Emergency Measures: Three Legal Changes to Help Address Somerville's Housing Crisis
A blueprint for immediate action in a crisis.
In an earlier post, I described how a city could automatically address its housing shortage by temporarily modifying its laws while an emergency persists.
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 six 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
Six 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.
Source: Apartment List Data. 2019 numbers, 2026 numbers.
Interesting read, and I look forward to reading the study. To your points:
1. I am interested to read more on how these percentage changes will impact cost. Personally, the bigger issue is the definition of affordable, being tied to the very thing making things unaffordable. I would to see it tied to something like state minimum wage, and then worked from there.
2. CBAs are that one thing the community has to maintain some control around them. While I agree, some agreements get out of hand, it would be tough to get that toothpaste back in the tube.
3. 100 percent agree with demo review. If the city had not designated a building before, why should that suddenly be a issue when someone shows interest in it. The 18 month wait period has lead to many buildings being half demolished then there is a waiting period that leads to derelict looking sites that house rodents and other animals.
Thank you for putting this together
1. A lot of residents and political leaders and the text of the emergency declaration seem to be leaning in the opposite direction, making an even larger percentage of units income-restricted. A lot of people also complain that 80% of AMI isn't really the demographic they are most worried about, and the additional paperwork of 110% AMI units (which rent close to market rate) has actually caused some of them to go empty for over a year. I agree the realities of economics mean this is probably counterproductive, and yet we do see projects like 363 Highland moving forward under the current IZ%. Based on the consultant's report, just dropping the IZ % to say 5% for the duration of the declared emergency, or until the end of the Trump Administration and tariff insanity, or for 3-5 years, would be fine with me, but perhaps politically unpopular. It would definitely be worthwhile to drop the 110% AMI units, and maybe the 80% AMI units as well, in favor of a smaller number of overall IZ units but more focused on 50% or 30% AMI. People who earn 80% of AMI really should be able to afford market-rate apartments, and we can get there by just building lots of market-rate rentals.
One way to make the economics work rationally would be to switch the IZ requirement to be paid for by the city. It's not fair, and it creates a development bottleneck, when all the financial burden for the IZ units is placed on the builder. Taxing something makes less of it, and directly and heavily taxing building really does create an undersupply of housing. The the city could make up the difference between market-rate and income-restricted units by using the additional tax revenue generated by the new building, or borrowing against that revenue. That revenue is also needed to pay for city services the building's occupants will be using, so it may be the only way to really do this would be a Proposition 2 1/2 override. I would support that, and people can decide if the benefits of government-subsidized housing are worth the costs.
It might be worthwhile to workshop various proposals with neighborhood councils, and then petitioning the City Council with whatever seems to have the most support.
2. I agree, though because this is unofficial, it cannot be "turned off" with an ordinance change. It is also now politically difficult to ask city councilors to approve zoning changes for specific developers without CBAs. The neighborhood councils are the official CBA negotiators. One approach would be to ask them to endorse projects without negotiating a CBA. This is what happened at the Davis Square Neighborhood Council for 363 Highland, nearly unanimously, giving the City Council political cover to approve the zoning change. This would not work with big projects like Copper Mill.
The best way to prevent CBAs from obstructing needed housing would be to modify the zoning ordinance so that buildings the community actually wants and needs can get permits by right. We need to get pending neighborhood plans finished, and the Land Use Committee to package some transit-oriented upzoning that was promised during the election, based on neighborhood plans and professional planning in other areas. Somerville YIMBY is also proposing a city-wide upzoning.
3. Just allowing a few years where any building could be demolished, no matter how historic, seems like a huge loophole that could result in the loss of genuinely historic buildings. A better idea would be to require the city to make a list of specific buildings it deems historically significant that would require review, and allow no-review demolition of everything else. It should get updated when something significant happens and with widespread publicity at least every 10 years, but not allow adding to the list after redevelopment has been proposed. Even if the list was a bit overbroad, it would be better than today, and developers could direct their resources to parcels that are uncontroversial to redevelop. Maybe we could transition to this list neighborhood by neighborhood so people have time to do the necessary historical research.
A petition of any 50 registered voters can force the City Council to hold a hearing and take a vote on a given issue. (This is in ordinance 7-28, not the zoning ordinance where it would only be 10.) I would sign a petition for this. I recently saw the Historic Commission designate as historically significant a perfectly ordinary-looking house on an ordinary street. It's clear to me the appointees need to be replaced, the system needs to be overhauled, or both.