An Interview with Jake Wilson

From At-large Councilor to Mayor?

Jake Wilson is a Somerville City Councilor running for Mayor. We sat down in Davis Square to discuss his vision for the city under his leadership.

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.