Episode 45: Sam Ghilardi (Housing for All Watertown / Sai Life Sciences)
Meet Sam Ghilardi! He's a senior scientist at Sai Life Sciences, a member of the steering committee for Housing for All Watertown, and a board member for CoLAB, all here in Watertown. We chat about his early experiences with science and studying cell communication (basically our skin cells are like toddlers), what it's like working in the life science sector in Watertown, how he got involved with housing advocacy work, and the recent changes to Watertown zoning that he's excited about along with other forward-facing thoughts on the topic.
(Click here to listen on streaming apps)
Check out Housing for All Watertown: housingforallwatertown.org
HAW Event, 2/23, 2pm: What will it take to build 100% affordable housing in Watertown?
Other local resources Sam wanted to share on housing:
The Boston Foundation’s Greater Boston Housing report card. This report published by the Boston Foundation is an annual review of the Greater Boston Housing market, highlighting trends like affordability, rental vacancy rates, housing production. Every year has a special section with a featured topic, and this year the topic is opportunities for housing on unused public land not marked for conservation.
How to Increase Housing Affordability: Understanding Local Deterrents to Building Multifamily Housing is a report from the Boston Branch of the Federal Reserve. It is a more technical study that looks at local deterrents, including zoning and special permit processes, that block the construction of housing.
Come celebrate Little Local Conversation’s one year anniversary on March 18th!
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Thanks to podcast promotional partner the Watertown Business Coalition, a nonprofit organization focused on connecting local businesses and strengthening our community. Check them out at https://watertownbusinesscoalition.com/.
This program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
Transcript
Matt: 0:07
Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode I sit down for a conversation with someone in Watertown to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This time I sat down with Sam Ghilardi, who does a few things in town from being a scientist at Sai Life Sciences, a member of the steering committee of Housing for All Watertown, and is also a board member of CoLAB, which is a nonprofit here in town that's connecting life science professionals with high school students. And I've talked about that in a couple episodes already, episode number 4 with Merle Kummer, the founder of CoLAB, and also a little bit more with Alyssa Cecchetelli from Addgene in episode number 39. So I don't dive into CoLAB too much in this episode with Sam, so if you want to hear more about that, listen to those two episodes. But we do dive into his science work and his work with Housing for All Watertown. So I'll let him introduce himself then we'll get into the conversation.
Sam: 0:58
My name is Sam Ghilardi. I am a senior scientist at Sai Life Sciences, which is a biotech company here at the Arsenal on the Charles. I also live in Watertown. I wear a couple hats in town. I'm on the steering committee of Housing for All Watertown and a board member of the CoLAB Club here in Watertown.
Matt: 1:14
Awesome. So you've got your feet in Watertown. Nice. So let's see what's the first angle I want to attack. Let's go, first of all, I guess how you got involved with Watertown.
Sam: 1:23
Yeah, so my wife and I moved to Watertown about 10 years ago. I graduated from college, I was looking for a place to live. Had a buddy who lived in Belmont and then we're getting married. We needed a place to stay and Watertown was right next door. I was at BU at the time, so we lived on the south side, right by the bus yard, so it was a nice easy way to get into Boston. And we fell in love with the place. Graduated, got a job here, I got to work in town, we were able to buy a house in town, and so that's sort of how we planted roots.
Sam: 1:49
But in terms of getting involved specifically with the community, I think it started, and this is going to sound very nerdy so I apologize, but the city was doing a parking study in 2019. And I really wanted to voice my opinion that we should have an app to pay for parking because Boston had it, Somerville. Like everyone around us did and I don't carry quarters. I'm digging around in the glove box, you find the old French fry, you know, but no quarters. And so I really wanted to say my piece. And when I went to the public meeting, I walk in and the consultant hands me a book of stickers, you know they had the poster boards and everything, she hands me a book of stickers and she's like, you're the only person who showed up under the age of 40. Vote how you think your generation would vote. And I loved the power I was given.
Matt: 2:29
That's a lot of power.
Sam: 2:30
But also it was like, oh, this is not good. So I was like, okay, I need to make a concerted effort to start showing up to these things and make sure at least there's somebody in this demographic who can show up. Because I can, right, at the time I didn't have kids, you know, I had some more free time. So it's like, okay, there's like a sense of civic responsibility to participate in our local conversations and our local government.
Matt: 2:49
Yeah, out of curiosity, how did you find out about that parking meeting?
Sam: 2:52
This was, I mean, this was 2017, 2018. So I think I saw an email on City Hall. I was looking up something else and I happened to see there's a meeting on parking and I was like this is my chance.
Matt: 3:04
Nice, okay, cool. So let's go back even further, though, now that I know where that is somewhere in your journey. Let's go back a little bit into how you got into the life science field, or just the science field, and how that got interesting for you as a younger person.
