The failure of the Copper Mill project—which would have built a large tower in Davis Square—is a tremendous loss to housing affordability, economic well-being, and neighborhood character for the city.

The proposed tower would have been hugely beneficial:

1. It would have added 502 units of housing in a city that has legally declared a housing emergency.

2. 126 of those units would have been permanently price-restricted and offered via lottery to low- to moderate-income people.

3. Davis Square businesses would have gained approximately 1,000 nearby customers.

4. The city would have received more than $5 million in one-time permitting and review fees, as well as $2 million per year in new tax revenue.

5. The developer offered two retail spaces to the city at no cost, for small-business or community uses.

6. The developer pledged to sign a Project Labor Agreement ensuring they used local union labor for the project.

7. The developer agreed to go to substantial lengths to preserve The Burren: not just offering it a new location at its old rent(!), but even preserving and restoring its interior woodwork.

I was pleased to see that the proposed tower was ambitiously tall. Height is one of the only ways to build a lot of housing all at once. The 2016 Winter Hill Plan estimated we’d need to build 8,000–14,000 units by 2030 to keep up with demand. We have created just 3,500 units since then. If we wish to dig ourselves out of this hole, we will almost certainly have to build farther from the ground.

Yes, the project’s market-rate units would likely have been expensive. But newly built units keep people from bidding up the prices of older ones. If you don’t want to compete with a well-paid newcomer for part of a triple-decker, you need to build newer units for them to rent instead.

Some worried that the tower would change the character of the square. I agree: for the better! Today’s Davis has low foot traffic, many empty storefronts, and 82% more reported crime than in 2017. I think we all would have come to prefer a Davis with a beautiful tower, newly thriving businesses, and 1,000 prosperous residents.

I am dismayed at our elected officials’ lack of public support for the project. I yearn for leaders who would listen to constituents’ objections around height or aesthetics and say, “I hear you. There are plenty of things we could complain about here, but this is a huge win for the city and we desperately need more housing, so we’re going to try to make it happen.”

The next time we are given a chance to add hundreds of units of badly needed housing along with many other adjacent benefits, I hope the first words from City Hall are “How can we help?”

Derrick Rice has already announced his run for the Ward 3 seat. But so far, no one has announced a run for Ward 2. The next city councilor could be you! (Or if you don’t live in this ward, one of your friends who does.)

Ward 2

J.T. Scott has been ward councilor to Somerville’s Ward 2 since he was elected in 2017. But on September 3rd, he made the surprise announcement that he was resigning as city councilor, to take effect on December 31, 2026.

The Election

Both seats will be filled by special election. The city council approved the special election at their meeting last Thursday, but no date was set in public, though they did suggest it might happen “at the beginning of the calendar year”. There’s been nothing from the Election Commission — past elections have taken place in January or February, but that seems optimistic given that resignations aren’t effective until 12/31.

The requirements to run for Ward 2 are pretty light. You only need to be a Somerville voter who lives in Ward 2. Section 2-1(c) specifies that “Any voter residing in the ward from which election is sought shall be eligible to hold the office of ward councilor”, and a “voter” is anyone residing in Somerville who is eligible to vote under state and federal law. From there, you need to collect at least 50 certified signatures from people who live in the ward, then you can file.

As of this writing, no one has announced their candidacy. The only potential candidate we’re aware of is Emily Doran, co-chair of the Union Square Neighborhood Council, who has expressed interest in the seat (per the CS Indie).

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Start Your Engines

This is an exceptionally exciting time to run!

The city council is unusually open. Not only are there two vacancies on an eleven-councilor bench, turnover in 2025 brought in two new at-large councilors in Wheeler and Link. Councilor Mbah is stepping down after winning his race for state representative and Walles is taking his seat. Your chance to make a difference for Somerville issues like transit or housing may never be greater.

If you have an interest in local politics, the barrier to entry may never be lower. This election is non-partisan, and there’s no party primary. If you’re a voter and resident of the ward, all you need is 50 signatures. Ward races are low-turnout, so the quality of your campaigning and organizing will matter a lot more than how much money you raise. And it’s not a big lift — the campaign will likely only run for a few months.

There are not a lot of elections where a talented citizen with little background in politics can show up and have a decent chance of winning a major seat, but this is one of them. The incumbent is actively recruiting — Scott’s letter is explicitly an invitation, and he extends an offer to teach the skills himself:

I invite you, my neighbors, to look inside yourself and ask if this is your time to step forward. … I mean it sincerely when I say that YOU can do this job as long as you care deeply for your community and are ready to work hard to serve it. There is no training program for this job and no degree that prepares you for it, but I am willing to help you learn the technical skills required.

This is a chance to invest a small amount of effort into a serious run for public office, with a chance to get elected as city councilor in one of the densest cities in America.

Somerville has a strong tradition of incumbency. If you win, you can likely remain city councilor for several cycles. And the position is a springboard, a chance to consider a run for higher office. Two city councilors (Ben Ewen-Campen and Will Mbah) just won their races for state representative.

If you lose, the run becomes a small and prudent investment to help you decide if you want to run again in the future, and gives you the experience to win if you do. No matter what, you will walk away with a deeper understanding of democracy and how the local political system actually works.

You can find what ward you live in using Ben’s Somerville Ward Finder tool (or try the official tools here). See if you live in Ward 2 (or 3).

If you’re interested in running for city council, reach out to Ben at ben@ben.net, we’d be more than happy to discuss.

If you don’t live in Ward 2, or you don’t feel ready to run, ask your friends and your friends of friends if they know anyone inspiring and talented who lives in Ward 2. Forward them this post! If you know someone promising, encourage them to consider a run, and to reach out.

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Please evaluate Somerville’s housing policy and give it a letter grade on its ability to offer broadly affordable housing for all. After, suggest some improvements with the largest ROI.

I then fed Claude’s initial response to ChatGPT for a fact-checking pass. This flagged a few errors which Claude corrected. I then hand-checked the final response below and have confirmed its accuracy to the best of my abilities.

The answer which follows is Claude’s verbatim output, with a bit of added bolding and links.

Grade: C+

Somerville’s zoning is better than almost any other Massachusetts city’s on paper, but not good enough to make housing broadly affordable. The rules now allow most of the building types a dense, affordable city needs. The problem is that several other rules decide whether those buildings get built at all, and those rules mostly stop them. The results show it. The city built about 400 units a year in 2019–23. Rental vacancy was 1.0% in 2022 [Ed: in NYC, a vacancy rate below 5% allows it to declare a housing emergency.], and the median sale price is about $1.0M. One-bedroom listings are around $2,750, up about 12% over the past year.

Sub-grades

What you’re allowed to build: B+. Triple-deckers and backyard cottages are allowed by right in NR (§3.1.6)1, and apartments are allowed by right in UR (§3.2.6). There are no parking minimums, there are parking maximums near transit, and most new buildings near transit can’t get resident parking permits (§11.2.6; Traffic Regs §15-2.1). The 3-unit cap in NR and the density factor hold this grade back.

Whether projects make money: D. Any building of 4 or more units must make 20% of its units affordable, and roughly 40% of those are at the deepest tier (§12.1.5). The city’s own June 2025 study, which modeled only rentals, found the requirement works only for large rentals in the strongest submarket. Paying a fee instead of building whole affordable units costs 2–2.5 times the value gap and requires a special permit (§12.3.7).

Process: C−. Housing needs a special permit in every mid-rise and high-rise district (Table 9.1.1). Site Plan Approval requires two neighborhood meetings, a design review meeting, and a public hearing (§15.3.2.d). Buildings 75 or more years old go to the Historic Preservation Commission, and if it finds a building significant and “preferably preserved,” it can delay demolition for up to 18 months (§7-28).

Where housing is allowed: D+. Housing isn’t allowed in the underlying CC, FAB, R&D, CI and CB districts (Table 9.1.1). Where the Master Planned Development overlay does allow it, Union Square, Boynton Yards and Arts & Innovation require 60%, 75% and 85% of floor area, respectively, to be non-residential (§8.4.17, §8.4.12, §8.4.19), even though Greater Boston lab vacancy is near 29%.

Tools for subsidized housing: B+. The Affordable Housing overlay, amended in May 2026, lets 100%-affordable projects build by right up to 8 stories in MR3–MR6 (4 stories on MR3 lots that abut NR), and allows multiplexes in NR within half a mile of transit, with no unit caps (§8.1). The city also has linkage fees, CPA money, and a housing trust.

Fixes with the largest ROI, ranked

The Beacon’s March “Emergency Measures” piece already argues for the inclusionary change, dropping community benefits agreements (CBAs) as a condition of rezoning, and suspending demolition review. I agree with all three [Ed: Nice.] and put the inclusionary change first. Fixes 2–4 below get less attention and cost less politically.

1. Recalibrate inclusionary zoning. The city’s own 2025 feasibility study provides the numbers:

   • Scale the percentage to the submarket. One of the study’s alternatives keeps 20% only in the strongest submarket and uses roughly 8–13% elsewhere. (The study’s preferred recommendation is a different change: using vouchers for Tier 3 units.)

   • Raise the threshold to about 10 units. Right now a 4-unit building owes 0.8 of an affordable unit, and because the first affordable unit is always at the deepest tier, the smallest projects carry the deepest requirement. The developer can pay a fractional buyout instead, but using the city’s FY25 average sale price for a two-bedroom (about $876,000), my rough math puts that buyout near half a million dollars.

   • Cut the payment for whole units to 1× and allow it by right. Fractional buyouts are already 1× and by right. Paying instead of building whole units costs 2× for condos and 2.5× for rentals and needs a special permit. The study calls that multiplier financially infeasible and suggests moving toward Boston’s lower standard; 1× is my number, not the study’s.

   This changes the numbers on every multifamily project and has no direct budget cost. Per the Globe on Sept. 24, Somerville still hasn’t followed Waltham and Chelsea in lowering its rate.

2. Let housing fill space the lab market won’t. Cut the non-residential minimums in Union Square, Boynton Yards and Arts & Innovation down to a ground-floor active-use requirement, and allow residential in the underlying CC district, plus FAB and R&D within transit areas. These are the city’s largest assembled sites, next to Green Line stations. Right now each one needs its own rezoning, like Hamilton’s February request for 180 units in Union Square. If the council wants to protect the jobs goal, it could make this a time-limited switch.

3. Make housing by right in the mid-rise and high-rise districts, and shorten Site Plan Approval. The city has already conceded the use is appropriate: the AH [Affordable Housing] overlay makes residential by right in these districts for 100%-affordable projects (§8.1.6.c). Special permits are discretionary and easier for abutters to appeal, and lenders price that risk. Cut Site Plan Approval to one neighborhood meeting with design review folded in, which the feasibility study also recommends.

4. Delete the density factor (§2.4.5.b.vii). For apartment and general buildings in UR, MR3, MR4 and MR5, it caps a building’s unit count at its gross floor area divided by 1,125 sq ft (1,500 on lots under 5,000 sq ft). At a typical 80% building efficiency, that forces an average unit of roughly 900–1,200 net sq ft. A building of mostly studios and one-bedrooms, the cheapest new housing to rent, only fits if it is Net Zero Ready and LEED Platinum, which lowers the factor to 850–875. MR6 and HR are looser (850–875 sq ft on larger lots, 650 for green buildings), but the same logic applies. If the goal is family-sized units, reward bedroom mix directly instead.

5. Shrink demolition review. Exempt projects that add units, or cap the delay at about 90 days.

Smaller cleanups worth doing

• Allow Multi-Plex and Apartment House buildings (4–10 units) by right in NR within the half-mile transit area for all projects. The overlay already draws this map, but only for 100%-affordable housing. [Ed: Combined with fix #1’s higher IZ threshold, this would make building small apartment buildings legal and viable nearly citywide. I would describe this as much more than a small cleanup.]

• Loosen the nonconformity rules. Today you can’t modify a nonconforming building type except to add building components by special permit, you generally can’t increase an existing nonconformity (§14.1.5.c), and you can’t alter an existing building to exceed its type’s unit count (for example, §4.2.13.c). That blocks adding units to much of the older housing stock.

• Stop the condo-conversion ordinance from catching gentle infill. Its exemption for single-family homes disappears once units are added and the house becomes part of the same condo association (§7-63). That can put the two-year notice period in effect since October 2025 (§7-64(a)(1)) on a small infill project, especially one where the house wasn’t owner-occupied for the prior year. Exempt newly created units.

• Drop the zero-carbon/Passive House certification (§8.4.8) and underground-only parking (§8.4.9) mandates in the master-plan areas.

Fixes 1–4 are all text amendments with no direct budget cost. In my judgment, passing them would move the grade to about a B+.

Sources

• Somerville Financial Feasibility Analysis, June 2025

• Somerville Housing Needs Assessment, Dec 2024

• City of Somerville: Inclusionary Housing Developers (FY25 average sale prices)

• Boston Globe: Boston, Cambridge, Somerville hold firm on affordable requirements (Sept 24, 2026)

• Boston.com: Union Square housing hinges on zoning change (Feb 2026)

• Somerville Beacon: Emergency Measures (Mar 2026)

• CBRE: Boston Metro Life Science Figures, Q2 2026

• Zumper: Somerville rent data

• Zoning and non-zoning ordinance text

(end of Claude’s response)

Your author’s thoughts

I agree with Claude’s assessment of our housing policy. Its fixes are pragmatic, but would likely move the needle. To me, they are the least ambitious changes that would count as a serious effort to end our legally declared rental housing emergency. We should pursue them with vigor.

The Community Path is officially multi-use, supporting not just pedestrians but also conventional bikes, Class I and II e-bikes, and various small electric vehicles. But concerns about high speed and reckless behavior have been a frequent topic of discussion around the city, and on the Somerville Subreddit.1

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Anecdotes can be valuable, but we think policy discussions are best when grounded in data. So! What kinds of vehicles are using the Community Path regularly? How fast is each type going, on average? Are e-bikes really a menace? Let’s find out.

Results

What sort of vehicles are using the path?

Traditional bicycles were the most common vehicle we saw, at about 73% of vehicles. Next most common were e-bikes at about 23%.2

Next most common were various forms of electric scooters, three monowheels (that’s what we called them at least; models like this), two recumbent bikes, and finally, two people on rollerblades.

Happily, we did not observe a single gas-powered vehicle on the Community Path during our tracking sessions. That said, we have witnessed mopeds on the Path on several other occasions.

How fast were people going, on average?

Overall we observed a mean speed of 15.6 mph, a median speed of 15 mph, and a range of 10 mph to 27 mph.3

Unsurprisingly, e-bikes tended to be traveling faster than conventional bikes. Perhaps surprisingly: not that much faster! Compared to 15.1 mph for conventional bikes, e-bikes averaged 16.7 mph, a difference of only 1.6 mph [95% CI: 1.2 to 2.0].

What surprised me is that scooters had a higher average speed than e-bikes, at 17.5 mph, and the fastest average speed of any vehicle goes to the monowheels, at 21.3 mph! We had a very small sample size for monowheels (just 3 observations), but even the slowest monowheel we saw was going faster than the average conventional bike.

Sitting by the path, any vehicle going under 20 mph felt pretty safe. I wouldn’t want to get hit by an e-bike going 16 mph, but that speed doesn’t feel reckless. Cyclists at that speed seem in control of their bike, and my intuitive sense was that if there were an actual collision, I would be able to walk away from it.

Everything moving faster than 20 mph felt dangerous. Even a conventional bike felt concerning at these speeds, and we did clock conventional bikes up to 25 mph.4

The fastest vehicles

Let’s take a closer look at our speediest group. We observed 37 vehicles going over 20 mph, 4.4% of measured traffic.

E-bikes were the most common vehicles going > 20 mph, and we observed 19 e-bikes at these speeds. But we also observed 11 conventional bikes going faster than 20 mph.

The real speed demons are people on scooters, making up 13.5% of people going > 20 mph despite being less than 3% of all vehicles — and 21.7% of scooters going at these speeds. And people on monowheels, with 66.7% (2 out of 3) monowheels we observed going > 20 mph.

In short, if you see someone going faster than 20 mph on the Community Path, our data suggest they’re probably on an e-bike. But this is largely due to base rates. Most e-bike riders stay below 20 mph.

You won’t see many scooters on the Community Path, but if you do, there’s about a 1 in 5 chance that it’s going faster than 20 mph, and if you see a monowheel, there’s better than even odds it’s going that fast.

Speed Limits

Technically speaking, none of these people were breaking the law, because there’s currently no speed limit on the Community Path.

The city of Somerville can put a speed limit or other restrictions on the path. State Law c. 85 §11B¾ says that:

(c) A municipality, local authority or state agency with jurisdiction over a bike path or bikeway after public notice and a public hearing may adopt ordinances or regulations prohibiting or otherwise regulating the operation of electric bicycles on such paths, including, but not limited to, the imposition of speed limits.

Before publication, we reached out to the Somerville Law Department, who confirmed that there was no current speed limit in effect on the Community Path. They also clarified that any speed limit would not be imposed by ordinance, but by the Traffic Commission, saying: “The Somerville City Charter delegates exclusive authority to the Traffic Commission to make rules and regulations relative to the movement, stopping, standing or parking of vehicles on all streets, ways, highways, roads, and parkways under the control of the city.”

Besides speed, there are existing limits on the type of vehicles that can be used on the path. E-bikes can be used on paths open to conventional bicycles, but “electric bicycle” is defined narrowly in c. 90 §1. Massachusetts recognizes only Class 1 and Class 2. A bike that assists past 20 mph fails both tests, so what the industry calls Class 3 isn’t an “electric bicycle” under Massachusetts law.

The City also confirmed that motorized scooters are not allowed on the path.

