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.

If you’re a legislator who is serious about solving your city’s housing shortage, consider writing an automatic response system into your law.

Here’s how: pass an ordinance that defines when a shortage has become severe, unlocks temporary tools to accelerate housing construction, and automatically shuts those tools off once the shortage ends.

In other words: treat housing the way we treat other critical systems. If the power grid goes down, we don’t form a task force to study the pros and cons of repair, we aggressively work to restore it.

Here’s what your ordinance might look like:

1. Define the shortage

First, pick a metric. You need a clear signal that your city doesn’t have enough homes and that it’s time to act.

New York City uses a 5% vacancy rate as its benchmark: when vacancy falls below that, a housing emergency is declared. That’s not a bad starting point. Choose a number that makes sense for your city, and define who will measure it (perhaps a city department or a local university).

To avoid overreacting to blips, you might require two consecutive quarters of low vacancy before the ordinance kicks in.

2. Define your temporary tools

When a city falls into a housing shortage, it needs to move fast. Rules designed for stable times (lengthy planning processes, restrictive zoning, historical reviews) become untenable when there aren’t enough places to live.

Consider having your ordinance temporarily suspend or override those bottlenecks.

You might include:

• By-right approval for housing that meets basic criteria

• Expedited environmental and historical review

• Waivers or reductions of parking minimums, height limits, and other blockers

• Fast-tracked infrastructure upgrades for projects that add housing

• Lower permit and linkage fees to encourage development

• Shortened or removed public comment windows

• Automatic conversion approval for commercial to residential use

In short: take the shortage seriously and prioritize ending it above your normal concerns.

3. Define when the shortage ends

Once the vacancy rate returns to a healthy level — say, above 5% for two quarters — your emergency-style measures shut off automatically.

Why this works

It’s clear

Everyone knows what counts as a housing shortage. No endless debate. Either the numbers say we’re short on housing, or they don’t.

It’s fast

Instead of waiting for someone to “do something,” the response is automatic. The second the shortage hits the trigger, the housing flywheel starts spinning.

It aligns incentives

If city agencies or local commissions know they’ll lose power during a shortage, they’ll have every reason to speed up approvals and fix problems before the trigger hits.

It ends itself

Once the shortage resolves, the rules return to normal. No need for political courage or legislative clean-up.

In summary

If you want to solve a housing shortage, build a system that:

• Knows when it’s in one

• Equips itself to respond

• And knows when to stop

In a future post, I’ll share some specific policy tools Somerville could activate to pull itself out of our current housing shortage.

This post is a lightly-edited transcript from an in-person interview. If you’d like to confirm an exact quotation or simply prefer the unedited content, please reference the original audio.

What is a realistic but ambitious single achievement that, if accomplished, would make your term feel like a success?

Initiating an unarmed emergency response program for the first time in Somerville.

I think it's really important that members of our community who do not feel comfortable having interactions with the police or contacting the police, but want to support their neighbors or want to receive support when they're experiencing crises, have a number to call, have a tool in the toolbox. We can create a program where someone can call, maybe it's 911, maybe it's a different number that we create some kind of shortcut to, in order to send a team of peer support specialists, social workers, people who come from the same communities that they would be supporting, in order to deescalate and bring people the resources they need rather than subject them to the threat of violence or incarceration.

This is something I'm really passionate about, and it is incredibly important, I think, for public safety and transforming our understanding of public safety, and reaffirming for folks the values that I think most residents have, which is that we make each other safe.

The community makes each other safe. It does us no good to turn on one another and to try to dispose of or displace folks who are here, whether they're unhoused, whether they suffer from mental health crises or substance use disorder crises, or whether they're just neighbors who are having a bad day.

How do you determine who responds to a call? Should the caller decide? The dispatcher?

It's a little bit of all of those things. There are calls where I think legally we would have to send the police.

I think that would be the case just based on if there's a report of someone brandishing a weapon. We, at the very least, would need to work our way up to that. This is a program that we want to start really strong, but with the expectation that it can't solve everything out of the gate.

These folks are gonna need a lot of training, a lot of support from different departments. Thankfully, we've seen examples of this throughout the commonwealth. There was a presentation that was done in Somerville Public Health and Public Safety Committee about two years ago, where we had experts from cities across the commonwealth who had programs like this already, to talk to us about the different models that exist, the different ways of funding, the different ways that they can interact with the public. But things like this have been happening in the United States for decades. Colorado has the STAR program (Support Team Assisted Response), Eugene, Oregon has a program, Cambridge has Cambridge HEART (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team), Northampton has had a program.

We were on the cutting edge of this conversation five years ago, and now we've fallen behind. And that's a place I do not want to see Somerville.

Would it make sense to train the existing police force in deescalation and responding to these kind of situations?

Some of them have taken some trainings on this, but it fundamentally does not change their role or the threat that they present to members of the public.

Whether you have the nicest police officer in the world or the meanest police officer in the world, if they're holding a badge and a gun, or handcuffs and gun, for a lot of people, that is going to be terrifying. And if they're already having an incredibly stressful experience, it is unlikely to me that everyone is going to come out of that engagement or interaction feeling calmer.

When you have peer support specialists, people who are from the community or who have engaged with particular populations very deeply, you get far better results. For example, when you have someone who's been unhoused as the ambassador to the unhoused community, and who can help deal with disputes and who can help get people away from conflicts and into spaces where they can be safe and provide safety for everyone around them. It's just a much more effective means of getting them the resources and then having them take advantage of programs. If you get a cop who says, "You gotta go to rehab," that might not stick because you're being forced to at threat of arrest, potentially. When you have someone who you've built a relationship with, who's a friend, I think that's just better for us all.

In 2020, did you create a group called Defund Somerville Police?

Yes, I was one of the founders.

Do you still feel like we should defund the police?

Yes. I think that defund was always a movement about the construction of the world we want to live in and the deconstruction of the systems that currently exist.

It wasn't just a call to say, "If you take this money out, then everything's okay." No serious activist or organizer had the opinion that, "Oh, if we just remove all the money from the police department, crime stops," or life becomes fully less stressful for everybody.

It was about saying how do we get to the root causes of crises in our community from a public health perspective, from a mental health perspective, and knowing that a lot of that is rooted in an allocation of resources that is not equitable.

How do you rebalance those scales so that someone isn't feeling so much despair about their own lived reality that they seek support through hard drugs or that they don't feel the need to do something violent in order to get enough money to pay a bill or get food for somebody. There are ways that we can do that, and in 2020, in particular when we founded it, it was because of the threat of COVID cuts. Mayor Curtatone at the time had a preliminary budget where he said, "We're gonna get all these cuts. We have to make some tough decisions. We're gonna take like 25% from Health and Human Services. We're gonna take like 18% from Economic Development, and we're gonna take maybe 2% from police."