Sam: 3:18
So I grew up in Chicago, born and raised, and we had a family friend at the time, still do, who their daughter was born without the first three fingers on her right hand. So she had a pinky and a thumb. And there was a procedure she underwent where they took one of her toes and attached it to her thumb so she could use it as a grabbing motion. And I was in high school at the time. I was thinking about what I wanted to do and they’re friends, they were over, they were talking about their struggles and their journey. And I remember just feeling like I want to help people and I want to make people's lives better. So I decided I want to study biomedical engineering, which is a field that studies those sort of things. And at the time it was a brain machine interface. It was a way of, you know, using your brain to control an implant, kind of like you've seen the videos of the guy playing chess with the neural link implant, something along those lines. So that brought me to Boston.
Sam: 4:05
I went to BU for undergrad and I started working in a lab. Freshman year I dove right in, started working in a mouse lab and they have you do video and data analysis. So I was sitting there tracking the mouse on a computer, you know, frame by frame. And then it got to the point when I was supposed to start doing surgeries on the animals and I realized I really don't like doing that kind of stuff.
Sam: 4:25
That's not something I really wanted to do. And so I pivoted to sort of what you might think of as biotech, you know, working with cells, doing research on how cells communicate with each other, understanding different physiological properties of the cells, things like that. And then I did an internship at the NIH where we were working on probes to try and detect different cancer genes and cells as sort of like a diagnostic is this cell cancerous or not? And that really got me interested in sort of biotech. So I decided to go to graduate school at BU and I studied cellular signaling. We can go into more details about that research, but broadly speaking, I was listening to the episode with Alyssa from Addgene and we actually did similar work in the sense that we both looked at calcium and how cells use calcium to talk to each other.
Matt: 5:09
Did you make pretty pictures for your research too?
Sam: 5:11
Oh, absolutely, and I have one, I joke with my wife. I have a picture of a cell that looks like it has a face in it, kind of like the man in the moon, but it's the man in the cell. And I joke that one of my life goals is to write a children's book. We would use that as the picture. You know a children's book about cell biology.
Sam: 5:28
But my advisor's lab focused on how cells talk to each other and my advisor had this cool video. We worked on a lot of different model organisms, we call them, she worked with slime mold. So she had this cool thing where she could use light to tell the cells what to do, and we don't need to go into the details how that works. But basically these slime mold, when they get hungry and they have no food, they'll form these spores and then shoot a spore off to a different place to find a new food source. And so she was able to figure out how do the cells talk to each other to make the spore and then she could use different tools we had in the lab on the microscope to actually make them do it. And I thought that was so cool. And so her pitch to me was, do you want to do that but with wound healing?
Sam: 6:05
Do you want to tell cells in the skin how to heal themselves? And I was like, yes, 100%. I want to be able to help people. You know, I want to make this process more efficient. It's very complicated.
Sam: 6:17
It's the difference between being a first year grad student and the end of it is you realize just how much you don't know. But what we found out is really it's a complicated thing. It's actually kind of like tug of war, where your skin has mechanical tension, your cells are always pulling on each other. And so when wound healing happens, it's not just a simple like telling the cells do this or do that. It's actually a balance where the cells near to the wound, you need to tell them one thing. You need to tell the cells in the back, kind of relax, tell the ones in the front to contract, and if you don't, you end up with this tug of war. And so you can actually make the wound worse if you're not careful. I know that was a lot, but basically the high level view is we work to understand how cells talk to each other to execute these complex behaviors.
Matt: 6:58
So you're kind of making like a playbook for the cells to go execute a scheme.
Sam: 7:02
It's kind of like being a code breaker. I think that might be the analogy I would use. It's like a code breaker or a linguist trying to figure out a foreign language, where you're looking at behaviors and trying to reverse engineer. Well, how did they communicate to do that? How did they talk to execute the structure?
Matt: 7:17
Yeah, and is there an easy layman's way to say how they are communicating?
Sam: 7:22
Yeah, so cells communicate, at least in the skin, which is the model we were studying, we had these model tissues, in two ways. They either spit different molecules at each other, that's their version of words. Or they're physically connected, you know, they live in like collagen. If you've ever been to Costco and you see the big skin creams that are like 100% collagen. Skin cells live in this sort of mesh of collagen. And so you could think of it as, you're holding onto a rope, I'm holding onto a rope, and we're constantly pulling on that rope. And so that's the other way they communicate to each other is you're like either spitting molecules at each other or you're pulling on each other. So they're kind of like toddlers, I guess. They're constantly spitting at each other or pulling on each other.
Matt: 7:59
I like to think that my skin is just covered in toddlers. It's a constant playhouse there. Cool. So where did your research go with that then?
Sam: 8:09
So we published the papers and then my advisor moved to Virginia to a different institution. It was kind of her dream job. I did not want to move to Virginia so I finished up a bit earlier than I was expecting. But as part of that, it was a couple years ago and it was during the biotech boom, I was looking for jobs and had an opportunity to get a job with Sai and I've been there ever since.
Sam: 8:32
I interviewed in Cambridge and Somerville and just nothing beats being able to walk to work. I feel very lucky and very privileged to be able to work in the community I live in. I was joking with one of my neighbors the other day I was walking to work and they were like oh, where are you headed? And I was like, oh, walking to the Arsenal for work. I just paused for a moment. I was like I wonder how many people in Watertown have said that. The Arsenal's been around since the 1800s. It's like this link to the past of being connected to Watertown's community, obviously doing different things than what the Arsenal was doing, but it just struck me as like oh, this is like a part of Watertown's history in our community.