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Methods

To measure speed, we used the Bushnell Velocity Speed Gun (User Guide and User Manual are linked on that page). We picked a spot on the benches near the exercise equipment (Google Maps labels it as “Calisthenics Park”) just west of Maxwell’s Green. These ones:

This seemed like a good spot to get a sense of how fast vehicles are going on the trail. It’s in the middle of a long, straight, mostly flat section, so vehicles have plenty of time and distance to get up to their cruising speed without much gravity assist, and we could see them coming from a long way away.

We sat out on the Community Path for four sessions, each an hour long. Two mornings — Thursday, August 20th from 9 to 10 AM, and Tuesday, September 8th from 8 to 9 AM. And two evenings — Wednesday, September 9th from 5 to 6 PM, and Wednesday, September 16th from 6 to 7 PM. We picked these times to give us a sense of the morning and evening commute, when we expected the most vehicle traffic.

During this time, Ben used the radar gun to measure the speed of every vehicle that passed, and Ethan wrote down the speeds. We considered anything with wheels that fully carried an adult to be a vehicle.

The experience was very pleasant — people on bikes good-naturedly calling out “how fast am I going?”, or pedestrians stopping to thank us for collecting data, citing the dangerous experiences they’d had with high-speed vehicles on the path.

There are some limitations on the data we were able to collect. Speeds are not perfectly accurate because the radar gun is not perfectly accurate. In the 100 meters or so of measuring distance, people didn’t maintain a perfectly constant speed.

We didn’t stop people to ask what vehicle they were riding, and there are an increasingly diverse number of scooter/e-bike hybrid vehicles that defy easy classification, so all vehicle types are our best guesses.

We weren’t able to clock the speed of every vehicle we saw. Sometimes there was too much foot traffic to get a good reading. Sometimes 7 bikes would pass at once and we couldn’t get readings for each one. Sometimes we stopped collecting data for a couple minutes to talk with passers-by. The radar gun does not register speeds below 10 MPH, so vehicles traveling slower than that aren’t in the dataset at all. We don’t claim to have clocked the speed of every vehicle — but we do think the data are mostly accurate.

Anonymized Raw Data

Bikes Somerville Data Forsharing

36.2KB ∙ XLSX file

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This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ben Orenstein: What would be your first order of business if you’re elected this fall?

Christine Barber: It’s a good question, because it is such an urgent moment where there are so many crises. I have many priorities, including protecting immigrants, making sure people are safe in our communities, addressing affordability. And I know your topic is housing. Housing is really the top one, and there’s so much unfinished on housing and so much to do.

But of course, with housing, there isn’t just one thing, so it’s challenging to pick one. But one thing that is really critical, and has obviously been through a lot of tumultuousness but also opportunity in the last year, is rent control. That is something that I’ve long been a cosponsor of and a big supporter of, and I would like to lead on it in the Senate. Senator Jehlen is the Senate sponsor of that. And given the support for rent control that came through the organizing of the ballot campaign, and organizing on legislation that’s been filed before: even though the question is off the ballot, we are in, I think, a very good place, and ready to take it to the next step and get to legislation that can stick on rent control.

Orenstein: What form do you think that would be? How far would you go? Is this a repeal of the ban so that communities could opt in, or would this be a mandatory thing statewide?

Barber: Definitely a repeal of the ban, because that is the main thing that’s stopping us. And then I want to continue to get people together to figure out what is the best way to move forward. I think we saw in the ballot question that there were a lot of concerns about how the ballot question was framed and drafted. I want to get more people together to make sure we’re getting the strongest language, but also the one that the most people can organize around, because we have to all work together if we’re going to win this. There are very powerful opponents to rent control, so we have to work together. We have to have the broadest possible coalition and be listening to people on the ground if we’re gonna win this.

I do not in any way think that I have all the answers, but I have worked with Homes for All, the advocacy work with the ballot question, the community development corporations, local organizations, and people who are renters, and I want to work to listen to the community and figure out the strongest bill that we possibly could. So that to me is really day one: getting people together so we can file something and win on that.

And I am a renter. I’m the only renter in this race. And to me, it is real. My rent just increased significantly, and I know what it’s like when you’re living year to year and wondering what is gonna happen to the unit that you live in, if you’re gonna have to move — people who have to decide where their kids are gonna go, if they’re gonna stay in school. This is a challenge that families are facing every day.

Orenstein: I think the original rent control ban is on the books because of negative results we saw with the first round of this in the state. So I’m curious: does that not apply anymore? Was that not a wise law in the first place? What’s changed?

Barber: I think the proposals that are out there now — rent control, rent stabilization — are getting rid of the ban, but also capping how much rents can go up. So I think any legislation that is going to stick is going to allow rent increases. No one is really arguing that rents are preserved in amber for the next hundred years. We know taxes go up. We want landlords to be investing in their properties and keeping them, of course, up to code, safe. And we know that that takes increases. The question is what percentage and how much? Because what we’ve seen in communities is sometimes rents doubling to push people out, or rents going up by 20%. No one’s wages go up by the amount that rents have gone up in the last number of years. And so it is a different way of looking at it than the rent control of the eighties, and it is also a very different time for housing. And I think that this is one of the most powerful tools we have to keep people from being displaced and pushed out of our communities.

Orenstein: Do you have any sense of the specifics around the shape of a rent stabilization or control that you would feel good supporting?

Barber: I have supported the local option bill for a number of years, and I think that has a lot of support: allowing communities to decide if they’re going to do rent control or not. I’m open to a conversation about different ways to do it, but that is the legislation that has been vetted and had a lot of support for the last number of years. That’s different than the ballot question. So I think we need to have a conversation about both what is the most impact, but also what can we get passed into law that provides the most relief to people as possible.

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Orenstein: You were endorsed by the governor recently. Congrats on that. I believe the governor has come out against the ballot measure in the past. Why do you think you differ on this particular point?

Barber: I don’t wanna speak for the governor. I do know she came out in opposition to the ballot question, and she had concerns about production. I will say another piece of this that is different than previous rent control: there is a measure to exempt new production from rent control for the first number of years, knowing that we need more housing production too, in addition to not displacing people. So I’m open to conversations about the statewide ban versus local option, if there’s ways that we can get there and get broader support for this.

And I’m really honored to have the governor’s endorsement. We don’t agree on everything, and that’s true on many issues. She has moved things forward. We talked especially about signing the PROTECT Act yesterday, and I’ve worked with her on reproductive rights and some health care issues. So I’m really proud to have worked with her. And on rent control, I supported the ballot initiative strongly, and that was a place where we differed. It’s frankly really urgent in the communities that I represent as a House member and in the Senate district, and I think we can’t wait any longer.

Orenstein: If we did pass some sort of rent stabilization, and it looks like housing production declined, is there evidence that would persuade you, “Oh, actually, we gotta change this. This isn’t quite working as we hoped it would”?

Barber: One of the things that I like about local option is there are ways to adjust it as we go over time. So if we hit a recession, or we hit some really significant challenges that we don’t even know about yet, local communities would be able to adjust and make the best decision for them, which to me would not mean putting the ban back on the books at the state level. To me, that is going too far, and it should be up to at least the community to be able to make that decision. So this is just giving more options and more tools in the toolbox to help prevent displacement.

Orenstein: It seems like you’re leaning towards local power in terms of deciding things around housing policy. Is that generally true, or do you think there are places where the state should be making things happen statewide?

Barber: You mean outside of rent control?

Orenstein: Correct. Zoning, particularly.

Barber: On zoning, yes, of course. Zoning has historically been up to local communities, and we have an incredible housing crisis in part because the majority of local communities haven’t built any housing in the last twenty or thirty years. So I am one of the people who filed the MBTA Communities law when it was a bill, back in 2016 or ‘17 when I first came into the House. And when I would testify, I would talk about Somerville. And I would say: we live in a dense community with transit, and this is a way that a lot of people want to live. And Somerville is a very popular place to live. I’m not saying every community should look like Somerville or will look like Somerville, but the idea of building denser housing around transit is popular and is something that people are looking for at all ages. Right? You see people who are downsizing and they want to be in a community where they can walk.

So I believe in MBTA Communities as a way to push the communities that have not built any housing to start to move in that direction. We all know that’s been a fight over the last few years. And honestly, when I filed it, it was one of many things we were working on, and it never felt to me like this is the one thing that’s gonna fix everything. It is one thing that passed, and it is pushing communities to rezone in different ways. And we’re seeing some pushback, but we’re also seeing communities zone for housing that haven’t changed their zoning in decades. There is more to do to improve the law, to give it more teeth, to make sure communities are complying and actually building, so we’re not just zoning on paper. This is not an exercise in, “Oh, you zoned around the cemetery.” This is, how are you actually building? And that’s the next step where I also wanna go: what’s kind of the 2.0 of moving them forward. But that’s a place where the state had to step in and say, this is where we’re overriding local communities.

Another place was in the Affordable Homes Act, which is the big housing bill we passed two years ago (I’ve lost all sense of time; I think it was two years ago). I worked on the ADUs by-right provision. So accessory dwelling units, the mother-in-law apartments. There’s spotty rules about them all over the state, and that is, again, not a silver bullet (nothing is a silver bullet), but I was especially working with people with disabilities and seniors, as an option for families who may have an adult child with disabilities, or who have parents who are aging and want to live nearby. Accessory dwelling units was a good way to be able to sort of easily add new units and add housing in communities where we have a housing crisis. And that provision allows ADUs by right all over the state. It is overriding local zoning for that. Is it perfect? No. But it is a way that we’re seeing them come online, and I know we’re seeing a lot built here.

Orenstein: So if you were working on something like MBTA Communities 2.0, do you have any specific things you would do?

Barber: Yes. Making sure it has teeth. So making sure we’re being real about what money communities are not getting if they’re not compliant. Making sure that compliance is enforced.

Orenstein: By withholding funding.

Barber: By withholding funding, right. So that is how the bill is written. There’s obviously been pushback from the communities who don’t wanna comply. The state provides significant funding on environmental infrastructure, lots of different grant programs, and I would like communities to comply.

I would also like to make sure that, as I said, communities are actually building. So going from a zoning plan, which is obviously the first step, to an actual “how many homes are you developing, how many homes are in the pipeline” plan, and creating greater metrics too. And sometimes that’s technical support too, because some smaller communities may not have the planning board, the planners, working for their communities. Like we do in Somerville (we have a great staff), but not all communities have that, to provide technical assistance and help them get there.

And then the third is affordability. One problem — and I’ve actually filed legislation on this, but I would like to revisit it — is looking at not just building, but also with an eye towards affordability: what are we building, and how much of it is affordable in communities? Because building luxury housing is not going to get us out of the housing crisis. We need to be building housing that people can actually afford, and that, I think, is something that gets lost in the production discussion a lot. It’s both looking at displacement and tenant protections, like your rent control, but also looking at affordability and using whatever leverage we can when we’re building to make sure that it is affordable at different income levels.

Orenstein: Why do you think that a lot of the production is at the higher end of the luxury scale?

Barber: So it’s true that building is expensive. I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but it is expensive to build per unit. It costs a lot. That is one reason for protecting tenants and protecting units that are, like, rent control, where there already are units. If we’re building units and losing existing affordable units, we are never going to solve the housing crisis. We really need to do both. So it is expensive to build new housing. And it’s also mostly done by private developers, investors. So we need to be using whatever leverage we can to make sure that they’re building affordable. And we’ve had some success in that in my district.

Two examples. When we rebuilt the public housing at Clarendon Hill, the North Street apartments. That is the housing along Alewife Brook Parkway. Those buildings were built in the forties for veterans, had not really been updated, and were full of mold and holes and really beyond repair. And so the city and the state came together to rebuild all of those units, but also add more affordable housing units. It’s not been an easy project: cobbling together various funds to be able to do that and make sure that we have not just very affordable public housing, but also additional affordable housing units, and new units that are sanitary and will stand the test of time and are more appropriate for families to live in.

And then the other project is the old Star Market site, which we’ve worked on for way too many years. But that project — working with some developers who really came to the table with the city and were game for making sure that half of that project is affordable. And we were able to get state money to put towards that project too, and figure out how to work with the developer to build affordable units: not just building more housing, but making sure that it fits with the community.

Orenstein: I think a lot of our discussion so far has been focused around protecting people on the lower end of the income scale as prices go up, and housing in particular. The median income in Somerville is $130,000 a year, so as a city, we’re fairly affluent. And yet I think even median-income people are reporting, “This is getting hard to afford; I’m considering moving out of here.” How do we achieve broad affordability across the market, versus for people that win the literal lottery for a unit that’s been protected as affordable?

Barber: There’s two main ways. The first is: the people who are most at risk are people who are lower income, and so that is where I put my focus, because those are the people who are most at risk of being displaced and not having as many options of where to go. And if we can address that, we can address the larger problem too, including for people with very low incomes, and for people with sort of median incomes, and the workforce housing that we talk about, where they’re making a little less than median but they still are getting priced out of our communities. So that is my focus.

The other side of it is that this is not a Somerville housing crisis. This is a statewide and a regional housing crisis, and we cannot solve this on our own. And I think it’s remembering that even though so many people in Somerville are working hard on the housing crisis — and I love that, and I love that there’s a lot of energy in organizing — the pressures that are driving up the cost of housing are not just ours, here in this community or in Cambridge. They’re not just regional; they’re statewide. I hear that from my friends who represent Gateway Cities. And when we look at Gateway Cities, we say, “Oh, it looks so affordable there,” because we’re comparing it to Somerville prices. But for people who live there, and have much lower median earnings, they are looking at housing that costs $500,000 and saying that is completely out of reach for us. So it is about taking this on statewide, and really, again, making sure communities are doing their part to build housing, and being thoughtful about how we’re doing that. Because we didn’t get into this overnight, and it’s gonna take some time to get out.

Orenstein: So it sounds like you would probably (broadly at least, or in theory) be in support of statewide legislation to maybe do some upzoning, increase density, holding local communities to some sort of metric of production, vacancy, or median price, something like that. Is that right?

Barber: Yes. So both having more tools at the state level where we’re pushing communities, and supporting and incentivizing those communities to actually follow through and do that. Because I think this is a statewide crisis, and we need all the tools possible. So yes.

Orenstein: You’ve been representing Somerville for six terms now. Rent has gone up a fair amount in that time.

Barber: Yes.

Orenstein: Do you have any things you would look back on and concede “We didn’t catch this in time,” or “We should have done this earlier”?

Barber: It’s true, rent has gone up significantly—

Orenstein: Your rent and mine!

Barber: My rent and your rent. Right. Sure, I wish that hadn’t happened. I wish we had passed rent control or rent stabilization a number of years ago and come together around that in a different way. If we had passed the transfer fee — which is also something I’ve worked on for many years that we have not yet passed, which would add a small amount to transactions when houses are being bought or sold that are not owner-occupied — that would put a significant amount of money into affordable housing trusts. We want to build much more. We have not yet passed that. So, yes.

And the way I do this work — I think the most important thing to remember is that talking about the housing crisis doesn’t get us that far. We actually have to pass things. And so what I’ve been focused on is figuring out what we can get enough votes for, and getting that passed. So MBTA Communities, as I said, was never meant to be kind of the only thing we passed, but it is one thing that passed, and then it has taken up a lot of oxygen. Do I wish there’s a bunch of other things that we had passed that we could also be moving forward? Absolutely.

But after MBTA Communities, I got back to work and started working on the Affordable Homes Act, which was the large housing bill that we passed, and trying to get as much policy in there as we could. We really tried to get the transfer fee in there. There was a lot of opposition to that, and we didn’t win that. But we did get ADUs by right, and we got a lot of funding for affordable housing that has been going out the door. So it’s at every opportunity to kinda move things forward. And that’s why, working on tenant opportunity to purchase, or TOPA, I just got that in the economic development bill, which is a broad bill, and that was an opportunity to get housing in there. And we’re also trying to get changes for single-stair building, a few other things around the edges in there, that are all moving the ball forward. And I think that’s what we need to keep doing: figuring out how to organize, how to actually get the votes, and actually how to get things passed. That’s what I’ve been doing at the state level, and I also think there’s even more opportunity in the Senate, with having 40 people, and some people who are very like-minded, to be able to get things across the finish line and get those good ideas actually into law. We can always go back and say we wish we had done this, or we wish this had passed, but until we can actually organize, get the votes, get that through — that is what we need to do, and what I’ve been focused on.

Orenstein: Do you think we can get single-stair building codes done?

Barber: I hope so. There doesn’t seem to be as coordinated opposition, which hopefully will continue to be true as I’m saying that. So is that gonna solve everything? No. But it’s all of these things around the edges that we need to keep pushing, and then push for bigger things too, like rent control, and work together at every opportunity that we have to have these conversations, and to have these conversations with people outside of Somerville. Because, like I said, basically every community has a housing crisis, but they look different in different communities. So making sure on my end that I’m working with people in other communities to say: this is what’s going on in my community, but what about yours? How do we get there? I have some colleagues who do not want rent control in their community, and I still wanna understand that better: why, and what do you see in your community, and then is there a way we could get there? And so those conversations and relationships are really important.

Orenstein: A phrase you used is “results, not rhetoric.” At the end of your first Senate term, how should we judge your results? What would be good results to you?

Barber: I can’t promise exactly what will be passed, because there’s always a lot of magic to that: coalitions coming together, and how we can work on things, and also what crises come up. But I’m proud that in the legislature I have passed dozens of bills: on housing, yes, but also on health care, and immigration support, and support for kids with disabilities. And looking at the breadth of work, especially on affordability. Because, yes, housing affordability is a crisis, but we also need to talk about all the other affordability crises in everyone’s lives right now. So looking at health care, and how much premiums are going up and copays are going up, and continuing to push for significant changes in how we provide health care, and making sure that people can get the care they need. So looking more broadly.

