The costs of living, especially electricity bills now and in a future that could see them inflated by the demands of data centers built to serve AI, were prominent Thursday in a five-way battle of progressives to take over the 2nd Middlesex District seat as senator Pat Jehlen retires after 20 years.
The district includes the cities of Somerville and Medford; and parts of Cambridge and Winchester. Duking it out for the seat are state representatives Christine Barber and Erika Uyterhoeven, Cambridge vice mayor Burhan Azeem, Somerville city councilor Matt McLaughlin and Winchester School Committee member Tom Hopcroft. Jehlen has not endorsed a candidate publicly.
A crowd of roughly 100 gathered in the Somerville High School lower cafeteria, while a further 81 joined online for a forum co-hosted by several Somerville-based community organizations. Many community questions focused on affordability, housing and worker protection.
With rising energy costs and unclear bills, several of the candidates took aim at the utilities Eversource and National Grid and specifically the transmission costs making up customers’ delivery charges.
Azeem and Barber spoke of the possible benefits of new solar and wind infrastructure, while McLaughlin floated nuclear investment and Hopcroft spoke of possible exploration of fusion power, but with a goal of upkeep for established infrastructure rather than building more. “If you go to Kendall Square, we are building the world’s most expensive substation,” Azeem said. “But it probably didn’t need to be $2 billion.” He argued that the reason for this cost was that utility companies benefited from transmission investments.
Data centers and AI
Data centers – giant, resource-sucking projects proposed nationwide to power the use of controversial artificial intelligence software – received widespread apprehension from the candidates, but not an outright no. Uyterhoeven called them a “figment of late-stage capitalism” and said the state should halt all projects until “we can figure out their impact.” Barber and Hopcroft sang a similar tune, with the school committee member going further to say that the “genie is out of the bottle” when it came to AI and computing.
Azeem echoed this, saying that like the industrial revolution, jobs would be lost to AI but “productive laws” could help the workforce adapt and limit its harms.
McLaughlin was not a “hard no,” but his position depends on whether developers would agree to pay their own costs and put money back into the community
In February, governor Maura Healey announced an AI partnership with Google and launched an AI-assistant program across the state’s executive branch. Uyterhoeven explained that she was “dismayed” with the governor embracing AI on a state level.
Several candidates also rallied around Mass Save, a program that McLaughlin said has helped provide own grandmother with proper cooling and heating. The anecdotal approach was a practice of the Somerville councilor in communicating a common-man image; he vowed in his introduction to connect each policy answer with an example of how life is lived in Somerville.
Housing costs
District housing costs have been especially high in Cambridge and Somerville, and councils in each of the cities have looked for ways to build more homes to keep up with demand and slow rising rent bills.
When it came to housing Barber and Uyterhoeven said housing was a “human right” – one treated instead like a “speculative commodity,” in Uyterhoeven’s complaint. “We have not built public housing since the ’80s,” she said, pointing to her efforts to double funding from the Community Preservation Act to bring millions into the state’s affordable housing trust fund.
The state reps also rallied behind rent stabilization. Barber said she was trying to create a “commission for rent control,” but did not elaborate on what this meant.
Azeem backed the idea of increasing the supply of starter homes, cheaper properties that are meant to be sold onward as owners age and grow in buying power; McLaughlin pointed to Somerville’s affordable housing overlay – which passed in 2020 and was followed by Cambridge’s own 100 percent Affordable Housing Overlay – as a model for what he hopes to achieve at the state level.
Other cost-of-living issues
McLaughlin and Hopcroft supported investing in early education and childcare. Hopcroft called education the “single best investment we can make in our children,” while McLaughlin quipped that he supported universal childcare because “we need someone looking out for us when we are old” earning him smiles from the gathered candidates.
Protecting workers was another topic, and a few candidates had records to back their talk. Azeem pointed to his participation in passing Cambridge’s wage theft ordinance in 2022, while Barber touted the Somerville Job Creation and Retention Trust, which she sponsored during her first term as a state representative. “Almost a billion dollars of wages have been stolen from workers,” said Uyterhoeven, emphasizing enforcement as especially important in Somerville with its many ongoing construction projects.