Matt: 9:03
Yeah, it's kind of cool. So do you want to talk about what Sai kind of does then?
Sam: 9:07
Yeah, sure. So we are a CRO and a CDMO, so a contractor research organization and a contract manufacturing organization. And it's an Indian company, we are the US subsidiary of that company and our branch focuses on early discovery research. So a contract research organization and a contract manufacturing organization means we take on clients who ask us to either do research for them or do manufacturing for them. So I'm not as familiar with the manufacturing, that mostly happens in India, though they do send out pictures of these enormous steel tubes of them making you know gallons and gallons of chemicals. But I'm mostly on the research side. And so we really have two main areas or two main focuses when we do early discovery research.
Sam: 9:51
And early discovery you can think of as like the very beginning of the life science biotech cycle. You have an idea, you've shown that maybe it works, and now you're ready to spin off a company. And so we really work with kind of two or three main groups of companies. We work with new biotechs. Sort of the folks they've founded the company, you have the LLC on paper, you have the company on paper. You have some seed funding, but you know it takes time to find lab space, though easier now than a couple of years ago. You have to hire people, you buy equipment.
Sam: 10:19
All of that takes time, right, and that's time you're not working on your research. And so we can provide, you know, we have scientists, we have equipment, we can do the research for clients while they're setting up their company, and then in a year or two years we hand off the project back to the client and they have work there. We also have a bunch of specialized equipment, sort of the big budget equipment items that a company isn't necessarily going to invest half of their seed funding on buying this one piece of equipment, and so instead you can work with us. We also have the personnel who are specialized in working on that equipment to execute those kinds of projects. And the third kind of company we work with, and this is more recent, is actually these sort of AI drug design companies. Where you have a company where they have this algorithm that will look at, you know, there are all these different drugs that bind to a target that causes cancer, for instance, right. And then they use machine learning AI technology to design hundreds of potential new drugs. And so we'll be the wet lab to test out all that work. You can think of it's a lot cheaper for a company to hire a bunch of software engineers and to get server space from Amazon Web Services than it is to stand up an entire wet lab. And so those are sort of the three main companies we work with or types of companies. And, like I said, most of my experience has been in sort of that middle specialized equipment role, though I've done work in all those buckets with early stage companies and with some of the machine learning AI folk.
Matt: 11:41
Gotcha. And can you take us through an example of working on a project, without giving details, you know?
Sam: 11:46
Yeah, so I recently had a client come in. You know I, like I said, I did a lot of microscopy in my grad school work, sort of like Alyssa, we were talking about the pretty pictures. And so we had a client who wanted to do sort of specialized microscopy with some of their stuff, and it just so happened to fall exactly in sort of things I did in graduate school. And so we worked through, what do you want to do? You know, as a project lead, I'm also responsible for writing up, this is sort of how we quote out the cost, the time, things like that. And then you execute the project. I also handle the logistics. So I'm the one who gets the email saying hey, we're shipping over a plate of cells for you to put on the microscope and take pictures of, things like that. And then we collect the data, analyze it, send it off in whatever format the client wants. They give us feedback, if they want to have a meeting to discuss it.
Sam: 12:29
With images it's challenging. They were taking quite a lot, and so I would send them the sort of data analysis. But then they're like, can we have a meeting and just look at some of the pictures to make sure things look like we want to see. You know it's hard to send 50 to 100 gigabytes of pictures. You know that was a weekend upload thing, but having them up on a PowerPoint and showing them we could have that much faster. But anyway, that's sort of the idea.
Matt: 12:51
And is there any project that you were in the early stage of that now you've seen it in its end stage and be like, oh, that's cool to see how that developed and that you can talk about?
Sam: 13:00
Yeah, so the flip side of it is the US company for Sai is still fairly new. You know, benchmark, it takes about 10 years from conception to FDA approval for a drug. And most companies, I think Merle mentioned this, very rarely does a company take it through the entire lifecycle by its end. Usually the company gets bought out somewhere in that process. It's very challenging. But we do have my first project that I worked on at Sai. That client has announced their drug is now, they have a candidate, they're going to be doing some early preclinical trials, and so that was really rewarding to see. Oh hey, I worked on that. And we'll see, obviously we'll see what happens in the next five to seven years, but it was really exciting and rewarding to see some of that work come to fruition.
Matt: 13:42
Yeah, it's interesting to see how kind of life science field and government are kind of on that same extended timeframe. Like you think these things should take not that long, but for a reason.
Sam: 13:51
Yeah, I was going to say that's actually something in undergrad, something they talked about in one of our senior design and government regulation classes. Is you basically go through, you know, we're not lawyers, so you're not studying the law specifically but sort of a timeline of the history of the FDA. And, like you mentioned, oh, The Jungle, sort of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, moving then up through the 60s and 70s and sort of the modern framework for the FDA. And so you're kind of like, on the one hand you're like, yeah, that's a long time. On the other hand, you read about the case studies that caused those and you're like, you know, maybe that's for a reason.