At the time when everybody was getting sick and losing their jobs, there were also cuts to housing, and people were losing their housing. It made no sense to us in the community that we would decimate those departments, including Office of Housing Stability, which was fairly new at the time. It was three years old at the time.

We would decimate those departments only to leave one of the largest source of our municipal funds, which for many of us does not feel that it is enhancing our health, totally unchanged.

So what we did is we got, as a community, we moved the council and the mayor to take over a million dollars out of that department and it got put into rental assistance, it got put into food assistance, it got put into two youth specialists, two bilingual youth specialists for our public high school students.

If you ask me if I think that was worth it, moving that money out of the police department and paying for people's food and housing and mental health supports, I would say absolutely.

And I think that is the direction we should be doubling down on.

As mayor, you’d certainly have the option to double down when you proposed the budget, right?

I think at this stage, we're going back to the previous conversation we just had, we're at the stage where it's not just about what we can take away from one department, but what we're trying to build up.

The alternative emergency response program is a program and institution, potentially a department even, that we could be investing in, to deal with a host of issues that do not require the police to solve.

Unfortunately, because of the way society has evolved, the police have a near monopoly on those situations currently.

So my overall strategy would be about what institutions can we build to take that load off of that department.

If there are only certain things that we have the capacity for them to do at this point, that's what they should focus on. They shouldn't be the only people who can do civilian flagging for roads and when there's construction, or monitor that, or all these things that don't require you to have the kind of training that police have.

So we should expect a Burnley administration to propose a budget that includes an unarmed response force in the first draft?

I would hope so. There is a complication that when you're elected mayor, you get in in January and the budget's due a couple of months later.

The budget's a massive project that takes an all hands on deck approach for the city. Every department obviously has a role in pitching what they want. Some of their needs are sometimes conflicting. It's a tricky thing to balance and to change direction for a ship that is so massive as a city.

But it would be one of my top goals. In addition to so many other community initiatives that we've been asked for over a number of years that have been delayed or simply denied during this administration.

What are your thoughts on the Copper Mill project? What about towers in Davis Square generally?

The way I look at pretty much all development in the city is based on what concessions are we receiving as a community, particularly for-profit developments.

What concessions are we receiving as a city? What engagement have they had with the community and the neighbors in particular, and especially through neighborhood councils which I am an advocate for, and I think we should be having more of them throughout the city because one of the things that I see in Somerville's future, and knowing some of the development plans we have currently, Somerville is changing, and it will continue to change. We cannot be a community that is stagnant. A city is a living, breathing thing. And in nature, when you don't adapt, you die. So the question to me is not are we gonna have development? It is what kind of development we're going to have and what can we receive as a community to make it worth it for us?

In terms of the Copper Mill project, in terms of the numbers of units, the numbers themselves don't worry me. Frankly, the height doesn't worry me that much either.

I've been to some of the meetings. I know that for a lot of people, the height is quite scary. It bumps up against their view of what the culture and character of the square is.

I have seen and heard from the Davis Square Neighborhood Council, which is still in formation, that the developers have been willing to make a lot of concessions, from moving the front entrance of the building, which is quite a big task to do in terms of how it changes overall plans and traffic impacts, to having a setback on the building, so it's not actually on the sidewalk. It's actually further away from the street, so it doesn't cast as much of a shadow on the street.

They've also been trying to work with local businesses. One of the things I did after that meeting is I connected the developers with the owner of Narrative Bookstore, because they had proposed a set of businesses that they would like to house on the retail level of their proposal, trying to keep the same type of businesses that exist, and ideally, the same exact businesses. But some of those businesses chose or are choosing not to return, if this project goes through.

So I want to make sure that we are not hurting existing businesses by trying to replace them with outside forces. I think we're still very early in that process. But I am hopeful that we can actually find a path forward for this project that doesn't harm the cultural gems of Davis Square.

They offered the city two free commercial spaces to use, which from my perspective as mayor there are so many things that we could be using those spaces for. That could be the space for a teen center. That could be a space for dealing with our public health in a much more robust way, in the city by using that as a space where people can go directly and receive the supports that they need. Because we're frankly at a loss for space for staff at the moment. We have plans around it, but we're still a while away from actually having enough space for our own staff and for all the programming that we need and that our residents demand.

Given that the developer seems to be very willing to accommodate community requests and the Neighborhood Council seems to be appreciative of that, if you took an up or down vote today, do you think you're in favor of Copper Mill going forward?

I wouldn't take an up or down vote today.

Which, as a councilor, I have the power to do. If the council gets something, and I don't want this to come off as a dodge, but if something comes before the council and we're not ready, we do have the power, legally, to push it off for at least two weeks using our charter right. If the mayor were to try to speed roll this through, I would say no, because we need a CBA in place. We do not have one, a Community Benefits Agreement, from the Neighborhood Council. They might be supportive in theory, but I want to see neighbors be able to directly negotiate with developers and have legally binding contracts so that we can say, as a community, "Look, we fought for this. We have agreements that we're gonna hold this developer accountable to. And we will only move forward when we know that our community is supportive of the direction we're growing in."

They've also agreed to a Project Labor Agreement, which is frankly, a huge thing. Because it's something that is often the make or break piece for these kind of decisions for the city. And it does add some cost to the project overall. But I would want to see all these things in writing first, before giving an up or down vote.

I've also been in contact with the owner of The Burren. I want to keep engaging with him to make sure that we're not losing one of the staples of the Square in an attempt to make it better for everyone.

Are we in a housing emergency currently?

Absolutely.

Are we building enough housing to get out of it? Would you support building more? How do we exit the housing crisis?

As the only renter in this race, and as someone who has been displaced from Somerville due to rising rents, and not only was forced to leave the city of Somerville but the state of Massachusetts when it happened to me, I take the housing instability of our neighbors incredibly seriously.

Probably more than any other fear or worry that I've been told about since I've become a councilor, the number one is, "I don't know if I'll be here next year. I don't know if in a couple months I'm gonna be able to sign my lease again. I think my landlord is gonna flip my house. I don't know where I'm gonna go." Things like this have become endemic to the story of Somerville.

I think it is incredibly important that we have leaders who not only say the right things on these issues, and frankly not even have lived these experiences, which I certainly have, but have a track record of doing as much they can to keep the folks who are here, who want to be here, able to afford this community.

We do have a housing crisis, but it is kind of a misnomer, because we have a housing crisis with many units that are not actually being put to use to house the people who live here.

We have many units that are just, frankly, far beyond the means of the people who live here to afford, including myself.

That's why the first law I put in place as a councilor was a tenant protection law that would let every tenant know their right when they moved into a unit in Somerville.

