by Nicholas J. Pinto-Wong, Contributing Editor

The president of the Mystic View Task Force spoke at the June 4 contributors meeting of The Somerville News.

“Somerville is composed of a number of different communities and cultures that don’t always understand each other as well as they might,” said William Shelton, the group’ s president.

“We have a lot of untapped strength here. We could become a model for the country if we could bring all of our different groups together.,” he said.

“The way to accomplish that is to find issues that people care so deeply about that they will act alongside people who they may not know or trust—what Paolo Fredi calls ‘generative issues.’ Over time, cohabiting and collaborating on those issues drains fear and animosity and builds bonds,” Shelton said. “Assembly Square is one of these issues around which community can be built, and that’s really why I got involved.”

Born in Arizona, Shelton said he soon moved to California with his family, but left and never looked back. After graduating from business school in 1988, he moved to Boston and began looking for a place to settle down.

“I spent a year going from neighborhood to neighborhood,” he said. “When I came to Somerville, I liked it, simply because people were nice to me here.”

As Shelton became more interested in the political and cultural climate of Somerville, he said he discovered that he had to learn about the city’s past.

“Around the turn of the twentieth century, Somerville experienced an enormous industrial boom,” Shelton said. “It was driven by the labor of a generation of primarily Irish and Italian immigrants. By the middle of the century, the 4.12 square miles of Somerville made up the most densely populated city in the Northeast. The city had 163 manufacturing plants, and a surplus of jobs. Somerville imported labor from other communities,” he said.

“In those years, the city also had an incredibly strong sense of community. The armature of society was a network of shared social institutions—church, friendship, political clubs and the like,” Shelton said.

The strong community, Shelton said, had a strong effect on the political culture of Somerville at the time. The community was ethnically homogenous, and politics was personal.

“The political priority was not so much on abstract policy as it was on concrete, local standards of performance— Did this politician manage to get a stop sign up at the dangerous intersection in my neighborhood?—that kind of thing,” Shelton said.

“Politics was personal also in the sense that it was based on personalities. Politicians knew their constituents by name. Voters elected a strong politician and then trusted him to do them right,” he said.

A great change came around the middle of the century, marked in particular by the closure of the Edsel plant and many other factories, Shelton said. The result was huge outward migrations to the suburbs. At least 40,000 people left Somerville.

“Today, 80 percent of the people in Somerville work outside the city. There are two residents for every job in Somerville, whereas in Cambridge and Boston there are two jobs for every resident.

“One of the consequences of the great exodus to the suburbs was that the people who stayed here were, on average, less likely to take risks, and valued the connectedness of the community more. This concentrated other tendencies, like insularity, trust of strong politicians, and, in some instances, xenophobia,” said Shelton.

The coming decades brought three or four more waves of immigration, Shelton said.

“In the 1960s, it was the Portuguese. The Portuguese immigration provoked some tension, but not a lot because the new Somerville residents and the old shared a religion and the values of the old world,” he said.

“There was a greater culture shock, when, beginning in the late 1960s, Carribeans, most notably Haitians, began to come to Somerville. At around the same time, Portugese-speaking people from Brazil, Cape Verde and the Azores began to come,” he said.

Shelton said the city handled this demographic change better than most communities. When Mike Capuano was mayor, Shelton said, he led a campaign called Count On Me, which discouraged racism.

“The program was fairly effective, and Somerville residents were tolerant of their new neighbors,” Shelton said.

Shelton said that in the 1970s, there was also an influx of bohemians, artists, students and progressives.
The last wave came in the 1990s, particularly after 1996, Shelton said.

“This was an influx of the affluent—yuppies. When rent control was abolished in Cambridge, Boston, and Brookline, home prices skyrocketed, and a lot of rent control refugees found their way to Somerville, where rents were lower,” Shelton said.

“This last group brought with them a very different culture. Their politics were impersonal and technocratic. Rather than relying on the strength of personal relations to drive the political process, they looked for the best policies, informed by the best information available,” he said.

After the departure of industry, the city converted many of the old plants to residential units, Shelton said.

Residential development, Shelton said, generates twice the cost to the city in terms of services, while only generating two-thirds of the tax revenue.

“Over time, it got to a point where we depended more on state aid than we did on our tax base,” he said.

“In 1998, some friends and I looked at Somerville’s financial structure, and we saw a train-wreck coming. We spent a year doing an economic analysis, looking for leverage points. One of the ones we came up with was Assembly Square.”

Shelton said that Assembly Square presents a significant opportunity for the city because of its size and location.

“It has $6 billion of transportation infrastructure,” he said.

“The only other place in eastern Massachusetts that has that much transportation infrastructure is the financial district, which is smaller. Assembly Square could and should be the next big thing in Boston,” he said.

This vision of the potential for Assembly Square has often led Shelton and the Mystic View Task Force into conflict with developers and the city government. Shelton said that while the group has, at times, relied on legal action to block development they disapprove of, he does not believe that courts can provide a lasting solution for Assembly Square.

“Legal action can’t change anything; it can only postpone it. Legal action can buy you time to change the culture and politics behind an issue, but if you don’t make those changes, courts can’t help you in the long run.”

Shelton said that the current political climate is defined by the cultural and political conflict between “old timers” and “new arrivals.”

“Newcomers don’t get why we can’t get what Cambridge and Boston have,” he said. “They value transparent, technocratic government, but they don’t understand what Somerville has lost as the community of the past has eroded. On the other side, people who grew up here know what they have lost, and they resent the newcomers for failing to appreciate it.”

The political force of the newcomers has yet to be fully felt in Somerville. “There are 5,000 people who have registered since 2000 but who haven’t voted in local elections. They will, though.”

While much of his energy has been devoted to the tactical issues of Assembly Square, Shelton said that his overarching goal is to heal the political rift in Somerville.

“It is an overdue need to bring these two groups together,” he said. “We have to sensitize the newcomers to the value of the old community structures, and sensitize the long-time residents to the value of technically informed decision-making.”