Debate over Everett soccer stadium shows flaws of decision-making by municipal boundary

LAST FALL, the political leadership of Everett was on the verge of a major step forward towards a complicated, controversial development. The city had inked a memorandum of agreement with the New England Revolution soccer team to build a new stadium on the banks of the Mystic River, and allies in the state Legislature were about to begin clearing a path around the remaining regulatory hurdles. But the progress soon came to a halt, not only because of legislative dithering, but because of concerns raised by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, whose office issued a statement calling it “unusual” that such a project would move ahead absent any “outreach or conversation” with Everett’s neighbors in Boston.

The proposed stadium is located entirely within the municipal boundaries of Everett. And in Massachusetts, control over land use is exercised almost exclusively at the local level. So, as some commentators wondered, why should Wu, the political leadership of Boston, or even the citizens and voters of Boston have anything to say about what happens within the borders of Everett?

It’s a good question—but not quite in the gotcha sense that some Wu critics would have it. 

How should we handle the politics of land use, given the fact that the political map is cut up by a crazy-quilt of rigidly-defined borderlines, while at the same time the functional map of social connections, economic flows, and environmental risks is far more fluid? Or, to put it more specifically, when a project like the Revs stadium has both benefits and harms that spill willy-nilly across the municipal borders of the city in which the project is located, who should get to participate in the decision about whether or not it gets built?

Political representation and jurisdiction in the United States—and indeed throughout most of the world—follows a strict “in or out” model when described in geographic terms. You are completely in one political jurisdiction right up until you get to the imaginary line that demarcates a border, and then suddenly you are completely out of it—and completely in the next jurisdiction. In fact, there is hardly even any conceptual grounding upon which we might imagine something like a fuzzy-edged jurisdictional terrain.

Would it be possible for a point on the map to be neither fully in Boston nor fully in Everett, but in some kind of blurry existence under the power of both? No, at least not within the conditions of our current system of political geography. On a map of jurisdiction, it’s all or nothing, in or out.

This effect has all sorts of distorting practical consequences for how we make political decisions about land use. Fans of the computer game SimCity are familiar with an old trick: It’s always best to place dirty facilities, like power plants, on the corner of the game board. That way, a majority of the pollution spills over outside of your city lines, minimizing the negative impact on the health and well-being of your own citizens—and avoiding negative points on your game score.

That isn’t just a contrived computer game scenario. In real life, the “score” can be analogized to the political benefit felt by each local authority’s own constituency.

Undesirable land uses, from industrial facilities to garbage dumps, are very often pushed out to the edges of political units. The logic works in reverse, too; positive amenities are unlikely to be located in peripheral areas. For instance, in the late nineteenth century, Cambridge and Somerville both hesitated to build parks along their shared border, fearful that recreational amenities supported by tax dollars in one city would be used too heavily by freeloading citizens from the next town over.

In Massachusetts, these edge effects are often exacerbated by the fact that many of our municipal boundaries are centuries old, drawn at a time when the functional geography of everyday life was utterly different than it is today.

Ironically, the border between Boston and Everett, which skirts the edge of the proposed Revs stadium site, is a complicated story of union and disunion. What is today Everett was once part of the area included in the colonial grant to Charlestown. The area north of the Mystic River was separated from Charlestown in 1649 as Malden, and much later, in 1870, the southern part of Malden was carved off to become Everett. Not long after that, in 1874, Charlestown itself was absorbed into Boston by annexation, forming the municipal line we live with today.

For much of this history, the Mystic River made a certain kind of sense as an intermediate space between communities that had a considerable degree of practical independence from one another. (Technically, Boston’s borders actually reach across the river: a sliver of land on the northern side of the Alford Street bridge is part of Charlestown, and once hosted the neighborhood’s almshouse.) Even well into the twentieth century, the banks of the Mystic were mostly lined with large industrial facilities, making the border seem like not only a conceptual but also a physical gap in the landscape.

But threads of interconnection steadily stitched across the city limits. The Charlestown Elevated train line, the predecessor to today’s Orange Line, crossed the river in 1919 and linked Everett into Boston’s rapid transit network (though the line would later be rerouted to Malden in 1975). Demand for housing and new transportation technologies—especially private automobiles—brought Everett even closer into the urban fold in the middle twentieth century.

Even as Everett and Boston grew more functionally close to one another, however, their political border remained firmly in place. The result was a spatial mismatch. Votes and taxes stay for the most part strictly within municipal borders and thus obey the in-or-out pattern of political geography. But the economic geography of Massachusetts is much more promiscuous.

Commuter data gives one particularly useful index by which we can measure the porosity of municipal borders. As of 2021, the most recent year for which US Census LODES data is available, more of the people employed in private-sector jobs in Everett were Boston residents (1,312 workers) than were Everett residents (1,295).

This means that there are more people represented by Boston’s government than by Everett’s government working at private-sector jobs in Everett, since political representation is determined by where you sleep at night, not where you spend the most of your day. In fact, the top 10 municipalities feeding workers into Everett’s private-sector economy (Boston, Everett, Malden, Revere, Lynn, Chelsea, Medford, Somerville, Saugus, and Quincy) combined made up only half of Everett’s employment base—meaning that another half of Everett’s workers come from an even wider geography of residential locations. Some cross state lines from New Hampshire and Rhode Island, meaning that although they work in Everett they aren’t even represented in Massachusetts-wide political institutions.

Environmental geography disregards political boundaries even more emphatically. Air pollution and the global climate system are two obvious phenomena where the political map is utterly useless in dividing the concerns of one area from another.

