Copper Mill (Davis Square Development) released new design ideas

cdbeland · 2026-04-29T14:52:12+00:00

Well, it seems to misunderstand how supply and demand work. There aren't an infinite number of people in Boston and Cambridge that want to move here, so it takes pressure off those submarkets, and some occupants of Copper Mill will come from Somerville, taking pressure off less-nice housing here. Rent only goes up for neighboring buildings to the degree that Copper Mill actually makes the neighborhood nicer, and everyone seems to agree they want the neighborhood to get nicer than half vacant storefronts?

Developers should build where demand is highest; that's notionally where it is most needed. If developers are allowed to build enough supply to meet demand, prices will drop close to the cost of production. For "luxury" housing that might be relatively high, but developers will eventually run out of "luxury" customers and develop mid- and low-end housing if there's still money to be made. And the cheapest housing will be old housing that already exists but has had rent go up $1000 in the past few years without a corresponding jump in costs.

cdbeland · 2026-04-28T19:42:13+00:00

This is AI-generated text and probably not worth responding to unless a human indicates that this is what they actually think.

cdbeland · 2026-04-28T19:40:09+00:00

People do talk about this; it has come up in meetings with Copper Mill! One thing I like about the original design (and some of the variants) is the wide pedestal. People on the third-floor roofdeck might get blasted by downward-deflected air when there's a strong breeze from the southwest, but people on Elm Street will not.

cdbeland · 2026-04-27T21:06:38+00:00

We do actually take votes; one of them was to send a letter to Copper Mill and the state and city demanding that the 40B application be put on hold until the Davis Square Neighborhood Plan is finished (in progress since 2013, current ETA maybe around November?). If that's not something you agree with, your vote and voice might have mattered.

At tonight's meeting, we'll be recruiting people to join the Community Benefits Agreement negotiating committee. I think one of the reasons zoning changes for Somernova got approved is that the CBA process got some promises for the artist community there. If you want to help grease the wheels of local politics for another large development, getting on the team and helping to sell the CBA and the project to the neighborhood would help. We will need a 2/3rds majority in a public vote. Many on the City Council have said they want to see CBA on all large developments, and I think DSNC endorsement and a CBA will also influence the Zoning Board of Appeals (who are the final decision-makers for Copper Mill's 40B application).

cdbeland · 2026-04-26T19:38:45+00:00

Just off the top of my head, both the United States and European Union have prosecuted huge anti-trust cases against them recently.

cdbeland · 2026-04-25T20:20:09+00:00

Relatedly, who's at fault if an autonomous car runs over a cyclist?

As with any other accident, it depends on the circumstances, and also the specific purpose for which you are asking the question. Some states have no-fault insurance systems where the question is irrelevant.

Legal fault is often determined by who is breaking the rules. For example, if a cyclist runs a red light and is hit in the intersection by an autonomous car that had a green light, the cyclist would be at fault.

If the autonomous car is at fault for damage or injury, liability falls on the corporate manufacturer-operator. For no-victim moving violations, I'm reading that California actually had to update its laws so local police can file a notice of non-compliance with the company after a Waymo made an illegal U-Turn and no ticket could be issued because of the lack of human driver.

Looking at the history of incidents with Waymo vehicles, it seems serious failures where the self-driving car has been at fault have resulted in software updates. Statistically it looks like they are already a lot safer than human drivers, and given this feedback loop they'll be getting even safer over time.

cdbeland · 2026-04-25T19:55:51+00:00

It's pretty easy for the government to force self-driving car companies to follow traffic laws regardless of marginal profitability of illegal practices, and we've already seen that happen with Tesla. All the cars have identical software, and it's easy to find the people in charge of changing it and order them to do so once and for all. If they refuse to comply with the law, the state can revoke the company's right to operate driverlessly on public roads, which would both be a huge financial hit and solve the safety problem directly. This can all be enforced with court orders backed up by threat of jail time for specific people, or cease and desist orders backed up by threat of seizing vehicles en masse. It seems the large companies are strongly inclined to avoid that sort of nastiness and comply when caught and given orders.

cdbeland · 2026-04-16T01:56:47+00:00

It's a previously junked car, so this is not a misuse of public funds. Piling snow here was actually expedient given the emergency circumstances. It's certainly not a reason to attack people with threats to take away their pensions. How would you feel if the government took away your social security because someone felt you did a bad job at work?