So judge it in bills passed, money gotten for projects, and actual results. As I’m continuing to organize people in the State House, in the Senate, and working with people in the communities: what are we actually getting done? Because that to me is how I want people to judge my time as a state rep, and also to look at the work as a senator.

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Ben: You said in your Cambridge Day interview that part of your motivation for running was not liking the idea, in a democracy, of one person just walking into an open seat. What’s the case for you specifically being a better rep than Ewen-Campen, versus just that we should have more options in the race?

Olivia: When I did that interview, it was early on in the race process. Where I’m at now, when folks ask at the door what the differences are, I first lead with my experience at the State House working for Representative Denise Provost and Governor Maura Healey. The constituent services I provided for thousands of residents, and the one-on-one assistance for working through bureaucracy and finding the specific programs that state agencies offer. I think this would be a very valuable thing for Somerville to have at the State House, especially while more cuts are going to be coming. Older folks, folks with disabilities, and those who oftentimes their voices aren’t heard, because it’s challenging to speak up when you’re also dealing with a personal crisis. I think that’ll be a benefit for us, to have a state rep who has that experience.

Ben: How do you imagine splitting your time between constituent services and getting legislation through?

Olivia: I think it’s a process that happens at the same time. As constituent issues come up, I think there’s a tracking of what are the biggest issues that we’re seeing, and the issues are often ones that legislation could be used to help. So if folks are having issues with their high utility costs, let’s see, there’s a bill that would ensure that Eversource is only fixing pipes that actually have leaks. Right now, they are incentivized to fix any pipe, and this is causing a lot of disruption on our streets, and oftentimes the roads aren’t put back in a way that is good for our cars. So there are direct correlations between legislation and the issues that are persevering in people’s lives. So just making those connections.

Ben: What do you think your biggest policy differences with Ben Ewen-Campen are?

Olivia: My experience working with caregivers and being a caregiver, I think, is one of the most important things I would bring to the job. There are so many folks who are caregiving and not being seen, and there are older folks at home, parents who are taking care of kids, and that labor is going unnoticed. And again, as federal cuts happen, it’s usually these communities that are affected the most. SNAP benefits and fuel assistance for people who have low income are going to be heavily affected. And I’ve seen it firsthand how challenging it is to navigate the system, and would love to make sure our caregivers, who are often women, our teachers, who are very often women, are protected from workplace violence and are being paid a livable wage.

Ben: How do you translate that into a bill or concrete policy change?

Olivia: In terms of having our workers work close to home or having easier transit — time is money. There’s a single mom who’s a friend of mine who now commutes two hours from Malden. And I was trying to use my connections in Somerville to see, are there any jobs? The school wasn’t hiring. And it’s really challenging for folks, especially with English being their second language, finding employment close by. So having more jobs programs that people can work in the cities that they live in. And if they’re unable to find that, being able to commute faster. One of the buses that she takes — limited service. So how can we make it easier for her to get home to her daughter and afford to live closer to work?

Ben: So legislatively, that might mean more funding for jobs programs in cities, or for the MBTA?

Olivia: Yeah. Dedicated bus lanes, and really listening to the community. I know the MBTA does do outreach and makes sure that when they’re changing routes, they’re listening to people. But are we actually getting to all the people who use that bus, and really focusing on that? Because it’s a bigger issue than I think a lot of folks recognize.

Ben: A classic challenge for someone new to the State House is that as a freshman you don’t have much power yet, so you’re limited in what you can actually get through. How do you navigate that and still be effective?

Olivia: I had the opportunity to work with legislators both at the State House in 2015 and as a restaurant server in Carrie Nation. And, you know, seeing folks as they’re looking to get food, or they’re humans going to work, I am able to connect with people on a lot of different levels. And so, talking about regional rail and making sure that we have good trains that are accessing different parts of Massachusetts, I feel comfortable that I’ll be able to work with these people. I have already worked with their staff, more so than with the reps and senators themselves, to make sure that constituents were getting the services they need. And sometimes it takes both the governor’s office and the representative’s office, and usually it’s the aides in those offices that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. So I feel confident that I’ll be able to use my communication skills and interpersonal relationship building. Most of the jobs I’ve had have been constituent services, restaurant work, plumbing (you have to work with people also), teaching, and all these are people-person skills.

Ben: How can voters get a sense of your policy positions? Ewen-Campen has the advantage of lots of council votes where he’s gone on the record; we don’t have that for you. How do we know where you stand?

Olivia: Whatever the topic is I’d be happy to answer. I think that until we all have safe housing and access to clean, healthy water and food, we’re not doing it well. Our society is still not functioning as it should be. And I don’t think we need to attack those who are doing the legislature currently to say this is a failing system.

Ben: Where are you on housing policy?

Olivia: Yeah. So I am a renter; my mom’s a homeowner. I see us building schools and families leaving. I am concerned about being someone who wants to start a family and unsure if I can afford to purchase my first home in my hometown. There’s also a challenge of environment, and I see new developments where the foundation of the house goes right up to the sidewalk, and they’ve taken away three feet of grass or green space. And that I don’t like seeing in my town. I really want to make sure that — I’m happy to build up. I think for me personally, six to eight stories feels ideal in the more metro areas. I’m happy to build more. I just want to make sure we’re not taking away green space that is so desperately needed. We’re the most densely populated city in New England, and I want my children to be able to interact with cardinals and butterflies, and if we take away what little space we have, it just doesn’t feel right. The MBTA — the state is in charge of the community path — so making sure we’re keeping that and never losing green space here, that would be a priority.

Ben: What’s your diagnosis of Somerville’s housing market?

Olivia: It’s in bad shape. The families thing I’ll just bring up again. So many of the buildings that I saw growing up are now broken into three-family or three-apartment condos. And it’s challenging for a family who wants to have some green space and have a little more room to grow, for us to have families. So yeah, I’m concerned with making so many things small and for individuals in our city.

Ben: So you feel it’s not a great move to break up a triple decker into three condos, for example?

Olivia: Before I was born, my great-grandparents had a house. And then my grandma was born in the house. And they were able to live three generations in one house and afford to do that. It seems impossible nowadays to renovate a full family house and keep a family there. There still are obviously families in Somerville, but it’s just more challenging if you want to have two kids, live on one floor with a two-bedroom.

Ben: Is part of your assessment that Somerville is too expensive?

Olivia: Yes.

Ben: Why is that, and what can we do?

Olivia: We have been the residential location for the Greater Boston area for a very long time. And we’re 70% residential. We need to improve our commercial sector. Cambridge has a much better balance of commercial and residential, and we have, I think, 14 vacancies in Davis Square. There are vacancies in so many squares. It needs to be easier for someone to start a business and have that cash flow come in so that our taxes aren’t completely burdening the residents. That’s a huge one.

Ben: So more tax income from commercial properties would lead to less property tax for residents?

Olivia: Yes, when more of the tax base comes from commercial development, residents won’t have to fund as much of our projects through their own property taxes.

Ben: Any state-level housing policy changes you’d like to see?

Olivia: The availability for middle-income folks to get assistance. I’ve heard it a lot, but I haven’t seen what the action is so much, to make it easier for someone to live in Somerville and get assistance even if their median income is larger than what you need to get benefits. For our unhoused and folks dealing with drug addiction, I think there needs to be better programs for supportive housing in community with counselors. I mentioned this at the debate, having a better pathway for people who are struggling, so they don’t fall back into, if it’s an incarceration system, or just off the grid. Too often, it’s really hard to get the information from someone and stay up to date while they’re dealing with crisis. So more funding there, because in the long run, it’ll save us money to help these people.

Ben: Banning toxic pesticides seems to be a centerpiece of your platform, and you have a personal connection to it. Do you want to talk about that?

Olivia: So in 2016, on April Fool’s Day, we got the call that my dad was diagnosed with cancer. It was a late-stage non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. And doctors say it was likely caused by Roundup, the pesticide. Designed by Monsanto; the company was bought by Bayer. And there are a lot of cancer cases and Parkinson’s cases tied to pesticides and herbicides. We are putting endocrine disruptors in our environment, PFAS in our water. There are a lot of chemicals we have to deal with. In my studying of engineering, I see the amazing things that you can do with plastic and concrete, but we don’t seem to, as a society, take responsibility for the fact that we’re poisoning ourselves and the environment.

So my sister moved home from Pittsburgh, I moved home from college, and my mom quit her job, and we all returned home to be caregivers. He would have cancer treatment, go to a rehab, come home, and there was a cycle there for two and a half years before he passed. So I want to make sure that no family suffers. This is a preventable disease.

I understand that we have a mass agriculture system. We have a monopoly over our food system, and it’s a very uphill battle, but Europe has a much better policy with glyphosates. They still use them, but it’s to a lesser degree, and I think working with regional partners, working with our restaurants, making sure that the food that we’re bringing in doesn’t have these poisons. And it’s a very big question to ask, of how we do this. So I hope I can help solve this issue.

Ben: Do you have thoughts on what a bill you’d support or sponsor would look like?

Olivia: There is already legislation that’s been presented. I am focusing this short campaign on meeting as many people, and I haven’t written or signed on to any other bills. I hope to use the opportunity of gaining the folks’ votes so that I can do this. I know that it’s not the top of many people’s list of issues we have to solve. I hope more people become aware, and I personally don’t want to go to the store anymore and look at the label and say, oh, if it starts with a four, I shouldn’t eat it because it has bad things. The label: if it starts with a nine, that means it’s organically grown. If it starts with a four, it’s not. I would like to go to the store and know everything I’m consuming isn’t going to cause some disease.

Ben: I’m a housing nut, so back to housing: any thoughts on the MBTA Communities Act, or the duplex proposal in the Senate right now?

Olivia: I think the MBTA Communities Act needs to be more strictly enforced. I have seen Somerville do its share. We’re building, we’re working hard to make sure that more units are coming online, and towns that aren’t participating aren’t doing their share. On the duplex question, in theory, I’m okay with this. I just want to make sure that in the municipalities, on the lots, the people who live there can have a say. And if there is some issue — I know that there’s a case with a friend of mine, and behind her house, three buildings were built in one lot. And it comes right up to her yard, and it looks like it could be destroying a tree. And again, it’s this taking away of green space. I don’t find that we have enough of it for us to be eliminating it at the rate we’re doing it. What are your takes, by the way?

Ben: What are my takes? I think housing is our biggest issue as a state. We’re losing population, and the top reason people give when they leave the state is because they can’t afford to house themselves, which I think is a pretty big deal. A shrinking state is losing revenue. It’s also losing electoral power. And to me, it’s sort of a tragedy. I have friends that need to move out of the state simply because they want to buy a house.

My take on it is that this is fairly self-inflicted, through restrictive zoning. If we could just build more housing, housing would get a lot cheaper. I’m a pretty big believer in supply and demand affecting the price there. And so things like making duplexes by right statewide, to me, seems like a great first pass. Let’s increase the density. We don’t have to go crazy with it, but start there and see what happens.

Olivia: I agree with that. And I also find that — if we could let the cities decide more. I don’t think the state should be taking away that opportunity. It should be the city.

Ben: Well right now, Somerville controls its zoning. It is lightly affected by state-level rules. The MBTA Communities Act didn’t do too much here because we were already fairly dense. And my view of the Somerville housing market is that it is constrained by supply, by zoning limiting us to two stories in most of the city. You could say “the state should make it so you can build six stories across the whole state and override all of local zoning!” That’s one option, on the more extreme side of state power. Or you could say municipalities should get to decide. If they want to be a two-story town, that’s their call. That’s their right. So where on that spectrum do you think you come down? Sounds like you’re more on the municipality side.

Olivia: I’m more on the municipality side. It’s a great question. I think six stories isn’t too drastic if we allow that, and just giving more access to the city to decide seems, yeah, the smart thing.

Ben: Okay. So you’re a local control fan, it sounds like, more than the state.

Olivia: I am.

Ben: If you’re elected, at the end of your first term what’s a good way to judge whether you’ve been effective?

Olivia: I think if the constituents in my district have an understanding of what progressed throughout my term: what bills I signed on to and how I advocated for funds to come from the State House to Somerville. If there was movement on bills that I wrote, signed, cosponsored that directly impact the residents here, that would be great. Adding to — we have Chapter 70 funding — making sure that if there’s a discrepancy in how much the city really needs for education funding and what we’re getting from the state, that we’re applying for grants or figuring out what else the state can do to help us, especially for our disability community. Our infrastructure is not rated at the top, and ensuring that we’re listening to industrial, transportation engineers and making sure our bridges — a lot of the bridges in Somerville are owned by the state. You want to be forethought and fix anything before something happens.

Ben: Any topics we didn’t cover that you were hoping to touch on?

Olivia: The combined sewer overflow. I want to ensure that the plan that we’re putting in place is going to accommodate the issues of climate change. I know that’s a really hard ask when we don’t know how terrible the storms will be or the flooding will be, but listening to experts and scientists, I think, is the right start, and not spending enough money on it now isn’t the right call. Making sure the state is helping Somerville fund this: it’s a regional process, and Somerville shouldn’t be footing the bill; we connect to other towns, obviously. So this is something that I’m very passionately concerned about. As you know, I did some plumbing, and making sure our sewage and our water — we’re not paying too much for our water and our sewage.

Ben: Awesome. Well, thanks for the time. I appreciate it!

Olivia: Thank you!

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ben Orenstein: You spent quite a lot of time in municipal government. I’m curious where you hit the wall of local power. What would you like to have done in Cambridge that you couldn’t do without Beacon Hill support?

Burhan Azeem: Well, I think that’s the right question. I’ve been in local office now for five years, and I think the pro of that is that, I hate to say it, you can have both someone young and with experience. Me and Erika got elected at the same time, roughly, and so it’s been a good journey over there. When I ran for office the first time, I said, here are the five things I want to do, on housing, on transit, on universal pre-K. I’ve done all five that I said I would do, so it feels like a natural time to go up.

I think the state has both deeper and wider powers. For the most part, zoning is a local conversation, but the state can just override it on housing policy. And especially once we get outside of Cambridge, Somerville, and Boston, where there’s a fight, and it’s hard, but generally we want more housing, and get out to other places, I think it’s just a place where you need state-level action.

And on transportation: love a good bike lane, but with a bike lane you can’t do too much. The way most people will get around as we add more people is through mass transit, especially the T, and fundamentally we do need to fix that. I’m a big believer in building more housing, and I think people kind of have a point, which is: if you’re mainly getting around by car... well, I like to say the car is an anti-density technology. That’s not a judgment on the value of a car, but just to say the more people you have, the harder it is to find a parking spot, the more traffic you have. That’s just a fact. Whereas the more people you have near a bus stop or a train station, the more buses you can run, the shorter the headways. The more people you have near the train, the more money it has to add more stations and expand.

So fundamentally, if we live in a world where you believe you just can’t build transit, that it’s just something the state doesn’t know how to do, then actually housing is kind of zero-sum. It’s not completely zero-sum; I think there’s value to it. But it’s a really, really hard nut to crack. Whereas if we could just build transit quickly and cheaply, then the whole housing conversation becomes a lot easier. Both on that end, but also, and I think sometimes people use this as a way of pushing off responsibility, there’s a positive version too, which is: if you could just get from downtown Boston to Worcester really quickly, that opens up a lot more space and a lot more availability, and it seems like a very doable thing.

So the main two things are housing and transit. But also, we did universal pre-K in Cambridge, and I’d love to bring that statewide. And if you want to go really deep in the weeds, I think there’s a whole conversation on AI policy, where states are really governing. But the two big people on AI policy, Scott Wiener and Alex Bores, are both stepping down from their state houses. Scott is running for Congress; Alex didn’t quite make it in New York. And I think there’s still a place where the only rules that get written will be at the state level, and there are only a couple of people who have real thoughts on what we can do. I would say that’s very niche, not a top interest for voters, but a place where I have interest.

Ben: That makes sense. So concretely, if transit is a big unlock for housing, and we want to get to Worcester fast, what are you thinking?

Burhan: I’d say two things. There’s the grand vision, and then there’s how you specifically get there, step by step. The grand vision, what everyone talks about, would be high-speed rail to Worcester. But I will say: I sent out this mailer that said we should expand the Red Line from Alewife to Arlington, which was in the original plan, and the Green Line to West Medford. And I did not feel like it was a big thing. It’s two stations. And then I saw people on Reddit commenting, “I just don’t think Burhan can deliver on this.” And I thought: you’re in a place where it’s unimaginable to have two extra stops. I’m not even talking about a whole new line. I get where they’re coming from, but that’s a pretty big bummer, you know? And obviously, people promise high-speed rail forever and things like that.

So I’d start with something very tangible. At Porter Square, there’s the Gift of the Wind, this art installation. It kind of looks like a windmill; you’ve probably seen it. And it’s just in a state of disrepair. It cost $300,000 to build the first time, and now, when you ask about the repairs, they say it costs about $300,000. It reminds me of the Golden Gate Bridge, where it was cheaper to build the bridge than it was to add the nets underneath it, just because of how bad we’ve gotten at building things.

I have a lot of ideas on how we can make construction cheaper, but that is a great, small, tangible litmus test. I think it’s about procurement. We write really complicated rules that mean not many people can bid for government contracts. We have ways of writing all these other requirements around who we hire and how we hire them that build up the cost. We make it really difficult to just have a permanent team whose responsibility is to do this cheaply, versus getting punished if they try to push too hard, so their job is just to do it, even if it takes infinite time and infinite money. So there’s a whole bunch of management, procurement, and contracting stuff that’s really boring. But the measure of success, in a small, immediate way you can see, is: can we fix the Gift of the Wind for less than the cost of actually building it the first time?

Ben: Inflation-adjusted?

