Most of what's circulated about Everett this year starts and ends with the same image: a 25,000-seat soccer stadium rising along the Mystic River, home turf at last for the New England Revolution after three decades of borrowing space from the Patriots in Foxborough. That part of the story is real. The Kraft Group and the cities of Everett and Boston reached agreements in late December 2025 to move the project forward on the site of the old Mystic Generating Station, a shuttered power plant along the Alford Street corridor, directly across the street from Encore Boston Harbor. It comes with a public four-acre waterfront park, an estimated $500 million price tag, and a target opening somewhere around 2029 or 2030, according to Revolution president Brian Bilello.
When Everett swore in Robert Van Campen as mayor in January 2026, he inherited the stadium deal, a second and unrelated waterfront development, a financial scandal tied to his predecessor, and a high school running well past its design capacity, all at once, none of which he created.
A Mayor Who Didn't Negotiate Either Deal
Van Campen, a longtime city councilor representing Ward 5, beat 18-year incumbent Carlo DeMaria by nine percentage points last November, a result that followed a state-led review finding roughly $180,000 in improper longevity bonus payments to DeMaria, which DeMaria disputes. Both the Revolution stadium framework and a separate deal with Wynn Resorts were finalized in the closing weeks of DeMaria's tenure, meaning Van Campen took office already holding two major waterfront agreements he had no hand in shaping.
That matters more than it might sound, because the two projects sit within a few blocks of each other and will both draw crowds, traffic, and construction activity to the same stretch of the Mystic River waterfront over the next several years.
Two Waterfront Deals, One Stretch of Road
The stadium is the one everyone's heard about. The other is Wynn's three-phase "East of Broadway" project on Lower Broadway. The Everett Independent reported that all three phases have been through Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act review. The original first phase, approved locally back in December 2022, called for a parking garage, a nightclub, and a theater. What's now emerging as the actual first phase looks different: two hotels totaling around 800 rooms, still awaiting Site Plan Review before the Everett Planning Board.
The Wynn agreement includes a pedestrian bridge spanning the full width of Broadway, connecting directly into the casino and theater with landing points on both sidewalks, built specifically to get people off street-level crossings. It's slated to be 100 percent union-built under a project labor agreement covering Wynn's Everett properties.
Meanwhile the stadium deal carries its own set of numbers most residents haven't seen laid out together. Everett is set to receive an estimated $91.7 million in total community value over a 20-year period, paid through direct payments and infrastructure investment, plus $2.25 for every ticket sold at the venue. The Kraft Group has separately committed roughly $100 million exclusively to environmental cleanup of the old power plant site. Boston, which shares a border with the project across the Mystic, negotiated its own terms: close to $48 million over 15 years, a dollar per soccer ticket, 1.5 percent of concert ticket revenue, and $13 million earmarked for traffic mitigation around Sullivan Square in Charlestown, the intersection expected to absorb the brunt of stadium traffic.
Neither project has broken ground. Both still need to clear state-level review, including a Chapter 91 license through MassDEP for work along the waterfront, on top of local approvals. Two large developments converging on the same half-mile of riverfront, under the same new mayor, is not a detail that shows up in a press release about ribbon-cuttings.
The Building That's Already Over Capacity
While Van Campen manages both waterfront deals, he's also dealing with a problem that has nothing to do with either one: Everett High School was built to hold about 1,650 students. It currently houses around 2,200. That's a school running at roughly 133 percent of its intended capacity, a gap Van Campen has cited directly in interviews about his priorities since taking office.
His response so far has been to use federal ARPA funds to repair the old Everett High School building and look for additional classroom space rather than wait years for a new building to clear its own approval process. Reopening the Pope John building as a school, rather than converting it to condominiums, has been floated as part of that search, with the City Council reportedly already supportive of the idea.
The overcrowding numbers are worth sitting with for a moment. A 550-student overflow at the city's only high school is another demand city leaders are balancing alongside two separate billion-dollar-adjacent waterfront projects.
What Van Campen Says Has to Happen First
Van Campen has been careful in public statements not to promise a smooth ride for either waterfront project. Asked directly about the stadium earlier this year in an NBC10 Boston interview, he called it:
"It's a transformative project, it's a breathtaking project."
He followed that with a condition, one he's repeated in more than one interview: that transit access and pedestrian access around the site have to be worked out in full before either project moves forward, not worked out later as an afterthought once construction is underway. That's a notably specific demand from a mayor who inherited both deals rather than negotiated them, and it suggests the actual pace of construction on the waterfront may have less to do with the Kraft Group's own timeline and more to do with how quickly Everett's Planning Board, and the state reviewers behind MEPA and Chapter 91, sign off on the transit and access questions Van Campen has put in front of them.
There's also a live disagreement outside City Hall about what "addressed to perfection" will actually take. Brad Campbell, CEO of the Conservation Law Foundation, told GBH that infrastructure needs around Sullivan Square will be substantial, and that the state needs to do more to offset effects on residents and commuters beyond what's already been committed. That's not a settled question yet. It's one more thing riding on the same timeline as the stadium and the Wynn hotels.
What This Adds Up To for Anyone Watching City Hall This Fall
None of this changes what's already public about the stadium: 25,000 seats, expandable to 35,000 for concerts, a public four-acre park, a target opening years away. What it changes is the frame around that news. The stadium isn't moving through an empty process. It's moving through a city where 800 hotel rooms a few blocks away are awaiting Site Plan Review, the city government is building out classroom space for 550 students who don't currently have a permanent seat, and all of it is happening under a mayor nine months into his first term who inherited every one of these decisions rather than made them.
The next real markers to watch aren't press conferences. They're Everett Planning Board dockets for the Wynn hotel phase, MEPA and Chapter 91 filings for the stadium site, and whatever comes out of the City Council's ongoing conversation about school space. Those are the meetings where the actual pace of change in Everett gets set, long before any of it looks like a finished building.
Chenell Blake keeps an eye on those same filings, because they tend to say more about where a neighborhood is headed than any single headline does. If you're trying to make sense of what's moving through Everett's Planning Board this fall, Arcay Realty is a good place to start the conversation.