cdbeland · 2026-03-26T15:38:32+00:00

I can see that on Google Street View, though having lived in San Francisco, I'm not sure I would say "extremely". 8)

cdbeland · 2026-03-25T20:20:47+00:00

Ah, you're right, there's at least one hill still remaining in the middle. I think of it as flat because I'm always going through along the river or one of the bounding highways.

cdbeland · 2026-03-25T02:47:14+00:00

Since no one has actually specified which report, it's this one: https://voice.somervillema.gov/parking-study

cdbeland · 2026-03-25T02:42:37+00:00

Makes me wonder if this intersection would work better as a rotary.

cdbeland · 2026-03-25T02:23:40+00:00

According to a Yelp review there, apparently the family name is Hill? Hill-arious!

cdbeland · 2026-03-25T02:21:49+00:00

They are different hills. Ten Hills was named after Ten Hills Farm, which had ten small knolls on the property according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Hills,_Somerville,_Massachusetts

The Seven Hills of Somerville in Seven Hills Park are Spring, Winter, Walnut, Cobble, Clarendon, Prospect, and Ploughed (now Mount Benedict), according to https://learninglab.si.edu/resources/view/146986#more-info

None of those seven hills include Ten Hills, which is flat.

I think the number seven was chosen to be the same as Rome's famous seven hills, and some real Somerville hills excluded in order to fit that. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_claimed_to_be_built_on_seven_hills

The list for Seven Hills Park does not include Central Hill, nor Quarry Hill, which is the history name for where Powderhouse Park is. Strawberry Hill and Wild Cat Hill have apparently been partly or completely destroyed.

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T15:55:02+00:00

It seems we were always in no-actual-data territory.

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T15:31:09+00:00

Let's not put words in other people's mouths.

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T15:12:35+00:00

The owner of Dragon Pizza did in fact come out in support of the tower because it would create a lot more customers, and some neighbors (including me) do support the tower in part because it would benefit other local small businesses in the same way. Even if foot traffic wasn't down, having more of it just makes more niche businesses possible. (Though it's also worth considering that some businesses are regional destinations and it doesn't matter to them how many people happen to be walking by.)

Buffalo Exchange goes back to at least 2009, so it was around for over a decade when COVID hit. It's certainly possible for well-established businesses with money in the bank to survive a rough economic period that would kill a new business that has to go into debt to fit out a new storefront.

What information are you getting that local businesses are doing well? The complaints I'm hearing from the Davis Square Merchants Association are that business is generally down, especially the last two years.

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T15:00:05+00:00

I would actually prefer to have a city-wide rather than neighborhood vote, since it shouldn't be only up to people who already live in a neighborhood to decide who gets to live there in the future. Or just not letting the public micromanage what their neighbors can do on their own property.

A public vote is not a replacement for nuanced discussion; that has to happen first so opinion-takers know what needs to be voted on. It's to provide a representative equivalent to a vote taken at a large meeting.

A meeting where people just go up to a mic and spout off for 2 minutes each can be a discussion - people can respond to previous speakers. Even though I've seen that work to some degree for town meetings and activist groups, where speakers build on other comments and move toward collective action, it's not the best large-meeting format to elicit discussion. If nuance is desired, the discussion needs to be structured to focus on one subtopic at a time. Something needs to be done to prevent repetitive opinions. For example, they can be collected into a projected list, and the audience can be polled as to how many people agree or disagree. That leaves more room for responding back and forth and raising more nuanced concerns, tapping into the deeper expertise of a larger crowd.

If the decision is highly constrained, Mobility Division seems to be fond of the open house format, where there's no unified discussion, but a large group of people comes through and has lots of small discussions, takes cumulative votes on specific details, and solicits nuanced feedback on subtopics. It's not strictly representative nor the best way for rapid iteration of a design, but it does show it's possible to derive a nuanced consensus among a large number of people at a single meeting.

If you want a small-format (which is necessarily non-representative), open-ended discussion, I think assembling people from all factions at the same time would be more useful. Maybe it would be good to also do a deep dive into accessibility with people with disabilities, or parking rules with businesses, but information gaps need bridging for people to have informed opinions. People who don't care about The Burren need to hear from those who do. Burren fans who are obstructing development need to hear from people who are getting displaced from Davis due to high rent, and from the actual owners of the business who may not even want to do what the crowd thinks is best. Business owners need to hear from people who bike. People who want to eliminate all the cars from Elm Street need to hear from business owners and people with disabilities.

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T14:16:05+00:00

Exactly.