Burhan: Inflation-adjusted, yeah.

Ben: I love hearing the focus on the nuts and bolts and the unsexy stuff, because I think that’s really important. But I’d imagine for each of the things you’re pointing at, there’s some political constituency that has pushed it to be that way, so you’re most likely always fighting somebody on this. It’s easy to say we should fix these things, but if other people are pushing against it, how do you still win, or compromise?

Burhan: I think that’s a great question. I would say a couple of things. One is: someone needs to focus on the nuts and bolts. You only get one state senator, but the State Senate and the State House are kind of a team. And my little critique of them is: you have a bunch of lawyers and policy people, which is fantastic, but everyone just writes “let there be public transit, let there be housing,” and then we’re 50th out of 50 in terms of building housing.1

So I really think it’s not just that we don’t want to do the right things. It’s that you have to care about the nuts and bolts. And at least in my opinion, I’m working really hard to give myself a demotion: I make more at the local level than I would at the State House. I really do think you can have a profound difference by focusing on the nuts and bolts.

To your point, yes, there are different constituencies, but that’s why I would focus on this specific case of the Gift of the Wind. It’s really hard to say “we’re going to do huge amounts of government procurement reform,” and then people say, “Who are you, Burhan? Will this even make a difference?” Even the proponents say, “I don’t believe this will work.” We talked about the two train-stop extensions. But no one cares about this one little thing, this one little art installation on one project. So I’m not saying we should change all of these rules for everything. Just change it for this one small installation. Make it a special exemption, and let’s just see if we can build it cheaper. Then that’s proof of point, and we can go from there. The other side of it is: the State House, and people in politics in general, love doing pilot programs. So give me this little pilot program, and let’s prove the concept that you can actually build things cheaper if you want to. And once we have that proof point, we can talk about what the next step is.

Ben: You alluded to state-level housing ideas as maybe a next step here. What’s your magic wand, if you could get something passed? And maybe two things: pie in the sky, if you could pass anything, and then a concrete first step, similar to the transit thing.

Burhan: I think it’s actually kind of one and the same in this case. The MBTA Communities Act had good intentions. It had the potential to solve our housing crisis. And it was just one of the worst pieces of legislation I think has ever been written in the State House.

Ben: Say more. Why?

Burhan: I say that with a lot of pain, because I spent five years defending it. When Milton decided not to implement it, we were on the ground organizing. When Marblehead, you know, was there. We were on the ground organizing in Weston when they tried to rezone over just industrial land that’s never going to be developed. So I say it in that context: I think you could not write a piece of legislation more meant to maximize conflict and minimize impact than the MBTA Communities Act. A: it basically had no effect on Cambridge and Somerville. B: it left out Boston. C: it asked a bunch of suburbs to rezone for housing when they didn’t want to, so they had malicious compliance. And D, I think most importantly, winning in housing is not “I’m really excited for this development,” because it does kind of suck. You have construction, you have noise, you have traffic. There are real downsides. Instead, it’s more like, “Yeah, we kind of have to do this.” It’s like eating broccoli: I get it, you’ve just got to do it sometimes. And that’s fine. But instead of having an affirmative vote in every single community, it’s just asking for conflict to spread all over the place.

Instead, what you should have done is take the spirit of the MBTA Communities Act and go really small. An eighth of a mile near every transit stop, for the commuter rail or for the T, you can just build, kind of like what we did in Cambridge, six stories of housing. That would build the 200,000 units basically overnight. It’s a very small amount of land we’d be talking about; most people would not be abutting it. And I think it would just solve this. Just do a statewide standard: this is the rule. And then we can put this in the past. But instead, because we decided to make it community opt-in, and we decided to leave out Boston, and we didn’t want to push Cambridge and Somerville because we’re already doing the right thing, we got a piece of legislation that I think is going to do less than the starter homes ballot question that I put forward.

Ben: Presumably, though, this was compromise legislation, due to lots of parties involved with political power and influence who are maybe still around. So how does a new senator get a Communities Act 2.0 passed, assuming those powers are still there?

Burhan: The question I would keep coming back to is: there actually is political will sometimes. Housing is the biggest issue. The governor talks about it the whole time. When Zohran and Trump met, the one thing they said is, “We need to build more housing in New York.” I just think the answers are wrong. The State House right now has a bunch of things they’re looking at in terms of housing, and they’re actually really difficult conversations. The State Senate wants to end single-family-only zoning across Massachusetts and allow duplexes to be built anywhere. So you could still build a single-family home, but you can also build a duplex. That’s a really hard conversation in a lot of suburbs, a lot of different places. And I just don’t think it’s going to have the impact. If you have a single-family home, let’s say it’s worth a million dollars, and you’re going to replace it with a duplex, you probably need to take down the single-family home. So you’re losing a million dollars. And then you have to build at least two units, where construction cost is, let’s say we’re being generous, $500,000 a unit. You have to sell them both for at least a million dollars or more. So the economics of it are actually quite poor. I think it’ll have a decent chunk of impact, more impact than the MBTA Communities Act, but it’s just not that big. Whereas we have empty parking lots near every commuter rail station, for the most part. Just build housing on that. And 200,000 units is not that many units in a state that has four or five million units.

So I think there actually is political will on this specific housing question. We just keep funneling it into ideas that sound like we’re really moving forward, but when you look at the unit count at the end of the day, which is what matters, they’re just not impactful.

Ben: So it sounds like your position is that the specific ideas are what’s holding us back. There’s political will for housing improvements, but we’re going about it the wrong way.

Burhan: I think that’s my critique of policy in general, and this is how policymaking works. First: it’s hard to do anything at all. Second: you very quickly have a values question. Are you pro-housing or anti-housing? And it’s super hard to even get a majority on those issues. So basically, first you do nothing at all on anything; that’s kind of the default. Then, if you do anything, it’s with the slimmest of majorities. The third part, which we don’t get to, is: let’s say you have a pro-housing majority, or a pro-transit majority. Is that specific thing you’re doing actually that valuable?

I’m a very big proponent of green energy and fighting climate change. In Cambridge, we’ve had the most aggressive building deregulation rules in the country, so I’ve definitely taken my share of tough votes, and that was a five-four vote. And then I look at pro-transit. Okay, we want to make the T better. What’s the big thing we want to do? Electrify the buses. And that is a terrible idea. And I don’t say that lightly; I would love electric buses. But getting anything done for the MBTA in the first place is really, really hard. That would be at the bottom of my priority list. Basically: taking the bus is already greener than taking a car. I think all of us understand that. Two: as we talk about all the time, the T has a limited budget. Everyone, when you ask about this, says, “We should expand the T and do electric buses.” And I say: that’s fantastic. When is it happening? Instead, we took the limited budget that we do have for the T, and we’re now spending it on converting to battery electric buses, retrofitting every bus station to have charging. And MBTA buses now need to go charge for a couple of hours, so that’s time they’re off the road. You’re talking about spending hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, retrofitting the system. And at the same time, so many bus routes here, from the ones that are parallel to the Green Line to the 94, which goes from Davis to Medford, are all on the chopping block. And it’s because you don’t have infinite money. You don’t even have enough money, and now we’re putting it into this thing that will marginally make the buses people do use more green, but then fewer people will use the buses. So I’m just not sure that’s the right direction. And I think you see that time and time again with the actual policy that we pass.

Ben: Where do you see the biggest daylight between you and the other candidates in this race, given you’re all similarly politically aligned, I would guess?

Burhan: I think it really, really is on the policy direction piece. I think values align; we’re 90% similar. But what really matters, to some extent, is the focus areas you have. Erika is a fighter: for every thing you’re a little bit upset about in life, there’s a bad guy, and she wants to fight that bad guy. Christine is kind of the insider: “I know how things on Beacon Hill work; I can make incremental change in a good direction.” Matt is the local guy: “I understand the nuances of Somerville, and I’ve been here forever.” He’s a very nice person. I like Matt a lot.

And then mine is: Massachusetts is really great in a lot of different ways, and yet in the places I care about and feel I have expertise in, the built environment (housing, transit, utility costs), we are the worst in the country. It’s not just 50th out of 50 in terms of building more housing, and third overall in housing costs after San Francisco and New York. It’s the T: half of all light rail accidents in the country happen in the MBTA system.2 And then we talk about expansion. And then we have the third-highest utility costs after Hawaii,3 which is expensive for a very specific reason. It’s actually really bad, and I don’t even see the incremental progress. And I don’t even think it’s a bad-guys problem, where, yes, Eversource makes a bunch of profit, and there’s a whole bunch of bad incentives, and we should fix that. But if Eversource or National Grid made 0% profit, we’d go from the third most expensive utilities to, like, seventh. It’s just not the single biggest factor. I really think we have profoundly written ourselves into a bad corner with a bunch of good intentions. You just write all these things, and they don’t make sense together.

Ben: Is this the “everything bagel” of liberal politics situation? Every project has to accomplish ten different goals, including social change?

Burhan: Partially, but I think it’s also simpler than that. I think it’s profoundly misunderstanding and not caring about outcomes. I’ll give you an example with the T, and then utility costs. With the T, you might say, “Oh, it’s unions or something like this.” And I think marginally that makes an impact on cost. But fundamentally, I think the biggest problem is the way we structure the MBTA. Montreal had the same problem: it was not expanding its REM. And you know what they did? This very profound thing: they just hired a permanent team. They said, “Your job is to expand our system.” We don’t have that at the MBTA; instead, we hire a bunch of consultants who consult for every project. And they said, “You’re going to design a station, and you can customize it 10% every time, but 90% of it will stay the same, and your job is to build a station every six months.” And actually, those three things were enough. You have a permanent team, so they all get to know each other, they know who’s great at their job, and they get better at their jobs over time. You’re building a station every six months, so you know where to source your materials, and you become cheaper and better and more reliable at sourcing them, and you know where to store them, and all these logistical things. And you’re given a timeline of every six months, so you know exactly how to plan ahead, and you just build it on a clock.

Whereas whenever we do a transit project, it’s an ad hoc special unicorn butterfly, where we hire a bunch of new people because we don’t have the in-house capacity, we’re figuring out how to get all these materials for the first time because we don’t usually do expansions, and it’s all on an undetermined timeline. How long have we been talking about fixing I-90? It’s been forever, and every time, it gets cancelled. No one would ever build a team like this, but we have the wildest structure of all time. And I think there are much simpler and more foundational fixes we can make. We are a very rich country, much richer than the rest of the world. We can actually have nicer things than the rest of the world. And the fact that we can’t even build a train stop where much, much poorer places can isn’t just “oh, we’re doing too many good things.” It’s that we actually can’t even do the very, very simple things well.

Ben: I feel like I’m listening to an argument mostly for state capacity increases.

Burhan: Yeah, I think it’s a state capacity and a State House capacity increase. It’s not that the MBTA doesn’t realize there are all these problems; there are really smart people there. But the rules that govern how the MBTA works prevent them from doing this sort of stuff.

Ben: So we need low-level rules changes to unlock the capacity building. So it sounds like your position is less that we can’t do these things, and more that we’ve saddled ourselves with regulations and rules that prevent us from doing them well. Is that generally correct?

Burhan: Yeah.

Ben: Great. That’s good news.

Burhan: Yeah. I mean, I guess we’ll rewrite the rules. I think it is very possible. I’m very, very optimistic, actually. Forty years is most of our lifetime, no matter how old you are, so people think, “I just don’t think it’s fixable; it hasn’t been tractable in my lifetime.” But in the realm of a government, that’s not that long. Governments run for much longer. We realized: hey, this is a metro region that is built for transit, and mass transit in particular, because our roads are all kind of messy. And so we built the first subway system in North America. We figured out how to put the trains underground and not suffocate from all the steam. And we were dramatically expanding up until the 1980s. We added 20 stations a decade. And now everyone is focused on Trump, and before that, kind of Bush, and we forget there was this era where we basically said, “The private sector is better; let’s just fire a bunch of government employees and hire consultants.” The thought was that it would increase capacity, because all these private sector people are better. But actually, it just messed things up, because consultants are there for twelve or eighteen months, and then we added all these other rules that we were afraid of, you know?

It’s very fixable. And you see things get better all the time. In Cambridge, the Cambridge Housing Authority was trying to build units once, and it was $1.1 million a unit. And then we just changed the procurement process, and it dropped by $100,000 a unit. It was still super expensive; we can’t change all the stuff that the State House can change. But it’s crazy: you can change one rule and save $100,000 a unit. Things are very doable, you know?

Ben: Is this the kind of pitch you’re giving on the doors, or is it simpler, smaller things? Does this resonate with the average door-knock conversation?

Burhan: The average door-knock conversation is very brief; you’re mostly just introducing yourself. That’s just one interaction. But I would say, yeah, it’s a core focus. If you look at our Instagram, it’s very technical, very positive, hopefully. I very much believe that our problems can be fixed, and we get a huge amount of attention. I think we’ve gotten two or three million people who have viewed our Instagram and Facebook videos, which is congressional-level attention for a low-level state senate race. And kind of the bet I’m taking is that there are enough nerds in this district that we can make a technical argument and get away with it. But it’s nice to talk about solutions, not just complain about problems, you know?

Ben: Can I be selfish a little bit and ask you some Somerville questions?

Burhan: Sure.

Ben: Can we accomplish a Cambridge-like upzoning in Somerville?

Burhan: A Cambridge-like upzoning. That’s a good question. Well, I would say it’s hard. It really was incredibly difficult on the Cambridge side. People see the final vote, eight to one, and they think it was an easy thing to do. But before I got elected, there was a vote for missing-middle housing, which was triple-deckers, and it crashed and burned. It did not even get enough votes to get a final vote, because it was just so unpopular. So there’s an incredible amount of work you do. It really took a year of my life, where every day I woke up and asked, “How do I build support for this?”

So I think the first step is finding your champions in City Hall who really want to do this. You need a group of people who deeply want to do this and are willing to spend a bunch of time and political capital on it. It’s about persuading your neighbors. It’s about figuring out how to write the rules, getting staff on board, getting anyone else who’s invested in the system on board, and making sure it works for them. There’s a huge amount of constituent groups you have to win over.

And then on the other side, there are structural advantages and disadvantages. Somerville is structurally, just based on demographics, more pro-housing than Cambridge, so you have better bones. But having district councilors makes it a little bit harder, because a particular development in a particular neighborhood really affects that councilor in a way it doesn’t in Cambridge, where we’re all elected at large. So you have pros and cons you need to figure out. But at least one part is done: forever, our zoning code was a hundred pages of dimensional requirements, and I narrowed it down to seven or eight pages. I wrote all that, so at least that part’s done for you guys. You can copy and paste it and make whatever twists you want.

But I think it’s a long road. And mostly, you want not only people who will support it — I think there are a lot of great Somerville city councilors who will probably support some sort of rezoning — but you also need people who are willing to spend an insane amount of time really understanding it, making the case, and persuading not only their colleagues but the entire public. I think that should be the focus.

Ben: Is that where you would start in Somerville housing policy, or would you look for your fix-the-sculpture-for-cheaper project in Somerville first?

Burhan: I think Somerville’s already done this cheaper project. On Broadway, there’s a project that’s 50% affordable, and it’s a really great TIF and all. It’s really great, and I think it’s worth it.

And I think you sometimes get yourself into lose-lose situations, like with a tower, if you try to do individual projects. Fundamentally, housing is kind of a game theory problem. Whatever you think about the actual tower, if I was near it, I’d think it’s a bad deal. Okay, so I have to show up to a special permit meeting and say, “Yeah, this is great,” and put up with all the noise and the construction and the traffic and all the things you have to put up with. And does someone in Gilman Square have to build a tower? Does someone in all the other parts of the city have to do theirs? Because one building is not going to solve the housing crisis; it’s marginally impactful. Instead, if I say and do the right thing, and show up to a special permit meeting and say I want this to happen, I get all the negative consequences, and everyone else doesn’t have to do their part.

I think that’s why citywide rules, or, even better, statewide rules, are really impactful: then we’re all in this together, and if everyone did their part, it’s not so much. And you avoid that game theory problem. That’s fundamentally why, if you look at the population, everyone’s the same. But at the local level, housing is extremely controversial, while at the state level, housing is a fifty-fifty issue. Basically every governor in the country is pro-housing. You get to congressional Democrats — I’ll go even further: Democrat or Republican, everyone in Congress is very, very pro-housing. And you wonder: how can we have such a difference of opinion among politicians when the people voting for them are the same? I think it fundamentally is the game theory problem: the bigger the polity, the more it makes sense to pass pro-housing legislation. Every special permit everywhere is almost always net unpopular, and the bigger the rezoning, the more popular it will be. I think that’s even why the MBTA Communities Act is popular in Weston, even though Weston voted not to comply with it, or to comply with it only on paper. People do want it. It’s just very rational: you would prefer to spread out the diffuse benefits and concentrated harm. You would like it to be as spread out as possible.

Ben: Gotcha. So it is the my-backyard problem: spread it over a lot of backyards a little bit, and the problem goes away.

Burhan: Fundamentally, yeah. Getting 200,000 units, to take the most extreme example, in a state of four to five million units is probably one extra unit of housing every two or three blocks. That’s barely noticeable. If you talked about it that way, I’m sure people wouldn’t mind. But there are reasons we end up with versions that are harder.

Ben: It seems like some projects here locally are having trouble penciling with 20% inclusionary zoning, and Somerville has been weighing tax relief for certain developers in exchange for affordable units. Do you like the subsidize-around-the-inclusionary-zoning approach, or do you think maybe the rate is off? Any thoughts on that?

