Somerville, Massachusetts

Somerville is distinctly a city of homes. This is radically different from a city of wealth or a manufacturing city. Such a city requires unusual effort to make it beautiful, convenient and comfortable. It must also have an unusually active local sentiment.

--Mayor Edward Glines, Inaugural Address 1902, quoted in Beyond the Neck: The Architecture and Development of Somerville, Massachusetts

Somerville, Massachusetts, has historically--and proudly--provided what its neighbors, snobby Cambridge and gentrified Boston, have not: four square miles of homes affordable for working-class families, elderly retirees, graduate students, and young couples without the financial resources to settle elsewhere. Irish pubs coexist with family-owned Peruvian restaurants, and landlords invariably live in the same three-floor, colonial-era homes as their tenants.

Unlike in many American cities, where “residential neighborhoods are African American, Asian, Latino, or white, and upper-middle-class, middle-class, working-class, or poor,” as legal scholar Gerald Frug writes in City Making: Building Communities Without Walls, Somerville’s neighborhoods have an eclectic mix of incomes, ethnicities, ages, and aspirations. There are no ethnic enclaves to speak of in Somerville, but there is a vibrant immigrant community life. And although some areas, and some people, are more downtrodden than others, there are no obviously “bad” parts of town, In this densely jumbled town of 77,000, people from various walks of life constantly bump into one another on the street or in one of the city’s innumerable squares.

This intense integration forms the core of the community’s identity. According to city alderwoman, Denise Provost, “It is...essential to the soul of Somerville that it remain home to old-timers as well as newcomers, to people of modest means as well as the well-to-do, and to families as well as singles.” These kaleidoscopic demographics did not come about by accident. In this city as in every other, the human geography is profoundly shaped by government intervention and the underlying legal structure that defines municipalities in relation to the state. And in turn, organized political constituencies shape how government intervenes. In Somerville, citizen participation in local politics has a long and fabled history. According to Haskell’s Historical Guide Book of Somerville, Massachusetts, it was here that “liberty found her first, fullest expression” when, in 1776, a cabal of American revolutionaries stood atop Prospect Hill, unfurled the Union Flag, “and bade defiance to an enemy.” In the late-1800s, Somerville successfully thwarted annexation by its neighbors, proclaiming that its inhabitants were “abundantly able to manage it” on their own, and setting the stage for a city with its own character as opposed to an appendage of Boston or Cambridge.

Today, Somerville residents’ tenacious spirit has been called to the surface by commercial development and gentrification driven by its neighbors’ booming housing markets. In the past year, the Somerville zoning ordinance has been modified to enable big-box retailers to develop in the city’s Assembly Square area. Single-family homes have sold for around $1 million, and serious talk has begun about extending a subway line from Boston through the city, which promises even more development and rising real estate values. Somerville seems well on the road toward economic empowerment, but for many residents, these changes threaten the fragile balance of their mixed-income, multi-ethnic community. As the city booms, there is the risk that longstanding inhabitants who have contributed to the richness and diversity that define Somerville will be pushed out. In response, concerned residents are mobilizing to preserve the heterogeneity they have come to love in their city.

At the forefront of the struggle is a motley crew of neighborhood activists operating under the umbrella of the Affordable Housing Organizing Committee (AHOC). Founded in June 2001, AHOC’s mission, as the name suggests, is to promote the creation and preservation of affordable housing in Somerville. During its first few years of existence, the organization was dominated by local policymakers and housing advocates but had little representation from the community at large. In 2004, AHOC hired two community organizers, Meredith Levy and Jesse Kanson-Benanav, to help build a membership base and launch a successful grassroots campaign. In spring 2004, Levy and Kanson-Benanav knocked on hundreds of Somerville doors, describing AHOC’s mission and trying to stimulate interest in the organization. In June, they held a community-wide meeting, which drew several dozen of the residents they had visited in the previous months. From this group, a core cast of community activists launched AHOC’s inaugural campaign.

Among the early initiates was Mary Louise Daly, a feisty retiree and lifelong Somerville resident. She had fallen into housing activism once before when the building she lived in was about to be sold to a new landlord who would have substantially increased rents. Together with her neighbors, Daly formed a tenants’ union and purchased the building from the owner. Today, the apartment complex remains fully tenant-owned and tenant-controlled. Another supporter of AHOC was David Omar White, a disabled WWII veteran and accomplished political satirist and artist who now lives on a fixed income and worries about rising rents. And there was Robin Morgan, a soft-spoken fundraiser for a Boston-area non-profit who, along with her graduate student husband, has apprehensively watched the development of six high-priced condominiums at the end of her street.

“I was just so worried about what would happen to us, and to others like us,” Morgan said. AHOC enabled Daly, White, Morgan, and a host of other Somerville residents to do something about their fears and frustrations.

