
The illegal city of Somerville - jseliger
http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/
======
bhickey
We're talking about this a lot in Cambridge and I'm hoping to put together an
analogous map for us. For example, here's a map of parcels where the floor-
area-ratio exceeds 0.75:
[http://i.imgur.com/D9m9Gx2.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/D9m9Gx2.jpg)

Most of our residential zones are currently zoned with a 0.5 or 0.6 cap.

The local NIMBY group has been petitioning the zoning board for more
restrictions: downzone an entire neighborhood, add setbacks and more area
restrictions along the main thoroughfare. Meanwhile, everyone who isn't
affluent or in subsidized housing is getting pushed out to the surrounding
towns.

~~~
vkou
The only thing I wish on NIMBYs is for them to spend a decade in a Soviet
queue for apartments.

This shortage is _man-made_.

~~~
ktRolster
Everyone is a NIMBY in their own way, it's just a difference of how much
annoyance you are willing to tolerate. Most people wouldn't want a noisy
factory or a smelly dairy next door, for example, but those things have to be
_somewhere._

Now imagine you spent a lot of money to get a house with a nice view. Suddenly
Larry Ellison decides to build a skyscraper next door, which blocks the sun on
your property every day. You can't even grow flowers anymore because there's
not enough sun. Some of your trees die. Are you happy?

Now imagine you spent a lot of money for your house. A housing company
proposes changes to the neighborhood that will reduce the value of your house
by 20%. In other words, you will be working and paying for years on a portion
of your house that no longer has value. Are you happy? Well, maybe you can
handle it because you're rich.

So these are the kinds of things that go through the minds of NIMBYs.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>Now imagine you spent a lot of money to get a house with a nice view.
Suddenly Larry Ellison decides to build a skyscraper next door, which blocks
the sun on your property every day. You can't even grow flowers anymore
because there's not enough sun. Some of your trees die. Are you happy?

I have _trees_ now!? Flowers? Luxury! My current apartment _doesn 't_ get
enough sun to grow plants that need sun. And we pay $2200/month for a two-
bedroom apartment here.

~~~
kirubakaran
Wow $2200 for a 2 bed? Luxury! That's how much you'll pay for a studio here in
Mission, SF... if you're lucky. (and I wish this were a Four Yorkshiremen
reference[1]. No!)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo)

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thenewwazoo
I genuinely don't get the point. Of course the buildings aren't legal under
current zoning laws. They weren't built under current zoning laws! We don't
tear down every skyscraper whenever the earthquake requirements change. Nobody
moves their house when the setback requirement goes from 8' to 12'. These
kinds of articles are tautological.

edit: the article mentions "illegal neighborhoods and illegal houses" but
doesn't say anything about the laws _when they were built_.

~~~
graeme
You're focussing on a nit. The situation is not "the neighbourhood is
generally fine, but would need some tweaks for the fire code"

The situation is: it's impossible to build a neighbourhood resembling
somerville under current zoning laws.

I live in a prewar neighbourhood in Montreal. It's dense, beautiful, and loved
by locals and tourists alike. If you could clone it and build it elsewhere, it
would be worth trillions to cities across North America.

But it's illegal to build, because the streets are too narrow, there isn't
enough parking, there is a mix of residential buildings and businesses, the
buildings aren't set back far enough, and so on.

~~~
tropo
Novelty brings value to things that would otherwise be junk.

We don't actually want narrow streets, lack of parking, and pedestrians
looking in our windows. The novelty makes it cute though.

If neighborhoods like yours were common, they would have no value.

~~~
krisdol
As a resident of near-downtown Boston, I want cars out of my neighborhood,
ideally the entire downtown. I love the wide sidewalks and want bigger ones.
Mostly I'm jealous that we can achieve neither the efficiency nor the beauty
of transportation in Central European cities like Zürich because the
suburbanites, their remote matchboxes, and their eyesore parking garages are
obstacles to every proposal to improve (or even maintain) public
transportation. To choke those folks out of the area with narrow streets and
zero-car zones would be a blessing.

Although a more effective solution would be to scrap zoning laws and actually
make the suburban blight towns convenient for workers and pedestrian
residents.

~~~
tropo
If you got narrow streets, they'd be bumper-to-bumper spewing exhaust. You
would be unhappy.

If you excluded cars, the place would turn into a downtown version of a strip
mall. (expensive tourist trap) There would be no jobs other than things like
waiter, retail clerk, manicurist, etc. -- is that how you wish to be employed?

You are focusing on the bad of cars, and ignoring all the benefit they bring.
They even bring benefit to people without cars. Heck, you can rent one. I bet
you've done it.

~~~
trgn
Consider Delft and Leuven. Two small vibrant cities, near Rotterdam and
Brussels respectively. Both don't have a lot of cars in their center, are
completely walkable, both are wealthy cities, both are not tourist traps, both
offer employment for all ages from retail clerk to PhD computer chip
researcher, they are most certainly not outdoor strip malls. Those are just
two examples that I know personally, but there are hundreds more the world
over.

