Dear Mayor Gay-

I have just recently moved to the city of Somerville. But I have been reading about the debate regarding the plans at Assembly Square for some time now. However, all my reading did not prepare me for the actual experience of being in the Square.

Assembly Square is a massive blight of concrete and shoddy big box stores, filled with hopeless, dead end jobs and cheap, lousy merchandise which give back nothing to this community. I purchased a house on Moreland Street in May, and moved in this past August, and I can tell you that it is definitely not a fun place to live. This is largely owing to the industrially blighted Assembly Square. The imagination soars with what could be there in its place. I have seen all kinds of amazing developments in other cities along riverfronts which were the saving of seemingly lost urban wastelands. This could be another such place, something which could give back beauty, careers, community, and life to Somerville for a long time to come. But only if it developed with intelligence, forethought, and idealism.

Recently I had occasion to read the Mystic View Task Force’s plan for the square. At last, I thought, a vestige of sanity! I saw a beautiful square full of benefits for everybody here, not just a few big box tycoons in Sweden and Texas and where ever else such folks live. I saw the possibility of jobs that are not horrible dead end retail jobs, a place where neighbors could meet one another and interact as a community- a place that would not scream "Leave Now" with every step forward into the endless parking lots. I am very sorry to see both parties in the conflict falling to the extremes of their arguments, and accomplishing nothing.

Times are hard, money is short, and IKEA is easy. It is likely that most of the members of City Council and the Mayor- though I could not say for certain- will never have to go to the monstrosity they build. At all events they will never have the burden of needing to go there for work, or having it be the nearest business district to their homes. Dropping huge, ugly, low-wage giving, life destroying big box hell holes into the middle of a neighborhood with few resources to argue is not "responsible development". I was born and raised in the Midwest, where we see our forests, meadows, and wetlands decimated by such developments for mile after mile. The people who own these businesses really do not care even a smidgen for the communities they do business in.

Why doesn’t the City exercise some creativity? Not only does the Home Depot and Ikea plan for Assembly Square smack of a lack of long-term planning, it shouts out with a lack of imagination at every turn. Don’t our elected officials have any sense of imagination, aesthetics, or purpose? More to they point, don’t you care that the people in the neighborhoods surrounding the area will have to live with the slum you create by allowing this to happen? Somerville is full of imaginative people. The city would do well to listen to its creative minds, who seem to me to be largely concentrated around Mystic View Task Force. If you don’t have any imagination and hopes of your own, you would do well to look to those members of the community who do, before you help in the creation of one more huge, ugly, blighted, homogenized concrete hell.

Katt Hernandez