And it's why we just passed at our last meeting a home rule petition to [make landlords pay their own] broker fees, so that we're not adding an additional $800, if you're like me, with several roommates, or $3,000, $3,500, to the initial cost of moving in or staying in a community. So before I even get to the supply and demand of it all, I certainly believe that we need to have a mayor who is incredibly focused on making sure that middle and low income residents aren't just pushed out so that we can be more attractive to folks who can afford more expensive housing.

Now, how do we do that? Part of that strategy needs to be doubling down in our efforts to support this Community Land Trust. We certainly work with them, and I've certainly worked with them and been supportive of them since their inception. And on the project that they're working on now, at 297 Medford Street, which is an all-affordable unit, as proposed, an all-affordable building, which I think we need more of, frankly, if possible.

I would love to see us move more in the direction of more permanently affordable housing, housing that takes use of municipal spaces, municipal lots, partnerships with the Land Trust, partnerships with Just-A-Start, one of our incredible not-for-profit developers in this region, to make sure that we are, yes, creating more units, but that they are either all affordable or that the affordable units involved are deeply affordable, because the affordable housing that we have, many people note, is not affordable for most people.

We need to actually see stuff that's not just 80% of area median income, but more like 50%, 60%, 30%. I've had conversations with developers when they come before us to speak about housing to say, "I want to see that full range and not just the bare minimum of what is legally considered affordable."

How do we get more of that? Is constructing more deeply affordable units the path out of the housing shortage that we're facing? Or is there another root of it?

It's kind of a related problem.

For the folks who are here who can't afford the housing that's being offered, we need this for them. We need to be able to say, "We're not just gonna create..." My colleague, JT Scott, always wants to make this analogy around housing where it's like, if people can afford a car and you just make a bunch more Bugattis, it doesn't actually help them afford a car more.

You might be able to say, "Yeah, the cost of Bugattis went down." But if I'm poor, I still can't afford it.

So yes, for the folks who are here who are getting pushed out, I absolutely think we need more deeply affordable housing. And part of that, and something I think I'm in a particular position to do, is through the leadership of the mayor, through making sure that Somerville is open for business, but making sure that anyone who wants to come and play in our playground has to play by our rules.

There have been a number of reports and studies and surveys that have said Union Square is one of the best neighborhoods in the country. And obviously there's a lot of development that's happening in Union Square, but there are a lot of other parts of our community that want that development. I think it takes someone who has the media training or the ability to communicate with the press effectively, to really shine a light on those other spaces so that we take some of that energy that's been focused at spaces like Union and Davis for so long and actually spread it throughout our more minor squares that I would like to see some of that.

As someone who lives in Magoun, I'm not saying I want to drop a massive development there. But I know it's coming. And I know that in order to direct that energy and influx of finances effectively, we actually need to be having leaders who can build bridges and connect the pieces that have fallen to the wayside.

The median household income in Somerville is $130,000. As a community, we're relatively affluent. But my sense is that rent is feeling less affordable for folks across the income spectrum. How we might try to address rent increases affecting a wide range of Somerville residents?

When I first ran for council, one of the things I did was look at the economic demographics of the city as well, over a span of about ten years. And you could see how the number of people who made over $200,000 in the city had went up in that time.

And how the number of people who made less than $60,000 went down.

I don't think it's because the people who were making 60 suddenly started making 200. Part of the reason that median has trended up is not just because people are making more money. It's because we've pushed out the people who don't have as much.

I think that is one of the saddest shames of growth that this city has had and it's something that a lot of members of this community, particularly in East Somerville and Winter Hill, remember well. When I knock doors in those neighborhoods, the feelings they have about places like Assembly and the growing sentiment for folks around Union around development, is deeply tied to the fact that their rents have skyrocketed and a lot of the folks who were their neighbors, who were business owners, who were core parts of their neighborhood are not there anymore.

So knowing that Somerville has its roots as a working class community, I hear that number and I think there's some positives to it, but there's a sad story that is attached to that figure.

Another piece of it is, when you're a homeowner and you have a mortgage, the cost of housing shifts is just a very different thing for you. Because having a mortgage is essentially having rent control. So for about a third of our community, they already have rent control.

And I'm very happy for them. I just wish I had it too. And that's another thing that I would continue to fight for as mayor. I think in the next few years, we're gonna have to start talking again about statewide referendum on that issue. Because from my perspective, that's the only way we would get rent control back as it currently stands.

But I also am a fan of missing middle, of course.

What do you think about the recent citywide upzoning that Cambridge passed? Is that something that would be good here in Somerville do you think?

I think it's good. I have a little bit of competitiveness with Cambridge. I'm a fan of some of the initiatives that they do and I'm certainly friends with some of my counterparts on their council. We have some of that already. I'm not saying we don't need it, I'm just saying. I don't see it as impressive. We're not that far behind them on that.

But certainly, I am very much looking forward to leapfrogging them on this.

I don't think that our residents want to have Kendall Squares in Somerville, or to become Cambridge. That is not my goal. However, there are certainly improvements we need to be making on our zoning.

Both from a size and density perspective, but also around accessibility.

I want to make sure that we're having more accessible housing in this community because one of the facts of life is that we're all getting older. And because of geography and because of a lack of investment and because of some restrictions, Somerville is a deeply inaccessible community for a lot of people.

So would you support a city-wide upzoning to four stories, with two more allowed if the units are affordable?

Sure, yeah.

The only reason I think I haven't personally made more moves on that is because I know that there are organizations that are trying to build out that zoning, such as Somerville YIMBY, and work with the council to present it and get it through. I think that will happen this year.

I don't want to just come in as one person with a lot of good ideas but just by myself and say, "I'm going to reimagine all of our zoning by myself."

I want to wait until advocates who've been invested in these processes and issues for a long time came to us and said, "This is what we want to see."

But if Somerville YIMBY came to you and said, "Here's our plan for four-plus-two citywide upzoning", you think you're probably on board with that?

In general, yes, absolutely.

Is the root of the housing problem a lack of supply, that we're not building enough housing? Or something else?

This is where my socialism comes in. I don't think this is as simple as supply and demand.

I think it's a part of it. But I do not trust the market to get us out of this problem. The market got us here. We don't have people who are unhoused and people who are paying 50 or more percent of their income into rent because there's not enough housing. We have those problems because people make money from that. It is to someone's benefit that there are people in our community that do not have a place to sleep at night.

It is a sad reality of capitalism that there are people who actually benefit from that.

What's our biggest problem after housing?

I think we need leaders right now who are going to make sure that people can find some semblance of economic stability in this moment. The world we're living in is chaos personified. It feels like to me and to a lot of folks right now, particularly on the national level, but the impacts of that locally are many fold.

Particularly for our schools, and for the future of our climate resiliency, because a lot of the funding, or a significant portion of that funding comes from the federal government, and from the state, which gets it from the federal government. As a councilor, I found ways to try to support our local businesses by cutting regulations that I found, or suspending, technically, regulations that I found overly and unnecessarily cumbersome in the financial sense.

