Ask a buyer who's been house hunting in Somerville this year where the smart money is going, and most will point to the same four names: Ball Square, Magoun Square, Gilman Square, East Somerville. New Green Line stops. New development. The obvious next Davis.
Except Davis Square, the one stop on this list that got exactly zero new trains, is still the most expensive place to buy a condo in the city. Not by a little. By a margin wide enough that it should make anyone comparing squares stop and ask why the neighborhood the extension was built to help catch up still hasn't caught up.
The Number the City Built the Case Around
The Green Line Extension was never pitched as a transit project alone. The City of Somerville framed it as an equity fix, and the number it used to make that case was specific: before the GLX, only 15 percent of Somerville residents lived within a half-mile walk or bike ride of a transit station. Once the Medford Branch and Union Square Branch were both running, that figure was projected to climb to 85 percent.
The Union Square Branch opened for passenger service on March 21, 2022. The Medford Branch, with its four intermediate Somerville stops at East Somerville, Gilman Square, Magoun Square, and Ball Square, opened that December, and the extended Community Path followed in mid-2023. That's nearly four years now, enough time for a housing market to answer the question the city was implicitly asking: does putting a new station under a neighborhood make that neighborhood behave like Davis Square?
What Actually Happened to Prices
Here's a rough read on where things stood across the squares based on 2026 sales activity, condo-focused since that's where most of the buying and comparing happens in Somerville right now.
| Square | Transit | Typical 2-3BR condo range (2026) | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| Davis Square | Red Line only, no new GLX stop | roughly $1.1M to $1.2M | Established retail core, Somerville Theatre, decades of foot traffic |
| Union Square | New GLX stop (2022) | roughly $800K to $950K | Heaviest new construction, most mixed-use pipeline |
| Ball Square | New GLX stop (2022) | roughly $700K to $950K | Small-scale, local storefronts, closest in feel to Davis |
| Magoun Square | New GLX stop (2022) | roughly $700K to $950K | Broadway corridor, residential streets |
| Gilman Square | New GLX stop (2022) | roughly $700K to $950K | Still organizing itself around the station |
| East Somerville | New GLX stop (2022) | typically the most affordable entry point | Older housing stock, largest remaining redevelopment site in the city |
A two-bedroom condo in Davis Square, as of July 2026, had a median price around $1,199,900, with active listings running from $799,900 up to $1,795,000. That's not a market of thirty comparable units. It's a thin, tightly held pocket where ten condos were on the market at once and buyers were paying accordingly. Compare that to the four GLX squares, where a buyer with $700,000 to $950,000 could realistically land 950 to 1,300 square feet, two or three bedrooms, and often deeded parking or private outdoor space.
Zoom out to the citywide numbers and the same story holds. Somerville's condo and townhouse segment posted a median sold price around $796,000 as of June 2026, with 8.8 months of supply across 359 active listings. The single-family segment told a tighter story: a median sold price of $1,245,000 with only 5.8 months of supply. Condos are the front door for most buyers precisely because the entry-level supply sits in the squares that got the new stations, not the one that didn't.
Why the Old Line Still Wins
If the theory behind the GLX was that transit access drives home value, Davis Square's premium should be softening as the new stations mature. It isn't, at least not yet. The likelier explanation has less to do with trains and more to do with time.
Davis Square built its retail density and its evening foot traffic over decades. It has an anchor movie theater, a dense strip of restaurants and bars, and a walk score that makes daily errands car-free by default. The Red Line has also simply been running longer, without the construction-era disruption that the GLX corridor experienced for years while crews were closing bridges and rerouting Community Path traffic through Ball Square and Magoun Square.
A new station changes how fast someone can get downtown. It doesn't, on its own, recreate forty years of small business turnover, foot traffic, and neighborhood identity. That's the part of the "next Davis Square" pitch that the price data isn't backing up yet. Transit access is a real amenity. It just isn't the same amenity as an established commercial core, and buyers are pricing the difference.
Where the New Money Is Actually Landing
The GLX squares aren't standing still. They're just building the kind of density and mixed-use activity that took Davis Square generations to accumulate, and doing it in years instead of decades.
Bow Market in Union Square converted a former warehouse into more than thirty small storefronts for short-term leases, giving the square a walkable retail cluster that didn't exist before. Ball Square added The Sphere, a 42-unit apartment building, and the city approved Powder House, an adaptive reuse of a former school into 48 apartments alongside more than 69,000 square feet of open green space and over 11,000 square feet of commercial space. In February 2026, the city issued a request for proposals for a nearly four-acre site at 90 Washington Street steps from the East Somerville station, describing it as one of the largest remaining transit-proximate redevelopment opportunities left in the city.
That's the pipeline a buyer in these squares is actually purchasing into: not finished density, but density under construction.
The squares with new trains are still building the retail core that makes an old square expensive. The square with the old train already has one.
What This Means If You're Choosing Between Squares Right Now
For a buyer weighing Davis against the GLX squares today, the practical takeaway isn't that one choice is right and the other wrong. It's that the two are answering different questions. Davis Square is a premium for an established, walkable commercial core with a Red Line that's been reliable for decades. The GLX squares are a bet that the new density around Bow Market, The Sphere, Powder House, and whatever gets built at 90 Washington Street eventually closes the gap, the same way Assembly Square's newer mixed-use blocks have already reshaped that corner of the city.
Somerville's FY2026 residential tax rate is $10.98 per $1,000 of assessed value, with an owner-occupant exemption worth up to $4,578, a detail worth running through your own numbers regardless of which square you're comparing, since it applies citywide.
Common Questions
Will the GLX squares eventually catch up to Davis Square on price? The infrastructure argument says yes over time, but nearly four years of data since the Medford Branch opened in December 2022 hasn't closed the gap yet. The new stations changed commute times immediately. Retail density and neighborhood identity are building more slowly, and that's the piece the price data is still waiting on.
Is Union Square different from the other three GLX stops? Somewhat. Union Square has the deepest development pipeline of the group, anchored by Bow Market and a wave of new mixed-use residential construction, which puts its condo pricing a step above Ball, Magoun, and Gilman even though all four opened stations the same December.
Does the tax rate change much between squares? No. Somerville's FY2026 residential rate of $10.98 per $1,000 applies citywide, so the tax line in your carrying cost comparison between squares comes down almost entirely to assessed value, not location within the city.
If you're trying to figure out which Somerville square actually fits your budget and your timeline, that's exactly the kind of comparison Aura Realty Advisors works through with buyers directly. Schedule your concierge consultation and we'll walk the current inventory in Davis, Union, Ball, Magoun, Gilman, and East Somerville together, square by square, before you write an offer.