Addressing food insecurity, McLaughlin said we have “more food than we need,” but that it’s not being allocated properly. Uyterhoeven blamed the eligibility gap of Snap recipients in Massachusetts, the second-largest in the nation, and said that work needed to be done to remove “hurdles” for potential recipients. She brought up the idea of state-owned supermarkets, alluding to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s city-owned efforts.
There was discussion of protecting the area’s arts economy and creativity by ensuring there are spaces artists can afford to live and work. The Creative Space Act, which proposes that government should preserve and create arts spaces as it does affordable housing, was brought up in a question about making the state more accessible to artists. Barber said she co-sponsored that act, while Hopcroft proposed adding artist space requirements into collective bargaining agreements with property developers.
Finances and federal policies
How to pay for it all, when the federal government under Donald Trump is focused on measures to punish blue communities?
Uyterhoeven said the state needed a progressive tax code, and that the millionaire tax passed in 2022 still saw millionaires “paying too little.” She voted in favor of adding the millionaire tax question on the 2022 ballot and has co-sponsored legislation to protect revenues collected through the Fair Share Amendment.
Candidates pitched solutions throughout the night on how to ensure state and city programs are insulated from federal slashes to social services and housing. Cambridge lost more than $8.5 million in anticipated federal housing funding in 2025 supporting the housing of unhoused individuals through policy changes.
The topic of protecting immigrants in the community was also broached. Barber said the state has to act as a “firewall” for immigrants and spoke on her efforts filing and passing the Work and Family Mobility Act, which allows all Massachusetts residents, regardless of their immigration status, to apply for a standard driver’s license. Uyterhoeven has been outspoken in her opposition to what she sees as the state not doing enough to protect immigrant communities, saying during the forum that “we still don’t have the law yet” – a reference to the pending status of the Protect and Dignity not Deportation Acts.
A different take was offered by Azeem, who called for a strategy of making “everything take twice as long” for federal authorities. Cambridge has begun to offer municipal housing vouchers to help move undocumented residents off federal waitlists, which could be obtained by immigration authorities, he said.
Congestion pricing, pizza and more
In the lightning round, candidates found themselves in near-total agreement on almost every issue, with an exception: their favorite pizza in the district.
McLaughlin yet again stood out by not sticking exactly to the program. Asked if they supported congestion pricing on highways, all candidates said yes; McLaughlin instead said “Tear down McGrath Highway.” It drew laughter from the audience and a reminder from the moderator to answer the question correctly. To congestion pricing, he said maybe.
There was a unanimous yes in support of allowing use automated speed and red-light cameras to ticket drivers for breaking the law, as well as for extending voting rights to noncitizens in state elections.
Asked whether they supported allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in municipal, state and federal elections, the candidates again expressed unanimous support, though Barber made sure to note that she filed the bill for it and McLaughlin used his turn to fire back: “I submitted the home rule petition.”
Barber was referring to Massachusetts House Bill 3918, in committee since she filed it in early 2025, to let 16- and 17-year-olds vote in Somerville elections. McLaughlin clarified afterward that the city had submitted home rule petitions for 16-year-old and noncitizen voting, which failed at the state house level. “It’s hard to say when they want a simple yes or no,” he wrote.
When it came to favorite pizza places, Barber and Uyterhoeven picked Leone’s Subs & Pizza on Somerville’s Winter Hill; Hopcroft chose Blaze Pizza in East Cambridge, McLaughlin shouted out Avenue Kitchen + Bar in Somerville’s Ball Square and Azeem went with American Flatbread at Sacco’s Bowl Haven Somerville’s Davis Square.
Feature image by Matt Abban. This post was updated July 19, 2026, to specify that a question about extending voting rights to noncitizens was about state elections.
About The Author
