Newsletter: April 2024

Volunteer opportunities and YIMBY news

Aaron Weber
April 17, 2024

We’ve got some action opportunities for our membership this month! We’re looking for volunteers to:

Create graphics, infographics, or illustrations to enhance any article on the Resources page.
Research and write a new explainer for the Resources page. We’ve got one person signed up to write about building code amendments, and we’d love to have more!
Create a five-minute presentation or video on any aspect of housing policy. Think “why is the rent so high?” or “what is zoning and why should I care?”
Call contractors and tradespeople who work (or try to avoid working) in Somerville, to research ways that the city could make it easier to build.
If you’re a member of any other community or activist group, serve as the Somerville YIMBY liaison to that group. We’ve got overlapping membership with more than a few political, environmental, and service organizations in the community, and we’d love to strengthen those ties.

We can help with most aspects of these projects, and connect you with other volunteers if you’d like to collaborate. Just reply to this email!

Events

483 Broadway Community meeting: Updates to the plans to relocate Woody’s Liquors. 6:00 pm, April 18, online via Zoom.
West Broadway Community Walk: The Pedestrian and Transit Advisory Committee (PTAC) invites you to walk along Broadway and discuss planned improvements. 6:00 pm, April 23, in-person, start at Lou Ann David Park, 1060 Broadway.

Reading

A few good articles that came to our attention in the past few weeks:

America is Full of Abandoned Malls. What if We Turned them into Housing? A Vox.com piece on the challenges and opportunities of retail redevelopment, featuring the Woburn mall among others.
Boston could lose 25% of its young people. I may join the exodus. WBUR covers the high cost of living in Boston and what it means for people under thirty.
Market-Rate Housing Will Make Your City Cheaper. Really. Economist Noah Smith explains the benefits of market-rate housing (even the expensive stuff) for a general audience.
Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and undeniably Indigenous: An outline of an incredible project coming from the Squamish First Nation, and a shining example of what we could be doing in the US if we thought bigger.
Bike Lanes are Good for Business: “Before-and-after surveys tend to show that in the long run, everyone winds up satisfied… once a street is changed, generally speaking, after six months or a year, nobody remembers what it used to look like.”