Somerville Seniors Urge City Council To Stop 90 Washington St. Plans

SOMERVILLE, MA – Low-income seniors at the Cobble Hill Apartments in East Somerville are pleading with Somerville City Council to stop the development of 90 Washington St., which would remove the senior housing complex’s parking lot, green space – including 84 mature trees – and back alleyway used for trash collection, residents and Cobble Hill housing officials said.

In a letter to Somerville City Council members sent Thursday by Evelyn Ortiz, property manager at Cobble Hill Apartments for 21 years, Ortiz pleaded with the council to vote against moving forward with plans to develop the property into a new public safety building, which would house a new station for Fire Engine 3, Police and Fire headquarters and emergency dispatch center.

90 Washington St. is a four-acre property adjacent to the senior apartment complex bought by Somerville’s Redevelopment Authority (SRA) in 2020 by eminent domain.

It was part of the city’s first-ever Demonstration Project Plan, a tool that “allows for the taking of property for a public need and to remove blight,” according to the website outlining the plans.

The property at 90 Washington St. had been home to Cobble Hill Plaza shopping center, which occupied the site from 1982 to 2016.

Ortiz said the noise created by sirens and alarms at the public safety building, coupled with the loss of green space and a back alleyway, would make conditions unlivable for the 225 low-income seniors living at Cobble Hill Apartments.

“The city’s plans for 90 Washington Street threaten the quality of life my residents have enjoyed for 40 years,” Ortiz wrote in the letter. “The harm it will cause is very real and irreparable.”

Fire Engine 3 averages 6.2 emergency siren calls per day, with 1.5 per day between the hours of 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., according to 2021 data.

The redevelopment plans would also mean Cobble Hill residents would lose access to the back alleyway behind the complex where resident trash chutes feed into, requiring seniors to haul their trash to dumpsters outside of the building.

“Requiring frail seniors to use perimeter dumpsters is an unnecessary burden,” Ortiz said in her letter.

The apartment complex is a Section 8 property for low-income seniors, and is known as "the oasis" in Somerville for its 10+ acres of award-winning landscape, according to the complex’s website.

Miles Byrne has worked at Corcoran Mullins and Jennison – which owns Cobble Hill – in mixed income and development for 29 years.

He said he believes if the residents were higher income, or homeowners, there is “not a chance in hell they [the city] would take their parking lot, green space, 84 trees and back alleyway in an eminent domain taking.”

Byrne said the Demonstration Project Plan is the only eminent domain tool the city can use that doesn’t require community input – and they didn’t consult the community first, he said.

“They never came and said let's meet with the residents,” Byrne said.

Byrne said the city bought the property legally by eminent domain, but “nobody really understood what the impact was [going to be] for the 300 elders who live here.”

He added that the move to purchase the land “made sense to people in a back room, but it makes no sense to the 300 elders who are at varying levels of frailty and have come to enjoy their years in this community that has green space and bunnies and trees and parking.”

Ortiz said Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne has not responded to the numerous emails she and Cobble Hill residents have sent voicing complaints, concern, and pleas to stop the 90 Washington St. development.

The 90 Washington Street Civic Advisory Committee is set to hold a second meeting about development plans over GoToWebinar on Wednesday, April 12 at 5:30 p.m. A link has not yet been provided for the virtual meeting.

A previous version of this article misnamed Corcoran Mullins and Jennison.