Bring me a rock (no, not that rock)

This past City Council meeting we referred to the Community Development Board a draft of our re-zoning of Mystic Ave. Developing Mystic Avenue is probably the most-repeated piece of feedback I’ve received from voters, other than redeveloping Medford Square. The potential for commercial revenue from both areas is huge. The new zoning would allow for higher building in the corridor and essentially make room for denser commercial and residential building in the area.

Even though we were finally responding to a long-delayed demand of the voters, our last City Council meeting saw repeated dialogue about how we were moving too fast, we needed to gather more community feedback, how we needed some plan but not this specific plan. I doubt that these conversations are going to stop the further along we go in the re-zoning process.

Commissioning a study and gathering feedback before acting is a mechanism to do your due diligence. After a while, though, it’s an excuse to delay. In 2006, Medford commissioned MIT to make a study of Medford Square that was subsequently shelved and never acted upon. The latest ones, which go back to 2017, are starting to be acted upon now in the form of a request for proposals from developers.

Any specific action is inevitably going to be unpopular with some group of people, so killing a project by saying that it requires more community involvement — despite years of studies that sought and received involvement from the community, time and time again — is always a way for a politician to get themselves more popular with somebody. It’s also a way to ensure that a community remains perpetually stuck in time. Medford has a history of doing that. I’m more than willing to listen to and address people’s concerns, but killing projects that voters have asked for repeatedly over a period of decades is simply not an option for me.