By William C. Shelton

(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)

Our city has the lowest proportion of green and open space in the Commonwealth because its elected officials colluded with residential developers rather than protecting their citizens’ best interests.

Within a generation after Somerville’s 1842 separation from Charlestown, increasing regional economic demand, improved industrial technology, and a flood of immigrants were reshaping a farming community and transit hub into an industrial center.

Developers hastened to turn farmland into housing for workers, many of whom had fled the Irish potato famine. The pace of immigration and development slowed somewhat during the Civil War, and then rebounded.

Some developers built grand houses in East Somerville and on Winter Hill, marketing the area to affluent Bostonians as a leafy suburb. Streetcar lines built in the 1890s enabled family members who were not factory workers to commute to Boston service occupations.

In the same decade, a banking collapse and two panics smothered the market for Somerville’s elegant homes. Developers shifted focus, buying up agricultural land and subdividing parcels into tiny lots with modest houses and no yards. They made such a killing that they began buying up the Winter Hill manses, razing them, and building brick apartment buildings.

Many residents felt that property should be set aside for parks and open space. But building on every available scrap was too profitable. City politicians even resisted allocating a skimpy amount of Prospect Hill land for a monument. A massive petition campaign persuaded them of the project’s political expediency, and Somerville’s most recognizable landmark was dedicated in 1903.

Union Square’s redevelopment offers an opportunity for city officials to begin correcting the errors of the past. But the rezoning now before the Planning Board and Aldermen would compound those errors. It allocates only 15% of new development to open space.

It was written to codify Union Square’s Neighborhood Plan, which is the product of an intensive seventeen-month planning process. In every one of its public meetings, citizens said they wanted more expansive open space. The mayoral-appointed Civic Advisory Committee quantified the minimum amount at 34%.

It’s difficult to visualize what 15% open space across a district looks like. If one’s perspective is with the open space concentrated in the foreground, as it is in the Neighbor Plan examples, it doesn’t look so bad. Otherwise, you wonder where the open space is. And 15% is worse than it sounds, since so much of Union Square is already built.

More troubling, the proposed zoning allows development on lots comprising less than 40,000 square feet to satisfy open space requirements with measures like wider sidewalks, passages between buildings, courtyards, or in-lieu contributions. As a point of reference, an acre is 43,560 square feet. If developers of all these “smaller” lots satisfied their requirements in this manner, the net result would be about 7.8% civic open space, and that only in the overlay district.

Contrast this with a town like Brookline. Although it already has ample parks and greenery, its zoning obligates developers to commit 35% of commercial projects’ land area to open space. The South Boston Municipal Harbor Plan required that 40% of the Fan Pier and Pier 4 sites “be devoted to parks, plazas, and other pedestrian-usable public open spaces, exclusive of streets.”

Most enlightened municipalities are requiring substantial portions of large-scale developments to be civic open space. And most enlightened developers understand that this increases the market value of what they build. To make it work, developers must be allowed to build denser projects.

Although we are often cited as New England’s densest city, the human need for open space is not about reducing density. Manhattan is almost four times Somerville’s density, yet it has four times our proportion of open space.

The need for open space is, instead, about the quality of the public realm. It is the common ground where diverse citizens come together to experience their city and create their community. It is what transforms space into place. It reduces crime, increases property values, and without it, cities are unlivable.

The proportionately larger the public realm is, the broader can be the range of human interaction that it nurtures, and the greater can be our sense of being connected to a larger enterprise. The inverse is true as well.

Legislation regarding the public realm goes back to old England and to concerns that all city dwellers needed light and air to be healthy. The charming term that remains in English law is “preservation of the ancient lights.”

In the middle of the last Century, legislation mandated green belts around English cities. Green belts now comprise 13 percent of English land. They curtail sprawl while keeping downtowns vital. And unlike in the U.S., this legislation and its enforcement is national, ensuring that developers and giant retailers cannot bully or seduce municipal authorities.

The solution in Union Square is fairly simple: build higher.

US2 has been pressuring city planners to expeditiously approve new zoning and to limit open-space requirements to 15%. Their motivation for the former is understandable. It’s been twenty-eight months since the Somerville Redevelopment Authority chose them to be the Master Developer Partner, and they haven’t been able to build anything.

They have the Beacon Sales and Green and Yellow Cab properties under agreement, the managers of which presented themselves at the October 18th public hearing as commonplace Union Square business people who just wanted the aldermen to approve good zoning—quickly. That zoning allows US2 to build twenty-story buildings on the Green Line block, Public Safety Building site, and Beacon Sales parcel.

So increase the allowed height of buildings on the Cab property and on any parcel not next to existing homes. But among those buildings, create the public realm that ‘Villens have deserved and been denied for a century and a half.