SOMERVILLE — When the MBTA opened the Green Line Extension last year, Gerard Amaral embraced the benefits.
The new tracks into Somerville and Medford did not immediately boost business to Union Tavern, the decades-old bar Amaral owns on Somerville Avenue in Union Square. But by spring, he began to see the upside: Two of his employees could commute into work more easily, and developments sprouting up around the train line brought new customers.
But then Amaral began to notice that the trains were consistently delayed and sometimes traveling as slow as 3 miles per hour. His consternation grew when the line was recently shut down for roughly a month. Then, last week’s discovery that the tracks on much of the extension are too narrow and in need of repairs brought Amaral’s remaining hopes for the MBTA crashing down.
“The Green Line Extension will make a bigger difference when it’s up and running — reliably,” he said. “But who knows when that will be?”
Like Amaral, residents and businesses near the region’s first new rapid transit line in decades see its continued issues as the failure of the MBTA, personified. The state had long touted the extension as an economic engine and a reason for developers to invest in neighborhoods along it. But a sharp reminder of how little riders can depend on the system came last Thursday, when the Globe reported that the tracks on up to 80 percent of the Medford branch and 50 percent of the Union Square branch need to be repositioned.
Those fears were redoubled Friday, when a Globe reporter in Somerville was evacuated with around 80 passengers from a Green Line Extension train and service stopped for four hours.
“Most of us in Union Square share a sense of betrayal about promises made regarding the Green Line, and it’s not a new feeling,” said Bill Shelton, a board member of the Union Square Neighborhood Council.
It not yet clear when the repair work on the extension will begin, though the T’s general manager indicated it could take weeks to complete.
Meanwhile, those who live and work nearby say that any temporary closures or service interruptions will leave them unable to quickly get in and out of Boston. Employees will face extra bumps on their commutes. Tenants who saw their rent skyrocket because of public transit access will not — at least temporarily — reap any of its benefits. And the tenants in millions of square feet of new offices and apartments will again have to make do without the rapid trip into downtown commuting hubs.
Real estate developers have poured billions of dollars into large-scale projects along the line in recent years — moves that Somerville, and to a lesser extent Cambridge, encouraged by rezoning land for commercial development.
Take, for example, the 4.5 million-square-foot Cambridge Crossing campus that sits alongside a new Lechmere station, where the Green Line previously ended. It was partially funded by developer DivcoWest, which has landed an enviable tenant roster including Bristol Myers Squibb, Sanofi, and Philips. Last year, DivcoWest touted the extension as “a clear example of how investments in transit can drive innovation and opportunity.” DivcoWest declined to comment for this story.
For Boynton Yards, a multi-building life-science and residential campus underway on the Cambridge-Somerville line just outside Union Square, the extension is “absolutely critical,” said John Fenton, development manager of DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners. DLJ and Leggat McCall Properties, Boynton Yards’ developers, aim to build a pedestrian bridge connecting the new Union Square platform to the project, part of a multi-modal transportation plan — a plan that relies, in large part, on working public transit.
“It’s obviously a disappointment,” Fenton said. “Boston is a world-class city. It’s got world-class education and health care. What it doesn’t have right now is world-class transportation or housing, and we have to fix those things. And we will.”
The Green Line Extension was approved as part of a mitigation deal between the nonprofit Conservation Law Foundation and the state, following CLF’s lawsuit over another long-delayed public infrastructure project: the Big Dig. Over decades of planning, the extension project has generated much fervor. Shelton recalled a public hearing at Somerville High School the evening of Oct. 27, 2004, when hundreds of residents came out to press for the extension rather than watch the Red Sox win the World Series for the first time in 86 years. It took another 13 years before the MBTA awarded a contract for the extension, then another five years of construction.
But at a city ribbon-cutting Monday for a new plaza at Union Square Station — complete with plantings and amphitheater seating — there was hardly a whisper of any woes. Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne touted how the nearly half-acre plaza makes the new platform “accessible to all,” and thanked her staff and the MBTA for “countless, countless” hours of behind-the-scenes work. Greg Karczewski, president of developer US2 — which is overhauling much of Union Square, including erecting Somerville’s tallest building next to the station — told the Globe the firm is “thrilled the Green Line is here.”
A few steps away, signs alerted riders that D Line trains running inbound to Riverside would arrive every seven to 13 minutes.
When Sarah Murphy heard the news of the track issues, it made her chuckle. The owner of Vinal Bakery and General Store in Union Square moved to Somerville in 2006, the same year she came across an apartment listing advertising the spot as “steps from the new Green Line Extension.”
Seventeen years later, that same line is causing major headaches.
Its opening last year slightly expanded Murphy’s customer base and offered some of her employees — residents of East Boston or Revere — a smoother way to work. But it is almost always late.
“The train cannot be depended on. Some people come in an hour before their shift. Some people are perpetually 30 minutes late,” Murphy said. When the repairs begin, “I will be fielding frustrations from staff who have to leave a lot earlier, or take an Uber, or rely on shuttle buses that come even less frequently than the train.”
Sophie Dodd, an employee at Great Eastern Vintage in Gilman Square, cannot help but feel the same. The 19-year-old takes the train to work on the weekends from her Emerson College dorm in Downtown Crossing, but the line lets her down frequently.
“What good is the train for me if it never comes on time?” she said. “Or now, if it never comes at all?”
It’s also striking that housing prices along the line have surged, in part due to the expectation of a new train that would whisk people to jobs in East Cambridge and Boston. Since at least early 2022, said Nicole Eigbrett, director of community organizing at Community Action Agency of Somerville, older apartment buildings along the extension have been bought at a rapid clip, as “property owners are taking advantage of the fact that investors are speculating.”
The average rent for a one-bedroom in Somerville is now $2,695, a 7 percent increase from last year, according to Zumper. That, Eigbrett said, bodes poorly for immigrants and blue-collar workers in the city of 81,000, where two-thirds of residents rent.
Liz Hammond, a 41-year-old department manager at Tufts University, moved to Gilman Square six months before the extension opened, with the intention of riding the Medford line to her job less than 2 miles away. An osteoarthritis patient, Hammond thought the commute would be convenient and less stressful on her body than walking or taking the bus.
The persistent concerns mean that the opposite is often true, even as the neighborhood gets pricier.
“Having the new Green Line Extension on the same block as my apartment was a major consideration in renting it,” Hammond said. “With the extension shutting down, I will lose the public transit options to get from my home to my work and into Boston.”
Correction: A prior version of this story misspelled Sophie Dodd’s name.
Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_. Catherine Carlock can be reached at catherine.carlock@globe.com. Follow her @bycathcarlock.