Assembly Square: Clear and Present Danger

A commentary by William C. Shelton

(The views and opinions expressed in the commentaries of the Somerville News, do not neccessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Somerville News or its staff)

We interrupt this series on Assembly Square‚Äôs past to bring you news that will determine its future, and Somerville‚Äôs as well.  The Board of Aldermen is considering rezoning legislation that would eliminate the few protections to Somerville residents that remained in the last rezoning that they passed in April, 2004.

That Massachusetts Land Court found the 2004 legislation to be illegal.  It was designed to allow a specific developer to obtain building permits for the projects that it calculated would be most profitable.  Illegal or not, it worked magnificently, in that the developer realized $30 million in profit by selling its Assembly Square interests to Federal Realty Investment Trust (FRIT), without having built a thing.

The current Assembly Square Mixed Use District (AS MUD) proposal is, in turn, designed to benefit FRIT.  In fact, the primary authors of the legislation, it seems, are not city staff, but FRIT‚Äôs lawyers, Goodwin, Proctor, LLP.  I would guess that after spending more than a half-million dollars to write the last piece of illegal zoning, the administration has decided to drop pretenses and let the developers draft their own.

In the previous zoning, the administration faced the challenge of how to let its favored developer build a big-box strip mall, while prohibiting other landowners from doing the same.  The result was a tortured scheme, whereby, if developers paired a desirable project with a less desirable one, they could fast track both projects and avoid the zoning, environmental, and public health review that the city normally requires.  Since Massachusetts law requires that all landowners be treated equally, the court found this to be illegal.

The current proposal solves this problem by fast-tracking everything.  If the rezoning passes, a three-unit condo conversion elsewhere in the city will get more regulatory review than a 300,000-square-foot big-box store, or a 1,000-unit apartment complex, or a fast food restaurant, or a bar at Assembly Square.  And this is before the passage of any condo-conversion legislation.

Now, as then, the developers and their City Hall allies are conducting a campaign of deception to support the legislation.  They say that it will bring the city desperately needed commercial property taxes.  But the last rezoning brought a big-box strip mall that costs the city more than it produces in tax revenue.   

They say that there is no regional demand for developing the office buildings that would actually bring high tax revenues, jobs, and low costs.  But office demand is now on the rise, while demand for the 3,000 apartments that FRIT wants to build is rapidly declining.

They call it ‚Äúsmart growth.‚Äù  But in New England‚Äôs  densest city, they want to squander the site‚Äôs $6 billion in publicly-paid-for infrastructure on low-value, high-congestion development that will exclude the office construction that would be ‚Äúsmart‚Äù for both the city and the region.

FRIT acknowledges that building offices will take them 15 years or more to get to.  But they avoid the unpleasant reality that, by then, the projects that they have already built would use up the traffic capacity required to support offices. 

You‚Äôre probably familiar with what McGrath Highway is like during rush hour.  That‚Äôs with 50,000 trips per day.  FRIT says that its and IKEA‚Äôs plans would add an additional 80,000 Assembly Square trips.  The I-93-Route 28-Route 38 intersection, ranked by the Commonwealth as its most dangerous, could not sustain even half that number of new trips.

Nor could the hearts and lungs of East Somerville and Ten Hills residents.  Two thousand scientific papers on particulate matter tell us why Somerville has the highest excess heart attack and lung-cancer death rate per square mile in the Commonwealth. 

People who live within a hundred meters of a major artery are 50% more likely to die from those causes.  Their kids are 100% more likely to have asthma, 200% more likely to have cancer, and 400% more likely to never develop normal adult lung capacity.  Yet the current rezoning proposal would eliminate any obligation on the part of developers to account for those impacts.

During the last rezoning exercise, several aldermen voting for the 48-page legislation candidly admitted that they didn’t understand what they were voting on. This 62-page document is also clear AS MUD.

Whether you believe that big boxes and thousands of new high-end apartments are just what Somerville needs, or you think that the city should zone for and demand something better, you might consider asking your alderman to explain exactly what he or she will be voting on.  And you might want to share your thoughts at the public hearing the evening of Thursday, June 15, at City Hall.