small businesses were – and are – struggling without the daytime population that weekday workers provide.

The resulting 2016 Neighborhood Plan and the zoning that implemented it contained much of what US2 preferred, and the opposite of neighbors’ and SomerVision’s expressed wishes:  outsized buildings, 3,130 new housing units, and meager open space. But it did zone what is now the Hamilton block for commercial use.

MMUR

In 2017 the Board of Aldermen passed the Mandatory Mixed Use Ratio zoning amendment. It required that in Union Square, Assembly Square, Boynton Yards, Brickbottom, and Inner Belt, no less than 68% of occupied building square footage must be used for commercial uses other than retail. The remaining 32% could be housing, retail, and civic uses.

This would have made a solid contribution to correcting Somerville’s many imbalances. But although it was law, planning staff never implemented it in neighborhood planning or zoning, and it was excluded from the 2019 zoning overhaul.

SomerVision 2040

Planning staff divided SomerVision 2040’s steering committee into eight separate work groups. They were never able to meet together to discuss how each focus—housing, economic development, open space, infrastructure, etc.—interacted, supported, and constrained each other’s development.

Recognizing that since SomerVision 2030’s adoption, city staff had produced plans and zoning at odds with the Comprehensive Plan’s goals, they chose goals they imagined would be less manipulable. Rather than a numerical housing goal, they chose a 2040 goal of 20% permanent affordability for the city’s housing stock. Their economic development goal was one job for every working resident. This was also to serve as a proxy for the commercial development needed to host those jobs.

But without a systemic analysis of which goals must take priority to successfully accomplish all, the Comprehensive Plan was not a plan, but a list of wishes. Planning staff continued to assign its own priorities. Since SomerVision’s 2021 adoption, the city’s proportion of permanently affordable housing has declined, and job creation is well behind schedule.

Hamilton’s rezoning proposal

The City Council will soon decide what budget cuts it must make, as our grossly unbalanced property-tax base cannot support our current level of city services. On Thursday, it will also consider whether to further unbalance the tax base, foregoing the substantial future net revenue that commercial development of the Hamilton properties would bring.

Those properties are now zoned Commercial Core. Hamilton proposes changing the district to Mid-Rise 5. Once approved, Hamilton could build as of right anything that falls within the new district’s broad requirements. So Thursday evening’s hearing may be the only opportunity that the public has to influence the future of one of Union Square’s most defining blocks.