Thanks for filling out  Somerville YIMBY 2025 Election Survey Here's what was received. Somerville YIMBY 2025 Election Survey Dear Candidates, Thank you for taking the Somerville YIMBY endorsement survey. We appreciate your time with this survey and your candidacy. If you'd like to compose answers outside of Google Forms, we've provided copies of the mayoral candidate questions and city council candidate questions as separate documents. About Somerville YIMBY Somerville YIMBY is an all-volunteer group that supports the city’s goal of becoming a place where all are welcome, and where housing choices are abundant. We believe that construction of new homes is especially important for: People with disabilities, who need the accessibility features present in new construction and renovations.  The environment, because living in cities like Somerville allows people to reduce their car-based carbon emissions, and because new construction is more efficient than old Elders, w...

Since we last spoke I've kept messaging along lines of keeping families in Somerville, Affordable Housing. I discussed basic needs with Sonia Conde of Padres Latinos and Rev. Jordan Harris of Connexion and attended the Anti-Displacement Task Force  Reportback . At the sole budget hearing open to public comment, I said continuing the particulate pilot funding is crucial for environmental justice and that I was opposed to cutting the Racial and Social Justice Department to increase funding of the police. Lately, I've door knocked on 18 streets in East Somerville. Over $3000 raised. Your dollars are going to Human Rights, not a popularity contest. A Somerville City Councilor who served ten years said this was inefficient because the poor don't vote. Around the corner from the East Somerville T-station, a resident who bought a house there thirty years ago said no Councilor had ever knocked on his door. It's true, I might have attended the Thursday Films at the Park Series b...

  I was door knocking with a big volume to ground me and a resident asked. "Just comics" I lied. I was bored on Tufts Street when I opened to Dinesh D'Souza's essay "Ignoble Savages" which stunned me, and on the train home, I read Toni Morrison's essay "Playing in the Dark," which unpacks the oblivious racism: "On July 12, 1776, he records with astonishment and hurt suprise a slave rebellion on his plantation: 'Judge my surprise...Of what avail is kindness & good usage when rewarded by such ingratitude.' 'Constantly bewildere,' Bailyn goes on, 'by his slaves' behavior...[Dunbar] recovered two runaways and 'condemned them to receive 500 lashes each at five different times, and to carry a chain & log 'fixt to the ancle.'" Three weeks ago, after receiving a housing questionnaire, I drew from  Housing the Nation  for inspiration posting of projects to social media . The Jennings in New York and ...

A Somerville resident is on the brink of telling the incoming professional class "Enough, you can have it."   While I was door knocking near Capuano Elementary, I met a man whose father, a US Navy veteran, in the 1950s moved the family from a Portuguese controlled Island--Madeira if memory serves. He proudly owns the Dell bought in 1991 on savings  scratched together from $10-15 hour jobs all his life, and there with his wife raised two daughters. He is now a grandfather to twins and wants to be able to support them. But he complained of the taxes and fees, in short the ever increasing unaffordability of Somerville. He had taken care of veterans--like neighbor Russ MacCauley, who passed eight years ago, recalling years taking him to medical appointments. As someone who had lived right, who had invested in Somerville, the increasing costs of living in Somerville were pushing him to the brink of leaving. I submitted the following letter advocating a No vote for Water & ...

A reportback--  I am here in Chelmsford, MA to attend a bail hearing for a man detained by ICE 82 days ago--a week since the co-owner of small business filed my letter of support along with Senator Pat Jehlen's letter. Please donate www.ElectSpicer.com  I raised funds for signage and doorknockers $1800 from 15 donors last Friday. According to Senator Pat Jehlen, new law allows me to put your campaign support to pay for childcare so I can campaign. Thank you in advance! At Finance Committee of the Whole, I spoke up regarding the Mayor’s proposed budget that would cut the Racial and Social Justice Department funds by $200,000 and increase the Police Budget an additional $5-9 million. The Cambridge-Somerville 350.org node organized me, and I spoke to the need to provide environmental justice protections from pollution to impacted neighbors--crediting the pilot project of Ward 1 City Councilor Matt McLaughlin--which would bring air filtration units to homes already most likely to ...

  If the detention of students condemning genocide is not a station of the cross I don’t know what is. Thousands of us assembled in Somerville near Tufts University in solidarity with Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student, who we must remember aside many other detained by ICE including asylum seekers unable or intimidated to play the role of a prisoner of conscience. My family, residents of Somerville have typically experienced the corner of Tufts Triangle as a place to play soccer, afterwards walked around Powderhouse Square in some kind of exercise and play, but that evening, as a family living in the midst of tyranny,  we were engaged in a civic belonging, grateful for community . Many of us activated to the emergency protest had heard about the detention of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Kahlil whose wife Noor Abdulla, certainly comes today before our confessing hearts. Noor, which means “light” in Arabic, attests to the strength of the mourning women. In Luke’s Gosp...

    In Rosa Lee, Washington Post reporter Leon Dash follows the li ves of one family enduring intergenerational trauma and coping with extreme poverty . She sits dignified in a jacket photo, holding a military portrait of a son. “Rosa Lee—that name made me—Wait she’s black. She looks like my mom,” said an unhoused person taking refuge at the Somerville Housing Coalition Engagement Center. The supportive housing search person three times looped back to asking about his housing search, adjusting, acknowledging, offering help right there . He was waiting to hear a definite about the Y. It was just too much, a hundred dollars a day. “Oh, yeah, the hotel,” the Mets fan said . “How long is the wait in Somerville?” Two years. As indicated by the subtitle, Rosa Lee is a mother in urban America. I brought it with me to an appointment with Hannah who had facilitated a conversation in May with Tracy Kidder and Dr. Jim O’Connell of the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless, the su...