Matt: 14:21
Yes.
Sam: 14:21
I mean that was also something I appreciated as a scientist. I was focused in undergrad a lot on, you know, I need to know the biology and the math and all of this stuff, and so it was nice to also learn about the law and how that interacts with the field, instead of just being in my lab.
Matt: 14:35
Yeah, it's good to have that fuller picture. Cool. I don’t know, is there anything else, particularly that behind the scenes, that you think would be interesting for the general public to know about working at a life science company in Watertown?
Sam: 14:48
I think it's kind of fun being someone who lives here and hearing folks talk about like discovering Watertown. Kind of fun to hear people be like, oh you know, I just found out about this new bakery in Watertown Square.
Sam: 14:59
You know there's this diner. We're going to go to lunch at this diner in Coolidge Corner. And they come back and they're like that was like the best diner I've ever been to. I'm like, yeah, that's why I live here. It's pretty awesome. I know Addgene had their winter market so people went over there and were like, yeah, there’s all these cool artists that live in Watertown. So it’s fun to see people kind of experience your town for the first time.
Sam: 15:19
And also folks are, at least at our company, the purchasing manager, the office manager, when we have events at the company they're very conscious. I appreciate it. They're like what's a local place we can get lunch from? What’s a local business? You know we wanted to get jackets and so the question was what are the local places we could get a jacket from? And so at least at my company, you know I don't want to speak too broadly, there's definitely a kind of a focus of how do we use local services and support local businesses being a part of the Watertown community.
Matt: 15:45
Yeah, and how do you feel about when people are talking about the life sciences? Like when they say life science and Watertown, from your inside perspective, when you hear that talk, how do you feel about that?
Sam: 15:54
I think it's challenging. It is as someone who kind of has a foot in both worlds, I can see the negatives right. Like if you're not working here, you just see these big buildings go up and you have to deal with the construction and the traffic and all of this. It is frustrating and on the other hand, there is a sense when I go to work sometimes and I'm talking to people, it's like we're in Watertown, but like its own bubble. And so I think that's also what's propelled me.
Sam: 16:18
What I really liked about CoLAB when I first heard about it and I talked to Merle is her idea of we don't want these two separate Watertowns, where you have the biotech Watertown on one side and the rest of Watertown. We need to be an integrated community, and that's something that really drives my involvement in CoLAB is, you know, I came halfway across the country to come work in this sector and our kids have this opportunity right in their backyard sometimes, literally. It would just be a shame if they end up not being able to take advantage of it because we, as either community members or as biotech members, sort of stay in our bubble instead of trying to reach out and build bridges and integrate our communities.
Matt: 16:53
Right, yeah, we've talked about CoLAB on the podcast before so people can listen to that episode with Merle to learn more about that, and Alyssa talked about it in hers a little bit. But yeah, Alyssa also talked about it in her episode about, you know, I don't think people realize that this is the hotbed in maybe the world for this type of stuff.
Sam: 17:09
And I think that's something as we try and work with the CoLab, but, like when we do career presentations, for instance. I just did one with a science teacher and one of the things we specifically hit on is the breadth of jobs that are available in the life sciences that don't require you to be a scientist. I also don't want folks in the community to think that, oh, unless you know, you want to be a biologist and go to graduate school and do all this research for a number of years, then this isn't for me, like there aren't opportunities. There are a lot of opportunities.
Matt: 17:37
Like what's an example?
Sam: 17:41
Yeah, so I'd say at our company, right, we're a contract firm and so business development is key for us. That's something where, if you have a bachelor's in sciences, if you can speak the science lingo, it's something you can learn quickly. You don't necessarily need an advanced degree. Or, for instance, our lab manager, supply chain manager. Like I said, we're the US subsidiary of an Indian company. We have a supply chain manager who studied supply chain management in school and their job is sending packages back and forth around the world and making sure, you know, it's a very involved process.
Sam: 18:06
I had to do it when we were in between managers. I had to send something and it's working out customs paperwork, all that stuff. It is an involved process. But again, that’s something that's totally adjacent to science but absolutely critical for our business and a number of businesses, not just ours. Life sciences is a global thing where you're buying reagents from different companies all over the world. You're collaborating.
Sam: 18:26
It's nice when we have clients who send us things and they're down the street. They can walk from one end of the campus to the other. But we also get a fair amount of clients who are shipping us stuff from halfway around the world.
Matt: 18:35
Yeah, so why don't we pivot here to a little bit of another one of your interests in Watertown? So you got involved with the parking, then you've gotten involved with even more stuff, such as housing. So how did that come about?
Sam: 18:47
So I think housing is sort of the undergirding and the housing crisis is sort of an undergirding topic that's always sort of simmering beneath the surface. And it's not always something you know we're saying cognizantly, saying up front of oh, there's a housing shortage or there's a housing crisis. But you hear it a number of ways. You hear folks say you know, landlord raised my rents, or my property taxes went up, or can I afford to redo my house. Or we’re having a kid, can we find space, those things. So it's always kind of there, even if it's not the spoken topic.
