The many wards of Medford

Medford has eight wards, each divided into two precincts:

Medford’s eight wards and 16 precincts.

The number of people in each precinct are comparable, though they’re always changing. And Medford’s city council seats are all at-large, meaning that everybody votes on all seven councilors, so candidates for city council often make their rounds across different parts of the city over the course of a few months. My own campaign has been particularly heavy in door-knocking and talking to voters, so I’ve explored just about every precinct at this point.

Medford’s wards are very different in terms of both the quality of infrastructure and socioeconomic status of its residents. This website has a database of census data that gets fairly granular, so one can explore the differences across Medford’s geography with cold, hard data. The mapping from that website that best visualizes differences in what I’ve seen anecdotally can be seen below — change in median household income since the year 2000:

Percent change in median household income in Medford since the year 2000.

Going through the census data on that website, which covers demographics, household income, household price, and other factors, one can see a concrete quantification of the historically Black neighborhoods in West Medford, racial disparities between Medford’s wealthier neighborhoods and its various public housing units, poverty in Wellington, the influence of Tufts on median resident age in Ward 4, and deeply affordable low-income housing in Walkling Court in the Hillside area. Because these factors are all correlated, the relative colorings of many of these are often similar to the map above.

This is closely related to politics. Voter turnout in the 2021 elections can be seen on Medford’s website, and a visualization of that can be seen here:

Turnout of registered voters in the 2021 municipal elections in Medford.

So the political landscape mirrors the socioeconomic landscape across the city. This isn’t exactly a revelation, but it’s relevant to the way that candidates campaign. To win an at-large election in Medford, candidates need to be active in Wards 3 and 6, without question, because they have the highest voter turnout. Knocking on the doors of residents there, I noticed that they often talked about when previous city council candidates chatted with them in previous years. In contrast, fewer candidates canvass around Ward 7, in Wellington. In part, these phenomena are cyclic and self-fulfilling: Ward 7 has a low turnout rate because fewer people canvass there, and fewer people canvass there because it has a low turnout rate. Ward 3 has a high turnout rate for the same reason. However, there are also practical considerations that individual candidates cannot easily overcome; because we’re not allowed to canvass apartment buildings, I can’t easily canvass the residents of Walkling Court or, really, most of the public housing buildings in Medford. And the voter databases, which nearly all candidates rely on, are not perfect. Some neighborhoods are easily walkable and have long-time residents, about whom there is consistent data. So when knocking on a door there, one can be sure that it’s a household of voters. Areas with more renters and students have less consistent data.

There are a lot of factors in this, but the net effect is that long-term homeowners with a consistent voting record have more contact with political candidates, which ultimately feeds an inherent disparity in political influence across the city.

How does this look, for me, on the ground? I’ve been canvassing since the start of the summer, so I’ve had time to explore more areas of the city. I personally canvassed Ward 7, which is comparably low-income compared to Wards 3 and 6, with a volunteer at the beginning of the summer, though a lot of voters in Ward 7 are in locked apartment buildings, so I couldn’t talk with them. However, this wasn’t the case with the public housing units in Ward 5-2, which aren’t locked apartment buildings. One of the residents whose doors I knocked on gave me one of the best conversations I have had in my whole campaign, both pointing out the lack of yard signs in public housing units, grilling me on the opening up of biotech on Mystic Ave, and asking how I would stop residents from being priced out as city council seeks to get more money into Medford. Ward 5 tends to have a lot of renters, which means a lot of people moved since the last election (in one of my turfs, 17% of listed voters had moved). A mother in 2-2, in a lower-income area of North Medford, talked about how she wanted to get involved in the city but had found city hall to be unwelcoming. In Ward 6-1, a woman who was visibly tired and burnt out talked to me about how the city never responded to her complaints about the sidewalk in front of her house. Many of the voters in these areas said I was the first city council candidate who had knocked on their doors in years of living in Medford. In contrast, I canvassed a street in Ward 3-2 in which all but three houses had voters. I got in longer conversations with more of the residents there, and one woman told me about how she saw almost all of her neighbors at the polls — mentioning community discussions in her street about who they would vote for.

This is a big part of why I’m in favor of reviewing the charter to get a mix of at-large and ward-based representation on city council. It would completely change who candidates are incentivized to talk to and who is elected — and it’s the only short-term, concrete policy change I can think of that would affect this dynamic. Furthermore, the expansion of the number of city councilors would also mean that more people are working on politics in the city — seven city councilors is very low for a city of 65,000 residents. Even though eight ward-based councilors and three at-large councilors would mean four extra part-time salaries, the net profits brought in by the extra policy work would be substantial in the long-term.