Burhan: I would say there are two different questions here. One is: is the math working? And I think fundamentally the answer is no. From Chelsea, close by, to San Francisco, another very left city, people have been reducing inclusionary numbers because buildings were not penciling. Part of it is that you have options; that doesn’t mean you have to lower the inclusionary. You have three options, fundamentally. One: you can lower it. Two: you can do what Cambridge did, which is a massive upzoning. We have buildings at 20% in Cambridge that are penciling, because you’re going from, like 9 Wyman Street, one single-family home to 56 units, and all of a sudden there’s enough surplus value, and the land value is divided among enough units, that it actually pencils. Though even in Cambridge, that only works in those mega-projects. It does not work for a 12-unit project or something.

And then the third option, which I really like, is what you’re talking about: tax increment financing. In my mind, if we’re getting really nerdy and in the weeds, it’s kind of like a pseudo land value tax. Say you have two cases: one triple-decker, and one empty parking lot. Now you want to build, let’s say, 15 units, with 20% inclusionary or whatever. The way tax increment financing works: let’s say the triple-decker is paying, I’m making up numbers for simplicity, $20,000 a year in taxes. If you built the 15-unit building, it would pay five times that: $100,000 a year in taxes. Well, that’s $80,000 a year you wouldn’t have if the building didn’t exist. So just say: you don’t have to pay those additional $80,000 a year in taxes for the first fifteen years after the building is constructed. That’s basically $80,000 a year they can add to their margins, which helps the inclusionary pencil a little bit better. I think tax increment financing is roughly equivalent to about a five to seven percent reduction in inclusionary. So I would not say it’s the same as what Chelsea or SF did. SF reduced to 5% inclusionary, or 3% or something like this. It’s basically reducing inclusionary from 20 to 15 or 13 percent. But you see how that’s worth $80,000.

But then if you had an empty parking lot, where people in general want more development than on a triple-decker, well, the parking lot is probably paying, let’s say, $5,000 a year in taxes, because it’s based on property values, and there’s no property there. So instead they get basically $95,000 a year. So you see how it’s also serving as a pseudo land value tax: the less you’ve done with your land, the more of an incentive we’re creating for you to actually do something valuable. And the more you’ve actually done something productive — yeah, we don’t want to incentivize as many teardowns of more valuable structures, where it’s more likely something negative is happening to the people living there. Instead, we really want to prioritize empty houses, or empty lots, or single-family homes where the person who lives there is selling their home, and it’s a better scenario, you know?

Ben: Okay, so the TIF incentivizes more development on lots that have less value currently, because the delta between the taxes is bigger.

Burhan: Yeah. You have to go three levels of nerdery deep there: you have to know inclusionary, you have to know tax abatements, and you have to know land value tax. And then you can talk about how this is kind of pseudo the same. So, yeah.

Ben: So it’s less that you’re actually taxing the value of the land. It’s, “Hey, by the way, you could get another $95,000 of tax abatements if you develop this thing.” It’s kind of a reverse.

Burhan: Yeah, it’s basically the opposite. Instead of actively taxing the land, you’re giving a reward for someone to actually invest in it.

Ben: Gotcha. Cool. Let me come up on the end here. If you’re elected and we’re at the end of your first term, what is an honest way to judge whether you have succeeded?

Burhan: That’s a good question. It’s both a long and a short answer. Legislative power definitely compounds the longer you’re there, and whoever gets in will be new. But my goal is to really focus on a few tangible aspects. In terms of transit, I gave you the example with that art installation; the Gift of the Wind is what I was talking about. In terms of housing, I actually think something bigger is possible. The real goal is: can we take all this momentum behind people wanting to do something on housing and actually channel it into better policy? If you see a delta between the old ideas and ideas that sound and look more like mine, then probably it’s not that I was critical to getting something passed. Instead, I was able to take something that was going to get passed, where I understood there was energy for it, and shape it in that direction. So I think those are two reasonable expectations for the first term.

I always hesitate to overpromise at the beginning, but I think the four-to-six-year timeframe is much, much more positive. I fundamentally do believe that’s a timescale on which we could pass something dramatic on housing that will make an impact. And I would consider it a failure, point blank, if in four to six years we don’t have big housing legislation. And two: I think that’s around the time you can really work through all the pieces to understand the structure of the T, and pass a really big cleanup legislation that could change how they hire, how they manage, and how they procure, such that you could have quite a lot lower costs across the board. And I think it’s also around the realm where you can change the funding formula, so they’re not always fighting for every dollar and trying to minimize their debts, but instead actively getting toward zero debt.

Ben: Thank you for the time!

The Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27) budget for Somerville, MA was adopted in June of 2026, and took effect July 1.

Mayor Wilson submitted his budget on June 4, and the City Council approved the budget on Thursday, June 25. It totals $394.2 million, a 3.3% increase1 over the FY26 budget of $380.1 million.

The Shape of the Budget

Everything below is derived from a single source: the table “Non-School Expenditures by Prime Account”2 in Section 1.3 of the FY27 budget book on the city’s ClearGov portal.

This is the city’s own classification of expenses, and notably, it involves some surprises. For example, reporting schools at 31.1% of the budget could be seen as a slight undercount, because school employees’ health insurance and the school custodians’ payroll sit outside it. More on this below.

Let’s take a look at the budget by function.

Schools — $122.5 million, 31.1%

The largest function is the school budget3 at $122.5 million, 31.1% of the total budget.

This function covers teachers, administrators, school building operations, and the district’s own programs. As previously mentioned, it does not cover health insurance for school employees, which is inside “Other,” and the school custodians, listed as a Public Works line at $4.8 million.

So the true cost of running the schools is meaningfully higher than 31.1%, perhaps closer to 37% once school employees’ health insurance and custodians are counted, and this is still not counting pensions and payroll taxes.

Other — $72,491,906 (18.4%)

Somerville’s second-largest budget function is the pooled cost of employing people (things like insurance, pensions, and payroll taxes) charged centrally rather than to each department.

Health and life insurance alone is $39.4 million. The consequence is that every other slice of the pie understates what that function actually costs: a firefighter’s salary is in public safety, but their health insurance is in “Other”.

This bucket also contains a $3.1 million contingency account, money set aside for union contracts still being negotiated, and $4.0 million in a line the table labels simply “Capital”.

Public safety — $55,349,268 (14.0%)

Did you know that Somerville spends more on Fire than on Police? I sure didn’t. Fire is the largest public safety department at $26.6 million, slightly ahead of Police at $23.2 million.

Parking regulation and enforcement is also in this function, at $5.3 million, counted as part of public safety rather than public works or revenue.

General government — $46,120,956 (11.7%)

The catch-all for running the city as an institution. It holds the mayor’s office and City Council, the Clerk and Elections, Law, People Operations and the whole finance apparatus.

Technology & Innovation is the largest single line at $7.1 million. This covers a small staff managing a contract and licensing budget of $5.7 million — mostly acquiring, implementing, and maintaining the hardware and software that City operations depend on. For a city with around 1,000 employees across dozens of buildings, that’s roughly $5,700 per employee per year in systems and licensing, high but not unusual for municipal IT.

This function also holds a substantial policy operation that a reader might not think of as “government overhead”: planning, housing, housing stability, economic development and mobility together come to $7.8 million, slightly more than the city spends on technology. Inspectional Services, which handles permitting and building code, is $3.6 million.

Public works — $45,416,108 (11.5%)

Facilities is the largest public works expense at $13.9 million, largely the ordinary maintenance costs of heating, lighting and maintaining municipal buildings. Trash and recycling is the next largest single service at $9.8 million, then streets & sidewalks at $5.3 million, then school custodians at $4.8 million. Snow removal alone for FY27 is budgeted at $1.8 million.

Debt service — $22,698,770 (5.8%)

Principal and interest on money already borrowed. This is the least discretionary and therefore least interesting line in the budget: it reflects past borrowing decisions and can’t be reduced without defaulting. It rose only $91,240 over FY26, or 0.4%, essentially flat.

Intergovernmental — $15,509,305 (3.9%)

This is money Somerville collects but doesn’t control, assessments charged by the state and county that pass through the city’s budget.

Culture and recreation — $7,059,731 (1.8%)

Only two line items, and almost entirely libraries. The library system is at $4.6 million, nearly twice Recreation at $2.5 million. Together they account for less than two cents of every budget dollar, less than the city spends on recycling and waste.

Health & human services — $7,050,892 (1.8%)

The smallest function in the budget, and the one that changed most in FY27. Aside from the Council on Aging, every unit in this function either did not exist under its current name in FY26 or was radically resized.

The largest line items are Community Wellness at $1.6 million and Public Health at $1.4 million.

Community Wellness is brand new in FY27, created as part of a city-wide re-organization. The mission statement is “To work together and with the community to build a foundation of health, so every person in Somerville can thrive.” From the budget book, we see that its purview includes youth services, farmers’ markets, and prevention services.

Changes from FY26

Massachusetts requires a balanced budget: appropriations can’t exceed estimated revenue.

City officials entered the budget process facing a projected $5.4 million shortfall driven by slowing revenue growth, rising fixed costs, and pressure on the commercial real estate market. According to the budget document, the administration balanced the budget by reducing non-personnel spending by approximately 5 percent, reorganizing city departments, strategically using reserve funds, and reducing staffing while maintaining core services. The adopted budget reflects a net reduction of 23.1 full-time equivalent positions compared to FY26.

Overall, the budget increased from last year’s by $14.1 million. Of that, the largest change was the increase in the school budget of $8.2 million. In comparison, the non-school budget increased only $5.9 million.

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Primary Sources

• FY27 Digital Budget Book — The full budget on the city’s ClearGov portal.

• somervillema.gov/budget — The landing page.

• somervillema.legistar.com — Hearing agendas, minutes, and recordings from the June sessions

• Mayor’s presentation announcement (June 4) and approval announcement (June 29)

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ben Orenstein: In the past, you told me that your time in municipal government showed you where local power ends. What’s the most important thing that Somerville needs state action to do?

Matt McLaughlin: I think I told you that when we first did the city charter, we had to ask for approval to change the name from Board of Aldermen to City Council. So it’s not a question of what — it’s everything. You have to get approval from the state for everything to really make any significant change.

Some of the home rule petitions we sent: we sent the entire city charter up; that’s the one thing that got passed. We submitted a home rule petition for a real estate transfer fee. That didn’t happen. We sent a rent control home rule petition up. That didn’t happen. We requested that Tufts University have a master plan; we needed a home rule petition for that. That didn’t happen. Tenant right of first refusal: that didn’t happen. Safe consumption sites. Almost everything you can think of requires some sort of state approval.

Ben: What do you make of that? Why do you think Beacon Hill is at such odds with what we’re trying to do in Somerville?

Matt: I think there’s recent history and then there’s old history. This goes back to the foundation of the state with John Adams. I wrote a piece about this that you can read. The title ended up being “John Adams Doesn’t Trust You.” It was about charter reform, because the state constitution was a model for the US Constitution. John Adams was a driving force behind it, and he was a person who did not really trust the public. Some people accused him of being a monarchist, and he created a state government that’s very rigid and can’t be changed. So it’s built into the system to make it difficult to change things. In some cases that makes sense, because you don’t want to just dramatically change things all the time. But we’ve gotten to a point where the state legislature doesn’t want to do anything.

I think that’s because of the recent history of noncompetitive elections. People don’t run for office. We have the second least competitive elections in the country, after Alabama. That’s why this seat is so hot right now: it’s the first time the seat’s been open in about thirty years. So we have four people running for it now. There were five until yesterday1. There’s no competition, there’s no need, there’s no sense of urgency.

And part of that is also because a lot of the people at the State House aren’t physically feeling the pain that people in the community feel. If this entire neighborhood gets gentrified five times over, it doesn’t matter, because the voting base is still the same. For me, it’s very personal, because the people I care about are leaving. That’s why I want to bring that message up there. I feel like I have a sense of urgency that other people don’t have.

Ben: Why does the state default to no on those home rule petitions? Is it ideological, or just an unwillingness to do anything?

Matt: I think it’s complacency. You look at a state like California, which probably has very similar politics to us, and they pass legislation all the time, and they have ballot questions that can be kind of crazy sometimes. So I think it’s the structure of our government combined with complacency, and just the fact that people get to keep their seat forever if they want to. I’m not even sure it’s ideological. On some of the things we’re talking about, yes, there are active forces who don’t want them to happen. But other times, it just seems like the effort isn’t being put in.

Ben: Why do people stay in their seats so long? Is there some way to make state-level elections more competitive?

Matt: I hear people talk about election changes all the time, and I’m not opposed to them. Ranked choice voting would make a lot of sense for this race in particular, where there are four people running and someone could win with 25% of the vote. So in that case, election reform makes a lot of sense. I do think, though, that doesn’t answer the original question of why people don’t run for office at all. And I think that’s a money thing. It’s a time thing. The Democratic Party in particular in Massachusetts is a supermajority, so there’s no competition within themselves. But meanwhile, 65% of the state is registered independent. So there’s just a lot of complacency.

Something I’m very proud of on the City Council (and Jesse Clingan will tell me this all the time) is that I made government more accessible to people in Somerville, because people didn’t think they could even run for office. People get this image in their heads that politicians have these brilliant minds, that they’re so select, they’re elites, and we need these elites to lead us. But we live in a representative democracy, and we need people who actually represent the public to be in these seats. I feel like I’m a representative of the community, and I think more people like that should run for office: more working-class people, more people who have something at stake.

But that also makes it difficult. In this situation, for example, maybe I’m not running for this seat if I didn’t get let go from the federal government and if I hadn’t just graduated from Harvard. It’s good timing for me. Other than that, I have to work to feed my family. So I think that’s the reason a lot of people don’t run.

Ben: You’ve said that the candidates in this race would probably tend to vote the same way. Where’s the daylight between you and the other candidates? What differences should move a voter?

Matt: Everyone’s talking about affordability: housing in particular, but also child care, health care, utility bills, all the things that make it difficult to live around here. If there’s daylight — I know everyone cares about it, but I definitely think that I care more, and I’ve cared longer, and I’ve done more. If there’s daylight between us, it’s the level of commitment to this issue in particular.

I think 70% of the people I talk to at doors will cite affordability as their top issue, and I’ve been the person championing this for decades. It’s not just a talking point. On the national level especially, affordability has become the new catchphrase, but it’s been something I’ve committed my life to. And it is one of those things where you can talk about affordability, and then you get to the State House, and you want to play ball, and you want to be nice with people, and it gets lost in the mix. For me, it’s everything. It’s my reason for going to the State House. So I’m not going to get dissuaded. I’m not going to be swayed and end up working on something else, or let something go because it’s convenient.

Ben: Given that complacency and resistance to change, do you worry you could get elected and then just be frozen out for agitating?

Matt: It’s definitely a possibility that anyone could get frozen out for speaking out. But I would say a few things. One, I often find it’s the person who agitates who gets the most, because with the people who play ball, no one’s afraid of you. It’s, “Oh, this person’s going to play ball, we don’t need to worry about them, we don’t need to give concessions.” As a Somerville city councilor, I agitated when I thought it was necessary, and I think I got more out of administrations than people who were on the inside. And I was also willing to work with people. There are several people who I was in opposition to — or they were in opposition to me — who are supporting my campaign. I think it’s because they know that I’m principled. This isn’t about you. I’m not going to the State House to antagonize the Senate president for no reason. I’m going because there’s an issue I care about, and if you can address that issue, then we’re not going to have a problem.

And something I did in Somerville was encourage more people to run for office. I’m willing to work with anybody. But if people aren’t willing to work with me, then we do have to have elections and get the right people up there. And that’s something I’m willing to do and have been able to do.

Ben: I noticed in your writing a bit of tension between market-rate housing production and things like tenant protections and social housing; production and inclusionary zoning sometimes pull in opposite directions. How do you balance them? Has Somerville struck the right balance, and would you bring the same approach to the state?

Matt: It’s interesting, because I feel like we’re doing the most on both fronts in Somerville. I think we’re definitely doing the most as far as housing production goes. And we’re also very focused on social housing and making sure that low-income people have housing.

Ben: What do you mean by doing the most on housing production?

Matt: I think we’re building the most units. We’ve changed the zoning to allow housing to be built as of right when most cities are fighting that, even three-family housing by right in Somerville, which to some people seems so small, but every other city in the state doesn’t allow it. Most of the state is single-family housing, and we’re three-family housing by right, with dense housing by transit. So I think we’re doing the right thing on the market-rate side.

The 20% inclusionary has become an issue for building some housing, in particular here at Assembly Row, and we’re looking at tax credits and tax relief to allow this housing to get built. We’re at a fork in the road: with the market being the way it is, the interest rates, the building costs, it is becoming difficult, and we were faced with choices: either get rid of the inclusionary zoning, give some tax relief, or not have housing get built. For some people, that third option is totally acceptable, and it’s not to me. I also want the affordable units, so I’m willing to provide some sort of relief. You look at somewhere like Burlington, Vermont: they have a 20% inclusionary rate, and they realized that the housing wasn’t getting built, so they gave some tax credits to incentivize it. We’re working on that right now. So I think I’m clear-eyed on what development needs to happen, and I’m willing to work with people on that. I just do want that affordable housing.

Ben: What does that actually look like? A developer comes to the city and says, “This isn’t penciling. Can we talk about tax breaks?”

Matt: I can’t remember if we’ve approved it yet. We had a public hearing on it that went very well, actually, and it’s called UCH-TIF. We did something similar to what we did in Union Square, where the developers are paying a tax to help pay for the Green Line Extension that came there. If we approve this, then an individual developer could go to the city and work out a deal for tax incentives in exchange for affordable housing. So we may even get more affordable housing than what we currently have, in exchange for some sort of tax relief: ten years of reduced taxes or no taxes, something like that. But it would be negotiated on a case-by-case basis, so we could actually end up getting more out of it.

