Assembly Square, the Back Story

Assembly Square, the Back Story
Part 12:  IKEA vs. City Government

A commentary by William C. Shelton

(The views and opinions expressed in the commentaries of the Somerville News belong solely to the commentators themselves and do not neccessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Somerville News, its publishers or its staff.)

    While the former owners of the mall deceived and manipulated to avoid regulatory requirements, IKEA undertook every regulatory process required of them.  Yet, they initially encountered more resistance from city government than did the mall developers.
    The world’s largest furniture retailer, bought 17 acres of waterfront property in 1999 for $19.5 million.  The company submitted plans for their typical sprawling, windowless, blue box, but the mayor and her staff rejected them.

    IKEA offered new plans in June, 2000.  They called for a larger store, but reduced its footprint from 200,000 to 160,000 square feet.  The blue box would become cream-colored brick, and IKEA would build a little league field next to the store.
    Publicly, the mayor’s spokesman said she was “pleased with IKEA’s revisions, but she would like to see more.”  Privately, administration officials were amazed that IKEA imagined it could balance its enormous community impacts with a baseball diamond.
    Six months later, IKEA submitted its “final proposal.” Mayor Gay rejected the plan because, “it did not include sufficient mixed use on their vital waterfront acreage.”
    At the same time the Board of Aldermen was considering three “Interim Planning District (IPD)” proposals to make Assembly Square’s zoning more conducive to high-value development.  IKEA publicly threatened to sue the city if the legislation blocked its plans. 

   Alderman Bill White responded that if IKEA pursued litigation, he would participate in a campaign, “inviting the world-wide press to see what IKEA is doing.”  Alderman Joe Curtatone was equally steadfast.  He said, “As a landowner and a new purchaser of land, there is an inherent risk that zoning may change when you purchase the land.”  Unfortunately, he would later work successfully to weaken zoning when the landowner threatened by zoning enforcement was the mall owners.
    The following week, IKEA filed a legal challenge, requiring that passage of any new IPD require eight, rather than six, votes from the eleven aldermen.  The Board subsequently passed the IPD drafted by the mayor’s staff.  It did not block IKEA.
     The company submitted new plans in June, 2001.  They called for a 250,000 square-foot store, 203,000 square feet of office space, and 22,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space.  Mayor Gay was pleased, but said that IKEA still had a “a little ways further to go….They have a yellow light, not a green light.”
Over the following four months, IKEA worked on its plans, culminating in two days of intense discussions with city staff.  The parties emerged the last week in October and jointly announced that IKEA would build a 250,000 square-foot store.  The agreement required IKEA to promise that it would build an additional 225,000 square feet of office, retail, and restaurant space, although it did not require IKEA to actually build it.
The city’s orientation had been to essentially accept the use that IKEA proposed, but to (1) mitigate its harmful impacts as much as was possible, and (2) obtain substantial compensatory benefits.  As Mayor Gay said, “I aim to get the very best deal for the city, and as you saw, I have sent them back to the drawing board many times.” 
Indeed, her staff fought long and hard, getting more concessions from IKEA than most other host cities had achieved.  Considering the enormous pressure that she was under to immediately produce new tax revenue, she took and held a courageous position.
Her critics reasonably asked whether it was a well-informed position.  It is natural to imagine that IKEA’s impacts are those of any other big box—like a bigger Home Depot or Wal-Mart.  In fact, IKEAs’ traffic congestion is unique.  From Emeryville to Stoughton, cities that accept an IKEA don’t realize what they are in for until it is too late.
In the U.S., city after city that does realize this has blocked IKEA developments.  In the U.K., Deputy Prime Minister Prescott banned new IKEA developments, including three that were already in progress.  IKEA challenged him in court and lost.

The orientation of activists like the Mystic View Task Force was that an IKEA store’s traffic impacts were fundamentally incompatible with Somerville’s best interests.  Therefore, IKEA should not receive a permit unless it was willing to develop a new model for doing business in an urban setting, as IKEA is now doing in England.
Mayor Gay had explicitly told IKEA officials to have no contact with Mystic View.  But after their agreement with the city, IKEA’s development officers solicited the activists’ views.  The parties met three times, and IKEA staff and their architects acknowledged that a number of Mystic View’s suggestions would improve the project’s design.  In the end, IKEA concluded that it was too late in the process to make changes.

Comments

[DickyBird]

Have you not seen a small bird chase of a great big bird

[thenoseknows]

OMG william, will this ever end. who gives a shit what you think happened? you go on and on and on....what happened at dinners you werent at, what was said privately, look up the word fiction in the dictionary and your picture is next to it.i heard from someone who knows that soap opera digest is offering you a job, and this is from a very, very good source,really no bull shit.
i also heard from someone else that your house is going to be for sale soon.that your leaving the city you love so dearly.
one guy that knows another guy told me another guy heard that you were broke and were ready to jump into a big deveopers pocket.that your just trying to look like a concerned citizen and then WHAM, your house is sold youve moved to another city that you love and you start your devilish schemes all over again.
and what did you do with your cut of the profits from the gravestar sale of good old assembly sq. i heard you bought a chalet in the south of france and ordered a whole new bunch of berets in every color known to man.i hear so much yet i print so little.i guess now that your series is winding down i can start,and if anyone else has heard a good william story, doesnt matter if its true or not, send it in im sure many of us would love to hear it.

[Shelton is starting to get old]

William Shelton is starting to get old. I heard that he is getting alot of his infomation from Puglia. Does that name ring a bell? Same old boring stories, just a another week.