Sam: 19:21
You know, it's sort of my own journey. We were renting in Watertown, we were looking at places and there happened to be a city meeting about Watertown Square and so I happened to show up and met some folk. And we all talked and realized, hey, for the four of us who met up, we were like this is a topic we care about, sort of housing and housing crisis and the fact that people are rent burdened, that people can't afford to buy in Watertown, and so we started at a kitchen table talking about these events. And we decided, you know, let's reach out to everyone else in the community. Maybe we're just crazy and maybe we just or not crazy, maybe we just have a niche perspective, and so we started just reaching out to people. We talked to city councillors, we talked to the business folks. That's actually in a roundabout way, that's how I ended up talking to Merle, Doug Orifice. I was assigned to talking to the WBC and being like, hey, is housing a thing you guys care about? Doug was like yes, that is very much something. You know, Bob Airasian is the co-chair. You can't not talk about that. He's like by the way, you said you're in biotech, can you talk to Merle about CoLAB? So, as a side note, that's sort of how I also got more involved in Watertown, was just talking to people and kind of getting over that fear of, oh, I don't really know this person, am I going to really talk?
Matt: 20:20
Yeah, it's welcoming in Watertown.
Sam: 20:23
It is, and people are willing to talk, I guess is my point. So it helped me kind of get over my fear of rejection. Like you’re going to reach out and people are going to be like, nah, I don’t want to talk to you. Or who are you? You know I'm from Chicago. There's the famous line, we don't want nobody that nobody sent. Where you know, unless you know someone or you're connected, we're not good. So I was just surprised at how much people in Watertown are like, yeah, let's talk about this. This is something, you know, maybe they didn't think it was an issue, but they were happy to talk and get to know people and just get to know their neighbors. And so I think two things came of that.
Sam: 20:47
There was broad agreement across a lot of different areas in the city that housing is a challenge. The housing crisis is an issue. Affordability is an issue. It also is a chance just to get to know the breadth of Watertown. I think same thing with these conversations you just don't know how many different and interesting folks there are in town and how housing touches on all of their lives. So with that we decided to form Housing for All Watertown, a group to really advocate solutions to the housing crisis in Watertown. And obviously this is a regional problem. The shortage is regional. It's not something Watertown is going to solve on its own, but we want to make sure we're doing our part, but also doing what's best for our city and the ways that address our specific needs as much as we can.
Matt: 21:28
Yeah, so a few questions here then. So who would be the other people that were in that group who started? Yeah, let's start there.
Sam: 21:35
Yeah, so it was Josh Rosmarin, Amy Plovnick, and Daniel Pritchard were the three other people at the kitchen table. And then we just started talking to people. We saw folks who were interested and we eventually formed a steering committee, which is Rita Colafella, Jacky van Leeuwen, Josh, Dan, and myself. We're the steering committee of the group, but we have a number of members and I'm still surprised at just the number of folks who are willing to go talk about these issues. You know there's always sort of in the back of your mind I still have that initial sort of question of like, is this a niche thing? How many people are willing to take time out of their day to write an email to the city council or even show up on a random Tuesday night to say, hey, housing is important to me. And I've just been blown away by the number of people who are impacted by this issue and who are willing to step out and talk about it and advocate for more housing. So really just impressed by our community.
Matt: 22:23
Yeah. Was there any story in those early conversations that you had that really surprised you about the situation here?
Sam: 22:30
I mean I was renting at the time and I kind of understood the grad school, you know my wife was a teacher, I was a grad student, sort of the challenges of making rent. We were lucky our landlady was very, very kind and you know the rent increases were reasonable. But talking to our neighbors, you know we had neighbors move because, landlord sold the place, the person came in, raised the rents and so they had to move. You know where we had friends who were looking to buy a place and they were going to open house after open house and they're like, you know we were number three in the bidding line or we were number two. You know we were always the bridesmaid but never the bride, kind of situation.
Matt: 23:03
So I guess what is the core work that you guys are doing now?
Sam: 23:17
So our core work really is to expand housing opportunities of all kinds in Watertown. We think the solution to the housing shortage is to build more housing of all kinds. That means more of your classic market rate housing, more deed restricted affordable housing, more subsidized housing from the government, more public housing. We've been active in supporting the Willow Park redevelopment. You know basically everything. That's what we're looking to support.
Matt: 23:30
How did you come to those conclusions?
Sam: 23:30
So we did some literature searches and there's a lot of literature that suggests that building more market rate housing helps a lot, but it's not sufficient. In science we say it's necessary, but not sufficient, right. There's always going to be places for folks, especially on the lower end of the income scale, where there's going to need to be units designed specifically for them so that they can stay in town. And so that's where the sort of kitchen sink approach came from. Was reading what do economists say, and then from that, where do we go from there. And then also, some of it is just sort of what does the city have capacity for at the time to study and understand. You know, like Watertown Square, okay, the city's going to invest. You know we have to do this for the state. The city's going to spend the time. What are the options for Watertown Square? What makes sense there?
