Is Somerville Full?

Everyone knows that Somerville is one of the densest cities in New England, with around 19,000 residents per square mile. Some folks use that number as a reason to say “we’re full, go away.” That’s not exactly welcoming to newcomers, especially not to those fleeing other states or countries who want to live in a sanctuary city like Somerville. It’s also not telling the whole story, because there are other ways of looking at density that tell us more about what it means for daily life.

When most folks think of the density of a city, they think about how it feels to walk through a neighborhood. But people-per-square-mile doesn’t tell us much about that, because it doesn’t take into account that other cities have more non-residential space than Somerville. For example, Logan Airport, the Arboretum, and the Financial District lower Boston’s people-per-square-mile number, while ports and industrial parks lower Chelsea’s.

A better measure of how dense a neighborhood feels is the number of homes per residential acre. That figure counts only area that contains at least one home per property: no public roads, no supermarkets, no parks, no industrial zones, and no offices.

We used the Massachusetts Housing Partnership’s Residensity dataset to calculate homes per residential acre for every town and city in Massachusetts. The top five are:

Somerville is obviously still pretty dense. But it’s not the densest, and it’s certainly not a lot denser than peer cities in the region. Our “densest city” claim depends mostly on the fact that we have a greater percentage of land dedicated to homes.

We can do more with that land to allow us to live up to our values of including everyone and providing them a safe and welcome place to live.