Porter Square Visioning process open meeting

[olszowka.livejournal.com]

I just attended a portion of tonight's Porter Square Visioning process open meeting.  I was bemused by the fact that right from the start of the meeting people were objecting to the proposal and intrusion into their neighborhood even though nothing had yet been proposed.  The presentation was limited to a set of observations that nearly all of the commercial property surrounding Porter Sq. is in Cambridge, all recent development in the area in Somerville has been residential, and that a growing proportion of tax revenue from the area comes from residential, rather than commercial property.  The presenter essentially ended with the question: are we OK with that or do we want to change it?  After 10 minutes of uninteresting comments on that, I left.

Comments

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

Was this a Somerville-only meeting?

I generally think of Porter Sq as a Cambridge square that has parts of Somerville near it.

[jwg.livejournal.com]

This is a good example of how the balkanized metropolitan area does't work well for an area that straddles two cities with completely independent government operations. This was a City of Somerville process - where were the planners from Cambridge?