Matt: 24:12
Yeah, so there's the, Nicole Gardner mentioned in her episode briefly that the Willow Park is getting redone, do you want to talk about that a little bit or other projects that are coming up that you're excited to see that are moving in the right direction?
Sam: 24:25
So I think the other challenge is, and this almost gets back to my grad school research, with the housing market. It's this interplay of we set policies at a broad scale, but those policies they don't actually build something. Most projects, with the exception of certain things like Willow Park or certain affordable projects, get funded by the city. Right, most of the time we're setting rules and then individuals then develop projects. And so it's always interesting sort of that interplay between what are the rules for development and then what do individual people actually do to build. And so I would say I enjoy the opportunities where we can do both. So, like Willow Park, for instance, the opportunity to work to advocate to our various local funding sources to support this project, to not only build new public housing, which is a challenge in America. You know, it was a challenge before the election, it's certainly a challenge now. But also to add on to it and create new spaces and new affordable units is really really rewarding opportunity. And so now that is going to be in the zoning stage. They need to get zoning approval to actually build the project and we'll be looking to support the project through that phase. But I think moving a step back, since most of it is focused on sort of those rules and regulations, I've sort of been focused a lot on the zoning issue, right. And zoning is the set of rules the city develops to govern when can buildings be built, what kinds of buildings can be built, how close together can they be, how much parking do you need? All those sort of details. It's not necessarily like the safety rules, if that makes sense, right, those are governed at the state level. That's the building code that says this is how you have to build the building, so it's fire resistant, or this is how you have to wire a building safely for electricity or plumbing. All that's at the state level. But zoning sort of tells us how tall, how big, how many trees, all the other stuff. And I think that's what surprised me walking around the city and walking through the city, what surprises me is it's an opportunity to do the reverse of what I did in grad school. In grad school you don't know what the rules are for how the cells are communicating, but you can see the behavior that results from it. In my case, you know, you see how the cells work together to heal a wound, but you don't know how they're talking. With zoning, it's sort of the opposite. With zoning, the rules are publicly available about what you can build where, how big it has to be, and then you can walk around and see, well, what did the rules produce? And I think that's what struck me is, at least in a lot of our neighborhoods, our zoning really doesn't match what is currently built in the neighborhoods, the current built environment.
Sam: 26:45
And I'll give you a quick example for your listeners. Our setback rules, the distance a house has to be from their property line, in a lot of districts the minimum setback is 10 feet. So if you think about that, that means you have two houses next to each other. This is a side yard, right. Two houses next to each other. There needs to be 20 feet between them. Average car is about six feet wide. So doing a little engineering math here, right, estimating, you know you should be able to fit at least three cars next to each other between each house.
Sam: 27:10
And as you walk around Watertown and you quickly recognize a lot of times you can't fit two cars between two houses. Or you know most of our zoning doesn't allow triple-deckers like the classic New England, the vernacular architecture. And then I walk down Parker Street sometimes to get to work and there's like three triple-deckers right there. You start questioning well, why are our rules like this? We live in these homes, these apartments, it's our daily lived experience, and so there's this disconnect where our rules say you know, the house you live in can't be built today the way it's built today. And then you're like but I live there and I love it, I love sort of the quirkiness. And so that's sort of something I'm interested in in the next couple years.
Sam: 27:48
To their credit, the city recognizes this. They recognize that we made it difficult for folks to renovate their homes. Right, maybe they have a kid that's coming or they have a family member that needs to come live with them. Our rules make it challenging to add on addition or dorm out the attic, and so the city is looking to reform this process. The city manager gave an excellent presentation last summer talking about all these details. I'm not going to go into detail. So that's one thing I'm interested with the housing is sort of the nuts and bolts. For the average resident, how do we make it easier for them to stay in Watertown as they move through life? The next thing I'm excited about this year is ADUs, accessory dwelling units. The state, as of Sunday February 2nd, the state has required every city and town to legalize them in certain areas. And so I'm excited. They do give cities and towns discretion as to the details, and so I'm excited to work through that process to make sure folks can take advantage of that opportunity so they can stay here.
Matt: 28:36
Do you want to describe what that is for people who?
Sam: 28:37
Yes, so an accessory dwelling unit, it’s an in-law apartment, a granny flat, all of those different things. And they can be, you know, maybe you convert your basement or your attic into an apartment, maybe you build a smaller carriage house on the back of your land, something like that. And there are rules about the sizing and we don't need to get into the details right, it's not like someone's going to plop a five-story building in their backyard. This is not the intention of the law, but it gives flexibility. You know, I'm thinking about my parents. They live in Chicago still and I live here. I'm their only son and it's like, well, eventually they're probably going to need to come live with me when they get to a point, you know, when they get older, and so that ADU gives them a chance to sort of live separately. They still have their own house, their own place, to be independent, but again closer to family. And it means they don't have to fight to get a floor in a 2 family or we can build it to be accessible. So you know a single level, so you don't have to worry about going upstairs, things like that. And that's just my own personal example. But what's exciting is it's giving everybody that opportunity and it's exciting to see how people use it I think. This is opening up an entirely new kind of housing or at least re-legalizing something.