I would say in Somerville, we’re taking it seriously on both fronts. I think we’ve talked about this: there are the YIMBY people, and then there are the affordability people, and I see them at odds all the time. There are people who think rent control is the only thing we can do: we need to focus all our energy on that, and we can’t allow housing to move forward. I remember years ago, the City Life people protested the YIMBY convention in Boston. They were against the people who were trying to build housing. And I’m like, man, you guys are on the same side. We all care about the same thing. And then some people on the YIMBY side think we can’t have rent control, no stabilization whatsoever: affordability is killing development. There’s something in the middle there. Everyone cares about the same thing; they just have different solutions. And I think we’ve got to pursue all the solutions.

Ben: If projects aren’t penciling at 20% inclusionary and we’re considering tax breaks to fix that, does that suggest 20% is too high? Is there a middle ground — say, 10% — that would pencil without the double hop of IZ plus tax breaks?

Matt: I think it’s the current situation that’s the problem. In my neighborhood in East Somerville, on East Broadway, I zoned everything for five to six stories, and I have several projects there that got built right away. And then the building costs and the interest rates went up, so now we’re in this situation. So I think it fluctuates. I’ve actually spoken to the planning department about this (this isn’t something that’s real yet, so I don’t want to advertise it), but maybe a fluctuating scale of inclusionary housing based on what the market needs. Having a realistic expectation. But then you also need some transparency from developers. You need to know: what’s your rate of return, how much money are you trying to make? In some cases, developers need a 5% rate of return on their investment. Some people need seven. So you need some sort of transparency on that in order to work out a deal.

Ben: If the rent control ballot question had gone through, where would you have stood?

Matt: I supported the question, even though it was not what I would have put on the ballot. One of my problems (and this is the problem with the State House and with ballot questions) is that ballot questions can often be rigid, and the State House often doesn’t respect them anyway. So it’s this weird situation where I have to tell people to vote for something that I don’t think is perfect, knowing that the State House may kill it completely or will definitely amend it.

I think about the marijuana ballot question from years ago. It took them something like four years to implement that policy, and it looked nothing like what they originally passed. I think about safe nurse staffing limits. That was something people had really legitimate concerns about: how is this going to impact the medical industry? And I supported it, because nurses had been fighting for years for some sort of safe staffing limits, and they were not being respected by the medical industry or the State House. So they took it to the ballot. That unfortunately failed, but I think if it had passed, the state legislature would have been forced to come up with a solution.

I think it’s the same with rent control. It was not how I would have passed rent control, but if it got to the State House, I think they would have been compelled to do something about it. And I would have supported something similar to what Michelle Wu did: a fairly high cap on rent increases, allowing new development to get built, exempting small property owners, something that prevents rent gouging. We have a guy in the city who famously got a 90% increase on his rent. When I tell people that, they say, “How is that legal?” And I say, well, because we don’t have rent control. So I’d like to prevent something like that, but also still allow development to happen and not burden small property owners.

Ben: Any lessons from the way the triple-decker changes went? We re-legalized triple deckers with an affordable third unit and the proximity rule, then had to roll that back to make them viable.

Matt: I think it’s similar to the 20%, and it’s also a lesson in incremental change. I had always supported three-family housing by right. If you go back years to when we were proposing this, that was the big sticking point in the zoning changes. It wasn’t the squares or the housing by transit; it was the residential neighborhoods. And there was a public and very private push to exclude all residential neighborhoods, which is the entire city of Somerville. I was on the side of three-family by right everywhere, and I was in the minority on that. There were people who were actively opposed, and then there were people who were quietly opposed.

So I proposed this compromise: what about an affordable third unit with a really high AMI? So it’s more middle-income, and maybe more palatable for somebody who wants to build that housing. We got that to pass. And then there were also some amendments that I really didn’t like, which basically said you can build a triple decker, but only next to another triple decker. I went along with that because the votes were there, not because I supported it. This is what we were getting out of it, and I still got some three-family units.

I’ll back up even further and say I remember one councilor was afraid that we’d have thousands of affordable units in the city. And I said, that would be a great problem. I would love for that problem to exist. More than likely, we’re going to get five or six units out of this, and we’ve got zero. So we did the affordable third unit knowing that it would probably limit the amount of housing, but that’s what we were going to get out of it. And then the city came up with this plan to require a housing lottery for that third unit, and I challenged that publicly and said, this is ridiculous. No small property owner is going to have it dictated to them who they can rent to. This has always been about, “Oh, my son-in-law wants to move into the apartment” — and now you’re not going to be allowed to have a family member in there? It made no sense, and it made it so that we had zero housing built.

Then there was turnover on the council. All of the people who opposed the third unit by right left the council. We had the MBTA Communities Act. And we actually had a moment when city staff kind of implied that we could do what Marblehead did and just zone an area and not build housing at all, or we could do something real. I was the one who said, let’s do something real. Let’s get this third unit by right done, finally. It addresses the problem that we created, and it addresses the challenge that the MBTA Communities Act gave us to build more housing. So I was happy to move forward and progress.

The affordable third unit was a compromise; I don’t think in the moment we knew that we weren’t going to get any housing at all. It failed, and we adjusted. I think you have to acknowledge when something doesn’t work. That’s important, especially around housing. People don’t want to acknowledge that something’s not working, and I’m just here to get something done. So that’s how we got to where we are.

Ben: If you had a magic wand that could get anything passed in the Senate, what’s your top one or two?

Matt: If I had a magic wand, I would just invest billions of dollars in housing, and have social housing, for example: truly affordable housing. I know that’s not going to happen. I’ll take a few hundred million; I think that’d be good. But I do think the government has a role in building housing. If we had unlimited funds, that’s what I would do. We don’t have unlimited funds; that’s why I also favor the market-rate side.

Ben: Specifically, the government should construct lots of housing and rent it out, or sell it?

Matt: I like the idea of social housing. I want to explore it: housing that is rent-controlled in itself. It’s a European style of affordable housing. What I like about it is that it’s all income levels, and you don’t have to constantly report your income. With an affordable housing unit, if you suddenly get a raise, they’ll kick you out of your housing. You try to move up in the world, and you can get pushed out of affordable units. This is more community-owned. It’s all income levels, and it helps pay for itself over time, because you have multiple income streams going in there, and all the money goes back into building the housing itself instead of us constantly investing more. So I think we have to think of a better way to build affordable housing. I think about projects in Somerville where we’ve sunk tens of millions of dollars, and they keep needing more money.

I actually took a class on social housing at Harvard, and I wrote a paper about it for Gilman Square, and now we’re building social housing in Gilman Square. So I’ll take a very small amount of credit for that. The mayor put it out there. One of the things I learned from that class was that back when public housing was getting built in the twenties and thirties, the real estate industry did not want middle-income housing to be made by the government, because they didn’t want to be in competition with it. So we focused on exclusively low-income housing, and what we got out of that were the projects, which are really not places that people want to live permanently. It was always meant to be a temporary living place for people to get on their feet, and they become ghettos, places that we’re sinking money into all the time. So I’d like to come up with a more community-focused affordable housing. If I had unlimited funds, that’s what I would spend it on. But again, knowing that we don’t have unlimited funds, we need to allow the market to do its part too.

Ben: What would be your second wish?

Matt: Unlimited funds? I would do universal child care, because it’s economically necessary at this point. I have a four-year-old myself. I’m 45; I had a child late, because that’s when I could afford to have a kid. And I see a lot of people either choosing not to have children or leaving their jobs to have kids, and both of those impact the job market. We’re losing talent. We’re losing young people in particular. Thirty thousand people left the state last year, and a lot of them are younger people with educations and good jobs, and they don’t see a future here. Part of that future is having a family and having a house. That’s the American dream, and it’s becoming impossible in Massachusetts.

This is something I am pursuing, and I think it will be expensive and necessary in order to keep people here, and in order to have people in the future who take care of us when we’re older. We need some sort of child care vouchers, tax credits for people, ways to make it easier to provide affordable child care. Because if we don’t do that, we’re just going to keep losing people. And I think that’s necessary for all income levels too, because there are really low-income people who desperately need child care, but there are people in the middle too, where it’s like, man, this is college tuition to send your kid to daycare. And if you’re spending money on that, you’re not spending it in the economy or somewhere else.

Ben: Is there an issue where there’s a clear difference between you and what Pat Jehlen has been doing in this seat?

Matt: Interesting. I’ll say the thing that I’m similar with Pat on is that she’s a person who fought on the inside and the outside, and I think that’s what the district expects. They expect someone who’s going to challenge authority but also get things done. And I think of the field of candidates, I’m the person who’s most similar to that.

I do think the affordability thing is a difference between us. Somernova, for example, was something that I strongly supported, because it was upzoning, and it brought development into the community, and it brought affordable housing. So I think that’s a good example of my willingness to accept change in exchange for the betterment of the community. And that was a process that took a long time for me to get to, because growing up, I was often the person who didn’t like the change happening in the community. I eventually had to accept that and realize that we need to harness the change to better the community. I think I am the strongest candidate on affordability of everyone associated with the state senate race.

Ben: You’re such a strong Somerville guy. What have you learned campaigning in Medford, Cambridge, and Winchester that’s shifted your policy views?

Matt: It’s enhanced my policy views, and it’s — what’s the word I’m looking for? — it’s validating to me. Also sad. I go to Winchester, for example. A lot of people told me, “Cambridge, Winchester, they’re not going to hear your message. They don’t care about affordability. It’s bougie,” I was told. And it was funny, because my first day knocking doors in Winchester, I’m knocking on a door across the street from a country club. They literally have a gilded fence. I just left my mail there — okay, I’m not even going to reach this person. The next door I knock on is a woman who said she can’t afford to live in the city she grew up in. Her son is going to graduate from college, and he said, “I’m going to have to leave the state because I can’t afford to live here.” And that’s a message I heard a lot in Winchester. I’ve heard it in Cambridge.

It was validating, because this is why I’m running: so I can represent the entire district. And Medford in particular — I’ve always had an affinity for Medford, because I know so many people who moved from Somerville to Medford. I grew up with Medford people. I think Medford is still a working-class community, more working-class than Somerville and Cambridge at this point. So I would love to represent them. I have focused so rigidly on affordability because I know that it’s a universal issue, and hearing it in different neighborhoods has confirmed that to me.

Ben: Say you’re elected, and it’s the end of your first term. What’s the best way to judge your performance? What would tell you you succeeded?

Matt: After one term? I definitely have to build relationships with people, so that’s important. I would like to get some modest changes immediately, something like changing the building code. Or, right now they’re talking about maybe passing two-family housing by right; I would increase it to three. That wouldn’t be that crazy. So I think there are some small wins we can get in there in the short term while we build toward longer-term goals. Building relationships with people, being an advocate in general, just being a voice for these issues is really important, because even though people are talking about it, there’s no sense of urgency whatsoever on this issue. So I would hope to increase the voice of this issue, build relationships with people, and get some good wins within the first term.

Ben: Anything we didn’t cover that you think is worth having in here?

Matt: I just feel like we’re running a really strong race. We’re an underdog, but I think the message is getting out there. Everyone’s talking about affordability, but I think I’m the most believable on the subject, and it’s because of decades of commitment and challenging people, challenging government to do more. I think that’s what’s really lacking right now: the willingness to really push on these issues.

I had a lot of fun asking questions (“Aren’t leaf blowers banned in July?”, “Can I ride a horse down Highland Ave?”, “Does the city have an official hay weigher?”)

This ended up being rather useful, so I decided to whip up a tool so other residents could enjoy the same ability:

→ The Somerville Law Bot

To be clear: the bot’s outputs are fallible, and are not legal advice. If you’ve got a high-impact decision to make, you should definitely talk to a lawyer. But for getting quickly oriented when the stakes are lower, I found it to be a handy option! The bot attempts to cite the relevant parts of our municipal code when it answers, so you can confirm exact quotations yourself.

After every answer, you’ll have the option to rate its helpfulness and accuracy. I’ll review these reports regularly and use the failures to tune the bot’s responses.

The plan in brief

On April 30, the cities of Somerville and Cambridge and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority will submit a draft updated Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) control plan to MassDEP and the U.S. EPA. The plan addresses overflows of mixed sewage and stormwater into the Alewife Brook, Upper Mystic River, and Charles River — events that occur when heavy rain exceeds the capacity of 19th-century combined pipes.

Submission opens a five-month public comment period. A final plan is expected in May 2027.

The plan recommends infrastructure that would eliminate CSO discharges in a projected 2050 “typical year,” at a total cost of about $1.29 billion shared among the three partners. According to Director of Infrastructure and Asset Management Rich Raiche, who presented the plan to the City Council on April 23, it is the first CSO plan in the country to design around climate change projections rather than historical rainfall data.

What changed since October

When Raiche presented an earlier version of the plan last October, it carried an estimated cost of $870 million and allowed a limited number of discharges in a typical year. During subsequent public meetings and consultations with MassDEP, stakeholders and regulators indicated that even a single discharge in the typical year would not meet the standard of “elimination.” The partner agencies revised the plan to target zero discharges in the 2050 typical year, increasing the cost to $1.29 billion. The MWRA Board of Directors approved submission of the revised plan in February.

Projected impact on Somerville sewer bills

The Financial Capability Assessment prepared for the plan projects the following annual sewer bills for a typical Somerville single-family home (assumed at 54 CCF of annual usage), currently $852:

• Baseline, no new CSO work — $2,094 by FY 2055, a 146% increase

• Limited CSOs in the 2050 typical year — $2,367, a 178% increase

• Recommended plan, zero CSOs in the 2050 typical year — $2,600, a 205% increase

• Zero CSOs in the 2050 5-year storm — $2,976, a 249% increase

• Zero CSOs in the 2050 25-year storm — $3,109, a 265% increase

• Full sewer separation — $7,409, a 770% increase

The baseline figure reflects projected costs of maintaining the existing system, including debt service on the Poplar Street Pump Station and anticipated MWRA reinvestment at the Deer Island treatment plant, which is approaching 30 years of operation. About 60% of each Somerville sewer dollar passes through to the MWRA assessment. Put another way: of the projected $1,748 increase between today’s bill and the FY 2055 bill under the recommended plan, about $1,242, or roughly 71%, would happen even without any new CSO work. The marginal cost of the recommended plan, compared to doing nothing new on CSOs, is closer to $506 per year by FY 2055.

Projected rate increases

To fund the recommended plan, the city’s draft rate model projects the following annual usage rate increases:

• FY 2027: 20%

• FY 2028: 17%

• FY 2029: 17%

• FY 2030: 17%

• FY 2031: 10%

• FY 2032: 9%

• FY 2033: 5%

• FY 2034: 3%

• FY 2035–2044: 2% per year, declining to 1% per year from FY 2045 onward

Somerville sewer bills have two components: a fixed base charge tied to the size of the property’s water meter, and a volumetric charge based on the amount of water a household uses. The proposed increases apply only to the volumetric portion. The base charge is not projected to change, following a restructuring last year that adjusted it to align with industry norms. The city plans to bring formal rate proposals to the Finance Committee next month.

Debt service on the recommended plan would extend to approximately 2072. A separately planned stormwater infiltration fee, which would shift a portion of stormwater costs onto properties with large impermeable surfaces, has been delayed by data issues in the city’s billing database and is not expected to roll out until mid–FY 2027.

Equity and cost-sharing concerns raised by councilors

Several councilors questioned the cost allocation among the three permittees. Under the regulatory framework dating to the 1970s, CSO outfalls were assigned to political entities, and the outfalls along the Boston side of the Charles River are permitted to MWRA rather than to the City of Boston directly. As a result, Boston’s contribution to the plan is indirect, through its share of MWRA assessments.

Raiche, who also chairs the MWRA Advisory Board, said the current cost distribution places a significant burden on sewer ratepayers across Cambridge, Somerville, and the MWRA’s 43 sewer member communities, and he encouraged the council and constituents to engage their state delegation on funding alternatives. The council passed a resolution last fall asking the state delegation to advocate for policy changes that would give MWRA a role in stormwater management. Raiche also told the council that EPA’s Financial Capability Assessment methodology (which determines whether a community qualifies for an extended schedule based on the ratio of sewer costs to median household income) is poorly suited to high-cost, high-income Massachusetts communities, and that the city has no avenue under the federal framework to negotiate relief.

Councilor Kristen Strezo raised concerns about impacts on lower-income residents, including tenants of the Somerville Housing Authority, whose water bills are paid by the authority. Raiche agreed that housing authority impacts should be part of the upcoming rate discussion. Raiche said Massachusetts law prohibits utilities from offering income-based subsidies through sewer rates, but Strezo and others have asked for a broader conversation about ratepayer assistance.

Construction impacts in Somerville

The recommended plan includes three major project areas:

• Alewife Brook ($340 million): Two storage tanks and a 9-foot-diameter microtunnel running roughly from Mass Ave in Cambridge to Dilboy Field, which would also hold roughly 2.3 million gallons of combined sewage and stormwater during storms. Construction would require a mining shaft in the Dilboy parking lot for two to three years, with roughly 20 truck trips per day traveling along Alewife Brook Parkway to haul excavated soil away from the site. A small permanent footprint would remain after construction.

• Mystic River ($260 million): 95 acres of sewer separation in Somerville and a 7.4-million-gallon storage tank in Assembly Square, nearly double the size in the previous plan version. Site negotiations with Federal Realty would be required.

• Charles River ($690 million): Storage tanks and approximately 446 acres of sewer separation in Cambridge and Boston’s Back Bay. The Back Bay separation work is expected to require approximately 25 years of phased construction.

Why not full sewer separation?