Wastewater is a more local example; for instance, if dozens of toilets at a new stadium in Everett flush all at once, they’ll send waste into the intercepting sewer that runs through Chelsea, East Boston, and Winthrop out to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority treatment plant at Deer Island. Because wastewater has to flow downhill, in the late nineteenth century the law of gravity overruled the independence of the municipalities in Greater Boston, leading them to cooperate on a cross-jurisdictional regulatory project, the Metropolitan Sewerage District, which eventually became today’s MWRA.

The example of the sewerage district typifies what has historically been the typical solution when a planning problem doesn’t map correctly onto jurisdictional lines: create a special-purpose district authority to handle the issue.

There are thousands of such examples around the world, from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to the Danube Commission. Closer to home, an alphabet soup of special-purpose authorities created by the state Legislature, like the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), and of course the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) have been established to treat, one at a time, the functional problems that knit the independent municipalities of eastern Massachusetts into a single area of concern.

But the power of such special-purpose authorities to actually determine land-use policy is severely limited. This is in part because they are not really political jurisdictions, the way the City of Everett or the City of Boston are. Nobody votes for the head of the MAPC. The Inner Core Committee doesn’t send a representative to the State House.

The best that these bureaucratic entities can do is encourage the jurisdictions that actually do have real authority to cooperate with one another—important work indeed, but rarely enough to overcome the power of local jealousies, or to blur the rigid lines on the map across which political power cannot pass. And, what is more, these authorities ultimately answer to the political power of the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which is not in fact always the most germane geographical unit for every given issue. For instance, the stadium developers need the Legislature to waive the site’s status as a designated port area. But is it really necessary for a representative from Williamstown or North Adams to have the same vote as a representative from Everett or Boston on an issue about the environmental and economic management of the mouth of the Mystic River?

What should we do, then, when a land-use question so obviously straddles the line between independent jurisdictions? Even when the edge effect isn’t so obvious as a stadium on the city line between Everett and Boston, we still face a welter of challenging issues about whose interests are most relevant in planning decisions, and how these interests index to geography.

A modest development, like an apartment block with a dozen units, might very well create real and painfully-felt street parking issues for the people who live within the local city councilor’s district. But it might also have a widely-cast benefit for the metropolitan community, adding desperately needed new housing to the available stock within commuting distance of the region’s job centers. That larger community, however, almost certainly doesn’t get a say in the decision.

Let’s return to the “in-or-out” metaphor of jurisdiction, and take the Revs stadium as an example. If Everett gets to make the decision about local land use, then everyone in Everett, at least theoretically, is a full constituent in this decision-making process, whether they live right next door to the proposed stadium site along Bow Street or on the other side of town near the Glenwood Cemetery. Conversely, everyone over the border is fully out: residents of Charlestown, of East Somerville, and Chelsea, even if they live much closer to the site, and are more likely to feel its direct effects, than Everett residents who live across town.

What if we imagined instead a kind of site-specific geography of constituency? What if the people within a nearby catchment area, regardless of their municipality, had the weightiest vote in the matter, while the residents of a larger adjacent region likely to be affected by the project had a slightly diluted vote, and the entirety of the metropolitan community had an even more diluted vote? In other words, what if the geography of the decision-making constituency was not hard-edged but blurry?

Or what if we didn’t determine an individual’s constituency status simply by the address where they sleep at night, but instead through the actual tracework of their lives on a map?

All of those Boston residents who spend their workdays in Everett—should they get to have a say in whether Everett allows a new stadium to be built? Taking the idea further, what might it look like in the dormitory suburbs famous for their recalcitrant attitudes towards inclusive housing policies?

Consider Milton, where residents recently voted down a proposal to encourage housing growth. What if we gave a vote in the referendum not only to the nighttime residents of Milton but also to the store clerks, hospital workers, nannies, housecleaners, home health aides, and many others who might spend more waking hours each day in the town than a Milton resident who commutes downtown?

These thought experiments run so counter to our understanding of how geography, jurisdiction, and representation actually work that they can be difficult to imagine.

They also introduce all sorts of practical challenges. Would it really make sense to draw a new jurisdictional district for every single large development proposal? If people could vote where they work, could they still vote where they sleep, or would they have to choose just one? But the thought experiment nevertheless points us in the direction of problematizing how we actually do make these decisions: a process which, for all its familiarity, is tortured by both conceptual and practical flaws.

Back on the banks of the Mystic River, where an invisible borderline slices between the part of the map where Everett gets to make decisions and the part of the map where Boston gets to make decisions, these flaws are on full display. When a politician like Michelle Wu presents a public complaint about being shut out from a decision taking place on her city’s doorstep, she’s trying to achieve through informal pressure what rigid boundaries make impossible through the procedural formalities of law: a recognition that the geography of who is affected by land-use decisions matches poorly with the geography of who gets to decide. And while she is right to say that Bostonians should get some say about what happens in Everett, Wu should also be ready to consider whether reverse is also true: shouldn’t Everett residents, for instance, have a voice in the redesign of Sullivan Square, though it’s entirely within Boston?

Our lives aren’t contained within municipal borders, yet our votes and taxes and our legal rights as constituents of decision-making process are. Because we can’t circumscribe the geography of our lives (and we wouldn’t want to even if we could), addressing the problems caused by this spatial mismatch will require pushing against the limits of our political imagination and rethinking who gets to make decisions—or at least have a voice—across lines on the map.

Garrett Dash Nelson is president and head curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.