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By Chris Dwan

The conversation around the fate of the low brick industrial buildings along Somerville Ave between Park and Church Streets (AKA American Tube Works, AKA the Ames Envelope Complex, AKA “SomerNova”) has entered a new and hopefully more productive phase. Mayor Ballantyne’s administration has started something they call the Central Somerville Avenue Plan – a city-led process to:

• Update the city’s master planning map (adorably called “SomerVision”), changing the designation for this land into a coherent block of “transform,” rather than a plot-by-plot patchwork of “enhance” and “conserve.”
• Update baseline zoning to strengthen protections for Arts and Creative Enterprises (ACE) in the underlying Fabrication (FAB) zoning, citywide.
• Host a public process to gather feedback on the desired mix of uses and to identify dealbreakers.
• Create a zoning “overlay” to guide the Rafi Properties(the owners) in their third proposal to build a large, integrated campus.

The “Central Somerville Avenue” project stretches from Park to Church Street.

The administration’s timeline is aggressive. They intend to power through a series of community meetings in the coming weeks, and then place a series of zoning items before the City Council in its six remaining meetings of 2024. That would be ridiculously fast if we were starting from zero, but we’re not. We’ve been at this a while and speaking only for myself, I hope this time is the charm.

This is my sixth piece about this proposal. I published SomerNova and Fabrication Districts and SomerNova more than a year ago after SomerNova/Rafi hosted a fractious and confusing public meeting that, despite notionally being based on thousands of hours of conversation, still seemed to catch much of the community by surprise. Since then I have written Keep No On the Table for SomerNova, SomerNo, and finally Somernova: Round Two – plus innumerable posts on social media.

Hundreds of people have collectively spent thousands of hours trying to figure this thing out. Artists have organized under the banners of Don’t F with FAB and Art Stays Here. The Union Square Neighborhood Council (USNC), originally created to negotiate a Community Benefits Agreement with US2, formed a negotiating committee that has subsequently struggled to define its role. YIMBYs have pushed for the project to include housing and to move as fast as possible. Abutters have asked for mitigations to address short and long term negative impacts on our quality of life.

Through all of this, the staff at Rafi / SomerNova have, from what I can tell, met with anybody willing to take the time and have evolved the proposal based on that input. From my perspective, they genuinely seem to be trying to do right by the community while still keeping the project viable from a business perspective.

I’m glad that the administration has stepped in – though I do wonder what other initiatives this will push into 2025 and beyond (hello, Union Square Plaza and Streetscape). We’re trying to thread a needle here: Development is necessary to bring needed resources to the city, especially given the recent biotech bust, the construction slowdown, the regional oversupply of lab space, and recent reductions in state and federal funding. At the same time, development is one of the drivers of displacement. When older, cheaper spaces get knocked down, the people using them move away and they tend not to return if and when the inevitably more-expensive replacements become available.

Put another way, the majority of the concerns that have been raised are valid, though the idea that there has not been -enough- opportunity for feedback is laughable. There is no simple solution here. It’s time to centralize the conversation, make some compromises, put it to a vote, and then let the development team decide whether it’s still worth their time and money to do the project.