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By Chris Dwan

The mood was cautiously optimistic at the Argenziano School cafeteria on a Wednesday night a couple of weeks ago. Nearly a hundred people gathered in person, and another 80 or so joined online, to see the Union Square Neighborhood Council and Rafi Properties share a “mid-point update” in their negotiations towards a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) for the proposed “Somernova” development.

The community benefits update meeting was well attended.

The organizers were at pains to make clear that, contrary to a recent Cambridge Day article, the meeting was not any sort of conclusion. No final deal was to be announced and no commitments have been inked. This is in part because so much relies on the city-run process to update the underlying zoning along central Somerville Ave. That parallel process is expected to submit zoning text for consideration by the City Council, well, sometime real soon now. Once the zoning is submitted, the CBA will be finalized, meaning that the city council will have all the needed specifics in hand prior to any vote.

Within those limitations, Wednesday was intended to share points on which the negotiating team had reached “consensus.” There were no handouts or summaries. The slides, which are no longer online, were mostly just a table of contents anyway. In later conversations I learned that the negotiating team had worked in silos – divvying up topics without working through the compromises that, in my experience, constitute the bulk of this sort negotiation. Put another way, it seems likely to me that some of this will necessarily be walked back when the budgetary rubber meets the road.

For all that, the announcements were good and well received:

• Arts and Creative Enterprise (ACE) will be 8% of the development, a total of more than 100,000 square feet.
• An “advisory team” will guide the process of filling the ACE space, and Somerville artists will get priority for public exhibitions.
• Housing will be included, and the payment to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund (a linkage fee), will be higher than required by current zoning.
• The project has agreed to track metrics on traffic, parking, and transit and to pause work if predetermined goals are not met.
• The Community Center will be at least 12k square feet, plus another 7k square feet of indoors multi-purpose space, and will be run by a still-to-be-formed nonprofit. The developer will provide 10 years of operating funding, after which the nonprofit will transition to grant and philanthropic support.
• The project will include a call center to field construction complaints and facilitate communications.
• USNC wants, and Rafi is open to, a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) with the trade unions. Rafi has committed, at least verbally, to preferentially employing Somerville residents and women, and to working with the high school to support vocational careers for recent graduates.
• The buildings will all be net zero or better, and the commercial buildings will be LEED Platinum.
• Rafi has committed to using 100% native species in the plantings, to planting at least 150 trees, to not using chemical rodenticides, and to installing raptor habitats.

The change in tone from the meetings in the fall of 2023 was remarkable. Gone was the tone-deaf boosterism from the project team and its close allies. Gone too was the razor sharp and occasionally brutal opposition from the neighborhood. Even the small group of neighbors who showed up on Wednesday still ready to oppose the whole thing seem to have read the room and moderated their comments. In the place of all that, I saw mutual understanding, better defined roles, and collegial working relationships that will be essential for a project of this scale. The developer is no longer trying to wholesale rewrite zoning -and- propose their project -and- sugar coat it with incentives and benefits. It has taken a while, but the city is working the zoning, the neighborhood is advocating for itself, and the developer will eventually have clear guard rails within which to design a project.

Honestly, watching my neighborhood work through this is giving me a tiny sliver of much needed hope for democracy and civic process right about now.

We’re not done, but we’re finally getting somewhere.