On the campaign trail, Jake Wilson stressed his first priority if elected would be “opening the mayor’s office door.” He followed through, making that his first act after he took the oath of office. And last week, Cambridge Day journalists went past the threshold to discuss his first 100 days in office, coming up April 11.
Wilson said an administrative restructuring has occupied much of his effort since taking office. “We’re building a team,” he said when asked about his biggest accomplishments thus far. He wants to leverage that team to execute future priorities, like data statistics and housing, he said. Other focal points have been strengthening regional collaborations and supporting efforts to create more housing, especially of the affordable sort.
Creating a cabinet
Showing someone the door has been perhaps his most visible act to date. In February, former Arts Council director Greg Jenkins was fired after almost 25 years of service, which Wilson later announced was part of a departmental reorganization, a reworking of the city’s administration into a cabinet-style architecture, Wilson told Cambridge Day. He now meets weekly with about nine senior administrators, instead of the 27 that formerly attended department head meetings. Each cabinet member represents a department, which are composed of divisions with their own budget lines, overseeing various city offices.
He said the cabinet structure is meant to escalate problems more quickly to him, to make faster decisions across the government.
The arts, libraries, and recreation will be divisions in a department headed by a new Executive Director of Culture and Community, hiring for which will be funded in fiscal year 2027 (FY27) starting July 1. Wilson’s staff is developing a job description for a new arts council director, reporting into the executive director.
He wants to make arts part of the cabinet structure because “it’s one of the things that makes Somerville special. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to move to Somerville. It’s part of our DNA, right?”
More tactical changes coming to City Hall will include a bigger presence of city staff at city hall. Staff began working remotely during the COVID pandemic: now, Wilson is developing a work-from-home policy with the “goal of getting people, where it makes sense, back in the office.” He said in-person work allows for relationship building that can’t occur digitally.
Wilson worked for Major League Baseball for more than a decade and calls himself a “Moneyball” kind of administrator. Aptly, he’s been driving a data dashboard using SomerStat, Somerville’s data and statistics tool. Wilson wants a dashboard containing key metrics affecting the city — like traffic enforcement stops and fines, sharps collection, and weather alerts — both in his office and on the city’s website. The tool is close to launching, he said.
Internally, the dashboard will act as a “performance measurement tool:” it can be referenced during leadership meetings and used to track departmental progress on key issues. It can also inform policy. Noting the percentage of traffic fines that result in monetary citations instead of warnings — currently around seven percent — could help set enforcement goals, for example. Knowing that number, Somerville “may have to turn that dial the other direction” on fines, Wilson said.
For more housing, it takes a village
Building a team isn’t confined to the walls of City Hall. It’s the “year of the neighbor,” Wilson said. “I want to extend that, you know, literally, to our neighboring communities.”
For instance, Somerville is exploring collaborative partnerships with Cambridge on a number of joint priorities, including homelessness and substance abuse, Wilson said. “I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag here too much, because a lot of this is still very early on, but we’re looking at other areas as well,” he continued.
Cambridge city spokesman Jeremy Warnick agreed that the focus on substance abuse and homelessness cited by Wilson “would build upon the long-term work that staff from the cities have been collaborating on for quite some time.” The Cambridge Coordinated Access Network, or C-CAN, and the Somerville Homeless Coalition maintain a partnership, for example.
Wilson called Cambridge and Somerville micro-cities, which necessitates cooperation. While large cities like Boston have increased in-house administrative capacity, it makes sense for smaller cities like Somerville to look to its neighbors to push out policy, he said. And the state can also support local priorities.
Housing is a prime example. Wilson said the Healey-Driscoll administration has a social housing pilot provided for by the Affordable Homes Act, a $5 billion piece of housing legislation signed by Governor Healey in 2024. Social housing is a form of public housing with market elements. He said Cambridge and Somerville are both interested, “we want to be the guinea pigs on this.”
Wilson even has a site in mind: next to the Gilman Square T stop, he said, gesturing out the window of his office. The site has transit, is “centrally located,” and its position down the hill from City Hall means that density wouldn’t cause too many shadows, he said.
The core of his housing policy will be to ease the impact of the gentrification Somerville has experienced, especially in the last two decades. “It was happening before the Green Line came in. The Green Line has sped that up,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s had some really negative impacts on the community.”
He said he had a meeting with the renters’ committee recently and “hearing someone just talk about, like, the actual personal impact it has on them of looking at a, you know, $400 annual rent increase, you know, you get it. That displacement threat is real to people.”
Wilson wants to see new units built. “We want to build more housing, especially more affordable housing,” he said. He cited 299 Broadway, where construction recently began to replace a defunct Star Market with a 288-unit mixed-income development, as demonstrating it can be done.
He said he and the city council were aligned on trying to help residents stay in the city. Preventing displacement was one reason, he said, why as a councilor he didn’t support last year’s city-wide upzoning proposal.
When talking to developers, Wilson calls the Broadway project a success story and encourages them to go beyond the 20 percent minimum of units required to remain affordable under Somerville’s inclusionary zoning rules. He pushed the Copper Mill development group, who have presented controversial plans for a 26-story building in Davis Square, on that point, he said. But Wilson said that the Copper Mill project is “is paused” and that the city hadn’t submitted its comments to the developers on their plans yet. “My comment on it publicly has been, you know, if the community supports this, we’ll get behind it too,” Wilson said.
The overarching goal for him for the rest of his term, he said, is to help Somerville keep its character intact even as its demographics change. “I don’t want to imagine a Somerville where we’ve lost that part of us that makes us interesting,” he said.
“We are, I mean, we’re fascinating. We’re lively. There’s a reason why I found home here and why I love this city.”
A stronger
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