As a mayor, I would love to do a reevaluation of a lot of our permit and licensing fees. When I got the tattoo licensing fees suspended, the reason that they wouldn't, that I was given, that the Board of Health wouldn't just make them closer to the equivalent fees in Boston or Cambridge or Salem, is because they wanted to do a wholesale reenacting. They didn't want to just say, "We're gonna take this one business industry and give them special treatment." Problem is, it's been three years and they haven't done that.

I think the city forgot. I don't completely blame them but we are sorely overdue a look at broad spectrum all of our businesses and how we're engaging with them through the permitting process and what kind of fees that we're recouping from them.

As a means of supporting our local businesses and not creating an environment that is more disadvantageous than if they just went to Cambridge or went to Boston.

I'm slightly surprised to hear your position there. That seems not super socialist of you.

I just had an endorsement Q&A with the DSA last night, and one of the questions I was asked was "How will you support local businesses?"

Because folks, I know these terms socialist and DSA. For a lot of folks it might seem scary. It might just seem like, oh, here's a bunch of people from outside our community who are telling us what to do and trying to control us. There are hundreds of DSA members in Somerville, hundreds, who are deeply engaged and care about this community and care about their local businesses and want to see those businesses thrive and not see big multinational corporations come and take their place.

If I have to make a choice between supporting a local business and supporting a huge chain, I'm gonna support that local business 10 out of 10 times.

Let's say someone owns a two-family house and they rent out half of it. Is that person a local business owner?

I wouldn't call it that. No.

How come?

I think housing is a human right.

For me, human rights are not things that should be commodified. I don't see the relationship between a landlord and a tenant is not the relationship of a person going to buy a candy bar and the person who's selling them a candy bar.

One is someone who's, I mean, with the candy in the case of candy it's, obviously what one might call a luxury item or it's not necessary to sustain life per se.

Housing is. And without getting too deeply into this relationship that I think is structurally antagonistic on some level, because one person is saying, "To sustain my life I need to give you this chunk, this large chunk of my money, or I could be in a position of dying." The dynamics are just too different for me to consider that a local business.

The idea that like, oh, well, they can just shop around. That's, I don't think that's a realistic expectation to have for people in this market who are being extorted in many cases, forced broker fees, I think is a form of extortion.

And do not necessarily have options and they can't opt out without going to live in the woods. I can choose not to buy a new laptop, potentially. But I can't choose to not have a home.

Why can't people shop around for different housing options?

Oh, they can try. But within the context of Somerville, it is very possible they just might not find anything that meets their particular needs.

So I consider that relationship just fundamentally different.

Let's say I live in Somerville and I start a small grocery store. If housing is a human right, surely food is as well. In that case, I am a local business owner, and I'm providing something that is considered a human right. If I rent out half of my two-family, I am providing something that is a human right, but I'm not a local business owner?

This is a problem with monopolies, because the idea of choice in the market to me is broadly an illusion.

In the housing market in particular?

No, I mean more broadly.

Any market that has monopolies, or corporate conglomeration, choice becomes, I think, a bit fanciful. But, in theory, with a market, you could go down the street and just find a store with slightly different prices. Not now, again, with monopolies, we could talk about price fixing, we could talk about the cost of eggs has gone up and it doesn't matter if you go to that store or that store, things are more expensive fundamentally.

But what I know of the Somerville housing market from talking to people who reach out to me who say, "I don't think I can stay here anymore" is it is a magnitude of difference between that and saying, "Oh, I went to Star Market and it's more expensive now so I'm gonna go to Market Basket."

When it comes to housing it's, I'm getting pushed out of my home and there is nowhere else for me to go in this community. Maybe if they move to Texas they can find something.

But we're having a situation now where, and Massachusetts on the whole is having this conversation, as you might remember, the governor made a lot of comments about it about a year ago. We're seeing people leave the entire state. Why? Because they can't afford to live here anymore.

So, to me, it's just a very different thing because people aren't leaving the state because they're like, "Well, my groceries are too expensive. I went to the store here and I couldn't buy that thing. So now I left the only state I've ever lived in."

I mean, I think that gets us... We could go into a much broader and deeper conversation about de-commodifying human rights and where business owners... I mean, certainly they're making... If you open, if you're a landlord and you're making profit, I guess you could say anyone who makes a profit is a business or a business owner in a certain sense.

I just think of it as a different kind of economic relationship than one with a significant portion of choice.

What's something Somerville should stop doing immediately?

Creating plans and not actually doing anything with them.

For multiple administrations and for as long as I've lived in Somerville, there has been a common complaint amongst residents that the city will create a task force, or a committee, or commission, ask for the time and energy of many residents through community meetings, and then create a report that just ends up sitting on a shelf and doing nothing. That's why one of the taglines of my campaign is "fewer studies, more action." And it's not because I am an anti-intellectual and I don't think we sometimes do need studies. We certainly do.

There are certainly things where we do not have the internal expertise from the city to advance. And sometimes we need outside help or sometimes we need to go to our residents to say, "We really need you to be a part of this process." What we do not need is for the mayor to create bodies that solely exist to justify a plan that has been already committed to behind the scenes and then gets advanced past the concerns of residents.

We saw that with 90 Washington Street, where every single public meeting that they had, at least every single one I went to, but I'm pretty sure every single one, the vast majority of residents who listened to the proposal said, "We don't want this. We don't want that. Don't do it." And then the city said, "We hear you. We're gonna do it anyway."

Or situations where the city says, "Hey, we want you to decide something." And then they steer the process very clearly past concerns so that they end up exactly where they want it.

And frankly, I think that was the case with the report that the city just put out around public safety where they said, "Instead of doing an alternative emergency response and instead of restructuring our police department as the last study we just did a couple years ago told us to do, we're actually just gonna double down on everything we're doing and just put more money into it."

To me, that flies in the face of all the public comment we've had, or the vast majority of it at least, multiple studies that we've done over the last 20 years.

And it is strictly a matter of the enforcement of one individual's political will over the city.

We're early in the race. Is there any chance you end up running at-large or are you 100% committed to running for mayor?

I've been involved with too many races, both for our Massachusetts senators, and other local races to ever say never to something. Politics is fast and moves quickly. Life can be really challenging. Recently, my dad actually had a stroke, and they found two blood clots in his brain. And he's thousands of miles away from here. He is recovering. He is doing well. He's very strong. But, I can't say with 100% certainty that if tomorrow he were to suffer a catastrophic incident or if someone else in my family were, that I wouldn't take the time to be with them at the expense of a race that I really care about.

So just knowing that life is precious and fleeting, I would never say never, but I will say I am committed to this city. As a councilor I've tried as hard as I can to not take second jobs just so I can devote more time and energy to passing laws, to meeting with constituents, to having these conversations.

