When the Boston Democratic Socialists of America started posting about Everett planning board meetings on their Instagram account, they were kind enough to include photos.
One shows several of their members inside the elevator at Everett City Hall, headed to a planning board meeting. One person is wearing a red hat. Another member of this group stood up at the meeting and lectured a representative of the Davis Companies about being an evil capitalist. The caption on the post describes their effort to fight the development of data centers in the Everett Docklands Innovation District. They describe the residents who showed up to support the ordinance as heroic. They do not mention how many of those residents are actually from Everett, how many are members of their own organization, or why a Boston-based political club is running operations inside another city’s governance process.
The Massachusetts Sierra Club was also represented.
These are not Everett organizations. They are not made up of Everett residents. They have national and statewide political agendas that extend far beyond whatever happens to the former ExxonMobil site on the Mystic River. For them, Everett is a useful battleground — a gateway city with an environmental justice designation, a new mayor who might be persuadable, and a planning board that recently acquired a sympathetic member. They showed up because the conditions were favorable, not because they have a particular stake in Everett’s future.
This is a pattern that Everett residents should recognize, because it has happened to other cities nearby. Medford, Somerville, Malden — these cities have all experienced versions of the same dynamic. Organized outside groups, often connected to the same political networks, show up at public meetings in force. They use the comment period as a platform. They pressure elected and appointed officials with the implicit threat of organized opposition in future elections. Local governance, which was never designed for this kind of sustained political theater, gets disrupted and slowed.
The result is not better policy. The result is governance by whoever can mobilize the most vocal contingent on any given Monday night.
In Everett’s case, the target is a development project that most actual Everett residents have been cautiously supportive of — a massive brownfield cleanup that could bring housing, commercial space, tax revenue, and a usable waterfront to a part of the city that has been industrial wasteland for decades. The Davis Companies have been in this process for years. They have worked with the city on multiple phases of planning. No data center has been proposed. None.
But the outside groups needed a villain, and Davis was available.
It is worth being direct about what this looks like from the working-class Everett resident’s perspective. A group of people from Cambridge and Somerville, many of them organized around an explicitly socialist political agenda, showed up to your city’s planning process to fight a development you have been told will clean up the biggest brownfield site in the city. They claim to represent you. They did not ask you. They are not from here. Their political home base is a city where housing costs have tripled over two decades, in part because the same politics they now want to import into Everett made it nearly impossible to build anything.
That is the model they are trying to reproduce in Everett. And they are being invited in by someone who sits on your planning board.
Everett has its own residents. Its own voices. Its own complicated, messy politics. It does not need to borrow someone else’s.
The next time Boston DSA posts about Everett on their Instagram account, the residents of this city should ask themselves a simple question: what exactly is in it for them?