Cars indeed have benefits, but they are noxious to cities. In my experience,
the fewer cars there are in the city, the more pleasant that city is. And as
the above examples demonstrate, that doesn't mean you are suddenly killing the
economy or your job prospects.

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agentgt
I live in Waltham... I can tell you Waltham is not far off from Somerville.
With Waltham we have the added complexity of having lots of mixed commercial
and residential zones (Somerville on the other hand is mainly residential).
Waltham is also more diverse than Somerville economically (Somerville has a
large amount of college kids that skew the demographics). Waltham has a lot of
first generation Americans that are afraid to report violations or just don't
know that they can. I have seen single bed apartments with serious safety
issues housing families of eight people and more.

Almost every house in my neighborhood is in some sort of serious violation. In
my small neighborhood (called the Island neighborhood) we have had 3 fires.
That is three houses that have had fires substantial enough where they pretty
much need to be demoed (luckily not the large family mentioned previously).

Nobody has wired smoke alarms but every three family or above requires it. You
are not supposed to have grills on any balcony or porch... everyone does...
Somerville is massively guilty of this as well. Proper egresses... haha use a
window.

Such is the style of living in ancient New England houses in high density
areas.

There is very little incentive to update or even try to correct behavior
legally. I'm not sure how towns like Somerville can get their landlords (I am
landlord so I am guilty as well) to update their properties. I do know lots of
people updated with the federal energy subsidizations.

It would be nice if their was some safety subsidizations to maybe start
turning this around (along with the rest of our crumbling infrastructure).

------
Feneric
Somerville is not necessarily typical, though. Not sure if it is still true,
but as of a few years ago it had the highest population density in all of
Massachusetts. Higher than Boston, higher than Cambridge, higher than
Worcester. Introducing it as an ordinary suburb of Boston is perhaps a little
misleading.

~~~
eru
Judging by the pictures in the article, Somerville looks very sparse. And
that's already the most dense?

~~~
tropo
Yes. It's houses next to Boston. Boston itself has other stuff. People aren't
supposed to live in the convention center, baseball stadium, or airport.

------
eru
I wouldn't want to live there. It's too sparse and suburban for me. (The kind
of city I like is even more illegal in America.)

~~~
dudul
Lived there 2 years, it's neither sparse nor suburban. It's the densest city
in MA.

~~~
eru
I judged only from the pictures in the article. I saw lots of freestanding
houses three story houses and wide streets.

Compare eg this random edge-of-city in Germany [http://kultur-in-
krefeld.de/medien/uploads/2015/01/KiK-Dreif...](http://kultur-in-
krefeld.de/medien/uploads/2015/01/KiK-Dreifensterhaus-I-Kopie.jpg) It's not
Manhattan by far, just a bit denser. And this is not a city centre.

(Alas, they don't have Google Street View in Germany.)

~~~
shados
Almost none of the houses in the article are of "free standing houses" (at
first glance, there's only one building that might have been a single family).

That's just how multi-families and condos look in the area.

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jandrese
How does this affect resale? I know when I sold my house the buyer's agent
insisted that we bring it up to modern code first, and that involved some
rather expensive retrofitting of the house.

~~~
Lazare
The article is discussing zoning codes; not building codes. Different issues
entirely.

It's not uncommon to find that you'll need to retrofit an old building to
match current fire safety laws, etc. My family recently had to rip out a bunch
of old electrical outlets and replace them with newer ones that were deemed
safer.

Nobody requires you to match current zoning laws.

~~~
sokoloff
As long as you can get a Certificate of Occupancy (which in my town requires
smoke and CO alarms only), I'd never cure a building code violation in a
building I was selling (certainly not in the current Cambridge/Somerville
market).

You want the code violation cured? No problem; I'll take one of the other 17
offers.

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tehabe
Isn't there something like a "Bestandsschutz" for buildings? I couldn't find a
fitting translation, it basically means, if you got a legal permit for
building something and the rules are changing, your building is still legal.
Which means that a town can only change the building code for the future, not
for the past.

On a side note, somewhere I heard or read that many US cities and town don't
allow mixed use zoning, so that a building can used commercial and
residential. Something which is very common in German town, especially in
downtown areas, you have a lot of stores in the ground level and above that
are flats.

~~~
ocschwar
That is Somerville's biggest problem right now: very tight and inappropriate
zoning and building regulations, but they only take effect in if you demolish
your house and build something new. So Somerville is frozen in amber.

A few years ago, I saw developers in Somerville get around that problem when
they wanted to replace one 3-apartment house with one exactly the same shape,
minus a whole lot of rotten wood, and plus a whole lot of good insulation and
the like.

So instead of tearing the building down and building it anew, they tore down
half of it, all the way down to the foundation, then removed all the parts
connecting to the foundation, leaving half of the building on stilts, and then
started building the new building, with the shell still in place.

