With Gilman Square’s stubborn lack of development passing the decade mark, residents have asked the Somerville City Council to help keep it from taking another 10 years.
The council was asked for support in removing the city-owned Homans site from more disposition studies – it “has been continuously studied for 10 years,” said Matt Carlino, of the Gilman Square Neighborhood Council – and to help start a formal urban renewal process for the area’s Mobil gas station.
“That is an item that could delay this another 10 years,” Carlino said.
The request of city councilors heard at a Sept. 26 presentation was for them to join with yet another body, the Gilman Square Civic Advisory Committee, in urging the city’s Redevelopment Authority to initiate the urban renewal process. “We know the Mobil owner wants to develop,” Carlino said.
Any vision for the square includes the Mobil station combining with the neighboring empty Homans site to create a parcel of significant developable size, councilor Jesse Clingan said.
The site is along Medford Street below the Central Hill complex, overlooked by Somerville High School and City Hall.
There have been discussions around the square since 2012, but it was in 2014 that the city released a “Gilman Square Station Area Plan” and around 2017-2018 that the neighborhood council got involved in partnership with the city. The December 2022 opening of the Gilman Square Station as part of the long-delayed MBTA green line train extension has only added to residents’ interest in seeing development, but with a new cause for frustration: the lack of a direct connection between the square and the T stop.
The Gilman Square council members want to make the T stop accessible by adding a bridge from the square to the station; to build affordable housing aided through two resident upzoning requests for transit-oriented, six-story housing; and to activate the streets with centralized greenery and retail.
A renewal plan crafted could be crucial in adding the gas station acreage to “something that is substantial and has the money behind it to be able to put in a walkway to the train,” Clingan said. “We need to ensure that the person who buys [the station] is not going to just keep it as a gas station.” With an urban renewal plan in place, “maybe we don’t have to take the Mobil – maybe it just sparks the activity that we need.”
There’s a more imminent question around the other request by the Gilman group: removing the Homans site from a disposition study.
“I want to learn more about whether the City Council has the power,” president Ben Ewen-Campen said. “That’s not something that I’m aware of, but I would certainly like to know more.”
The issues were referred to the Housing and Community Development Committee, which next meets Oct. 21.
The goal of the Gilman Square group is to “create a vibrant, sustainable, and equitable neighborhood,” said Stani Iordanova, a speaker at the September meeting that, with Carlino, was sponsored by councilor Willie Burnley Jr.
“We were on a pretty good process with the city, and then Covid hit, and it sort of stopped everything. And then there was a mayoral change and some staff changes, and then the Civic Advisory Committee was formed,” Iordanova said. “A bunch of these things have delayed and delayed and delayed.”
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