And I hope this year and next, regardless of what happens, to continue to contribute to Somerville and to try to see us become a better, more inclusive, more economically powerful city.

Where do you stand on the Brown and Winter schools? Which of the proposed plans that have been laid out so far seems best to you? Would you like to see a combined school at Trum Field?

I think it would be a real loss for our community to lose Trum Field.

And I don't just say that because I live near Trum Field and I've been to it many times to meet with friends or to run around, or for the yearly fireworks. Trum Field's one of the largest contiguous green spaces we have in the city.

And it is incredibly difficult for me to imagine how we would make up for that space in the years following any massive construction onto that plot, to get us back to where we are now. We have goals as a city. We have plans that include how much green space we ultimately want to have, and I don't want to see us actually go backwards on those plans.

Having said that, I am acutely aware of the needs of the Winter Hill students especially. I was just into Edgerly a few weeks ago to talk with two classes of eighth graders, to be on their podcast, Municipali-Tea. I know that they not only have been denied the ability to go to the their neighborhood school, they've also had to deal with a kind of psychic and social pain of feeling like the city does not care about them.

When you listen to the second episode of their podcast, it is a lot of students just saying that people feel like their school was all bad and that they didn't have any good connection to it or memories from it because it is a building that was in disrepair. And as someone who grew up in a lower middle class community and went to the poor schools in my community, I know what it does to a person's self-image when every sign around them tells them, "Hey, you don't really matter. You don't have any power. You come from nothing and you're not actually gonna be able to advance past that." And I heard echoes of that from these students and I want to make sure that we are building the best possible school for them in the future, one that is fully sustainable.

I'm certainly inclined to think that we should, it should be a school that has enough space to accommodate the Brown school, because without some major renovations, it is hard for me to imagine that the life of that building will see the next generation of students through.

I'm personally in favor of kind of phasing out the Brown rather than a hard stop which as soon as we build a building saying, "No more Brown school."

I think that would be too harsh even though frankly when that building is ready it'll be a totally different generation of students. But I do think that we need to find a more appropriate use for that space, and that combining the schools ultimately in the long term will serve more people's needs.

This post is a lightly-edited transcript from an in-person interview. If you’d like to confirm an exact quotation or simply prefer the unedited content, please reference the original audio.

On Municipal Communication and Goals

Q: What single ambitious yet realistic achievement would make your first term a success?

I would say a dramatic uptick in how informed the community is about what's happening in their city from a governmental perspective, from a development perspective, just from a construction perspective. To me, it will take work. I'm realistic about this, but someone with a real love of communications and with a communications background, I see a real opportunity to come in and effectuate some rapid change.

I've got some ideas involving constituent relationship management and a mobile app. I think that the mobile app piece is potentially a game changer for the city in terms of push notifications and people being allowed to say how they want to be contacted by their city and then us honoring that and communicating with them in a much more effective way.

On Traffic Safety and Enforcement

Q: If you could have one piece of legislation automatically passed, what would you choose?

I will go for what I actually see as low hanging fruit here, which is camera traffic enforcement. I've been working on this for multiple years now. There's really encouraging movement at the state level. We saw toward the end of the year, Beacon Hill legalized school bus cameras. And the governor in her budget basically put something in that would legalize speed cameras.

And I will use the term low hanging fruit for that because I really genuinely believe the camera traffic enforcement is low hanging fruit. That investment will more than pay for itself in terms of ticket revenue. And again, not doing this to drive revenues, but to make our city safer.

On Davis Square Development

Q: What is your vision for Davis Square during your term?

Real revitalization and making it people centered. As opposed to now where you have a conflict: is it a place where cars drive through, or is it a place where people walk around and go to restaurants and bars and nightlife and retail establishments? Is it a thriving small business ecosystem or is it a place for people to cut through on their way to or from work?

I think you have to pick one when you're trying to figure out what the identity of a square is. I know my answer: this is a place for small businesses and for people to walk around and live, work and play in. I think you accomplish that by making Elm street pedestrianizable, whether that's 24/7 pedestrianization or picking out certain times of the day that it is closed to vehicle traffic, but we need to do something on that front.

Q: Would you support building towers in Davis Square?

I think it makes sense to build dense housing at the transit hub, which Davis is, even still, even with the drop in commuter traffic, with more people working from home, this is still a transit hub. A lot of those bus lines that go through the city that people take terminate or at least stop here in Davis square, a lot of transfers between bus and subway with the Red Line being here.

So even with the work from home that's happened, even with the introduction of the Green Line that has decreased the foot traffic here during commuter times, even with all of that, this is still one of those areas that we need to have some transit oriented development here.

Q: Is additional housing itself not enough of a benefit?

Housing is an answer. Affordable housing is an even better answer. But we're always going to get that. What are we getting in terms of community?

What about a project labor agreement with local hire? That's in the news lately: the developer that is putting together a potential proposal for the project on Elm, between Chester and Grove street on the North side of Elm. They're talking about a Project Labor Agreement. That's a very good community benefit that creates, I've talked to so many people on the labor side who got their start thanks to a job that had a Project Labor Agreement and then totally launched them on a real career in the trades. And sometimes it just takes that one project to get you going. And these are people who live in Somerville, having the local hire part of it is key because that would, those are permanent, in many cases, permanent jobs that start out as a one-off job on a construction project that turn into a permanent job paying a real living wage for people who live in Somerville.

So PLAs are part of it. We've seen everything from community spaces to civic space as part of those. But that's where I'm really glad in this case we have the Davis Square Neighborhood Council coming online and tackling the big thing right out of the gates. This is a big moment for Davis square and figuring out what do we do with this potential proposal coming along.

On Community Input and Neighborhood Councils

Q: If the developer and the neighborhood council can't reach an agreement, what would your approach be? Would you still support upzoning?

There's transit oriented upzoning coming citywide this year is my guess. I really hope it's this year. I strongly support that. It just makes sense to take a citywide view and pursue transit oriented development by allowing upzoning near those transit areas.

So in the case of a failure to reach an agreement, the upzone is going to happen anyway, most likely, but I'd encourage the groups to work together and hope for the best. Take the SomerNova proposal, for example, where they're currently in a Community Benefits Agreement negotiation with the Union Square Neighborhood Council. That's a real key indicator for me of whether they have the community support behind it.

As a city councilor, we work for the people. We have all these public processes where we try to synthesize all of this public input and somehow arrive at a conclusion of how the public feels.

Having a body elected by the community go pursue a community benefits agreement with a developer and to be able to say, yes, there's a meeting of the minds on this. We're in agreement. That's a pretty clear indication that the community has been brought in and that's the will of the community that this go forward.

