Residents meet with Copper Mill officials May 27 in their project office on Elm Street in Somerville’s Davis Square. Now the project in question is dead. (Photo: Marc Levy)

The development company Copper Mill is giving up on its plan for a redevelopment and residential tower in Somerville’s Davis Square. The company’s head, Andrew Flynn, named the cause in a letter Monday: “There has been no reciprocity from the city’s leadership over the past three years.”

The city rejected blame. The allegation by Copper Mill was “laughable,” mayor Jake Wilson said in response. “The idea that we’re not here to work with developers, that we’re somehow apathetic to development, is just ridiculous.”

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The plan for a 502-unit, 26-story tower emerged in 2023, with Copper Mill taking over with a residential and retail concept after its predecessor, Scape, gave up on a labs concept. After a series of public meetings in 2024, Copper Mill went largely silent for a year – then filed for site approval Dec. 22 under state Chapter 40B rules for projects that include significant amounts of affordable homes. The project would include around 126 affordable homes among its total.

To residents upset about the proposed height and saying it was out of scale with the neighborhood, Flynn spoke of the challenges of getting the project to “pencil out,” starting with parcels priced at around $43 million by the real estate company Myer Dana and Sons. He said his firm needed commitments by the end of this year for the project to go forward, and that the community could expect around two years of construction.

The state process triggered a public comment period that would have expired Feb. 6, but was paused by the MassHousing agency to get its own questions answered.

“This has always been between Copper Mill and the state,” Wilson said in reference to the 40B process that Copper Mill filed for. “We didn’t even get the opportunity to submit a comment on it – for, against or neutral – because this was paused at the state level. So the idea that that we’re somehow to blame for this is pretty laughable on its face. I’m surprised they’re not blaming us for other developments of theirs that have gone awry.”

In June, the company was sued over a deal involving the Queen Anne Inn in Chatham, which Copper Mill bought for $10 million in 2025. After reportedly missing payments on a $7.8 million loan agreement with the sellers, Copper Mill sold the property at a loss in November 2025.

The news raised doubts among residents, and the company went largely silent again despite opening a little-used project office on Elm Street.

The city, though, already knew the Davis Square project was dead from its conversations with the Dana family, which owns the real estate on which Copper Mill would have built, Wilson said.

“We knew this was coming. We knew that that partnership was no longer in effect,” Wilson said.

A rendering shows a proposed retail design for a project by the developer Copper Mill at Elm and Grove streets in Somerville’s Davis Square. (Image: Copper Mill)

That puts the emphasis on a Davis Square Neighborhood Plan that is expected to be finished and presented in the first half of 2027 and could shape whatever follows the Copper Mill project.

After launch in 2015 and a derailment by the Covid pandemic, revived work on a neighborhood plan this year was to ramp up in the spring and finish within three to six months, extending into fall if necessary – but now is “going full steam ahead” for next year, Wilson said, with several public engagement opportunities near. A technical advisory committee has been named, “and we’re moving ahead with urgency here. We want to make sure that we deliver on this and get this over the finish line, because it’s been promised for over a decade.”

“Ideally, I’d love to see it happen in the first quarter of 2027,” Wilson said of the neighborhood plan. “But that is admittedly a stretch goal.”

The end of the Copper Mill project would be discussed at Monday’s meeting of the Davis Square Neighborhood Council, said its president, Elaine Almquist.

“My personal hope is that this means we can all turn our attention to engaging in the ongoing Davis Square Neighborhood Plan process, and expect that future proposed projects will be guided by our proactively collected community desires and that we will not need to react to a one-off project proposal in this way again,” Almquist said in an email.

Developer Andrew Flynn talks with Alex Pitkin, the architect behind the new Somerville High School, at a Copper Mill community meeting in March. (Photo: Marc Levy)

The city’s head of Strategic Planning and Community Development, Tom Galligani, had been part of meetings with Copper Mill from its earliest days.

“We’ve been working with the Dana family and Andrew for quite some time, for like seven years, in various different proposals, and we were excited that there was a receptiveness from the developer to work with the community and to really engage,” Galligani said. “I think we got to a place where people were like, ‘Yeah, I think we need to do more housing. I think we need to see housing.’ But we definitely have a community that has polar, bifurcated opinions. There’s a lot of people who were very excited about the project as it was developed by Andrew, or as it was envisioned by Andrew, and there were others that had a lot of hesitation, and we’re working through the process to to see where community acceptance really stood.”

From Copper Mill’s perspective, “we knew that there was deep community interest in the development project (rightfully so) and that there was a wide-ranging spectrum of opinions and perspectives,” Flynn said. “Despite a constant lack of direction from city leadership, we were enthused by the progress that we made.”