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The thousands of new units built in Somerville in recent years, many of them luxury products at Assembly Row, have served as a valuable relief valve, siphoning high-end buyers and renters off of the city’s market and keeping its high prices from climbing even higher. Image courtesy of Federal Realty
If you believe the way out of the housing crisis is to build, build, build, then Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone is your guy.
More than 2,200 condos and apartments, including hundreds of affordable units, have hit the market in Somerville since 2010 under his watch, Curtatone contends.
But as Somerville voters prepare to go to the polls Tuesday, housing has emerged as area of political vulnerability for the 53-year-old mayor, who first took office in 2003.
Curtatone is taking heat for pocketing campaign contributions from some of the big developers behind many of the 2,200 new housing units that have come online since 2010.
And mayoral challenger Marianne Walles has seized upon Somerville’s still sky-high prices and rents to argue Curtatone’s approach to reining in a runaway housing market has been a failure.
Challenger Blames Prices on Development
Backed by the local Bernie Sanders’ fan club, Our Revolution Somerville, the social worker and union official blames the building boom for boosting prices, with too many new luxury units and too few affordable ones.
“Our city has become the place of luxury condos and apartments,” Walles says on her campaign website. “We need to be focused on affordable apartment buildings, not just a percentage of luxury apartments being set aside to be affordable.”
The dustup over Curatone taking cash from prominent builders – featured prominently on Our Revolution Somerville’s website – is not a good look for Somerville’s long-reigning mayor.
Under pressure from critics, Curtatone announced he had sworn off contributions from for-profit developers, only to have a slew of them pop up on a recent campaign finance report filed with state regulators.
Oops.
These include hefty checks – ranging from $500 to $1,000, the most allowed under law – from development executives with big projects in Somerville.
Somerville’s Beacon Street as seen from above in 2015. Demand for housing in Greater Boston is so strong and suburban construction so limited, the 2,200 housing units built in Somerville since 2010 haven’t kept home prices and rents in check. Image courtesy of Nick Allen / CC BY-SA 4.0
The mayor’s staff told WGBH News, which reported the contributions, that they were reviewing the contributions and hadn’t decided whether to return them or not.
OK, spare us the silly runarounds and lame excuses, please. If you say you are not going to take cash from developers, don’t.
But the campaign contribution mess aside, Curtatone stands on much firmer ground when it comes to his approach to battling the housing crisis than critics on his left flank like Walles, his challenger.
Somerville’s prices aren’t going up because too many luxury condos and apartments are being built.
Rather, prices are going up because Somerville can’t do it on its own, with nowhere near enough housing is under construction across the hundreds of cities and towns that make up Greater Boston.
Somerville Can’t Hide from Demand
Somerville’s big push on housing is by far the exception, rather than rule, with only Boston and a handful, at best, of other communities pulling their weight.
In fact, without all those new apartments and condos – yes, including all those luxury ones – prices and rents would be even higher in Somerville than they already are now.
This is not East Podunkville, not anymore anyway. Somerville, as well as Boston and Cambridge, are now global destinations, with broad social and cultural appeal and a perch smack in the center of the region’s booming biotech, research, health care and higher education sectors.
We’ve seen an influx of highly paid professionals from moving into the region’s urban core over the past two decades, bidding up prices and rents for older homes and apartments built decades ago for the region’s middle– and working–class families.
The wave of new luxury apartments and condos that has been hitting the market over the past few years only helped to take the pressure off of the existing housing stock, even if the results can be hard to see.
Brokers are all over this too, fretting for a while now about the eventual impact of the flood of upscale digs on more humble units farther down the real estate food chain, especially when the economy slows down and the owners of all those luxury apartments are forced to slash rents.
Luxury Units a Relief Valve
In fact, without all those upscale new units and the greedy capitalist developers the Bernie Sanders crowd loves to fume about, rents and prices in Somerville could easily be even worse right now.
One needs to only look at what has happened to rents and real estate prices in the Bay Area, where a booming economy collided head–on with stifling zoning restrictions.
Scott Van Voorhis
The median price of a home in San Francisco is $1.7 million, with Boston-area prices looking like a steal to refugees from the Bay Area.
Beating up on Curtatone for trying to get badly needed housing built is not going to lower rents or prices in Somerville by a single dollar.
The real problem isn’t the fancy apartments developers are building in Somerville, but rather the barricade of zoning rules and other red tape thrown up by suburban leaders to block not only new apartment buildings, but also condo projects and single-family homes.
The 1-, 2- and even 3-acre lot sizes so many towns and suburbs now require all but ensure the only thing that will get built are pricey McMansions
If the Our Revolution crowd in Somerville truly wants to make a difference, they should hit the road and start pushing NIMBY suburban planning boards to loosen up their zoning restrictions and let more housing get built.
Now that would be a revolution worth signing up for.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