But to your original question: when would we go against a neighborhood council? That's tough to imagine happening as long as neighborhood councils are seen as operating in good faith and being representative of the community. It's tough to imagine going against a neighborhood council, hopefully it never comes down to it.

But I'll be honest. I've publicly said, with the Union Square Neighborhood Council on the SomerNova project that if they reach an agreement that I'm a yes, and until then I'm not a yes.

On Housing Policy

Q: In 2019, the council declared a rental housing emergency. Are we still in one?

Yeah.

Q: How will you address it?

We're in a national housing emergency. We're in a regional housing emergency. We need more housing. And it's one of these things where one project isn’t enough.

I understand supply and demand. I think when we're part of a region here, it's going to take a lot, one development is not going to move that needle. It's going to take a lot of developments, which is good. The MBTA Communities Act is a good thing. Something on that scale. That can actually help address the regional housing situation where if all communities are adding housing there'll be enough of an aggregate impact that I think the supply demand situation will shift in a good direction. Somerville cannot solve the housing emergency on our own, but we can do our part. And I think that's where housing creation is an important part of this.

Q: What primary lever would you use to increase housing supply?

The inclusionary housing part is really good when it's done on a large scale. Not as a one-off unit here or there, though those make a world of difference for the households that win the literal lotteries to go in there. Where I get excited about the inclusionary housing is when you're talking about something like 299 Broadway, where they're building huge numbers. They're way beyond the inclusionary numbers. They're at 42% affordability, in the old Star Market site.

And I'm on the Winter Hill Civic Advisory Committee with Councilor Clingan. I live around the corner from that site and I'm very, very excited about that project. It's a project the city's put a lot of resources into both working with developer and actual money, and tax incentives. The council's approved a UCH-TIF, a tax increment financing scheme where for 20 years, we'll pretend there were no improvements made to that property [ed: thus lowering its property taxes].

It's been 18 years since that Star Market left. And if this doesn't happen, Mark Development can’t come in and look to build a very, very impressive project there, 136 affordable units, 306 total units, in what's a very derelict, abandoned, basically a surface parking lot with a big abandoned former grocery store in it.

For me, that's a very worthy project and I'm glad to see the city subsidizing that both with the tax increment financing, and then with the actual cash then out of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund for subsidization.

Q: What specific tools can the mayor use to increase housing supply?

The Affordable Housing Trust Fund, putting more money into that and then using that to subsidize worthy projects. Is it worth upping that to require a project labor agreement? Where we end up with these, what I like to call noble causes in opposition.

One of the most common ones is affordable housing versus organized labor. Both extremely worthy causes. Unfortunately, they end up in conflict when you go to build affordable housing because by definition you're talking about a project you're going to need to do as economically as possible because you're not going market rate.

And so oftentimes then union labor is something that gets cut from those to try to make the numbers pencil out. So my question is always, I've talked to folks on the financing side of development about, well, what would this mean? And you're probably talking about a 20 to 30% increase on the labor costs of a project. Then you're talking, well, if we're going to walk the walk as a city, if we're going to say we support organized labor, is that worth the city potentially paying in some of that? If it gets us, like I talked about earlier, good quality, lasting jobs for Somerville workers in the trades.

Q: Does the housing emergency push you to prioritize building more housing over labor concerns?

I have to believe there's a way that we can get over this conflict. It might require the city putting its money where its mouth is on labor. People like to say Somerville is a labor city. The reality is we're not, not like, definitely not like Boston. Boston is truly a labor city.

A lot of times these projects end up using some partial union labor in some cases go back and end up reversing earlier decisions to not use a particular non-union subcontractor and bring in a union subcontractor. It happened in Union Square. It's happened with some painters there where they find out, oh, it's actually not prohibitively expensive and actually works out better if you go with local union labor.

On Somerville's Top Problems

Q: What do you consider Somerville's most pressing problems?

Housing. The housing crisis. And I always talk about the two sides of that coin, the housing stability crisis and displacement, as well as the affordable housing crisis, and they are very related. People are oftentimes in many cases being displaced because of unaffordable rents, rents that are going up.

But then there's just the loss of naturally occurring affordable housing in the city, which you'll see most often with flips that happen. And I'm all for people investing. I think it's good to see properties invested in and fixed up. I'm less excited when it's a flip.

You see a lot of times, you might see one or two family place get bought by a flipper and razed except for the front, the front wall, the front of the house will stay up like a Potemkin village. And that's because then it's just a renovation and they can keep their existing setbacks. Cause some, as we know, so many places in Somerville are not, they don't have much in the way of setbacks. Our houses are close together.

And then it comes back as two luxury townhouses, but maybe before it was naturally occurring affordable housing, not something in need of a refresh, but it was because of the condition of it, it was available at lower rents or a lower purchase price. And it's that naturally occurring affordable housing, just like naturally occurring affordable commercial and naturally occurring affordable artist space. These are things that that's the cost of development is usually losing the naturally occurring affordable space.

Q: Beyond housing, what are the other major challenges?

We need to figure out how to support our small businesses better. One of the ideas that I'm working on is the idea of an affordable commercial inclusionary component to zoning. How do we figure out how we can make sure that when development does happen in say Davis square on say Elm street, that there is commercial space that's actually affordable to current and future Somerville small businesses that want to come into that space and start up there and be able to afford the rent. Because generally new construction is going to be rented out at a much higher rate. And so how can we prevent it from being, chain stores and banks?

Zoning is part of that: specifying what kind of businesses can be on those, in those storefronts along the street. The goal being that everything should be a place that someone could be walking by and say "oh, I'm going to go in there." So not a dentist office.

Counselor Davis, Ward Six counselor had a very good idea with that pedestrian streets part of zoning. And you can see the benefits of it when, especially when you're talking to a developer about how they're going to tenant retail space. They learn very quickly which types of establishments they can bring in.

Q: And the third?

Our municipal workforce has been really decimated here in recent years by just a flight from the workforce. Waiting for these new contracts has really hurt both on the labor side and the non labor. So the exempt and non-exempt sides.

So the new contract that was just agreed back in January, I believe, and funded at the most recent city council meeting, I think. That's going to make a big difference. Problem is it's coming much later than it should. It took too long. And we just bled city employees during that time.

Honestly, we need to rebuild our municipal workforce at all levels. From our DPW, our parking departments, department heads, we currently have, when the last budget came out last summer, one in eight positions was listed as vacant. One in eight.

That really hurts us with employee retention because the employees who are here are being forced to do the work of an additional colleague or two in their department. And it's leading to folks getting burnt out or just discouraged and then they leave.

On Housing Development

Q: Are we currently building enough housing in Somerville?

