I hesitate to start talking about candidates here.
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On Wed, 2025-07-30 at 20:19 +0000, 'Denise Provost' via Davis Square Neighborhood Council wrote:
Good questions to ask at any forum.
East Somerville has the same stuff going on.
Unhoused people living in public spaces and vacant storefronts are
not just confined to Davis Square.
These may be good questions, but problematic behavior in public parks was not asked about at the Union Square forum, and vacant buildings were mentioned by the candidates but not articulated as a focus of concern from residents. I suspect that's partly because residents there are not going through the same sort of public park crisis that Davis residents are.
Denise later wrote to me that there were many unhoused people in East Somerville, "many living in parks". This got me wondering about the facts on the ground there, so this afternoon and evening I took a bike tour of almost all the parks east of Central Ave and some around the other half of the city. I saw very different conditions (mostly much more positive than Statue Park), even in parks that are pretty close to each other.
One thing I realized is that I don't actually go to the parks in East Somerville regularly, and that people who live and work and play there have on-the-ground knowledge that makes them best positioned to bring effective complaints to elected officials and candidates. If I don't see a problem personally or hear about it in the news or from someone personally affected by it, I won't know to complain about it in the first place, it's probably not a priority for me, and I certainly won't know there's a disconnect between a nice-sounding answer and reality on the ground. The majority of the people of Union Square seem to be somewhat disconnected from Davis, in the same way I'm somewhat disconnected from East Somerville.
I think the people of East Somerville would benefit from their own forum to ask specific questions about the specific problems in their neighborhood. Some of the issues are the same and there are common solutions in zoning and social services and whatnot, but in different neighborhoods there are somewhat different people, hotspots, politics, causes, available solutions, and outcomes from attempted fixes.
Anyway, here are the results of my tour, which is of course only one snapshot in time.
Major problems:
(Note that physical proximity does not prove causation, and I didn't check to see if similar services are unavailable near other parks.)
Left me with questions:
No problems witnessed (generally clean, some empty of people, some with dog walkers, some with large numbers of people playing sports or swimming or relaxing on gorgeous green fields in spectacular summer weather):
Overall it was a lovely day to be out and about in Somerville, excepting the two parks with illegal activity, two major potholes, one unpaved road, two cars blocking bike lanes, and one blocked bike rack. Two of those involved people screaming the f-word; I'll leave you to guess which.
-B.