An Interview with Ben Ewen-Campen

Somerville City Councilor and candidate for the House of Reps. 27th Middlesex District

The following is a lightly-edited transcript of my in-person interview with Councilor Ewen-Campen. To verify exact quotations, please see the original audio.

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.

1. Census data