By William C. Shelton

(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)

The disappointment in the room was tangible last Wednesday night. Greg Karczewski, president of the Somerville Redevelopment Authority’s chosen Master Developer Partner US2, had just told Somerville residents that his firm intended to build 525 housing units for affluent young professionals on Union Square’s most strategic block.

Stunned attendees who wanted to discuss this were told to go play with Legos^®. Their sense of betrayal seemed to correlate in its intensity with how much they had sincerely participated in Somerville by Design, the Union Square Civic Advisory Committee (CAC), and other processes advertised as guiding Union Square’s redevelopment.

The SomerVision Comprehensive Plan had set goals of creating 6,000 new housing units and 30,000 new jobs by 2030. The enormous jobs goal is necessary to correct Somerville’s gross mismatch between jobs and workers, the worst in Massachusetts.

Office and lab space that could be built to attract employers would also correct a radically unbalanced property tax base, dominated by residential properties that pay lower tax rates but generate higher municipal costs. The city’s resulting reliance on precarious state aid limits its ambitions and increasingly puts tax burdens on its homeowners.

To meet both housing and jobs goals, SomerVision called for concentrating housing development in “Transform” areas like Inner Belt, not in “Enhance” areas like Union Square, which are needed for office and lab space. Accordingly, it set a goal of only 350 new housing units in Union Square, and 500 new units in the larger Boynton Yards “Transform” district next door.

The Union Square Revitalization Plan reaffirmed that goal. And the Request for Qualifications to which US2 responded to become the Master Developer Partner set a goal of “350 housing units for Somerville residents of all socioeconomic levels…” [emphasis added]. A joint venture between the Somerville Community Corporation (SCC) and Cathartes is already contributing 65 units toward that goal—26 market-rate and 39 affordable.

Wednesday night, US2 told a packed house that they had to build as many as 925 housing units—525 of them in the “D2 block” on the northern edge of the Green Line station—for millennials. The rest would go in the “D3” block on the station’s southern side. By “millennials,” they mean the youngest generation currently in the workforce.

Their stated rationale was that we need more millennial workers to attract office and lab space tenants. In fact, Somerville already has so many millennial residents that they are displacing every other age cohort, younger and older, and their families. We already have the second highest proportion of millennials in the U.S.

Building ever more housing for childless households does eliminate the city’s costs to educate their nonexistent kids. But it increases transiency, thereby hastening the unraveling of our community fabric.

Molly Heath, a Senior Vice President with James Lang LaSalle, had emphasized Somerville’ exceedingly large millennial population at the previous evening’s CAC meeting. Among many of its services, her firm successfully manages major commercial properties and recruits tenants. So they carefully track the commercial real estate market.

In an insightful, data-rich and well-designed presentation, she listed what the companies that we want to attract are looking for in their location decisions. Each of their criteria is either one that Union Square and Somerville already possess, or one that is created through building design. In response to a pointed question, she said that the only objection she hears from potential tenants about Union Square is that there is no space for them to move to.

The following evening Greg Karczewski began the presentation of his company’s Union Square development program with a slide titled “Your goals.” First on the list was building an additional 9,000 new Somerville housing units before 2030.

In fact, the SomerVision Steering Committee has not increased its goal from 6,000 to 9,000 units. If reconvened, it would reject the increase. The Board of Aldermen did not approve it. And it is not my or my neighbors’ goal.

The Mayor decreed it. He took it from Massachusetts Area Planning Council’s population projections for the 101 cities and towns within its purview.

MAPC’s report describes its projection methodology. But within it I can find no consideration of how dense a city already is. Or whether a city has the fiscal strength or physical room to absorb a 27% increase in its housing, much less within fifteen years. Or that every additional housing unit contributes little to, or worsens, our municipal costs-to-revenues imbalance while worsening our jobs-to-workers imbalance.

MAPC periodically prepares job-growth projections as well. It takes a town’s own estimate and tweaks it based on considerations that include compatibility with MAPC’s own regional projection. The result for Somerville is not only the highest of all 101 municipalities. It is two-and-a-half times that of the second highest town’s rate, and nine times that of the regional average.

When you stop laughing, consider that we’re not going to achieve even a fraction of that if we don’t start building office and R&D space and siting it where it’s most attractive to tenants.

Which leads us to Dimensions of Displacement, a report prepared by MAPC, with support from SCC and city staff. It embraces the 9,000-unit projection and seems to argue that because the Green Line is coming, more people will want to live here. So we should build more housing to stabilize prices.

In fact, the housing market is regional. There is no amount of new units that we could physically cram into Somerville sufficient to equilibrate supply and demand at price points significantly less than where we are otherwise headed. We’ve done our part while other towns maintain one- and two-acre house lot minimums.

Massachusetts’ obligation to extend the Green Line does not exist to make New England’s densest city denser. It exists to ease that city’s transportation benefits-to-burden ratio, the worst in the Commonwealth. It goes back to a long overdue 1966 MBTA plan and 1990 consent decree.

Maintaining housing affordability is essential. But it will require permanently removing an additional portion of our housing stock from the inflationary spiral. We must not distort our tax base with so much housing that we lack the fiscal strength to do that, or to pay for ‘Villens job training and placement in companies that we could attract if we built the space they need next to transit nodes.

I was disappointed that Dimensions of Displacement did not discuss that other way that lower income ‘Villens can avoid displacement while empowering themselves—jobs with a future. Low-wage, low-mobility retail, restaurant and service jobs now dominate Somerville’s employment base. But the companies we could attract offer a range of jobs and career paths, starting with workers who possess a high school diploma or less.

Dimensions of Displacement does include some important insights. Among them is that people are willing to walk up to a half mile to a T station. Conversely, major employers want to be as close to mass transit nodes as possible.

Siting unneeded millennial housing on the same block as the Green Line would not only displace office and lab space. Many Union Square parcels are of a size or configuration that can’t support office and lab space. Inevitably, they too will be developed as high-priced housing. Adding them to US2’s proposed housing would ensure that unaffordable housing, which we don’t need, largely preempts job and tax-revenue creation, which we desperately need.

Perhaps in anticipation of attendees’ outraged reaction, and wishing to diffuse it, those who planned last Wednesday’s meeting had set up tables with maps of the Green Line station site. Lego blocks represented the amounts of housing, retail, and office space that US2 intends to build there.

Presentations by Mr. Karczewski and his architect were followed by Russell Preston, a consultant hired by the city to facilitate community participation. He directed attendees to place the Legos in the configuration that they would like US2 to build.

Four different audience members said that they would prefer to continue discussing US2’s plans, evoking audience applause. Mr. Preston told them that they would have to play with their Legos and save discussion for another time. His response may have avoided mayhem, but it intensified discontent.

An imminent train wreck is now in motion. How it might be avoided is not clear because zoning for the Green Line station blocks are in limbo. The Master Developer Agreement states that US2’s development plans for those blocks must “proceed in advance of completing the Neighborhood Plan.”

Perhaps the aldermen will assert their authority. Or the citizenry, theirs.