Sam: 29:38
Watertown allowed these briefly in the 90s as sort of an amnesty period to convert illegal apartments to make sure that they were brought up to code, things like that. But basically it's the first time really since Watertown was developed that you have a lot of small hands building housing, right. We're used to in the last 20 years these sort of large apartments and redevelopments of things on Arsenal Street and Pleasant Street, these sort of big projects built by these national developers. And so this is the first time where, like, your neighbor gets to do something. This is so cool and this is again informed by my grad school, which is seeing how do collectives of people use this law to improve their lives and to sort of add character to the neighborhood. Right, like I may use it, for example, for my parents and other folks may be saying you know, this is something for my kids are in college, this is the place for them to hang out or for a place for them to come back when they come back from college or whatever.
Sam: 30:26
You know, someone is an artist and they want to create an artist studio or something whatever. Who knows right, like that's the beauty of it. It goes beyond even anything any one person can think of and you have cool opportunities. Now, of course, there may be folks where it doesn't work out and the city needs to step in, but on the whole, we kind of get to see the full creativity and the full expression of our community in bloom, rather than sort of this one big building on Arsenal Street. Which isn't to say we don't. We need those buildings as well. Right, we need those types of housing as well. And, honestly, those are very big buildings. It's expensive, it's time consuming to build. An ADU, it's a much smaller building, more accessible to people. Sorry that was a long. You can see I like to talk about.
Matt: 31:03
No, that's, it's good to hear those perspectives. Again, that's something that the average listener might not know about, so.
Sam: 31:08
And so I should say just one more thing on the citywide rezoning. I think in the same vein it's looking at how can we allow residents and landowners to use their property and use the land they own to build housing to address this crisis in a different way than what we've seen. Again, you can't build this big apartment building, but like seeing how does my neighbor, how do they add an addition? You know, I live, in my neighborhood there's like three different house designs and so I'll walk up and down the street and I'll be like, oh, they enclosed their porch or they're putting in a dormer. Do I like how they put in a dormer? I kind of like how my other neighbor put in a dormer. Maybe I'll ask them for their design. So again, you get to see that sort of creativity in the community fully expressed and it's also creating space for new residents and helping people stay in town helping create space for new residents who can then contribute to the community.
Matt: 31:52
Yeah, maybe one last category that I always like to ask about is the middle group. You know, the people who own their own houses. Then you have the low-income housing. And then what about those people who are renting, maybe would like to own someday, but can't in Watertown, like that middle group you know.
Sam: 32:08
Yeah, this is where, again, I think two things. This is where ADUs and activating that sort of average homeowner is one opportunity for folks like that. If nothing else, it is much less expensive to turn a basement or an attic to build that as a fully formed apartment or put down a carriage house than it is to build a big apartment building. It's just a cheaper per unit cost for various reasons, right. And so for folks in sort of that middle group, that opens up new housing opportunities for them. And studies from Seattle, California, Oregon show that on average, these units rent for cheaper than an equivalent unit, definitely a unit in what we would consider, say, a two family or they're definitely cheaper than something you know at Arsenal Yards or. And so one, that creates an opportunity to, if nothing else, stabilize your rent budget, keep it constant so that creates more space to save. That same principle applies to citywide rezoning. Is there an opportunity to create smaller apartment buildings, to create infill development that, if not drives down the price of housing at all, it keeps it constant, right. If you can keep the price of housing constant, you know people's buying power will increase over time. And I think it's an alternative to our current situation.
Sam: 33:10
I don't know about your neighborhood, but in my neighborhood, really, the only thing that's being built. Right, there are single family homes that are being torn down and rebuilt as like these huge McMansions, and then two family apartment to condo conversions. And if you think about it, someone buys a two family and they flip it. You have to spread out the entire construction cost basis over two units. But if you can allow a third unit, if you can allow a couple more units, you can spread over some of those costs over more units. And it's new construction, it's still going to be a higher cost, but the per unit cost is going to be lower than if you're forced to do all that work for two units. I think, something that surprises me, the two family across the street from me, I was looking at it because it's on the market. I think each unit is 2,200 square feet, so that's 4,000 square feet in this building that already exists, but you can only sell it for two units. What if you divided it up into three apartments that are 1,200 square feet or something like that? Right now it's the same size, the same amount of work square footage, but over three units, things like that. So there are opportunities there.
Sam: 34:06
You know and I'm not an economist, so you know this is where the city studying this comes in, and you can work with economists and work with land folks and developers to say this is sort of what we need. This is sort of the minimum to get there. But that's the broad idea is using that to help stabilize housing costs and bring them down. Yeah, I mean we were able to buy our house partially because we had a friend who's like my neighbor is going to be selling their house, and so we were able to get the jump on and be prepared. When things came around, we were ready, we had everything lined up. And like I said, at the beginning, the thing that I think a lot of us value about Watertown is that we are welcoming, we are open. And so on the flip side, when buying property in town requires you to sort of know somebody or have to have a connection right, that kind of goes against the rest of the ethos of Watertown. And so that's something I'd like to see is make it easier for folks. I mean, I'm grateful that my friend gave us it. Of course I'm grateful, but like that shouldn't be the norm.
