“Somerville will, in fact, need to pay $28 million to the prior owners of a Washington Street property it seized in 2019, according to a recent court decision, which affirmed an earlier ruling that the city drastically underpaid for the land when it took control of it against the owners’ wishes.
The Wednesday decision from the Massachusetts Appeals Court came after a lower court found the four-acre parcel was worth $35.3 million, a sum substantially larger than the roughly $8.8 million the Somerville Redevelopment Authority paid for it.
George McLaughlin, the former property owners’ attorney, said they “feel vindicated” during a Sunday interview.
‘This has been a long and emotional battle for my clients,’ McLaughlin said. ‘They wanted to develop this property, and had an opportunity where they would have made a lot of money, but it was unnecessarily taken from them by Somerville, and Somerville paid them a fraction of what it was worth.'”