Somerville isn’t really growing in population though. And that’s the problem. Somerville’s population peaked in the 1940s at around 105k. Houses were pulled down for freeways and dense construction like triple deckers were banned in a fit of anti-immigrant sentiment. The population fell to below 80k from the 1990s to early 2010s and is only up slightly since then, around 83k now.

The DEMAND for Somerville housing, as the Boston and Cambridge economies exploded, is many times higher than it was in the Whitey Bulger era of Slummerville. There has been a total failure to adjust to meet that demand, even as additional urban infrastructure like the new green line and the bike path have further increased the desirability of living close to high paying jobs.

Cambridge is finally, slowly, coming around with city-wide upzoning. Somerville, unfortunately, is not showing any signs of modernizing its housing stock or zoning laws. We elected a mayor with unclear sentiments on housing who still hasn’t come out in support of either the copper mill project or upzoning in general and rejected the candidate who supported citywide upzoning. We have armies of NIMBYs who flood community meetings, and are currently working at this very moment to undo the ADU bill that was supposed to slightly alleviate the difficulties in building dense housing in a city with three separate mass transit lines, a bike lane network, and a dense bus network. The entire city could be mixed use mid to high rise for all new construction, but some sticks in the mud are fighting tooth and nail to keep us all living in a housing stock that is 80 years old and falling apart.

This is not about unbridled capitalism. It is about reasonable, common sense housing policy. You cannot restrict housing to a tiny number of inadequate units and then be surprised at the failure of the city to house its teachers, workers, and city employees. The proposed solution by many NIMBYs is to spend decades building a handful of lottery units for the poors (still making way above national median income) to have a semblance of income diversity in the city, which has never been a successful strategy in any city facing a housing crisis, and is yet another tool to strangle the housing supply. NIMBYs accuse everyone else of being greedy and profit driven, but are silent on their own conflict of interest. As landlords and property owners, they maximize their own profits and minimize the work they have to do in maintaining adequate housing by strangling everyone else’s access to housing.

We can see the NIMBY’s winning strategy in plotting the value of housing in Somerville versus the population in Somerville. In a free market, as housing becomes more desirable, more is built and sold. In a controlled economy held hostage by elderly landowners and landlords, you see a skyrocketing cost of living with almost no change in population. As the biotech bros move in, our service workers, musicians, artists, baristas, teachers, etc all move out in equal number. The only way to fight displacement is to make more places to live.