No. We're way off. We're way short. We're talking private development, right? As much as I would love Somerville to be building municipal housing, unfortunately the federal government got out of the public housing game decades ago. The state followed suit, state's looking at getting back in that a little, we're going to tweak some things. There was an exciting social housing component to the governor's housing bond bill that rep Mike Connelly was able to get inserted. It's going to need some tweaks. Cambridge looked into it and ultimately found that it's going to need some tweaks before it makes sense for them to pursue.

I would like to see us pursue something on the social housing front. It's going to take a partnership with the state. We have those kinds of financial challenges looming just in terms of renovating and replacing our existing infrastructure, whether it's a new school, the 1895 building, new public safety building. There are huge infrastructure projects. Our sewer system is a multi-billion dollar problem. Our street services are another 10 digit problem.

The good news is our budget has grown a lot. We're seeing all this new growth, it's made possible by development, especially on the commercial side, which is great. But now we have to figure out, and now we have a triple A bond rating, which allows us to borrow at lower rates. The problem is rates are currently very high in general. So it's all relative. We're borrowing at lower rates from a high base rate.

But we're going to have to figure out how are we going to leverage that new borrowing capacity when rates hopefully do drop, to tackle all these big infrastructure projects? How do we prioritize them? And how do we make sure that we're playing catch up in a way that makes sense, that is fixing our infrastructure?

Q: Is 20% the right amount for inclusionary zoning?

It's a good question. I don't think anyone's going to come out and say we need to lower that. Just because you're going to get attacked in so many different directions. I could, the one thing I could see us doing is potentially allowing a second way to satisfy that with 20% of square footage of the FAR. Cambridge I believe offers that as an option. You can do it either 20% of units or 20% of square footage.

And I think that could have some good benefits to it. It also would likely incentivize more family sized units because currently you get a lot of studios that are affordable. If you start doing by square for 20% of square footage, you could see a lot more two and especially three bedroom units, which we really badly need in the city.

It's very common for families. I'll see the post on social media: hey, we're looking for a three bedroom or got from a four bedroom place, anyone know of anything? In two or three months, you're going to see the followup post: hey, we really enjoyed our time in Somerville, but we're off to Belmont or Burlington or something suburban, where it's easier to find a family sized unit. One of my goals is to be able to keep more of those families in Somerville. That's one of the things that excites me about the 299 Broadway project is the number of family sized units on the affordable side. And that projects like that will keep families that we all know in Somerville.

On Policy Challenges and Solutions

Q: What ordinance in Somerville is well-intentioned but actually makes things worse?

We're currently looking to ban realtor fees from being charged to tenants, which is a good idea in that we're lowering a hurdle. [ed: Wilson followed up to point out this that is actually a home rule petition rather than a simple ordinance]. Right now, if you need to move apartments or you're coming into the city, you have to pay first, last, deposit, rental, realtor fee. Four months of rent oftentimes. That is a huge hurdle.

So we're smartly looking at, what if we took the onus off of the renter in terms of covering the realtor fee? Reality is, we know landlords aren't just gonna absorb that. That will get bundled into rent then. We know this is what's gonna happen. I guess I wonder, would it be better to have transparency? So right now, there's a transparency that's built in around having the renter very clearly pay the realtor fee.

I just wonder, if we accept that landlords are gonna pass that onto renters eventually, can we remove that hurdle by having it transparently broken out over 12 months? My big concern is, if it gets folded into the rent, then if you stay in that unit beyond that first year, you're gonna always be paying that higher rent because of that fee baked into it. This is just part of the conversation that's about to come before the council, but that's something that's been in my brain.

On Political Courage and Beliefs

Q: What beliefs do you hold even knowing they might hurt you in the election?

My belief in being straight with people and not just telling people what they want to hear. If I knock on doors and I hear people who have strong opposition to, say, harm reduction strategies, like an overdose prevention center, I'll have a conversation with them, but I'm not going to cover up the fact that I can understand the studies out there that show that harm reduction strategies and overdose prevention centers specifically are proven effective.

Q: Are there other positions you hold that might be politically difficult?

Smart development, transit-oriented development. I understand concerns people in an area might have about more density, but that's one of the things I run on - good, smart, transit-oriented, dense development. And I support that.

There might be people out there who hear that and say, "Oh, we're already the most densely populated city in New England. Why should we..." Reality is, Somerville once had 120,000 people in it. We're at 82,000 now.

I'm not saying that we should aim for 120, but the reality is this city once had many more people in it. And yes, it was a different time where you had triple deckers and multi-generational families in each unit, a lot more people sharing bedrooms. Clearly, we live differently now. People want more space.

So I'm not saying we can get to 120 or that that's even a reasonable goal, but I think there's a case to be made that the city has had many more people living in it at one point in time - 50% more people.

On Political Divisions

Q: What should Somerville stop doing immediately?

I'll tell you something Somerville electeds should stop doing immediately, and that is carrying out proxy wars for the two main political groups in Somerville politics.

Q: Which groups are you referring to?

We'll call it your sort of establishment Democrats and DSA. That plays out in really unproductive ways, at council sometimes, internally on the council, ward committee election. It's been years and years in the making, and it really has a corrosive effect on our government.

One of the things I'm running on is I don't play that team stuff, sometimes to the annoyance of colleagues who can't understand why I'm not on their team on a particular thing. I'm on the side of the city. I'm on the city's team here. I work for the people. I'm on the people's team. And I'm for fairness. I call it as I see it.

On a particular issue, I might side with one side over the other, and it sometimes rankles colleagues who don't understand why I wouldn't go with them on something. The reality is, for me, it's not about any of that. I don't come from those political circles. That's why I ran as an outsider basically in 2021.

And I have operated as a very independent person on the council, and that's something I would love to see go away, and that's one of the things I'm running on. I'm running as a unifier who doesn't play those games, who's going to always do right by the city.

Definition

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court uses this definition of spot zoning: “a singling out of one lot for different treatment from that accorded to similar surrounding land indistinguishable from it in character, all for the economic benefit of the owner of that lot.”1

Notice the three components:

1. A singling out of a lot (or handful of lots),

2. That is indistinguishable from surrounding lots in character, and

3. Purely for the economic benefit of the lot’s owner

The third point is important!

• It’s legal to rezone a single lot.

• It’s legal to rezone a single lot, even if it’s indistinguishable from the lots around it.

• It’s legal to rezone a single lot that’s indistinguishable from the lots around it even if the owner will benefit!

• It’s illegal to rezone a single lot that is indistinguishable from the lots around it if the only plausible reason you did so was to make its owner better off.

Okay, if rezoning a lot simply to make its owner richer isn’t allowed, when can you rezone a single lot?

