For locals whose ideal Saturday involves re-reading “Infinite Jest,” listening to alt-J, and sipping an Americano out of a delightfully mismatched mug, a decision must be made: Cambridge or Somerville?
Both boast their fair share of used bookstores, independent coffee houses, record shops, and vintage retailers. And although Cambridge has been a long-standing champion of flannel, the Greater Boston cultural landscape is changing.
In the past year, Somerville has gone from “up-and-coming” to “arrived.” It’s less often described as “the new Cambridge” and more used as an enviable standard in its own right: Medford is the Next Somerville. No Watertown is. No, it’s Malden.
While several key factors contribute to a city’s development, the least tangible and perhaps most important is culture.
“These areas are certainly ‘hip’ which is a hard thing to pin down with statistics, but you know it when you see it. There are a lot of hot restaurants, the type you might go get drinks with friends at,” said Katie Einstein, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University.
Einstein works with others at the Boston University Initiative on Cities “to research, promote, and advance” urban leadership and development. The changes tracked by both the IOC and census data underscore the similarities between Cambridge and its neighbor Somerville.
“While I don’t have hard data [on the number of independent coffee shops], a good proxy for this kind of measurement is the population of young college grads,” said Einstein.
After all, Cambridge has a long history of supporting a large population of young people. Home to top tier schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, these institutions draw undergraduate and graduate students alike, contributing to the well-educated class of 18 to 35 year old Cantabrigians.
Straddling Somerville and Medford, Tufts University also attracts youth. But unlike “cool” Cambridge, up until the 1990s Somerville may have provided less of an incentive for its alumni to stick around. Back then, your favorite boutique honey store was probably one of many “Slummerville” meat packing factories or manufacturing plants.
Is Somerville really the little sibling who’s given up hand-me-downs once and for all?
“Offhand, I would say that the current Brickbottom/Inner Belt planning area bears some similarity to the blank slate that was Kendall Square in the 1960s,” said Timothy Reardon, Assistant Director of Data Services for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
Reardon refers to the period of Cambridge’s history during which Kendall Square was the subject of an urban revitalization project. After initial plans for a NASA Electronic Resource Center went south, much of the area became the Cambridge Center and the Volpe Center, the National Transportation Systems Center dedicated to technical and institutional innovations.
These developments point toward what is still a crucial difference between Cambridge and Somerville. Whereas Cambridge plays host to many biotech companies, Somerville’s Brickbottom/Inner Belt area is predominantly an artist community. While Partners Health Care Systems and and UPS distribution facilities reside in Somerville, these and their neighboring companies fall short of the more lucrative Cambridge-based businesses.
“The cities are also very different in a number of ways, beginning with the presence of Harvard and MIT and including extensive industrial land uses that once predominated in Somerville in a way they never did in Cambridge,” Reardon told Boston.com, “So, I would caution against describing the changes going on in Somerville as following the same linear development path that Cambridge followed.”
Einstein also noted the economic implications of Cambridge academia.
“Cambridge has a richer tax base than Somerville, and Harvard and MIT contribute strongly to the Cambridge economy. They’re huge sources of employment.”
Perhaps it isn’t possible to extrapolate Somerville’s continued development based upon that of Cambridge, but can a new city become the next Somerville?
The main obstacle to any of these claims is public transportation, Einstein told Boston.com. While Somerville residents hop aboard the Red or Orange lines and Cantabrigians ride Red or Green trains, Malden, Arlington, and other hopefuls probably haven’t yet made their cities accessible enough to experience the jump in housing price and perceived desirability.
That desirability is what has driven the median cost of a single-family Somerville house to more than quadruple in the last 20 years. With the advent of Assembly Square station and the anticipated Green Line extension by 2020, prices are estimated to rise by 67 percent in some areas, according to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
With rent on the rise, college grads on a budget may have no choice but to hop on their fixies and seek alternative accommodations, perhaps in Medford, or Watertown, or Malden?