By Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone

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

By any measure, business is booming in Somerville. We have added 247 net new businesses during the past two years. The largest employer in New England, Partners Healthcare, is building central offices in Assembly Square. Our local restaurant and hotel excise taxes are estimated to rise by more than 13% each during the next year. More than half of our new tax levy growth is coming from commercial sources. Yet we are still in the early phases of Somerville’s commercial boom. For instance, we estimate the Green Line extension will spur the creation of 30,000 new jobs along the extension over the next 30 years. This means, Somerville is poised for some very exciting and challenging transformations in our former industrial zones—and we need an updated zoning code to ensure it brings the benefits we’ve planned and hoped for.

We laid out our community’s goals for economic development in our SomerVision 20-year plan. We want to promote commercial growth that will reduce our dependence on residential taxes. We want to have a daytime workforce that will visit and give a boost to our small businesses. We want to create a diverse mix of new high-quality jobs. We want to transform our old industrial areas while enhancing our city squares.

However, achieving that growth will not be as simple as “build it and they will come.” To realize the commercial development potential of areas like Boynton Yards and add new jobs, we need to update our zoning so that commercial developers have a clear set of rules and regulations to follow. Right now we have a mish-mash of regulations that add uncertainty to the process. Predictability and consistency are critical elements in attracting commercial development, and we need to provide that to make our economic development goals a reality. In other words, if we zone for it, the ones we want will come.

The good news is that our SomerVision goals are in reach because Somerville offers what American business increasingly wants: walkable, bikeable, transit-accessible urban communities with bustling city squares, appealing playgrounds and parks, and engaging cultural opportunities. In short, they’re looking for well-planned cities with good infrastructure.

We have the benefit of experience with Assembly Square to guide us. When Assembly was still a post-industrial husk, commercial developers did not jump in and lay their money on the line. Only after the new T station became a certainty and a new neighborhood started to form next to the banks of the Mystic River did the business potential of that location become readily apparent. It took good planning to overcome the commercial market’s natural risk aversion.

That’s what we’re trying to embed in our zoning on a citywide basis. We have our transformational areas like Assembly Square, Union Square, Boynton Yards, Brickbottom, the Inner Belt and Grand Junction (where the Twin Cities Mall is located). Then we have our enhancement zones – our city squares along with corridors like Broadway, Highland Ave., McGrath Highway, Somerville Ave. and Beacon St. We’ve put forward a detailed zoning map of which spots are zoned as one of five different types of mixed-use districts, fabrication districts, commercial industry districts, and special transformational districts. We have explicit building standards proposed for each of those. That way when a commercial developer looks at Somerville, they know what they can do and where they can do it.

You may have noticed I use the term “mixed-use” above. That refers to zones where we’re going to enable both commercial development and new housing. In our major transformational districts we’re looking to have 60% of all new square footage be devoted to commercial use and 40% for new housing. And it is important that we enable both. Developers are now transforming abandoned suburban office parks into housing to mimic the sort of neighborhood/city square feel we have in Somerville. Corporate CEOs are looking for places with day and evening activity. Workers are seeking places to live where they can walk to work. In Kendall Square, the City of Cambridge is looking to add more housing because it went too far in the commercial direction and the area gets a little too sleepy at the end of the day. We believe the 60-40 split represents a good balance. That balance will create six new jobs for every new unit of housing.

Yet we need to make sure our zoning is flexible enough not to be stuck on that 60-40 split. That is our goal for the entire city, not on every parcel. We might get new housing located next a bigger all-commercial project. We might see 80-20 splits next to 40-60 splits. We’re trying to create sustainable, livable business districts with open/community space as a vital part of the mix. If the residential and retail markets mature faster than the office space market, like we saw in Assembly Square, we need to be able to react to that and make sure we create and sustain positive momentum in our transformational districts. Sometimes, what a commercial developer or corporate CEO needs to see is new residential development nearby.

The main thing is that we have a plan. We have put together a comprehensive zoning overhaul to enable the economic development our community has called for. The zoning will create predictable and straightforward rules for companies that are ready to grow and build here. If we get it right, it provides us with property tax relief, a vastly larger number of jobs right here in our city, and a daytime influx of people to help support our local retail, restaurant, and service sectors. We have been through extensive community input, getting down to parcel-level detail in many cases. Now it’s time to get zoning passed.

This is crucial to the future of our city and we should not take for granted that good things outside the scope of our planning and zoning magically will fall into place. We will get the future we plan—and zone—to have. Jobs and commercial development require a greater level of organization than our current zoning provides. If we want to achieve our local economic goals, we need zoning that aligns our community vision with a clear, well-constructed set of rules. We believe we have that on the table.