Somerville has a new mayor. On January 2, Jake Wilson was sworn in after beating out fellow city counselor Willie Burnley Jr. in November 2025's elections. He takes charge of the city after Katjana Ballantyne served two terms. Ballantyne lost in the preliminary election in September, where she faced major criticism. GBH’s Morning Edition host Mark Herz spoke with Mayor Wilson about his vision for the city and the challenges that lie ahead. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Mark Herz: A big part of your campaign centered around improving how city officials communicate and respond to the public. This comes after some dissatisfaction with previous leadership. So tell us more about how you plan to improve this.
Mayor Jake Wilson: Yeah, it was a big part of the campaign. I’m someone who comes from a communications background, so this is something that I know the importance of personally. It’s always been a key tenet of just good government, that people know what’s going on in their city, feel connected to their government, and are able to make themselves heard. That’s why we set about making sure that we’re making that happen. It started on day one when we opened and unlocked the mayor’s office door. I know from knocking a lot of doors myself around the city just how important it is to people to feel that they can come into City Hall, talk to someone in the mayor’s office, ideally the mayor if they’re around, and be heard. And that’s why also we introduced weekly office hours. On Thursday nights folks can sign up for a slot or if we have walk-in slots available come in and talk to us and make sure that we hear, whether it’s a small pet peeve or a huge city-wide issue, that we hear from them about what’s really important to them, and so far the response has been really favorable.
Herz: Are you saying in some cases, people can walk in without a prior appointment and they’re not some big-deal person in the city, and actually sit down in the office and talk to you?
Mayor Wilson: If I’m there they might get to. They have me booked in a lot of meetings. What we do have is an office full of really talented people. We’re building a really good team and we have folks in the office whose job it is to interact with the public and to talk to them and liaise with them. We created a new position, the Mayor’s Public Liaison.
Herz: Here’s a timely public concern issue: we’ve seen a lot of people in Somerville sharing online about how difficult it’s been navigating streets, sidewalks, and finding parking with all the snow. I realize some of the streets are the state’s responsibility, but when they’re in your city, I’m assuming there’s some liaising there. Parking spaces aren’t all clear. Sometimes, on these four-lane roads, not all the lanes are all the way there. This is a really important, bread and butter issue for a mayor. So where are we at on that right now?
Mayor Wilson: Yeah, we got a really early stress test for us with this big storm. One of the largest snow storms to ever hit the region. And I will really credit our DPW workers as well as the other departments who did a lot of work on this. We’re just dealing with an impossible situation. And yes, there were areas where we fell short of what we wanna see from a response to a storm like that. We came out with a statement acknowledging this and promising the public that we’re working on identifying those and we’re getting to it. It’s tough on people not having all the parking that they’re used to.
Herz: Higher level concern: one of the biggest issues impacting Somerville, of course representative of just the whole region, is high cost of living, particularly for housing. How do you plan on addressing that?
Mayor Wilson: We have a national, regional housing crisis and I always say, Somerville can’t solve that on our own, nor should we try to. We can do our part and we should do our parts and we’re working on that. We’re looking at building housing, especially around transit stations. We have all these new green line stations as of a few years ago, right? So when I was on the city council prior to being elected mayor, I led a push for transit oriented up zoning, basically around all those new T-stations, allowing for greater density so we can build the type of housing we need there. And they’ve studied it. People want to generally live near T-stations, right? It’s how we can add units without having to figure out the parking side as much. You’ll get people who, if they live near a T station, don’t feel the need to own a vehicle.
Herz: Well, compare contrast, if you will. Your neighbor, Cambridge, has some really aggressive zoning changes where they’re just going to let things start going higher. And that’s been a challenge for so many communities. How do you see what Cambridge is doing through your lens?
Mayor Wilson: Cambridge did what they thought was right for their city by doing sort of a blanket approach of a minimum of four stories with a bonus of two additional to give to six stories, if there was affordable housing as part of that. Every community is different, and in Somerville, we have a large, vibrant immigrant community. We have a decent number of working families in the city. We want to make sure that we’re adding housing in the way that makes the most sense in terms of the most bang for the buck, the least aggregate pain also, because there’s displacement risk that comes with this.
Herz: How will you measure success as far as housing affordability or availability?
Mayor Wilson: Well, it depends on the sort of global development markets, right? I have ambitious goals of adding units. I’m also cognizant of the fact that I’m realistic, that we’re at the bottom of the cycle, and that there’s been a downturn. And it’s really tough to get that 20% inclusionary zoning, it depends a lot for a developer. There’s a school of thought that’s, “Well, we should cut breaks. We should look to make it easier on them” and I don’t like the idea of dramatically changing policy, just because of where we’re at right now at this moment in time. I think we need to be realistic about the cyclical nature of development. It’s gonna pick up, I don’t want to give away the farm just because we’re desperate to get things going right now. If we were looking at a prolonged downturn, I’d be more willing to look at that but we have projects that are happening. We don’t have as many of them, but we have decent sized projects that are moving forward. There’s Somernova, which has a decent amount of housing it. There’s the 290 on Broadway project, that’s 319 new units of housing coming in Winter Hill. So things are happening, not at the pace we want, but we know our value, we’re not gonna give away the farm. We’re gonna stand by our values also in terms of affordable housing, the kind of projects that we want to build in the city.
Herz: Do you have some numbers, any targets that you want to hit, even contingently right now?
Mayor Wilson: No, we aren’t sitting down and coming up with hard numbers on that. The market’s going to change and we’re going to be aggressive in trying to get other things going. I’ve had a series of meetings with developers. It’s all about how can we make these projects pencil out for them to get the kind of projects built that we want to see, which is high thresholds of affordability, both the income eligibility levels, and then the number of units. And I want to more two and three bedroom affordable units. It’s one thing to build a lot of studios and ones, building twos and threes allows us to keep working families in the city.
Herz: What are your first major areas of focus in the year ahead outside of the issues we’ve been talking about?
Mayor Wilson: Operations in government’s a big thing. That was one of the reasons I got elected, is people want more from their government. They wanna see the government just very actively look into identifying and address issues that come up. Our first full day in office, we held the department head meeting and rolled out basically the sketches of a reorganization. We soft launched a city-wide restructuring, and so things get escalated very quickly to the mayor’s office. We find out very quickly key decisions we need to be making, key challenges, blockers that have come up that require, in many cases, cross-departmental collaboration. That’s what people want. People want a government that is thinking creatively, a spirit of innovation, a culture of curiosity, and looking to just reinvent government. People want a nimble, efficient, productive government.
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