The recommended plan’s headline outcome — zero CSO discharges — applies only against a projected 2050 “typical year,” a planning benchmark representing typical rainfall conditions, not the largest storms. Storms above that benchmark would still cause discharges. Tested against the past decade’s actual rainfall, for example, the Alewife system under the recommended plan would have produced no discharges in most years but would have spilled during 2021’s Hurricane Ida and a 2023 storm that dropped nearly two inches of rain in an hour.

In response to questions from Councilors Clingan and Wheeler, Raiche explained why even full sewer separation (at an estimated $2.64 billion in additional capital cost on top of Somerville’s baseline) would not improve on those outcomes. The downstream MWRA interceptors built in the 1800s have limited capacity and were designed with hydraulic relief points. Even if Somerville and Cambridge fully separated their systems, stormwater inflow from upstream communities and the inability to expand downstream conveyance would still produce overflows during large storms. Walling off the existing relief points, Raiche said, would back sewage into homes — an outcome the partners consider worse than river discharges.

The water quality modeling also indicates that stormwater, not CSO discharges, is the largest source of bacterial pollution in the Alewife, Mystic, and Charles rivers. Eliminating CSOs alone would not make the rivers fully fishable or swimmable.

What happens next

• April 30, 2026: Draft plan submitted; five-month public comment period begins

• June 2, 2026: Public meeting on the draft recommendation

• September 2026: Public hearings

• Late October 2026: EPA and DEP issue comments and direction

• May 31, 2027: Final updated CSO plan due

• Next month: Somerville Finance Committee considers the FY 2027 rate proposal

The full draft plan, presentation slides, and Financial Capability Assessment are available through the city’s joint CSO planning portal at voice.somervillema.gov/joint-cso-planning. Public comments will be received by MassDEP and EPA throughout the formal review period.

Q: Why are you running for state rep?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Somerville needs state representation that will be willing to really, really work hard on tough stuff. I think if you talk to anybody that works in the State House, it’s hard. It’s challenging. Some call it bleak. Progress takes a long time. Even seemingly small stuff takes a really long time.

Everybody has different diagnoses for what that is. But I’m someone, I don’t believe in shortcuts, great man theory, none of that. It’s like you need people who are going to go in and work really, really hard. This is an open seat. And I have a lot of experience now in Somerville, in the legislative process. I have really deep, meaningful relationships with a lot of our community, and I want to continue taking the stuff we care about, our values, and trying to make progress on it.

Q: What do you think the core lessons from the council time will be in terms of getting things passed in a much larger chamber that moves a bit slower?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: I’ve had a really unique experience in terms of people who do politics, especially people like me who consider ourselves on the left. I was elected alongside a bunch of new councilors, progressive, running on a slate of economic justice, affordability, climate, et cetera. And from the first day that I was elected, we had a super majority governing together. So it was never about being a lone voice for what I care about. It was always, from the beginning, about trying to get stuff done, passing laws, making sure that we’re passing stuff that can work.

And I think that’s really affected and influenced how I approach all this stuff. I’m always thinking about what is within our power that we can really do, and I’m not going to focus on the stuff that we can’t do. We don’t have the time to think about all the things that are outside of our power.

I think the State House is a very different dynamic, right? By no means is there a super majority of people in the Massachusetts State House who share all of the same values as Somerville. There are a lot of different communities facing lots of different kinds of challenges. But I think fundamentally, the issue is the same, that you need to build coalitions across the state that understand the urgency.

In Massachusetts, we have all these amazing things. The issue is the inequality, the access to these amazing things. I think if you’re wealthy, most parts of Massachusetts, it’s the best place in the world to live. But there are huge parts of the state that do not have access to the kind of schools they deserve, the kind of infrastructure they deserve, housing they can afford. So to me, that’s what it’s about, is making sure that all the amazing things in Somerville are equally shared.

Q: Massachusetts is pretty firmly a one party state. Super deep blue. It seems like we have broad political alignment. Why do problems persist? Why doesn’t one party rule result in utopia?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Well, I think the Democratic super majority in the Massachusetts legislature masks a lot of disagreement. If you were to take national hot button issues—gun safety, abortion, access to healthcare—I think Massachusetts does have a lot of consensus on that. But when it comes to progressive taxation, when it comes to tenant protections, when it comes to investment in mass transit, there’s not the same kind of alignment. And I think a lot of that disagreement is not manifested publicly.

It’s interesting. You look at some states where they’ll get a one or two seat Democratic majority and just pass this unbelievable... And I think in a situation like that, that’s where you actually need to listen to the input of every single member. In Massachusetts, there are often situations where maybe the entire delegation from Cambridge, Somerville, Boston, feels one way on an issue, but they don’t need their votes. So I do think that there’s a lot more disagreement on a lot of the stuff, particularly that Somerville cares about.

Q: What would you hope to have Somerville gain from [you winning this seat]? If you could suddenly have a big impact on what’s going on at the state level, what most would you like to bring back to the city?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: For me, it’s housing affordability. That’s the thing that I think brought me into politics, continues to be the number one issue, and obviously, it’s a very complicated issue. There’s a lot to do around it.

For me, this is going to sound oversimplified, but I really think of money from the state dedicated to affordable housing programs is really like a knob you turn. If there is more money, more housing can be built. The housing that can be built, you can have more subsidy, you can have more programs to support people in need. You can incentivize the kind of housing that you want to create. And with less money, you get less. Period, end of story.

I think it gets obfuscated a lot. This is even more so at the federal level, where they can do very serious things. But in the state, it’s extremely true. One of our top priorities in Somerville since I was elected was the transfer fee, which is on high-value real estate transactions—one to two percent of it goes specifically to affordable housing. We’ve studied this thing to death. It’s stable. It’s not a disincentive tax, it’s a stable revenue generator. That’s how it’s designed.

Q: Why isn’t it a disincentive if it’s a new tax on construction?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: So, you can do market studies on this, which Somerville has done, and the idea was, if you want something to be a disincentive, like cigarettes or whatever, those taxes are 20, 30, 40%, right? When you have a real estate market like we do in Somerville, a one or two percent fee as a part of that, when people who understand markets study this, they’ll say that’s not going to make a meaningful impact. The idea of whether it makes zero impact whatsoever, I’m not going to sit here and say that, but real estate agents take a big cut of a sale. There are a lot of costs that go into one of these transactions.

But it seems very clear to me, and it’s borne out in lots of states around the country that have something like this. When we started in Somerville, we were one of two communities that was pushing for this. Now there are close to 20. It’s endorsed by the governor. It’s endorsed by the Mass Municipal Association. There has been a real movement growing for this, but again, things take a long time in this.

Q: Is this a response to Prop 2½ being a thing? And if so, would you want to repeal that?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Short answer, yes.

Q: Yes to repeal?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Yeah. I think as a fundamental thing, any program you’re talking about, the rate-limiting thing is revenue. And what we have in Massachusetts, I think our taxation system is super regressive. It’s really opaque. I think people don’t really understand how taxes work.

Q: It’s confusing. Prop 2½ is confusing.

Councilor Ewen-Campen: I think it’s designed to be confusing. But something I’ve heard my predecessor, Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven say is, even more libertarian tax people would say, “We should have a flat tax where everybody pays the same.” What we have is worse, right? Where the wealthy people pay a lower percentage of their income and wealth.

And I think whether it’s Prop 2½, or the way the capital gains are dealt with, the estate tax, corporate loopholes, offshore—there’s just a million things that when you talk to budget people about, they’re like, “This disproportionately benefits the very wealthy that are able to influence politics, basically.” There’s not a conceptual reason why you should be taxed a lot less on income you get from investments than income you get from labor.

Q: Can you say more what you mean about the tax system being regressive? My impression was that you pay a greater percentage of your income as it goes up. Is that not true?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: My understanding is that we have a very regressive tax system in Massachusetts. If you look at studies from Mass Budget, I think it comes down to the way that people make money from wages versus investment income. I’ll say that when I look at the taxes that I have to pay, it is often remarkable. I have a little bit of investment income, and it’s taxed at this tiny little rate. I don’t understand it. It makes no sense to me. It doesn’t seem fair at all. Whereas someone getting all of their income purely from labor is taxed quite heavily.

But yeah, as a basic issue, Massachusetts is an incredibly wealthy state, and we can certainly ask the wealthy to pay their fair share, and then we can fund all the stuff that we need. It sounds trite. I just think it’s true.

Q: So is the core move here just basically tax more, spend more on affordable housing? Is that the rough loop, if you were going to lay it out?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Not just affordable housing. Public goods. Mass transit, climate infrastructure.

Q: In terms of revenue sources, if we focus on Somerville—most comes from property tax, right? Plus a little bit, maybe 20%, from the state.

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Yeah. And state aid has fallen off a cliff, basically since 2008.

Q: So we’re mostly looking at proceeds from property tax, it seems like. So if we repeal Prop 2 ½, we could increase that?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Yeah. If you look at a way that a tax system is regressive, the fact that every single municipality gets all of its budget just from the property taxes there. Rich cities have a lot more money to spend on their schools and their roads than cities that are struggling. I don’t think that’s a good system.

Look, I’m not pretending that I’m going to go in there and overhaul the tax system single-handedly, day one. But just to be clear about what we’re talking about. Rich cities get to have better schools. It’s not fair.

Q: Do you think of Somerville as a rich city?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: No. But I think that it is very rapidly becoming wealthier.

Q: I think last time I checked, the median income was $130,000 a year.

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Is that the current number?

Q: I think it is. [Editor’s note: it’s actually $142,000 now.1]

Councilor Ewen-Campen: You don’t need me to say it’s changing very rapidly, right? A lot of people with a lot more income are moving to Somerville, for sure. And so a lot of the issues we face on the city council often have to do with this. I absolutely have residents who are elderly, on a fixed income, really struggling, and their property value is doubling, right? So the taxes that they pay, by state regulations, increase dramatically. That transition can be very challenging and inequitable.

Q: One thing that kind of strikes me is that while I would call Somerville a pretty wealthy community, given [the median income], it feels like there’s a lot of focus on maybe the bottom 10 to 20% of income in the city. And if we’re spending a lot on affordable housing, we’re subsidizing housing costs for people that are not nearly at $130k. But I have friends that are close to that number, in that range, and they are actually struggling, too! These are people with have good jobs who are like, “Okay, we want to buy a house now. We want to start a family,” and they’re moving elsewhere to do it. So it seems like actually, even maybe towards the middle of the income distribution, it’s still pretty tough due to how high the prices are. How do we balance the benefits of investments in housing affordability across the income spectrum, so everyone gets something, ideally? And is that a good strategy, or is it not?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Let me just say, what you said is 100% true. I know more friends than I can count who rented in Somerville for years, and then when they wanted to buy a house, there was no chance they could buy a house in Somerville, and they moved to somewhere like Malden. And now many people cannot afford to live there anymore, right? And it’s spreading and spreading.

I don’t think there is a silver bullet solution that can solve this stuff. I think we need to be doing everything we possibly can all at the same time, and it sounds like a bad answer, but it’s actually true. We need to do as much as we possibly can for people who are homeless, people who have $0. That is a critical need that the city should be investing in seriously.

Also, across the income spectrum, as you just said, there’s incredible need, and if you look at what the city of Somerville is doing, you’re seeing a reflection of all those things, right? There is, I would argue, very serious efforts to increase housing supply at all income levels. There’s also really serious investment in programs for very vulnerable, extremely low-income people. We have the municipal voucher program, which was a first in the state or country program. And because of the costs of it, it’s not available to everybody. That’s a trade-off that inherently goes into this. For every unit that we build at any income level, there’s 100 people applying for one unit.

You can sit around and feel sorry for yourself at how impossible the problem is, but we’re just trying to make as much progress as we can with the limited powers that we have. And I think the philosophy is basically true at the state level, too. We don’t control zoning at the state level. But in terms of—

Q: Some might disagree.

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Yeah. No, it’s true. There is some of that. There have been, like the MBTA Communities Act and... I do think that I often think some of the zoning fights we have in Somerville are a little bit overblown, to be honest. Just given how, by and large, people are kind of on the same page. We’re not a community of large McMansions. We’re a dense community of multi-family houses, and have been forever and continue to be.

But when you look across the state, zoning is unbelievably inequitable.

And really, there are communities that have huge lot size requirements. Single family zoning. And we all actually pay for that, right? It might feel like a decision that just one town is making, but we all, as a metropolitan area, as a county, as a state, are affected by those decisions.

Q: Because it reduces housing supply overall, and thus drives prices up?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Yeah.

Q: Speaking of zoning, how do you feel about it? Should Somerville densify its zoning? We’ve got a lot of T stops that could support a lot of people. And no parking minimums, thanks to council action, which is great. How would you feel about building a bit taller around transit stops?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: I think the honest answer would be, if you want to know my views on zoning, you should look at the Somerville zoning atlas which I voted for repeatedly. And have also voted to change a lot. But I think that’s a fairly good reflection of what I... how could I have voted for this stuff and then come say “Oh, that was stupid. We should do this...” If you want to know an incumbent, a person who was there when we passed the overhaul, I think it’s fair to “say you guys are responsible for the way the zoning currently works, and that if you’re not, you should change it”, right?

So yeah, my general view is we should have denser multi-family housing and commercial mixed use around transit. I think that the part of the city that I represent has that. There’s always good faith arguments about where did we get it wrong? Where should we increase?

I hope this doesn’t come across smarmy or something—but one of the things that’s great about being on the city council is the arguments about zoning aren’t an abstract debate of which side of the seesaw we should be on. They’re a concrete debate about specific parcels.

I remember one of the first things that happened when I joined the council, there was a property on Bow Street. It was an auto mechanic shop, and I think under the current zoning at that time, it was two townhouses maybe. But we were doing the overhaul, and there were a number of people advocating, “This is on a major street. It’s right near Union Square. This is the kind of property that should be an apartment building. It should not be a couple small townhouses with 12 parking spaces. This should be a five-story apartment building.” There was someone actually proposing a passive house apartment building, which was novel at that time. To me, that’s a no-brainer.

And then there are other situations where you have some developer buys up a house full of long-term immigrant families and asks to upzone it because they want to redevelop that. And you might get more units, but I represent these 11 families. I’m not going to randomly upzone one parcel because a developer asked and then look these people in the face. And I understand—I have other constituents who say, “No, this is a math thing. Those people one day are going to get evicted anyway, and then what have you done except the building that gets built gets a little bit smaller?” I understand the philosophical argument behind that, but I don’t agree.

Q: Imagine someone dropped a proposal for upzoning within a certain distance of transit stops–call it a quarter mile. And say we went up to six stories within that quarter mile. Do you think you’re a likely yes on that?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: I think I would have to see what that map looks like in real life. So we’re now working on Gilman Square. That’s something that the land use committee has been working on for a long time. The Broadway area around Ball Square has been actively, there are planning efforts for that. I think by the end of this year and next, there will be definitely fleshed out proposals for zoning near transit. And I can’t say what will happen with them, but I’m glad that work is happening. I anticipate that we’ll be able to get something to pass this time.

Q: Can you talk about the rent control ballot measure?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Yeah. Well, so we did a home rule petition in Somerville. This was a big priority of mine. Something that I’ve seen firsthand a lot is an existing apartment building gets bought by a new LLC. The new landlords think that they can raise the rent because they can. They went to the bank and got a mortgage to buy this thing based on the premise that they’re going to double the rent. And then they do, and people get kicked out. They’re not doing construction. They’re not building new units. That’s not the conversation at all. They’re just evicting people or displacing them. And I don’t think that’s good. I don’t see any reason for it, and I think it should be regulated against.

Q: But if they can double the rent, that means the previous landlord was choosing to have below-market rents, right?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Yeah, certainly below market. Oftentimes, these buildings were last bought in 1960. They don’t have a mortgage anymore. They want to keep their long-term tenants there, right?

Q: And so do you support the rent control ballot measure in its current form?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Yeah. I’m voting for it. To me, the only issue with rent stabilization is if it has a really serious negative effect on new construction. That’s the downside, right? And I honestly haven’t really heard an argument against it other than, “Well, but this is going to make it harder to build new housing.” I think that’s where the operative question is—what should be the exemption for new construction? Oh, I guess, what should the annual increase be? Sure. Okay. That’s arguable.

I personally think that’s a bit more of a political question than an empirical question for people. In my view, what’s the social value in raising the rent on people for no reason? I don’t get it. I don’t get the social value of that. In terms of new construction, I think the one in Somerville we exempted for 20 years. The ballot question says 10, but that’s not going to make me vote against it by any means.

Q: Do you worry at all about it disincentivizing upkeep and maintenance of the units? The current ballot question limits it to 5% or inflation, whichever is lower. So in any period where inflation’s higher than that, your real earnings as a landlord are getting degraded. Do you worry about things falling into disrepair because there’s no incentive to keep them up to date or upgrade them as time goes on?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Not meaningfully, no. I think landlords should keep up their apartments. But in terms of doing a massive upgrade that’s going to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, I think if the cost of that is that every time you do it, you have to evict the tenants, I don’t like that.

Q: Well, doing that sort of investment would become infeasible, because even if you put 100 grand in the apartment you wouldn’t be able to change the rent at all, right?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Yeah, I guess where I am on this is I don’t think you should be able to triple the rent, say, on an elderly woman. Most sympathetic case you can possibly think of. And right now you can, and that’s an active policy choice that the State House made, and I think that’s a bad choice that we should change and regulate against. And, like every policy, there will be consequences of that decision, but we’re living with the consequences of it now, which is just massive displacement of tenants.

Q: What lets a landlord triple rent on somebody? Why is that possible, other than no rent control? Why not 100x?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: I think you’re asking, can they find someone to pay triple X? Is there a market for that? Of course.

Q: Yeah, exactly. I’m thinking about market forces, basically.

