Development in underused sites can spur growth

By Andrew Firestone

In a showing of hope for the future, Mayor Joseph Curtatone last week pledged his administration would pursue a complex, holistic approach to development in the city of Somerville. In a meeting with aldermen and Assembly Square developers, Curtatone  presented a portrait of a new Somerville, one that included increased access to transportation, more jobs and development projects.

The presentation took place at Assembly Square at the offices of Federal Realty Investment Trust. In front of a massive scale model of the new development, Curtatone summed up his hoped for direction, and plans to take advantage of a possible upturn in the economy by partnering with private developers.

“You can take advantage of the best practices of public-private partnerships, where the municipality partners with private developers to unlock economic potential,” he said, displaying a diagram for a “catalyst project” at the rundown public safety building in East Somerville.”

A catalyst project is one which synergistically improves the development infrastructure of a given area, said Curtatone. He unveiled several of these projects, including the Buena Vista garage in Davis Square, the waste transfer station at Brickbottom, the Post Office at Union Square and 161 to 165 Broadway.

Partnership with the private sector “takes advantage of the private sector’s ability to solve some of the challenges in terms of financing and build-out.”

Curtatone began by noting the stagnant job growth in the city, and pointed to flaws in the overall layout of the city. “Our 20-year average has been at a stand-still, and that is tell-tale,” he said. “That has curtailed our ability to invest and begin to grow.”

There is less than one job for every two people in Somerville, he said.

“A disconnect exists between Somerville jobs and Somerville workers,” he said. “The vast majority of our workers are forced to leave Somerville everyday and there are a lot of negative implications with that: more cars on our roads, fewer parents close to their children, fewer customers for smaller businesses, very few people here in the daytime to do the shopping to take advantage of any amenities we have.”

Curtatone said nearly 85 percent of the 44,000 employed Somervilliens worked outside the city, leading to poor traffic circulation. “Just think about when you’re on Highland Ave. or Broadway in the morning, it looks like Independence Day, the movie, all the cars leaving Somerville,” he said.

Curtatone unveiled a three-pronged approach to foster job growth. First, he said that bringing the Green Line to Somerville would bring transit access to 85 percent of the city, as opposed to the small 15 percent. The stops included a much-needed helping hand to the Inner Belt, an area he lamented bitterly.

“Even though we’re immediately adjacent to Northpoint, we’re completely cut off from Boston, Cambridge and the rest of Somerville by rail lines and elevated highways,” he said. “And we’re not even served by this infrastructure, which is really absurd.  “It just allows people to use Somerville as an on-and-off ramp to go around Somerville to Boston and other job districts within that region.”

Curtatone said there were 475 identified “brown fields” which suffered industrial blight. Beyond that, there were inappropriately zoned land parcels, which he proposed revising, and replacing broken infrastructure and repairing the sewer system installed in the 1800s.

Third, was the development of property. The mayor pointed at Assembly Square as a harbinger of this kind of development. He invited the Board of Aldermen to inspect the area after they had approved a $25 million Development Innovation Fund (DIF) for it.

Alderman Bill White saw the presentation as upbeat, but said that the future fruition of Curtatone’s projects relied upon factors of the economy. “You have to look at a time line where the proposals in the DIF area would be more likely to take place in the near future and then the more intense developments, the office buildings, would  probably be a couple years behind,” said White.