By Philip Parsons

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

Income and wealth inequalities have become so stark that even Republican presidential candidates now feel obligated to take notice. But many Somervillians limit these concerns to rising housing costs.

Somerville Neighborhood News has focused in-depth coverage on housing advocacy and market conditions. Mayoral appointees to the Civic Advisory Committee have identified maintaining socio-economic diversity as a primary concern for Union Square’s redevelopment.

Union United is a coalition organized by the Somerville Community Corporation to support the creation of a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) with Union Square developers. It too focuses on the accelerating displacement of lower income residents and small businesses—especially minority-owned enterprises—resulting from rental cost escalation.

While our declining affordable housing stock is worthy of attention, I would argue that inequality in Somerville is about more than rent and housing prices. And I would argue that our small city can use planning and zoning to ameliorate inequality’s local causes and consequences.

City planners have drafted the most complete rewrite of our Zoning Ordinance since the Board of Aldermen voted it into existence in December 1925. They are simultaneously planning a massive Union Square redevelopment in anticipation of the Green Line’s arrival. Together, those efforts will bring the greatest change that Somerville has seen in living memory, and they could reinforce trends toward inequality, or reduce them.

We can ensure that these changes bend toward the justice that Martin Luther King Jr. found in “the arc of the moral universe.” Doing so will require reconciling naturally competing motives: Developers are accountable to their investors; residents are accountable to their community. Achieving the best outcomes for these two stakeholder groups will require hard work and creativity from all stakeholders.

We tend to think of inequality in terms of income disparity. That’s a matter upon which we in Somerville can have real but limited impact. Our skimpy commercial tax base is overly invested in retail, restaurant and services uses, which tend to create low-wage jobs with limited upward mobility.

We can zone for office & R&D uses that bring jobs with a broad range of skill requirements, entry points and career paths. And bringing jobs closer to home reduces transportation and childcare costs.

We can also work to keep housing affordable, especially for elders and families. That’s essential, and the Mayor has embarked on a serious multi-pronged initiative.

But a city can do a lot more to ensure that all its residents enjoy a decent quality of life, regardless of their income level. So much of how well we live is not just about housing, but created in the “public realm,” and available to people of all income levels: a strong sense of community, a wide range of local jobs, proximity between home and work, parks and open spaces, schools and community centers, pleasant walkable streets, safe and attractive bike routes, good public transportation, better air quality, and reduced congestion.

SomerVision, the city’s community-generated comprehensive plan, captures these values in its objectives. Community groups like Union Square Neighbors reinforce them.

These are the objectives upon which zoning and planning can have major impacts. Achieving them requires vision, and net municipal income sufficient to implement that vision.

Boosting city tax dollars can only come from a strong and rapidly expanding commercial property tax base, which will bring jobs and workspace with it. It cannot come from building more housing, because housing does little (and sometimes nothing) to increase net city tax revenue. Nor is there any clear reason why building more housing will stabilize rental and sale prices, since Somerville is a small part of a large regional housing market.

The city’s new draft zoning essentially leaves it to developers to decide whether to build housing or commercial space in Union Square and certain other zoning districts. Inevitably they will prefer to build high-end housing for the increasingly lucrative “millennial” market.

Requiring 20% of these units to be “affordable” will not address inequality in this broader interpretation. It may in fact make things worse. Large blocks of mostly expensive housing will create isolated enclaves.

And the draft zoning does little to strengthen the public realm. It provides no reliable mechanism to implement SomerVision’s goal of expanding open space by 125 acres in the city with the least open space per resident in the Commonwealth.

There are similarly few incentives and requirements for bike and bus lanes, and for adapting to or improving conditions for walking, biking, and bus transit. Overall, the new zoning favors private development over public investment.

City officials have set a goal of reestablishing a redeveloped Union Square as Somerville’s downtown. They contemplate drafting “special district” zoning for the Square, pending completion of a Neighborhood Plan. A team of consultants selected by the city and financed by the developers leads the planning process.

Union Square’s zoning should reflect the community’s aspirations and not merely facilitate the developers’ needs. At a minimum, this will require increasing public open space, including green space, and ensuring a balanced mix of uses that favors office and R&D space over residential development.

Good zoning simultaneously encourages private investment, generates value, and improves the public realm. It creates a natural synergy between development and civic needs.

We need to pay attention.

Philip Parsons is a long-time Union Square resident and a member of its Civic Advisory Committee. He served as Harvard’s Dean for Planning and was a Principal with Sasaki Associates, a leading urban planning and design firm. He currently operates his own consultancy and is conducting a study of Somerville for the Audi Urban Future Initiative that anticipates impacts of changing mobility practices on city planning.