Earthquake weather

Mike Capuano's election to Congress rocked the changing city of Somerville. Warning: Aftershocks predicted.

Somerville by Ben Geman

When a pro sports team wins a title, the hats and T-shirts proclaiming them the champions show up instantly, obviously printed in advance. It's all rather presumptuous, and it makes you wonder what happens to the goods when the team loses.

Politics, thankfully, doesn't work the same way -- not in Somerville, anyway. After Mayor Michael Capuano won the free-for-all Eighth Congressional District primary, the THANK YOU signs in the windows of his Davis Square campaign office looked anything but planned -- they were hand-drawn in felt-tip marker and taped up the way someone leaves a note for a late-arriving friend. Not given much hope in the race's early months, Capuano himself was taken aback by his victory. "Pretty goddamn unbelievable" were his first words to supporters on election night.

Edge city In cultural as well as electoral politics, Somerville's stock kept rising in 1998. The city has continued to live up to the "hip" tag given the Davis Square area in a 1997 Utne Reader article. Somerville author Pagan Kennedy came out with the well-received novel The Exes (Simon and Schuster), about an indie-rock band in its twilight. Jonathan Baird, another Somerville resident, also ventured deep into hipster terrain in Day Job: A Workplace Reader for the Restless Age (Allen & Osborne), an ode to the Dilbert-era workplace and its toll on twentysomethings. But as with any hot cultural commodity, Somerville's shelf life on the edge may be limited. When the Utne article surfaced last year, members of the city's political establishment couldn't even get the magazine's name right. One city politician suggested taking a look at "Unre" magazine. A business insider boasted of the city's mention in the "Utne Leader." Now the word is out, and with rents climbing, the hip may seek higher, less-discovered ground. Malden, anyone? It's on the Orange Line, you know.

No kidding. The Eighth Congressional District race dominated the political landscape in Somerville and neighboring Cambridge in 1998 -- and the success of Capuano's no-frills "street campaign," which let him expand far enough outside his powerful Somerville base to top the 10-candidate field, was by far the area's biggest political story. All summer long, Capuano and his Somerville machine chased front-runner Ray Flynn, the former Boston mayor who led for most of the race although he seemed to lack both a platform and a reason for running.

Although some predicted that progressive activists would get together and pick a horse -- probably John O'Connor, Marjorie Clapprood, or George Bachrach -- that didn't happen. So Capuano chugged along, keeping his temper and his penchant for the occasional nutty line mostly in check while displaying a strong grasp of housing and education issues. Meanwhile, he unleashed the massive Somerville machine he's built over the past decade. On Election Day that edge proved decisive, with Somerville handing more votes to Capuano than to all the other candidates combined.

Now comes the hard part. Capuano, long used to being his city's dominant political force, is suddenly a freshman member of a minority party led by a crippled president. More important for Somerville, Capuano's victory in the closely watched race to succeed the retiring (for now) Joseph Kennedy has set off what amounts to another political earthquake. For the first time in a decade, the mayor's office is wide open, and a slew of candidates are hoping to take over the top spot in a city that was already rising in stature before Capuano's improbable win.

The temptation in Somerville has been to compare the race to replace Capuano with the Eighth District contest. Both fall into the "sprint" category -- Kennedy's announcement last spring made for a short congressional campaign season, and Capuano's departure means a special election this spring to replace him. In many ways, though, the similarities stop there. In the Eighth District, candidates were relatively free to define themselves and their causes -- O'Connor stressed his environmental record, Bachrach was the "unabashed liberal," and so forth. But in the more insular confines of Somerville, all the candidates must focus on a single set of concrete issues. "There are going to be a couple of hot-button items, like development, where candidates will stake out positions and other candidates will try to attack or use those positions to gain their advantage," says Somerville alderman Walter Pero, who is considering a run but has not declared himself a candidate. "I think the issues will define the candidates because the candidates themselves are not all that dissimilar. They are experienced Somerville politicians and operatives known to voters."

Development may be one of the most talked-about issues in the mayoral race. Somerville's strong economy has proved a mixed blessing as city officials wonder how to respond to the flurry of schemes to redevelop some of the city's few large commercial tracts. It's an issue that no would-be successor to Capuano can afford to ignore. Case in point: plans to build a massive new Super Stop & Shop in gritty East Somerville. Nearby residents oppose the store, citing traffic concerns and a giant market's impact on the mom-and-pop shops that dot the city near the Charlestown line. At the same time, labor unions see opportunity in the plan and are indicating that their support in the race could be linked to how candidates handle the touchy issue. It's a tough choice for candidates: East Somerville residents vote, but building-trade unions endorse. "For the people of East Somerville and the affected neighborhood, clearly it's an important issue," says Somerville alderman Bill White, who considered but abandoned a mayoral run. "I think others will take the union position and say you have to look at the tax dollars and the jobs."

Similarly, candidates must treat gently the city's long flirtation with passage of a living-wage ordinance, which would force employers with city contracts to pay workers at a rate well above the minimum wage. With a similar ordinance now pending in Cambridge, the sides are clearly drawn. Somerville's chamber of commerce, again a player after many moribund years, has been fighting the living wage almost since the measure's introduction in 1997.

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Beyond the policy debates, Somerville confronted broader questions in 1998. A common one: "The rent is how much?" It's pretty much gospel now that rent control's death in Cambridge and Boston has joined forces with Somerville's reputation as an up-and-coming city to drive rents higher and higher, creating speculation about how much longer blue-collar workers and immigrants can find a home here. Somerville, like Cambridge, works to create pockets of housing reserved for low- and moderate-income residents. Still, as in Cambridge, units designated as affordable are a fraction of the total housing stock. "Landlords are getting the sense that others are getting more rent, and they want to get the same thing," says Peggy Powell, who directs the eviction-prevention project at the Community Action Agency of Somerville. "It's really hard in a market economy, unless you regulate rents, to come up with many other mechanisms to keep housing affordable."

Amid the changes, though, one political constant has remained. State representative Vincent Ciampa won round two against rival Josh O'Brien to hang on to his 37th Middlesex District seat, proving that not all the tectonic plates have shifted in Somerville. O'Brien, who came within a few dozen votes of knocking off Ciampa two years ago, again fought the incumbent to a virtual draw in Somerville but couldn't eat far enough into Ciampa's Medford base to unseat him. This year, by the way, was smooth for these two compared to 1997, when they nearly came to blows at Somerville City Hall and O'Brien filed, and subsequently dropped, an assault charge against his foe.

Ciampa's resilience aside, however, few doubt that the political and economic forces changing Somerville's landscape will slow much in 1999. The city is thriving in some ways, yet it remains unstable -- certainly at City Hall. As one city official notes: "When there's a power vacuum, you don't know what will be sucked in."

Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.