Matt: 34:58
Right. Well, we could talk on this for, I'm sure, a very long time. There's lots of things to dig into there, but I appreciate that perspective. Is there anything on the housing in Watertown, or Housing for All Watertown, that you just want to leave a last thought for people to get engaged with it more?
Sam: 35:14
Yeah, so if you're interested in signing up, so we have sort of a monthly here's what's going on in the housing world in Watertown opportunities for advocacy things like that. We usually have one monthly update and then for big things like Watertown Square we'll send out a separate email. You can sign up at housingforallwatertown.org. There's a signup form there. One of our other pushes this year is looking at ways to make it easier to build affordable housing, capital A Affordable housing, one would say. You know, that's actually deed restricted by law to be rents are set at a certain level. And that's tied into some city initiatives that are also happening this year, and so as part of that, we have an event coming up on February 23rd where we're going to bring in some folks from nearby communities, some home builders, who actually can talk about that process and talk about ways to make it easier to do that here in Watertown that might make sense in our community
Matt: 36:02
And they can find that on the website?
Sam: 36:04
Yes, we will be putting it up.
Matt: 36:06
Any other last thoughts you want to get out there about anything, Watertown, life science, housing related, or you feel like you got everything off your chest?
Sam: 36:14
I would just encourage folks. You know we're a unique opportunity in the sense that our access to local government here in Watertown. I feel like we have some of the benefits of a city in terms of city staff, city government, the representation there, but we still have a lot of access compared to being in a bigger city like Boston or Chicago or something like that. And so I just encourage folks you know to get involved and to speak out when you have something you're interested in. Maybe it doesn't have to be as niche as trying to get a parking app for the parking meters behind City Hall, but if there's something that interests you, by all means go to a city meeting, go email your city councilor. I'm sure they would love to hear from their constituency, hear from residents about issues that they care about.
Matt: 36:51
Yeah, great point. Cool. Well, thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts and your stories, and all your points of contact here in Watertown. And yeah, thanks for taking the time.
Sam: 37:00
Thank you. And thank you for doing this podcast.
Matt: 37:03
So that's it for my conversation with Sam. You can reach out to him where he mentioned. Also put some links in the show notes for the event that Housing for All Watertown has coming up on Sunday, February 23rd at the library and a couple of other resources related to housing that he wanted to share as well. If you like the podcast and like to follow along, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, which you'll find in the show notes, or if you head on over to littellocalconversations.com where I have all the episodes and events that are coming up. And speaking of events coming up, I have a couple coming up. The first one is on February 28th Friday morning event. Second, Creative Chats over at the Misesian Center for the Arts. Guest is going to be Jamie Kallestad, singer-songwriter. Head on over to again littellocalconversations.com. Rsvp for that to let me know. Event is free. Just helps me figure out how much food to get and coffee to wake people up on a Friday morning. Those events again are just for people who are interested in creativity in any capacity. Hope to see everyone who came out last time and more people because it was a really good time.
Matt: 37:59
And the other big event that I have coming up is I woke up a couple of weeks ago realizing that I was coming up on a year of doing this podcast, which is crazy to think of that it's been that time already. March was when I released my first episode with Doug Orifice, of Arsenal Financial and Watertown Business Coalition, just about a year ago. So I wanted to do something to celebrate, but also celebrate the community. So on Tuesday, March 18th, at 5:30 pm, I'm going to have an anniversary event at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. I'm going to invite some past guests back, do some live podcast panels. There'll be light bites and cash bar. This is the first event where I will be asking for some money, but not for me. It's a suggested $20 donation and all the proceeds from the event will go to two nonprofits the Mosesian Center for the Arts, who again will be hosting the event, and the Watertown Community Foundation. So I hope that if you're listening to this bit at the end of the podcast, you're probably a fan of the podcast and learning about all the people in our community. So I hope you'll come out for what I hope will be a good community event, bring people together, having some more conversations, but in person this time, and also help raise a little bit of money for some local nonprofits doing some good work here in town. So I'm excited about it. Again, March 18th. Tuesday evening at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. Look in the show notes for the links to RSVP for that. Really hope to see you out for that one.
Matt: 39:15
All right, and a couple of things to wrap up here. I want to give a thank you to the Watertown Cultural Council, who've given me a grant this year to help support the podcast. I want to give the appropriate credit, which is this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. Find out more about them at watertownculturalcouncil.org and massculturalcouncil.org. I also want to give a shout out to a promotional partner, the Watertown Business Coalition. They're a nonprofit organization here in Watertown that's bringing businesses and people together to help strengthen our community. Find out more about them and events that they have coming up at watertownbusinesscoalition.com. So that's it. Until next time, take care.
