As usual, The Baffler is smug and ignorant to the point of dangerously distracting incoherence. Having visited and lived in Cambridge and Somerville for about

As usual, The Baffler is smug and ignorant to the point of dangerously distracting incoherence. Having visited and lived in Cambridge and Somerville for about 20 years, the problem has nothing to do with entrepreneurs and everything to do with the prices/value of transient housing. There have always been hugemongous factories intermingled with the residences (remember Necco? Junior Mints? Analog Devices?) With or without recent crass attempts at branding, the area has been a legendary entrepreneurship hot bed, from World War II radar to Ms. PacMan to Guitar Hero and everything in between. It doesn't need explicit branding to achieve this status. Innovation here comes in waves. Biotech was big 10 years ago. Now it's online social stuff with biotech still fairing strong. There are more specific problems, such as Harvard's capital buying out houses and turning them into faux fraternal organizations and ever more dorms. Or my favorite frustration, the generation of do-nothings in Somerville and Medford who inherited three-deckers from their parents and do little but collect rent from Tufts, Harvard and MIT students. Confounding the process is that fact that so much of the population is temporary - 2 to 5 years in resident that they can - and hardly desire - political coherency, thus yielding power to the incumbents.