They did good work. They replaced a well-designed but badly neglected building
with one that is also well designed and more liveable. They should not have
had to do this charade that they were just "renovating" it, but that was the
only way to do it legally.

------
rwhitman
Personally I would love to see a suburb go completely rogue and draft up
zoning laws that flipped the script and required their town be built to 1890's
code.. or better yet, 15th century Europe code.

Victorian era density is nice but we have so few places in the USA that have
any of the human-scale character of the Old World to pull from, that most
Americans have no idea what a small walkable village really should feel like.
If we want to talk about the good old days before postwar zoning in order to
get the character in our places back, why not look at the places that are real
gems that we never had at all, like UNESCO villages and such?

~~~
ocschwar
Massachusetts is doing that. Every outlying town is now required to select an
area where they will now zone for denser housing with offices and shops. If
they don't, Beacon Hill (the state government) will select it for them.

It's still not going to be completely European (the early American settlers
built streets wide for fear of fire, and because they really, really liked
being able to do U-turns with horse carts,) but American 1890's style is well
worth cherishing on its own merits.

~~~
agentgt
They are even doing it in the rich suburbs of MA like Wellesley. Wellesley and
Newton are trying to stop tear down McMansion mania and our passing laws that
you can't knock and rebuild unless you have lived there for a while or have an
"accident".... I predict more fires in the coming years...

------
cbr
Somerville is in the process of updating its zoning code:
[http://www.somervillema.gov/zoning/resources/2015-01-22-ordi...](http://www.somervillema.gov/zoning/resources/2015-01-22-ordinance-
boa-submittal.pdf)

My impression is that one of the goals of updating it is to make much more of
the city be zoning conforming.

------
abalone
FWIW the City of Somerville recognizes this and is working to reform the
zoning code.[1] Here are some highlights from the proposal:

 _" Makes Somerville a national leader in using zoning to produce affordable
housing with the most ambitious inclusionary housing requirements in the
state"_

 _" In areas of the city where major new development is planned, up to 20% of
new units must be set aside for affordable housing."_

 _" Ensures that infill development fits into the form, scale, and pattern of
existing neighborhoods and squares."_

 _" Only permits formula businesses and big-box stores by special permit."_

 _" Requires new buildings in certain districts... to set aside 5% of gross
floor area as leasable arts and creative use spaces."_

[1] [http://www.somervillema.gov/zoning/key-
changes.html](http://www.somervillema.gov/zoning/key-changes.html)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I don't see anything there that, strictly speaking, requires them to actually
build dense housing. Setting aside 20% of suburban development for people poor
enough to qualify for "affordable housing" subsidies just creates a welfare
cliff.

------
xyzzy4
Somerville needs more highrises and more subway trains.

~~~
drdeadringer
I'd tentatively agree on the subway trains.

~~~
Finnucane
There's no solving the housing problem without more transit. You're just not
going to ever have enough housing here for everyone to live in one place,
zoning or no zoning. So: people need ways to get from one place to another.
More cars? No. Then you need more roads, more parking. Where are they going to
go? Guess what? Some people are going to end up in Malden, Medford, Everett,
Revere, etc. So what? Is that so bad? Not if you have a way to get to work in
the morning. I'm old enough to remember when we lived in Somerville because it
was cheap. The Red Line and the end of rent control in Cambridge brought a lot
of gentrification to Somerville. Transit is absolutely necessary in a dense
urban area (and yeah, Somerville and Cambridge are already among the most
densely populated cities in the country.

Another thing is that people use more space now: Before WWII, these cities had
more people living in fewer units of housing. We've gone from 4 per unit to 2.
As you make more housing available, people want more of it. That's why there's
never enough no matter how much you build.

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gm-conspiracy
Don't get me started on classic automobiles.

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tn13
The way people use land varies a lot of with time but the laws created by all
wise bureaucrats don't. SF and bay area in general has been classic good
example. The government attempts to solve problems creating by zoning law is
to create more zoning laws eventually becoming an overfiting problem.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://www.vox.com/2016/6/16/11948630/somerville-zoning-
ille...](http://www.vox.com/2016/6/16/11948630/somerville-zoning-illegal),
which points to this.

~~~
bhickey
Thanks, dang. The Yglesias post is basically a regurgitation of our discussion
on /r/boston.

~~~
wcummings
At least its not the globe tho

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jhallenworld
They should demolish it...

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City)

~~~
Aaron1011
Did you even read the original article?

~~~
jhallenworld
Of course, and I was jokingly pointing out a slight similarity between
Somerville and the famed Kowloon Walled City, which was demolished because of
its extreme density (3.25 M inhabitants / square mile vs. 18K inhabitants /
square mile for Somerville).

Basically, is it possible for the mores to change so much (as reflected in the
zoning codes) that not only would the city be illegal to build now, but that
it should be demolished? What happened to Kowloon suggests that it is.

