A report by state officials planning the Green Line extension into Somerville and Medford may have paved the way for a professional soccer stadium just four miles from Tufts' campus.
In the October report, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation (EOT) seemed to move away from plans to build a Green Line maintenance facility in Yard 8, a Somerville lot that the New England Revolution's owner is considering as a site for a new stadium.
The EOT is considering two other locations for the facility after city officials and local business owners said a facility at Yard 8 would throw a wrench into plans for mixed-use development there.
The Kraft Group, which owns the Revolution and the National Football League's New England Patriots, has been exploring the possibility of moving the Revolution into a smaller, soccer-specific stadium, a current trend among Major League Soccer (MLS) franchises. The Krafts have been considering Somerville as the potential home for a new stadium for around two years, and started looking at development opportunities in the Inner Belt and Brickbottom areas last year.
Supporters of the move believe it would make the team more accessible to fans in the Boston area, since the Revolution currently plays more than 20 miles outside the city, at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. The planned Green Line extension would serve the Inner Belt area, where Yard 8 is located, and the new stadium would sit only a mile from downtown Boston.
A smaller venue would also mean that soccer crowds would not be dwarfed in a huge stadium designed for football. Gillette Stadium seats 68,756; a new soccer stadium would reportedly host between 20,000 and 30,000 fans.
In its Draft Environmental Impact Report, published Oct. 15, the EOT said it would look into the possibility of two locations other than Yard 8 for construction of the maintenance facility: "Mirror H," the City of Somerville's preferred space, and "Option L."
The EOT had chosen Yard 8 in large part due to concerns over costs, but, from the city's point of view, Mirror H would actually be cheaper, according to Michael Lambert, Somerville's director of transportation and infrastructure. Many have argued that a maintenance facility for subway trains in the center of Yard 8 would have made it difficult to develop the area.
"It's good news," Lambert told the Daily of the report's recommendations. "We think Yard 8 would have serious negative ramifications" from economic, quality-of-life and access points of view.
Option L might serve as a good compromise location, Lambert said, especially since an old railroad facility already sits on that land. "Putting like uses next to each other is a very logical choice," he said.
The EOT, which merged into the newly created Massachusetts Department of Transportation this month, is carrying out preliminary analyses of the possible maintenance-facility locations.
"We are working on it internally," Kate Fichter, the Green Line extension project manager, told the Daily. "We are not yet ready to share information with the public."
As for the stadium, Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone has not met with the Kraft Group in over two years, Lambert said. Lambert explained that the poor economic climate and uncertainty over the location of the maintenance facility have stunted plans.
Kraft Group spokesman Stacey James told the Daily that there was nothing new to report with respect to the possibility of building a soccer-specific stadium in Somerville.
But the city still believes a stadium would serve as a good centerpiece for a mixed-use development of the Inner Belt, including buildings, restaurants and offices. This is an approach the Krafts have indicated they would want to take, according to Lambert. "We remain interested were it to become a possibility," he said.
"If you have someone who's not only going to put a stadium but also a mixed use development down there, that would go a long way to getting the large public-infrastructure investment you would need" from the state, local and federal governments, he added.
The stadium's potential location in an urban area of Somerville, a city with large immigrant populations, could bring in soccer fans from those communities, as well as a younger fan base without easy access to Gillette Stadium.
"If you look across MLS, the teams that have had success are teams that are located in downtown areas and that have been able to successfully market to younger markets," said Andrew Helms, a senior who calls himself an avid soccer fan.
A Washington, D.C. resident, Helms is a fan of D.C. United, Washington's MLS team. Helms said the United has done a great job tapping into the local Hispanic population, an example he suggested the Revolution could draw on.
"In Somerville, you've got big soccer-loving Brazilian and Portuguese populations," he said. "They're clearly soccer fans, but they're not New England Revolution fans."
Helms said he has never made it to a Revolution game, in part due to Gillette Stadium's inaccessibility from Tufts.
"The Revs have done a horrendous job of having support in Boston," he said. "There are tons of Tufts kids who are soccer fans, and I don't think there are any who are Revolution fans."