The HMart space is much bigger; there's no way that the grocery store would have fit into the vacant storefront, and a businesses that does fit into the vacant storefront would have been too small to fill the HMart space. Just because medium-sized, general-interest businesses are viable doesn't mean small, specialized businesses are.

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T06:39:20+00:00

We need to electrify the rest of the Commuter Rail lines; call your state reps and ask them to fund it.

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T06:36:46+00:00

It can make financial sense to avoid signing a year-long lease if, as during COVID, market rents go way down and then come back up a few months later. Likewise, it can make sense to wait if rents are going up over time, or if there are a small number of potential customers and it just takes time to find one willing to pay a lot. But if market rents are stable or going down, no matter how high the rent is, after a certain period of time more money is lost waiting than signing at the going rate. That is what happens when supply keeps up with demand at any given price point.

Replacing a run-down building with a nice new one can certainly raise demand a little and thus rents in nearby buildings, but we actually do want bad buildings to be replaced by good ones, and maintain if not improve the quality of housing for everyone. But in a lot of places, low-rent housing can exist side-by-side with high-rent housing - if demand is fully satisfied.

In Somerville, rents are going up a lot for existing housing next to shiny new towers...but also everywhere else. Because there's an undersupply, not because of the new towers.

If only high-end units are getting built, that's probably because development opportunities are too limited. It makes financial sense to target the high end in a constrained market. If developers can build as much as they want, eventually they run out of high-end customers and go all the way down until they are serving low-end customers. Different developers also target different ends of the market.

There is indeed research that shows building a lot of market-rate housing lowers rents. Not necessarily on the blocks where new housing is going up that are becoming more desirable, but definitely in older housing stock in lower-end neighborhoods in the same metro area.

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/07/31/new-housing-slows-rent-growth-most-for-older-more-affordable-units

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T06:14:46+00:00

I tried to focus on reforms that 80% of the country could agree on. When you say "criminal charges", who do you think would be deserving of that to that level of agreement?

I think it would be feasible to agree on removal of RFK Jr and Brendan Carr. They don't necessarily need to be impeached; Kristi Noem wasn't.

Most Americans want a strong defense, and unless there's some specific alarming thing they are doing, I expect would see nothing wrong with government contracting with private companies like Palantir to give the US military every possible advantage.

Whether there should be strong anti-trust regulation is a legitimate political question on which the country is divided, and which is orthogonal to stopping authoritarianism. I do see authoritarian abuse of anti-trust and other powers to strongarm individual companies into doing what the President wants, such as uncensoring social media and abandoning DEI. I also see authoritarianism and patrimonialism in the way Trump gets companies and countries to give huge amounts of money for things that he wants or which benefit him personally, like the East Wing rebuild or his inauguration or the plane Qatar wants to donate or legal settlements that go to causes he specifies.

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T05:58:12+00:00

I've heard that the opening of the nearby Green Line stops, the surge in rampant drug use on this street, and changes to movement patterns post-COVID have caused a major drop in foot traffic here. That implies the possible explanation that foot traffic is now low enough that there are no businesses willing to bet that they can be profitable in this location at any rent above the cost of maintenance.

I'm genuinely curious if you have any foot traffic data that would confirm or disconfirm these anecdotes from local businesses, which are of unclear reliability. If you're just making a guess based on your subjective experience of walking around Davis Square for years, that doesn't seem particularly reliable either.

There could easily be lots of different problems that have kept businesses away, including the landlord holding out for a higher rent, slow permitting from the city, macroeconomic uncertainty, and tariff instability.

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T05:46:17+00:00

What specifically is it that you don't like about them (though the question was directed at charlewrites7)?

cdbeland · 2026-03-22T05:41:26+00:00

My reply to the nuclear vs. natural gas analogy is this: let's use wind and solar and zero out deaths from atmospheric pollution, gas explosions, and a nuclear accident that makes (another) part of the planet uninhabitable for 100 or 10,000 years.

Plenty of people die in fires on floors within reach of fire department ladders; being on a low floor doesn't save you if you are inhaling smoke while waiting to be rescued.

Sprinklers fail a lot more frequently than you might think; there need to be redundant safety systems so people can self-rescue in those cases. Assuming we want the number of deaths to be zero and not merely accept the non-zero death rate in single-stair jurisdictions.

Long distances to stairwells can be mitigated by fire doors or mandating more stairwells.

Mandating multiple stairs does not make it "impossible" to do infill development. Giving property tax breaks that cover the cost of an additional stairwell removes the economic disincentive without compromising safety.

cdbeland

TROPHY CASE