AHOC’s initial campaign centered around a segment of Somerville’s zoning ordinance known as the affordable housing linkage fee. In general, housing linkage programs require the sponsors of large-scale urban development projects to make financial or in-kind contributions to a city’s affordable housing stock in exchange for building permits and zoning variances. Such exaction fees are premised on the notion that major development projects may adversely impact communities by inducing rent increases and encouraging displacement. Linkage fees are thought to mitigate this impact by forcing private developers to internalize the social costs associated with their activities. When Somerville’s linkage ordinance was enacted in 1990, it required commercial developers of projects exceeding 30,000 square feet to pay $2.60 per square foot into the city’s affordable housing trust fund. For AHOC’s newly expanded membership, increasing this linkage amount became a paramount concern because it was considerably lower than the fees in Boston ($7.18 per square foot) and Cambridge ($3.28 per square foot)

More significantly, the rezoning of Assembly Square for big-box stores had placed the effects of commercial development at the forefront of community politics. According to some residents, the introduction of new businesses--particularly a major retailer like IKEA or Staples--was crucial for job growth in Somerville. Others worried about the downstream effects that such development could have on the housing market. The connection between economic growth and affordable housing was thus front-and-center in Somerville’s public dialogue, and AHOC hoped to enter that debate with a concrete suggestion for how the city’s low- and moderate-income residents could capture the benefits and limit the harms of development.

Working in conjunction with local housing experts and legal services lawyers, AHOC members put together a proposal recommending that the Somerville linkage fee be increased to $3.91, with the threshold project size remaining at 30,000 square feet. Based on AHOC’s estimate of the anticipated size of future developments in Assembly Square, this relatively conservative increase in the linkage fee could translate into hundreds of thousands more dollars for the affordable housing trust fund. In August 2004, Denise Provost, an alderwoman representing Ward 5 and a long-time supporter of equitable development in the city, introduced AHOC’s proposal to the Somerville Board of Aldermen. As Provost has described in her online community blog: “Change can bring us much good provided there is good planning that provides for and relies on community input into the extent, rate, and geographic location of changes in the landscape of our city. We need such a community process, just as we need a diversity of affordable housing options in Somerville, as dual bulwarks against the forces of displacement.”

Throughout late-August and early-September, AHOC activists began to reach out to their neighbors and colleagues, to fellow parishioners and pensioners. These one-on-one conversations revealed the intuitive appeal of linkage for average Somerville residents--namely, the Robin Hood-style of the program: taking from the rich company and providing for the poor. It also offered a healthy compromise between those who wanted to encourage the economic growth of the city and those who worried about what the ramifications of such revitalization might be.

Prior to AHOC’s campaign, the very concept of linkage remained obscure to those most affected by it. Discussions remained confined to lawyers and housing policy wonks. Not surprisingly, then, increasing the linkage fee was never a priority for political decision makers in Somerville City Hall or, in fact, in most municipalities that have such programs. Alderman Provost had attempted to increase the Somerville linkage fee on numerous occasions in the past, but to no avail. On her own, she was unable to generate the kind of widespread public support necessary to prompt successful legislation. Similarly, Boston’s linkage fee remained at $5 per square foot for fifteen years before housing advocates were able to get the Mayor’s support to kick it up to $7.18 in 2001. But when more than 100 Somerville residents crowded into the Aldermen’s Chambers in City Hall for a late-September hearing on the proposed linkage fee increase, the city’s political establishment had to take notice. Many of those who spoke were individuals who had never been politically active within the community before; all were there due to AHOC’s outreach efforts.

The next day Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone announced his own linkage fee proposal, which would raise the exaction amount to only $3.50 per square foot but would lower the threshold project size to 20,000 square feet. An additional $0.50 per square foot linkage fee would be imposed for the creation and preservation of open spaces in Somerville. The Mayor’s counter-proposal created a strategic quandary for AHOC. Over the long-term, less money would be generated for the affordable housing trust fund under the Mayor’s plan, but if AHOC opposed his measure too strenuously, valuable time would be lost in which the city could issue building permits to developers under the old linkage regime. AHOC decided to push its campaign into high gear and move for a vote as fast as possible. As part of this effort, AHOC members organized informal meetings with each of the city’s aldermen and with local residents. Mary Louise Daly recalled: “We scheduled the meetings wherever we could--Dunkin Donuts if we had to.” The Alderman for Ward 7 visited her house. The politician appreciated the invitation to a constituent’s home, and the residents felt the same. “One resident was amazed that an alderman would come and talk to them in a private home,” Daly said.

By the end of October, AHOC members had used these personalized meetings to solidify the support of the entire Board of Aldermen for their proposal. The legislative matters subcommittee meeting on November 8, in which the linkage fee increase was passed with a unanimous vote, was almost anti-climactic. AHOC had scored its first major victory, and the impact on individual AHOC members was palpable. As Kanson-Benanav recalled: “I was amazed to hear Omar [White], who had published so much political satire, say that this was the one thing he had done where he felt he had accomplished something.”

Academics concerned with housing segregation often focus most of their time on designing ideal policy options. In Somerville, the city’s mayor and legislators were pushed from indifference to unanimity on the linkage fee increase not because of great policy ideas, but because local citizens were added to the mix of housing policy experts, legal services lawyers, and professional organizers arguing on its behalf. AHOC’s campaign had its shortcomings: recently arrived immigrant communities, for instance, are not well represented within the AHOC membership, though they may be among the most vulnerable of Somerville residents. And future campaigns may focus on more controversial issues like rent control, around which it will be much harder to generate community consensus. Still, AHOC’s success shows that the real action in housing segregation issues lies in knocking on hundreds of doors in changing communities like Somerville, not in the research in the hallowed halls of Somerville’s neighbor to the west.