Assembly Square, the Back Story
Part 7:  Voodoo Redevelopment

An editorial by William C. Shelton

In early September 1999, Mayor Dorothy Kelly Gay sat down with Assembly Square‚Äôs 15 landowners and persuaded them to delay development activity for at least six months to give the city time to create a ‚Äúcomprehensive development plan.‚Äù  All agreed.

The first week in December, the Cecil Group, urban planners whom the city had retained to lead the planning effort, held the first of six public meetings.  Their purpose was to integrate public participation into the planning.

Mayor Gay also appointed an advisory committee of Somerville residents, business representatives, and city officials that met nine times over the next year.  The advisory committee gave no advice, having no means of critically analyzing, agreeing on, or offering recommendations.

The next week, Assembly Square Limited Partners (ASLP) announced plans to replace the mall with a 135,000 square-foot Home Depot.  The existing Home Depot would become a Home Expo. ASLP had faced universal hostility to a similar plan at a public meeting in August.  An angry Mayor Gay said, ‚ÄúThese developers agreed to a six-month planning process.  I don‚Äôt want a concrete jungle with a collection of big-box stores and parking lots down there.‚Äù 

ASLP denied that they had made such a promise.  Instead, they offered the first of three myths that continue to undermine wise redevelopment:  the K-Mart lease obligated ASLP to only build retail uses on the mall site.  ASLP declined to show the lease to city officials. 

In fact, the proposed Home Depot was, itself, a lease violation that K-Mart, desperate for any development, quickly agreed to, as they have since to any development proposal that was presented to them, including the current strip mall.

Perhaps sensing this, Housing and Community Development Director Steve Post asked a Globe reporter, ‚ÄúWouldn‚Äôt K-Mart want to be a part of a premiere mixed-used development with retail, office, and an entertainment center for the region?‚Äù  Unfortunately, he did not ask K-Mart.

Planning continued.  At each of the public meetings, participants overwhelmingly opposed big-box stores.  They advocated a fully integrated plan, dominated by offices and served by the site‚Äôs Orange and commuter lines, that would generate high tax revenues, low traffic, many jobs, usable open space, and ground-floor retail.  They urged the city to approve no projects that would take decades-long detours away from this vision. Meanwhile, the developers and their allies were putting enormous pressure on the Cecil Group and city officials to include big boxes in the plan.

On April 11, 2000, Mayor Gay met in her office with the advisory committee for the only time.  Chamber of Commerce representatives on the committee complained that Cecil appeared to be moving toward the vision advocated in public testimony, which, they said, excluded the tax revenue that big boxes could quickly generate and unrealistically relied on a nonexistent office market.  These were the other two myths.

They did not know that Cecil was caving under pressure.  Steve Cecil had told Mystic View leaders the previous evening that he would be recommending a phased development.  The scheme proposed beginning redevelopment with the new Home Depot and Ikea.  In eight years, real estate market forces would begin to fill in the giant parking lots with the office buildings that both advocates and city officials wanted.  In 20 years, market forces would replace the big boxes with more office-based development.

Community advocates were at loggerheads with ASLP and IKEA.  City officials and Cecil fervently wanted to find a workable compromise.  However, Cecil based his solution on an unworkable economic fantasy. Operating their core businesses in strategically located stores with cheap parking is vastly more profitable to IKEA and Home Depot than would be any one-time property sale gain.  Moreover, the increased property value resulting from building big boxes would create a high economic hurdle for a developer who later wanted to replace them with high-tax-and-job-generating projects.

Cecil said that Emeryville, California provided an example where Home Depot, Ikea, and other big boxes formed an ‚Äúurban village‚Äù with apartments and offices.  He showed pictures of stores with iron sculptures in front of them.

Mystic Viewers went to Emeryville.  Looking in the opposite direction from the sculptures, they found a vast sea of asphalt.  The apartment complex, wedged between the asphalt and Emeryville‚Äôs busiest street, was surrounded by a high iron fence. Ikea‚Äôs traffic deluge had forced the state to build an $80 million dollar new lane on I-880.   

The city‚Äôs largest employer, Sybase, had left town.  A spokesperson cited IKEA‚Äôs traffic as the tipping factor in the decision.  But weekend traffic was worse, requiring a dozen police officers to manage the big-box gridlock. And although Emeryville, unlike Somerville, received sales tax on every big-box sales dollar, its retail economy produced public safety costs greater than its property and sales tax revenues combined.