Land Use Updates & More

Good News from the Land Use Committee

Over the past few years, we’ve had conversations with city residents, City Council members, and Planning staff about a handful of subtle technical updates that can make the Somerville Zoning Ordinance clearer and more effective. Some of those have already come to pass, like a reduction in upper-story step-back requirements for fully-affordable housing construction. Another small but impactful update is on the docket at Land Use committee this December 5th: allowing Neighborhood Residence (NR) building types in the slightly-more-dense Urban Residence (UR) zone. Currently, our zoning code has distinct building types for residential in each zone, and any "non-conforming" buildings require significantly more legwork and paperwork for basic changes. For example, an existing triple-decker zoned as NR only needs basic permits for a standard porch replacement. Without the proposed change, the same building in a UR zone would need a variance and extra permits for the same change. We support this proposed update because it fixes that issue preemptively, and therefore makes the UR zone more flexible and useful.

Somernova Updates

The city’s meetings about Central Somerville Avenue, aka the area around the Somernova campus, are still ongoing. Unfortunately, housing is slipping off the priority list. The city’s next workshop on Somernova zoning will be Monday, November 18 at 1:30 pm, so if you can, please attend and speak in favor of maintaining a housing element in the plan.

Clean Energy News

Great news on the budget and environment front: Mayor Ballantyne has announced new, lower rates for renewable energy available through the Community Energy Choice program. The default option is a better deal and includes more renewables than in the past, and opting up to the 100% renewable plan is more affordable than ever. Learn more at cce.somervillema.gov.

Winter Market Tabling

Somerville YIMBY will have a table at the Winter Market at the Armory on 11/23/2024. If you’d like to volunteer to help run the table, sign up through our messageboard. Or just pop by and say hello!

Book Club

Whether you’ve finished reading our quarterly book club pick, Sacred Civics, or are still planning to start, we’ve got a poll live now to choose a time and date for the discussion. Hope to see you there!

As always, you can find our event calendar at somervilleyimby.org. If you need access to our messageboard or Discord chat, want to get involved, or just have questions about the group, just drop us a line.