Work on a Davis Square Neighborhood Plan will ramp up in early May and finish within three to six months, extending into fall as needed, Somerville officials and staff said. It could provide a foundation for talks about a 26-story, 502-unit apartment building proposed for the square.
Scope and scheduling for a plan process is being set with the Mayor’s Office, and community engagement events are expected through the spring and summer from a project team that includes new hires as well as consultants who are already on retainer, said Dan Bartman, director of Somerville planning, preservation and zoning.
A webpage for the process said as of Tuesday that specifics are “coming soon.”
“The mayor has asked the planning divisions to complete the Davis Square planning effort started many years ago,” creating long-range urban planning guidance but not specifics for individual projects, Bartman said in a memo to the Davis Square Neighborhood Council.
Neighborhood council leaders said they went to City Hall on Thursday to meet with mayor Jake Wilson mainly to talk about public safety and community policing, but the plan was touched on. They discussed the meeting and memo on Monday.
“There have been many versions of this plan that have stopped and started over time,” said Elaine Almquist, president of the council, reporting to DSNC members the approach described at City Hall. “They are consulting all the previous documents and feedback in order to move forward on this. They’re not starting from scratch.”
The first attempt
City Council president Lance Davis, whose Ward 6 includes the square, said work on the previous plan began around 2015, inspired in part by a proposal at the time to build a hotel atop a public parking lot. Then “Covid just derailed everything,” Davis said, but there were other factors: City planner resources were strained by other demands, including a transformation of Union Square, a citywide zoning overhaul and a proposed revamp of the Somernova tech and business campus.
There is a continual challenge for staff bandwidth, Davis said. “Municipal employees are not paid enough for the incredible work they do, and we need three more of everybody.”
In addition to those challenges, there was the arrival of a developer named Scape that wanted a commercial development at the same corner where the developer Copper Mill hopes to put up the apartment building on a base of retail and restaurants – just one sign of how much things have changed.
Expectations for a plan
From what Bartman told Davis, the previous plan for the square “reflected a pre-Covid world, and the whole world is different,” Davis said. While sentiment at neighborhood council meetings is that it would be irresponsible for planners to ignore their earlier work, Davis also doesn’t “think they should just crib off what they did before.”
The previous version of the plan set smaller business as a focus, but never got to setting density bonuses, Davis said. He felt planners agreed to a more conceptual approach and that a specific zoning map was “not the best idea.”
DSNC member Chris Beland, though, said the City Hall meeting promised proposed zoning changes along with delivery of the neighborhood plan – though some aspects of Davis Square’s future would be handled separately. An Elmway project, which could close Elm Street to car traffic and switch a section of Highland Avenue to two-way traffic to compensate, would get its own process because “here won’t be construction-ready documents coming with a neighborhood plan.”
Neighborhood council work
The council voted to create a working group to handle issues surrounding the Davis Square plan. The working group was limited in power to not make recommendations without a vote of the full body.
A six-month planning process brings the city, residents and Copper Mill into November. Company founder and chief executive Andrew Flynn said at a community meeting held March 10 that to go forward with “a viable, feasible project,” consensus and approvals are needed before the end of the calendar year. Without that, the company might “have to move on.”
Before the Monday meeting of the DSNC came one with Copper Mill catching up on a promise from Flynn: to present new options for project designs that were met with resident hostility and that even he agreed were “soulless.”
Designs are due from architect CBT on Wednesday and will be likely be shared with the public next week in the Copper Mill project office at 235 Elm St. “There’s not room for everyone here to show up on the same day,” Almquist said, “but they hope to have staggered times when people can just show up and talk to them directly.”
Developer engagement
Copper Mill has vacant spaces in addition to the former Caramel patisserie that under city code can’t be easily reopened or host pop-up businesses. The company has agreed to keep its properties clean and to consider a proposal from the neighborhood council to put art in their windows coordinated by a hired curator. (The city’s Arts Council, reshuffling duties with the loss of an executive director this month, told the DSNC that it is happy to advise but cannot take on the project.)
Residents at the meeting had concerns about the idea, including if a curator would be paid but not the artists whose work would be shown; and whether it was useful for Copper Mill to put art in the windows of their empty storefronts when Davis Square had so many other vacancies.
“It’s actually a very useful tool,” board member Carmen Phillips said, because other developers might be shamed into matching Copper Mill’s beautification efforts. “Everything happens one step at a time, and also this is a nice way of gauging how well Copper Mill responds to things. If they can’t bother to do something like that, then that’s really helpful to know when it comes time to the community benefits negotiating agreement.”
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