Councilor Ewen-Campen: The fact that there is someone willing to pay a lot more does not mean, to me, that you should kick someone out of their house.

Q: Yeah. I guess the thing I’m getting to sort of obliquely is the thing that I think gives landlords pricing power is lack of supply.

Councilor Ewen-Campen: I know you think that. [both laugh]

Q: Do you not think that? Or do you think it’s more nuanced than that or something?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Well, I think that’s coupled with also massive income inequality. So yeah, of course, absolutely, supply is a part of this. I literally have constituents who make $1 million a year. They can pay whatever the fuck they want. Come on. I don’t think we should, because of that fact, say to everyone who currently has a house for a lot less, “You’re out.”

This conversation, it’s less abstract when you just literally know these people who have been evicted for no fucking reason. I actually have friends who are landlords, and when they’ll post an apartment for below market, they’ll get harassed by other landlords.

So yes, of course. There’s obviously way more people that want to rent, especially at lower rents, than there are apartments. No disagreement about that. I think the question is, human being, should you be able to evict, whatever, a family with the kids in school because you want more money? And the reason you want the more money is because it’s your job to be a landlord. I don’t care. That’s where I land.

Q: Selfish question. How’s the School Street Community Path crossing looking?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: It is not happening fast enough, that’s for sure. I’ve been really concerned about that intersection for a long time. The city is advancing a plan. It’s taken a really long time. I spend a lot of my time explaining to the public why things take a long time. It doesn’t mean that I like it or accept it. It’s really, really frustrating. I do happen to know that they’re prioritizing it. It’s a big deal for them, too. We’re constantly in triage mode.

But yes, some Robin Hood figure was putting up these mirrors that really helped the visibility, and they keep getting taken down. [Editor’s note: I put the mirrors up.]

I have confirmed that it’s not the city [taking them down].

Q: How will you feel if you end up leaving office before Highland Ave gets repaved?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: Very angry. Very sad. Well, it’s not the repaving, right? It’s the redesign with a bike lane and good sidewalks. This has been something that the mayor’s office promised to the community in 2019. It’s just incredibly frustrating to me that it’s been kicked down the road this long. I do know the cost is significant. It’s not a cheap thing to do. It’s not like put out some flex posts. It’s a full rebuild of a long street. And the fiscal situation for the city, for every city, is really, really tough right now. So this is not like, “Oh, the mayor’s scared to do it.”

Q: It’s a funding thing mostly?

Councilor Ewen-Campen: 100%. And I acknowledge that. But if I’m lucky enough to win this seat, if my successor or their successor doesn’t support Highland Ave, I will drop everything and run again.

The System That Works

Since 1985, Somerville enacted its Historic Districts Ordinance, which let it create Local Historic Districts. These are specific properties (usually just one home, despite the name) that the city has determined are historically significant enough to warrant protection.

Each designation goes through an involved process:

1. A study committee investigates the property and prepares a report.

2. The report is sent to The Planning Board and the Massachusetts Historical Commission to weigh in.

3. A public hearing is held.

4. The City Council must approve the designation by a two-thirds supermajority.

A supermajority is a very high bar (you can pass a new ordinance with just a majority!), but this is an appropriate requirement. Designating a property as historic imposes meaningful restrictions and costs on private property. The city can and has designated properties as historic against the wishes of their owners. Actions such as these should require significant oversight and broad agreement across the Council.

Despite the high bar, Somerville has used this process to designate 432 locations in the city as historic.

The System That Needs Reform

In 2020, Somerville passed the first version of its Demolition Review Ordinance.

This law requires any building more than 75 years old to be reviewed by the Historic Preservation Commission before it can be demolished or have its exterior substantially altered.

Unfortunately, the choice of 75 years as an automatic cutoff isn’t very sensible in our city: ~91% of Somerville’s buildings are more than 75 years old1.

When a rule captures that much of the city’s building stock, it is no longer functioning as a focused preservation measure, but as a blanket permitting obstacle. And unlike the Local Historic District process, this obstacle can be imposed without state input or City Council oversight.

If the HPC does determine that the building is historically significant (which it can do with very broad latitude), it can impose a demolition delay of up to 18 months.

This extreme delay and its associated costs amount to a backdoor ban on demolishing the building, but without the due process required to have something marked as an Historic District.

We can do better.

Three Proposed Reforms

1. Replace the Age Threshold with a Fixed Date: Pre-1900

The current 75-year threshold captures 91% of Somerville’s buildings. Limiting review to buildings constructed before 1900 drops the figure to about 14%.

This change would dramatically narrow the scope of automatic review, while retaining the Local Historic District process for preserving significant buildings regardless of age.

And unlike a rolling age threshold, a fixed date doesn’t gradually swallow more of the city’s housing stock with each passing year.

2. Reduce the Demolition Delay from 18 Months to 6 Months

Half a year is time enough for the Commission and the property owner to have a genuine conversation about alternatives to demolition. Eighteen months is punitive.

If a building is important enough to merit permanent protection, the city already has a mechanism for that: Local Historic District designation. Demolition review should not function as a year-and-a-half penalty box.

3. Create a Categorical Exemption for Projects That Add Housing

If a proposed project results in a net increase in dwelling units, we should consider exempting the project from review entirely.

This is a strong action, but something I think should be on the table during declared housing emergencies (which we are currently in!).

Preserve the Real Thing, Reform the Dragnet

None of these reforms would affect Somerville’s Local Historic District protections. The 400+ individually designated historic properties in the city would continue to receive the same protections they have today, with the option to carefully add more.

We should rely on that better tool for preservation, and reform the messier one so it blocks less housing.

Here, I'll suggest three specific changes that Somerville (which has already formally declared a housing emergency) could implement to meaningfully alleviate our crisis.

These proposals involve real trade-offs! Under normal circumstances, each of the laws I suggest modifying serve legitimate purposes. But when a housing emergency has been declared and rents have risen over 20% in the seven years since, we have to ask whether these policies are doing more harm than good in the current moment. Like any emergency response, the goal is to act decisively now and restore normal operations once the crisis has passed.

Somerville isn't alone in grappling with this question. In New York, democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has filled his housing team with pro-development advocates and is pushing to cut regulations that slow construction. In Los Angeles, DSA-endorsed City Councilmember Nithya Raman is running for mayor on an explicitly YIMBY platform, arguing that even well-intentioned policies like L.A.'s mansion tax have "unintentionally stalled housing production." The emerging consensus across the political spectrum is that when people can't find homes, removing barriers to building shouldn’t be thought of as a concession to developers, but a smart, progressive action.

1. Reduce the Inclusionary Zoning Percentage

Somerville’s inclusionary zoning (IZ) ordinance requires that 20% of units in new developments larger than three units be offered at below-market rates. This can make otherwise viable projects unprofitable, and thus unbuildable.

This recent UCLA paper found that an inclusionary zoning percentage of just 17% reduced the production of market-rate housing by 49%. This is the sort of headwind that is hard to stomach when we have legally declared a housing emergency.

More locally, Somerville commissioned a Financial Feasibility Analysis which was delivered in June 2025. It showed that while the most in-demand area of the city could support 20% IZ, the other four-fifths of it needed levels of 10%-13%, 8%, or even lower, depending on their price dynamics. RKG (the report’s authors) interviewed numerous city staff and local developers at a cost of $60,000 to the city. I think we should bias strongly toward implementing their suggestions!

Keep in mind that infeasibly-high IZ requirements don’t just mean that market-rate housing isn’t being built. When inclusionary requirements reduce housing production, this includes affordable units. As the saying goes: 20% of zero is zero.

During this emergency period, Somerville should consider temporarily reducing its inclusionary zoning percentage. This calibration would likely make numerous marginal projects financially feasible, resulting in more total housing (both market-rate and affordable) being built throughout the city.

2. Eliminate Community Benefits Agreements as a Pre-requisite for Re-zoning

Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) are city-sanctioned tools enabling residents to negotiate concessions from real estate developers to mitigate the negative impacts of development.

The recent CBA negotiated for the Somernova project imposed 17 pages of requirements on its developer, including:

• Donating $500,000 to the Somerville Community Land Trust (a non-profit that buys properties and sells or rents them at below-market rates)

• Donating $250,000 to Union Square Main Streets (a local business association)

• Donating $375,000 to the First Source Jobs Program (a non-profit program that helps people find jobs)

These donations alone exceed $1M, but additional requirements (like setting aside 100,000 square feet of art space), will almost certainly cost substantially more in lost rent (one estimate put the cost of this benefit at $50M).

This is a heavy cost to bear, and the uncertainty and slowness of the process presents a major roadblock to development.

While CBAs are technically optional in Somerville, they very much function as de facto requirements. City Councilors (and our current Mayor) have publicly stated that their votes on the Somernova re-zoning hinged on whether a CBA was successfully negotiated.

The underlying assumption of CBAs (that housing itself isn't a sufficient community benefit) becomes particularly problematic during a housing emergency. When people are struggling to find homes, the community benefit is the housing itself. Each month spent negotiating CBAs is another month of rising rents and displaced residents.

3. Suspend Demolition Reviews

Currently, demolishing any Somerville building older than 75 years requires approval from the Historical Preservation Commission (HPC). This seemingly reasonable policy becomes problematic when you consider that 94% of Somerville's buildings exceed this age threshold1. The assumption that “old” and “historically significant” are likely the same simply does not hold in Somerville.

The HPC can (and often does) designate buildings as “preferably preserved”, imposing up to 18-month demolition delays.

Developers report that these delays (and even the threat of them!) render projects financially unviable before they even begin. And, in the end, these delays don’t necessarily stop the demolition, they just delay it.

Historical preservation is a worthy goal, but it shouldn't take precedence during a housing emergency.

A temporary suspension of demolition reviews would remove a significant obstacle to addressing the immediate crisis.

Temporary Measures for Extraordinary Times

Seven years ago, the Somerville City Council voted 10-1 to declare a housing emergency, and Mayor Curtatone signed it into law.

The fact of the emergency is literally in our book of law.

The fire alarm has been pulled! A klaxon wails away in our municipal code.

So where are the trucks?

Since 2019, the median rent for a 2BR apartment has increased over 20%2. Despite the alarm sounding for 6 years, the fire has only gotten bigger. We must conclude that the actions taken so far by our government have not been sufficient.

No one wants to have their home flooded with thousands of gallons of water. It couldn’t be further from how you want to live every day. But when your house is on fire, it’s exactly what must be done to return to normalcy.

By implementing these changes for the duration of the declared housing emergency, we can dramatically accelerate housing production while maintaining the principle that these are extraordinary measures for extraordinary times.

After housing supply is rushed to the market, and the emergency declaration has been repealed, we can all celebrate the return to business as usual.

I very much look forward to that day.

The information was by no means secret: it’s available in the video and minutes the city publishes for each meeting. However, the videos are long (3 hours+), the minutes have a lot of noise, and in practice I found it just annoying enough to peruse them that I tended to not do it.

I realized what I wanted was a skimmable summary of each meeting sent to my inbox. So I built it!

This free tool watches for new meeting videos, extracts a transcript, summarizes the important bits, and emails out a digest.

So far, I’m finding it to be a very handy way to stay abreast of what’s happening without investing a ton of time.

It costs money to run this tool, but I’ve decided to provide it for free as a service to the city that I love. I hope you find it useful! And if you have ideas for making it even better, please get in touch.

This conversation was recorded in June, 2025, shortly after announcing her plans to step down from the Council.

Highlights from the Conversation

Housing and development

• How she handled the Mystic Valley Parkway rezoning, gathered feedback, secured additional community benefits, and ultimately overrode the Planning Board.

• Strong support for taller buildings near transit, including six story buildings in Ward 7.

• Views on the proposed 25 story Copper Mill project and the role of neighborhood councils in shaping major developments.

• The tension between urgent housing needs and the slow reality of community benefits agreements and public process.

The housing emergency beyond production

• Rent stabilization blocked at the state level.

• Challenges created by lead law requirements, eviction protections, and a lack of accessible and family sized units.

Council dynamics

• Which colleagues excel at constituent services.

• How antagonistic questioning during budget season harms relationships with staff.

• Her analysis showing that women and people of color in department head roles faced more scrutiny.

Structural issues in city government

• The council role has effectively become full time as resident engagement has increased.

• Why Somerville should consider full time council positions or at least dedicated staff support.

Citywide challenges

• Budget constraints, slower commercial growth, a hiring freeze, and uncertainty around a federal funding lawsuit.

• Water and sewer rate increases tied to long term infrastructure needs.

Looking forward

• Pride in advancing Clarendon Hill, language access work, and improved community engagement practices.

• She is stepping away from elected office but plans to remain active in Somerville civic life.

I’m very pleased with how it went!

One benefit of co-producing the debate with the Somerville Media Center is that they recorded and speedily released this very nice video:

Reflections

Rules

As moderator, my first responsibility was determining the rules we’d use.

I got a decent first draft from ChatGPT, though I probably spent about 4 more hours refining them. When I was happy with the rules, I had Claude Code turn them into some pleasant-looking html and published them on my personal website.

I didn’t want to have to remember whose turn it was to answer first, so I brought a printed copy of the run of show, and checked the candidate’s name after each of their responses on this table:

This worked great for easing my cognitive load, and gave me something useful to do with my hands.

Questions

Another critical duty was generating the debate questions.

I have to say I think I nailed this 😄.

I went a little bit bold with my questions. Once or twice I heard near-gasps from the audience, and I could often feel a bit of frisson in the room. I got a great laugh at one point, too. I think I achieved my goal of being a bit pointed, but not needlessly provocative.

To generate my question bank, I asked Claude and ChatGPT with their Research modes on to dig into this year’s Somerville news coverage and generate 40 possible debate questions. Most were pretty terrible, but there were a few gems in there. Out of the 80 generated questions, approximately four made it to the debate. I massaged the language on all four at least a little.

I also solicited ideas for questions from readers of this blog, though I don’t think I ended up using any of them.

The remaining questions came straight from my dome.

You can see the final list here.

Imperfections

Overall, I feel like I pretty much nailed it. I’d give myself a 95%.

Two things cost me those last 5 points:

1. I didn’t do a dry run with actual humans. There was a rules question that came up during the debate that I definitely would have already resolved if I’d actually tried running a few questions with people. I’m happy with the call I made under pressure, but the blip was avoidable. This was one of the few pieces of Daniel Golliher’s advice that I didn’t take, and I wish I had.

2. At one point, Councilor Burnley mentioned that I had donated hundreds of dollars to Councilor Wilson’s campaign. I decided to respond immediately after his statement, clarifying that I had made a donation, but subsequently asked Councilor Wilson to refund it, which he had. I’m glad I responded in the moment, and think I handled it fairly well. However, I wish I’d also mentioned that I made that donation before I knew how I intended to engage with Somerville politics, and asked Wilson to refund it once I realized I might conceivably end up moderating a mayoral debate.

Celebrations

Nine months ago, I had no connection to Somerville politics.

Last night, I stood on stage with both mayoral candidates and asked tough questions so Somerville’s residents can determine who they want to govern them.

This project almost died several times. I spent a lot of time unsure if it would happen at all. But it did! And we nailed it. And that feels awesome.

Thanks so much to Joe Lynch and Sean Effel from the Somerville Media Center, Daniel Golliher, and Joel Sutherland. It wouldn’t have been nearly as good without you.

The Somerville Media Center and this publication are co-producing this event, which will also feature At-Large City Council candidates.

As a Somerville resident, I have plenty of topics in mind, but I want to hear from you: what should I ask the future Mayor of Somerville? Please comment below!

You’ll go from a curious citizen to someone with real fluency in how the city operates. By the end, you’ll be in the ~85th percentile of local government knowledge and be much more effective at accomplishing your political or civic goals.

📚 Course Details

• Instructor: Me, Ben Orenstein

• Dates: 4 weeks, 7/1–7/22

• Time: Tuesdays, 7–9pm, plus a City Council meeting on 7/24 (possibly canceled due to their summer recess).

• Location: Maxwell’s Green, Somerville

• Class Size: Up to 15.

• Cost: $50

• Application: Apply Now

• Questions? Email me: ben@benorenstein.com

🧠 Topics Covered

We’ll dig into how local laws are passed, the powers of the City Council and Mayor, how zoning works, our housing emergency, and much more. We’ll also attend a City Council meeting together to witness government in action (hopefully–the meeting I’d hoped we’d attend may be canceled due to the Council going on summer recess).

For more likely topics, see the draft curriculum →

✍️ How to Apply

Applications are open now! The deadline to apply is June 23rd.

👉 Apply Here

🌱 Part of Fractal University Boston

This class is part of Fractal University Boston, a summer experiment where friends and I are each teaching small, high-quality courses on things we care deeply about (like Chakra-Inspired Yoga, Vibe-Coding for Non-Technical Folks, and Pencil Portraiture).

Check out the full list of courses here:

👉 Summer 2025 Course Catalog

With just a little effort, we gave folks a way to see around this formerly-blind corner. It felt great to do, and feedback from fellow Somerville residents has been extremely positive.

I’m pleased with what we accomplished with such a small intervention. The mirror definitely helps! However, the School Street crossing is still dangerous. (For details of why it’s dangerous and how it came to be this way, see this video I recorded a few days before installing the mirror).

And thus, we are not done.

On Wednesday June 18th, 2025 at 7pm, I’ll be hosting the first meeting of a group of citizens who are organizing to get the School Street crossing fixed for good.

(It’s gonna be a whole thing–I’m already expecting 15 folks!)

This project won’t be easy, but the current design is widely used, unambiguously dangerous, and deeply unpopular. I think we’ve got a real shot at getting a significant change pushed through.

If you’re willing to help tackle this project, please read the event guidelines and RSVP.

Together, we can turn this dangerous intersection into something that actually works for everyone.