SOMERVILLE — If you’ve been to Davis Square for one of its many food and entertainment options, you know this stretch of Elm Street: Dragon Pizza, McKinnon’s Meat Market, the Burren.
But the future of one of the most quintessential neighborhood business districts in the Boston area has been in flux. Owners of the segment on Elm tried to redevelop the property into 250 units of housing in 2019, but that fizzled. So did an effort to bid to build lab space.
Owners have pivoted again, this time aiming high — really high. They have proposed a 25-story tower of 500 apartments atop a space that for many years has been mom-and-pop stores and restaurants, but is also just a short walk from a Red Line MBTA stop at a time when housing near public transit has become a statewide priority.
So how would something like that look in a place like this?
Many neighbors got a first glimpse of it from, of all things, a paper flier. The developer and local housing advocates argue that the depiction is highly inaccurate. It was nonetheless an opening shot of a flier war that has added a distinctly Somerville tint to a housing debate playing out in cities across the state over the balance between preserving what people love about their neighborhoods and adding new housing, especially the affordable kind.
The first flier, which showed up anonymously in mailboxes around Davis Square and has since been discussed at length on social media, included a DIY rendering of a drab skyscraper-like building towering over the intimate neighborhood.
“Do we really want something like this in Davis Square?” the flier asks in all caps, inviting viewers to attend meetings held by a local neighborhood group, or to call the mayor. No one has claimed responsibility for making it. The same goes for a paper-bound anonymous rebuttal singing the development’s praises that was later spotted in the square.
When Andrew Flynn, head of the development firm behind the proposed building, first saw the fliers, he was flummoxed. After all, he said, his company, Copper Mill, had already published renderings of the project, which looked nothing like the one in the first flier.
“It’s very rudimentary, poor design. It’s just this massive monolithic polygon going up into the sky,” he said, with more than a hint of frustration. “The perspective from the street is just a complete canard.”
The unofficial plans his firm shared in public meetings look quite different. Its renderings are from the ground level and don’t show how the 25-story residential tower would look from the street. Instead, it depicts nine units of retail spaces, some of which, Flynn has said, would include the current tenants like the Burren, should they want to return once construction is complete. So far, the ground-level images have cut off where the retail portion stops and the hulking tower begins. Flynn said the firm plans to publish a depiction of how the structure might look to pedestrians at some point in the next few weeks.
Flynn’s firm hasn’t filed any official paperwork connected to the proposal, which is just in an informal planning and public discussion phase. But Flynn has said it will need to include at least 500 units, which would be stacked into 25 floors, in order to be profitable. The tower, he said, could be built farther back from the street and perhaps at an angle, which he said would make it hardly as imposing as the one in the flier.
“If you’re walking down Elm Street on the sidewalk, you may not even be able to see the building,” he said.
There are many hurdles to clear before anything as grand as that is built here. Current zoning rules for the site, which sits on about three-quarters of an acre, don’t allow residential buildings, only commercial ones, and cap building heights at just four stories. Asked about the plans, Mayor Katjana Ballantyne said in a statement that any proposal would be thoroughly reviewed in a public process. “Somerville thrives on dialogue, and I encourage everyone to stay involved in these conversations,” Ballantyne said.
“What we published looked absolutely nothing like that,” Flynn said, referring to the handmade mockup in the fliers. It bothered him, he said, “to see somebody do this and not even have the guts or the accountability to put their name on it.”
It has nevertheless made an impact. Word of the fliers spread online, triggering lengthy conversations about the project on social media. One popular post on a city-focused Reddit page accused its creator of “fear-mongering,” a sentiment echoed by many of the hundreds of commenters who chimed in.
It even prompted one nascent group, the Davis Square Neighborhood Council, to release a statement denying responsibility for it, as the poster had invited people to attend its meetings. The council instead urged them to view the real plans, which the council has carefully detailed along the way. This warning is still pinned to the top of its website.
Still, the flier discourse as it played out on street corners and on social media may have been for the better, said Elaine Almquist, head of the newly formed and still informal council.
“Do I want community members to put out misinformation? Absolutely not,” she said. But “I think the fact that we’re having a community conversation and more people are engaging with it is a good thing.”
It was only natural a housing debate in this city might take this route. Somerville, the state’s most thickly settled — and arguably quirkiest — city, has a lot of love for paper fliers. They can be found taped or tacked in every corner of high-traffic public spaces and have kept the old-school medium alive and flourishing as an art form.
So it was in character this month when a new flier began appearing on some utility poles in the neighborhood, responding to the original and using “Crying Wojak” and “Yes Chad” meme images that are commonly used online to mock opponents. Those posters heralded the possibility the project would lead to new housing and benefit local businesses.
Christopher Beland, a local activist in favor of new apartment and condo buildings, who had called for retaliatory fliering, said he wasn’t personally responsible for the printed riposte but was glad to see it.
“I was disappointed to see the first flier trying to generate a NIMBY mob,” he said, using the acronym for “not in my backyard.”
“The community-developer meetings shaping the revitalization of this block have so far been much more nuanced and productive than either of these anonymous posts,” he said.
Whether she asked for it or not, the flier drama has also helped Almquist recruit to the new neighborhood council, she said. Since it started, she said, dozens of people have signed up for her group’s email list, where discussion about the project happens on a near-daily basis.
“I wish the rendering [in the flier] had been more true to what was actually being proposed, and I suspect that was a choice by the person who made the flier,” Almquist said.
At the same time, she said, it has kicked off “a real discussion of what the real proposal is. That’s a net positive in my book.”
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.