Valid reasons to rezone a single lot

Massachusetts courts have made clear that if a zoning amendment for a specific parcel is in harmony with the municipality’s broader plan or welfare objectives, it will not be considered impermissible spot zoning. Here are some circumstances where a single-lot or small-area rezoning may be allowed (and upheld in court):

• Advancing a legitimate public goal: If the rezoning supports goals like housing production, economic development, transportation-oriented development, or environmental protection, it’s usually deemed valid. For instance, upzoning a parcel near a transit station to allow multi-family housing might further the general welfare (addressing housing needs and smart growth) and thus be lawful, even if only one lot is directly affected.

• Consistent with a plan or study: When a rezoning is backed by planning studies or a master plan, it is less vulnerable. In Franson v. City of Woburn (2016), a single residential parcel abutting a business district was rezoned to allow 18 townhouses. Neighbors sued, alleging spot zoning. The Land Court upheld the change, finding the city had rational, well-documented objectives – increasing housing stock, providing public access to a historic site, and creating a transitional buffer between residential and commercial zones. Because those public benefits were identified, the rezoning did not conflict with the purposes of Chapter 40A and was not arbitrary, defeating the spot zoning claim. The presence of a rational planning rationale is an antidote to a spot zoning claim.

Winning a spot zoning lawsuit

…is unlikely!

The courts have stated that “claiming that a zoning amendment, a legislative act, amounts to spot zoning faces a heavy burden.”

Courts apply the “fairly debatable” rule: zoning changes are presumed valid as long as there is some rational, plausible justification for them2. Courts won’t invalidate a zoning decision simply because people disagree with it or question its wisdom. Instead, a challenger must show there is no legitimate public purpose served—meaning the zoning is unreasonable, whimsical, capricious, or arbitrary. If reasonable minds could differ over whether the zoning change furthers the public welfare, the courts will generally defer to the municipality’s legislative judgment.

I’ve been going to Somerville City Council meetings with friends and have found the experience to be very rewarding:

• It has humanized our elected officials. Many are friendly and proactively introduce themselves!

• I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on what’s going on in the city, and I feel more deeply connected with it.

• Most people don’t attend the meetings, so we stand out in a good way.

• There’s something special about going to City Hall. It’s a beautiful old building and it feels nice.

• Witnessing government demystifies it in a hundred ways. It is no longer an amorphous blob, but specific humans doing concrete things for understandable reasons. I’ve gained a much better handle on how I might make political change happen at some point.

Like most things, this experience is more fun with friends. We catch more subtleties, laugh at the funny parts together, and share the occasional good-natured eye-roll.

The next meeting I’m attending is February 27th, 2025. If you’d like to join me and have a nice time, drop me an email at ben@benorenstein.com. Please share a little bit about yourself and what you’d like to get out of the meeting.

This post is about changes to our Zoning Ordinance, the document that governs what can and can’t be built in the city.

These are all the changes that Somerville made to our zoning in 2024:

• Ordinance 2024-01 added “Shared Workspace and Arts Education” to the list of permitted uses in the Powderhouse School Special District. (This “district” covers only the location of the now-defunct Powderhouse Community School, which has since been redeveloped into condos and a park.)

• Ordinance 2024-03 newly allows recreational camps for children in nearly all of the city.

• Ordinance 2024-08 upzones 6 lots (mostly on Highland Ave.) owned by the Somerville YMCA to a Mid-Rise 6 story designation to make it more likely that the YMCA can be redeveloped and modernized. Interestingly, the applicants note “even if this zoning map amendment is approved [which it was], the Project will still require zoning relief. This map amendment merely allows the YMCA to file a zoning relief application for the Project." This may be due to the mixed-use nature of the redevelopment, or perhaps the geometry of the newly-proposed structure.

• Ordinance 2024-09 upzones 4 lots on Pearl Street near the new Gilman Square Green Line stop, allowing for development of 6-story mid-rises instead of just 4.

• Ordinance 2024-12 changes 282 McGrath Highway’s zoning from Neighborhood Residence to Small Business to allow a restaurant to operate there.

• Ordinance 2024-13 permits the operation of Adult or Child Day Cares in ~6 of the zoning districts.

• Ordinance 2024-14 consists mostly of small clarifications and cleanup of the Zoning Ordinance.

• Ordinance 2024-16 upzones 501 Mystic Valley Parkway so that it can be converted from a single-family home to an apartment building.

In total, in 2024 Somerville modestly increased the density of 12 lots in the city.

Because we take so many votes, I'm on the losing side fairly frequently. To my surprise, this has been rather good for me, because it rewired my brain a bit.

My old response to losing a vote was frustration with the other side's failure to see the correct path.

Now my reaction is to wonder "what could I have said in debate to flip more people to my side?”, “if I’d invited certain folks to coffee last week, might they have become allies?”, and "who else in my community could I bring to the next meeting who might share my views?"

In other words: "how do I do democracy better?"

I never experienced this rewiring when my only voting was in governmental elections. I think the losses were too infrequent to get good at them.

But now, losing a vote sparks curiosity: “what can I learn from this defeat that will help us win next time?”

(This post is about statutory changes. To read about 2024’s changes to our zoning, see Somerville Upzoned 12 Lots in 2024).

In 2024, the Somerville City Council met 25 times and passed 7 ordinances:

1. Ordinance 2024-02 added a small clarification of which set of guidelines governing biotechnology labs take precedence in the city.

2. Ordinance 2024-04 restructured the city’s Water and Sewer Department finances, moving from a system where waterworks revenue flows to the city generally and reduces taxes to one where the department retains those funds and must sustain itself on them.

3. Ordinance 2024-05 required the city to install 29 miles of separated bike lanes by 2030 (as outlined by the Somerville Bike Network Plan). It also required the city to make any improvements described in the plan any time it undertakes significant work on a road (assuming that road appears in the plan).

4. Ordinance 2024-06 updated the salary structure for non-union city positions by adding two new steps to the existing pay scale.

5. Ordinance 2024-07 increased the fares that traditional taxis can charge from $1.95 for the first ⅛ mile and $0.45 for each additional ⅛ mile to $3.80 and $0.50 respectively. (This change did not affect Ubers or Lyfts, which are considered livery vehicles).

6. Ordinance 2024-10 established safety requirements for construction and demolition projects.

7. Ordinance 2024-11 changed the effective date for Somerville's net zero emissions standard for new construction and major renovations. The original law was set to take effect on January 1, 2025. This amendment creates two possible trigger dates for implementation: either 180 days after Somerville joins the state's Fossil Fuel Free Demonstration Project (a pilot program allowing certain cities to ban fossil fuels in new construction), or when the state legislature approves Somerville's Home Rule Petition (which would directly authorize the city to implement these standards).

In addition, the Council updated its own internal rules, and the state legislature made a very small change to the city’s Licensing Commission (the Massachusetts state legislature can pass laws that just concern Somerville, but that is a subject for future posts).

Finally, Somerville also updated the Zoning Ordinance 8 times, which you can read about here: Somerville Upzoned 12 Lots in 2024.

That’s it!