The fortunes of Cambridge and Somerville seemed to shift in 2024, from a sunny postpandemic party dosed by development and federal Covid funds to a global economic hangover that affected elections and signal even more complicated times ahead.
Though the year at least didn’t start with violence and grief like 2023 – with a police shooting – those looking for omens would find it impossible to miss one from Jan. 1: The New Year’s Day Cambridge City Council inauguration was disrupted by a 20-minute protest over Israeli violence against Palestinians. That political issue grew over the spring with protests through the city and camps at Harvard, MIT and Tufts University, then dispersed as campuses cracked down and then cleared for the summer.
With November national elections returning Donald Trump to the White House and giving Republicans control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives – local results showed turnout down in Cambridge and Somerville but Republican votes ticking up – the foreshadowing was clear.
Economically, the remote work needed during Covid lockdowns persisted long after they were needed for a health emergency. Demand declined for the office and lab space that kept pushing innovation industries upward and outward from Cambridge’s Kendall Square, not just toward neighboring Central Square but taking leaps into the Alewife and Porter Square neighborhoods and crossing the border into Somerville’s Davis and Assembly squares. Though some work, such as by the developers Healthpeak and IQHQ, drove onward, other developments froze without tenants to take occupancy after completion. The trend seemed to culminate in the Oct. 2 opening of the 40 Thorndike tower in East Cambridge after a decadelong slog; the Boston Business Journal noted it “may be the first major office project in the Boston area to deliver vacant.”
Office and lab construction and commercial development and spending in general has provided the dollars for good times and capital projects – the reason Cambridge only had to wince at approving a $299 million combined campus for the Tobin elementary and Darby Vassall upper schools. The austerity that city officials and staff had been warning about for years was seen in budgeting and taxation decisions. The $955.6 million budget that Cambridge passed in June had a public investment fund budget of $38.4 million that had started in the $90 million range, and “harder decisions are coming,” finance City Council co-chair Patty Nolan said. A few months later, the overall property taxes rate for 2025 was voted through as a 9.2 percent rise, the highest in recent years.
In Somerville, a $342 million general fund operating budget was approved, a rise of only 1.6 percent – essentially level funded – after years in which budgets trended happily upward. Record property growth since the 2020 fiscal year seemed to peak in fiscal 2024 at $17.7 million, dropping to $13 million for the current fiscal year. Projects and staffing made possible by federal American Rescue Plan Fund now had to make a transition to local funding, and not everyone made the cut; in Cambridge, money was taken back after being promised to enhancing the open space called Jerry’s Pond and seeking “a path to permanence” for the outdoor entertainment complex Starlight Square.
Issues of drug use and the unhoused became recurring themes, especially in Cambridge’s Central Square and Somerville’s Davis Square, one a sidewalk daytime gantlet of people with no place to go and the other a hot spot for complaints of trash and discarded drug needles. A fierce increase in police presence and clearing in Davis didn’t prevent the most dramatic example of the conflict: an Oct. 10 altercation in which bystanders said they’d formed a human shield between an ax-wielding man and the woman he was attacking. A police log entry described the attacker as homeless.
With the Somerville Homeless Coalition saying the city’s unhoused population grew because they were uprooted by construction in Cambridge, the ax attack was also a cross-border reflection of how the presence of homeless in Cambridge seemed to bring a spike in crime – though , officials noted that it was actually just a surge in crime within and against the homeless themselves. The grimness of the news was surpassed with dropping temperatures and the Dec. 19 death of a homeless person trying to put out a fire at a camp near Alewife Brook.
Neither city is on the whole dangerous. Cambridge, for instance, has seen drops in a half-dozen crime report categories out of seven over the past couple of decades (but a surge in rapes), according to the most recent available full year of statistics, 2022. That makes increases more dispiriting, and in the past year Cambridge saw a dozen gunfire incidents and six people injured by gunshot. That’s a doubling of incidents from 2023, though the number of victims stayed the same – not including Arif Sayed Faisal, who was killed by police in the new year.
Click to read:
- Stories Cambridge and Somerville shared in 2024
- Cambridge stories we shared in 2024
- Somerville stories we shared in 2024
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Marc Levy – for some of us the health emergency situation doesn’t end because corrections were not made in buildings to deal with risk factors of future disasters and our own health risks leave us at risk. Some of us are STILL needing to mask when using the transit system or in public buildings because we can’t afford to get sick with the continuing strains of covid and other diseases ongoing nationally.